Childhood Gender Nonconformity and the Development of Adult Homosexuality

Robin M Mathy, Jack Drescher, Robin M Mathy, Jack Drescher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000156874
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents leading experts on the scientific study of gender, providing their views on what we know today about the relationship between gender nonconformity in childhood and future adult sexual identities or behaviors. This book explores the topic from a wide range of perspectives, including historical, sociological, psychological (social and developmental), and psychiatric viewpoints. Parents, parent educators, therapists, and counselors who work with gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents or adults and/or gender atypical children will find this resource insightful and very useful.

It presents highly respected authorities offering their own expertise and perspectives on a subject of much cultural controversy. Chapters explore: historical and cultural examples which suggest that homoerotic relationships during adolescence or early adulthood do not necessarily lead to homosexuality; the difficulty in identifying an example of a pattern of childhood behaviors that is predictive of outcome; a review of empirical retrospective and prospective literature; whether there is a causal link between childhood gender nonconformity and sexual orientation; and the diagnostic category of Gender Identity Disorder in the most recent DSM.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health.

Childhood Gender Nonconformity and Adult Homosexuality: A Historical View

Vern L. Bullough, PhD, RN

Though it is often widely stated today that gender nonconformity during one’s youth is causally related to adult homosexuality, it is a thesis that is very difficult to document from historical data. A major reason is the lack of information on childhood of most people in history, regardless of whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. A second major problem is the assumption that all effeminate boys become homosexuals, an assumption that confuses gender nonconformity with sexual nonconformity. They are not necessarily the same thing. It is also not clear that homoerotic relationships during adolescence or early manhood necessarily lead to homosexuality. For example, in the ancient Greek world, homoerotic relationships were institutionalized, at least among males during certain periods in their life. Yet as adults approaching 30, they would be expected to marry and have a family.

We do know, however, that the homoerotic Greeks regarded effeminacy among males as degrading. This undoubtedly means that there were such individuals, but they were more or less ostracized and suffered discrimination by a society which accepted adolescent homoerotic relationships. Clearly, the masculine status of the adult male was not jeopardized by sexual acts with other men or boys so long as they took the dominant, active (sexually insertive) role. This bias against the receptive homosexual is reflected in Greek comedy and in satirical epigrams and was carried over to Roman poetry in attacks on effeminate men in Catullus, Juvenal, and Martial, all of whom favor boy love but violently excoriate the passive (sexually receptive) adult.

A third difficulty is in defining what might be normative conduct for a youthful male or female in any society that would distinguish those who became identified with adult same sex activities and those who did not. The problem is further complicated by the ability of those youth who feel an attraction towards members of the same sex in societies where such activities are looked upon with great hostility to disguise and cover up their desires from the public at large.

Quite clearly there were effeminate boys in the Greek and Roman world, at least some of whom came to be identified as “homosexuals” as adults. However it was not the only path to self-identification as a “homosexual” as an adult.

The most difficult path was as an effeminate boy since, to put it simply, excessive effeminate behavior could lead to catastrophe. For example, in Roman times, Fabius Maximus Servilianus (126 BCE) is said to have killed his son for having pleasurable relations with men and then voluntarily exiled himself for shame at the dishonor his son had done (Valerius Maximus, 2000, 6:1.5; 2.5). Not all effeminate Roman boys suffered this fate. Some in fact were encouraged to become more effeminate by powerful patrons. This was the case of Sporus, the young lover of the Emperor Nero. Nero had him castrated and then staged a mock marriage ceremony with his new bride (Suetonius, 1913-14, 6:.28-29; 2:131-33). No other emperor went quite this far in enforcing feminine behavior. Probably the best known adolescent partner of an emperor was Antinous, the beloved companion of the second century Emperor Hadrian. The surviving portraits of Antinous show a beautiful young man, with luxuriantly curling hair, with what Louis Crompton (2003) called a hint of oriental voluptuousness. But whether this is a stereotypical portrait of a youthful adolescent lover is unclear. Certainly if it was then Antinous, in spite of his beauty, took care not become too effeminate and was known as an enthusiastic hunter and outdoors person. Probably such “virile” activity was undertaken by many of the so called effeminate boys to establish their manhood.

In the medieval period, both nonconforming boys and girls had an out in the monastery or convent. Here they could enjoy the camaraderie of their own sex and avoid what might be regarded as stereotypical homosexual behavior in the secular world. That many did enter because of their same sex orientation is evident from the continuous effort in the medieval period to reform wayward monasteries and convents. In fact, monasteries were continually being reformed and reconstituted as they were charged with immoral conduct, conduct which has been interpreted by many, including myself, to be associated with same sex relations.

It is not until the later middle ages and early modern period, however, that enough data becomes available about the childhood of individuals (usually kings or high ranking nobles) whom we might identify as homosexual. One such individual is Edward II (1283-1327), the homosexual king of England. Certainly, one of his favorites, Piers Gaveston had earlier been executed by hostile lords, and he himself was forced to abdicate, then was suffocated, and had a red-hot iron introduced through a tube in his rectum. None of the sources, however, describe him as having been effeminate in his youth. Instead, contemporary accounts of the period picture him as tall, muscular, and good looking, devoted to the arts of rowing and driving chariots, an excellent craftsman, or in the words of Louis Crompton (2003): he was like a “Wyoming rancher.” Yet quite clearly there was already a standardized image of the effeminate boy who became attracted to same sex relations as an adult. While Edward was not described by his contemporaries in this way, later writers did so. In fact a feminized version of Edward’s child-hood was institutionalized into the literature by Christopher Marlowe writing two centuries later. In his tragic play, “Edward II,” Marlowe describes Edward as an effeminate youth who delighted in music and poetry and relished ambiguous courtly masques (Marlowe, 1994). In short, when it was not quite permissible to deal with homosexuality openly in many literary works, the portrayal of an effeminate boyhood could carry a message to the audience.

In France, Philippe d’Orleans, known as Monsieur, the flamboyant homosexual brother of Louis XIV, is described as a child of delicate beauty. His mother, Anne of Austria, called him “my little girl,” and he was encouraged to wear feminine clothes. He was fascinated as a child with women’s dresses and adornments, loved jewels, perfumes, huge wigs, colorful ribbons, high heels, and malicious gossip. In his teens, he attended a ball with a female cousin dressed as a shepherdess. As an adult, he was surrounded on one hand by virile young men and, on the other, by effeminate men who shared his tastes. Still he was an outstanding warrior who led his troops effectively, sometimes with beauty patches on his face. He also fathered three children. In popular parlance, he was the (feminine) moon to his brother’s (masculine) sun (Barker, 1989). It is possible that his femininity was a survival mechanism in order to prevent him from being seen as a rival for the throne his brother held. There was always the chance that dissident forces would rally around him in order to challenge his brother. Ever conscious of the danger his existence posed to his brother, he might well have exaggerated his feminine persona. The only evidence for this is that his most flagrant effeminate behavior always appeared most strongly after a particularly humiliating defeat at the hands of his brother, as if to emphasize that he was no threat.

The female opposite of Monsieur was Queen Christina of Sweden. As potential heir to the throne of Sweden, her father trained her as if he were his son. She learned to ride, shoot, and hunt. In her autobiography she says she had “an aversion and invincible antipathy to all that women are and say.” When she was crowned ruler of Sweden, she called herself “king” and began to wear numerous items of male attire-boots, hats, and doublets. Her voice, her manner of speaking, her walk, her style, were all described as masculine. When she abdicated her throne in 1654, she cut her hair short and donned men’s clothes and kept up her masculine appearance until her death. She also had many affairs with other women. One of her great loves was her lady-in-waiting whom she left behind when she departed from Sweden (Crompton, 2003). Quite clearly she conveyed the image of a butch lesbian as a young woman, a stereotype of the same order as the feminine boy.

Frederick the Great of Prussia had a horrible childhood because of his “effeminate behavior” as an adolescent and his disdain for things masculine and military. He played the flute, loved French literature and poetry, wore his hair long, and was denounced by his father for “lascivious and womanly activities.” His father called him an “effeminate boy, without a single manly inclination, who cannot ride or shoot.” Fearful of his son’s close male friends, his father either had them removed or killed. His effeminate boyhood, however, did not prevent him from becoming the most effectual military commander of his generation (Crompton 2003). Interestingly, his successful rule led nineteenth century historians such as Thomas Carlyle (1897-98) to deny even the possibility of Frederick’s same sex preferences. For Carlyle, homosexual men simply did not become great generals.

If the effeminate boy had been regarded as a potential indicator for adult same sex preferences, it was the psychoanalytic movement which pushed it as a major factor in homosexual development. While Freud (1935), observed that homosexuality was neither a virtue nor a vice, most psychoanalytic writers after him regarded same-gender sexual orientation as not only a different line of psychological development, but also, necessarily a disordered line (Lewes, 1995). Emphasizing the stereotype of feminized boys in psychoanalytic literature was the work of Bieber (1962) and his colleagues. In describing the effeminate manner of the gay child, they also emphasized the role of the mothers as domineering and their fathers as passive and distant. If the effeminate boy had not been regarded as the typical path to identifying as gay before, Bieber and his colleagues emphasized that it was. They held that adult homosexuality resulted from growing up in a schismatic family or with an overprotective and dominating mother who blocked her son’s access to usual boyhood developmental experiences. The father failed to counteract this malignant maternal control or to serve as a positive masculine role model.

One of the critical early longitudinal studies reinforcing this belief was done by Richard Green. Green, who had studied transsexuals, originally hypothesized that the boys who were referred to his clinic for extreme feminine behavior, might well grow up to become transsexuals. This would conform to the theory of Harry Benjamin who reported that males seeking transsexual surgery recalled feeling like members of the “opposite” sex since early childhood. They remembered wanting to dress in girls’ or women’s clothes, wanting to play with girls’ toys, relating more comfortably to girls and avoiding conventional boyhood activities (Benjamin, 1966).

The boys whom Green studied were not only regarded as “sissies” by their male contemporaries, but by their parents, their nursery school teachers, and ultimately by the consulting psychiatrists. They liked to dress in girls’ or women’s clothes. They preferred Barbie dolls to trucks. Their playmates were girls. When they played “mommy-daddy” games, they were mommy. And they avoided rough-and-tumble play and sport. In fact, the children were referred to Green’s clinics because they were so extreme. One mother describing her eight year old son said:

He acts like a sissy. He has expressed the wish to be a girl. He doesn’t play with boys. He’s afraid of boys, because he’s afraid to play boys’ games. He used to like to dress in girl’s’ clothing. He still like to, only we have absolutely put our foot down. And he talks like a girl, sometimes walks like a girl. (Green, 1987, p. 2)

Green believed that gender discordant boys might well become transsexuals since he believed that gender dysphoria and homosexuality were not necessarily the same thing. However, at the completion of the fifteenth year of the longitudinal study, none of the boys turned out to be transsexuals or even transvestites. Instead, two thirds of the original feminine boy group had homosexual or bisexual fantasies, while none of the control group did. As far as behavior was concerned (after some drop outs) six of the boys still identified as heterosexual or only incidentally homosexual (0-1 on the Kinsey scale) while all but one of the control group did. On the other hand, 24 identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual (Kinsey 2-6), while only one of the men in the control group did so (Green, 1987, p. 100). Quite clearly, the effeminate boy often becomes an adult homosexual, but not all do, only emphasizing the importance of other factors.

Most information about childhood gender discordance does not come from longitudinal studies such as Green’s, but rather from recollected memories of those in psychotherapy or respondents to research studies. Vern and Bonnie Bullough and Richard Smith (1985a, 1985b) did some interesting studies comparing the boyhood of gay youths to those of transsexual and transvestites. One of the differences between gay, transvestite (TV) and control groups was in attitudes towards sport during adolescence. Men who later identified as transvestites were even more interested in sports as boys than the control group (45% to 44%) and much more so than gay youth (12%) or transsexual youth (18%). Members of the TV group were also more likely to go into masculine occupations such as engineering. In a sense they tried to downplay their effeminate cravings and were much more successful in concealing it during adolescence than the gays or transsexuals. Transvestites in particular were highly conforming to traditional versions of American boyhood. Interestingly, those in transsexual sample were more conforming than those in the homosexual one.

Although homosexual and bisexual youth, as well as transvestites and transsexuals, often report feeling different from other males in their boyhood and adolescence, some have better success than others in conforming to outward ideals. Boys with transvestite tendencies seem to have the greater success perhaps because they often go through purges of their hoard of feminine clothing and try to reassert their masculine conformity. In addition, making it both easier and more difficult, they are also conscious for the most part of their attraction to the other sex. This attraction is clearly different than that reported by homosexual youths or even by transsexuals. Plummer (1995, p. 82) emphasizes in his stories about gay youth what he calls the “master narrative,” the feeling of being different from other men but this does not necessarily lead to them being looked on as effeminate.

Later studies have also challenged the assumptions of Bieber ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Childhood Gender Nonconformity and Adult Homosexuality: A Historical View
• 2 Childhood Cross-Gender Behavior and Adult Homosexuality: Why the Link?
• 3 Reflections on the Relation Between Sex-Typed Behavior in Childhood and Sexual Orientation in Adulthood
• 4 Is There a Causal Link Between Childhood Gender Nonconformity and Adult Homosexuality?
• 5 Nosology, Etiology, and Course of Gender Identity Disorder in Children
• 6 Developmental Gender Differentiation: Pathways in Conforming and Nonconforming Outcomes
• 7 Gender Atypicality and Sexual Orientation Development Among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth: Prevalence, Sex Differences, and Parental Responses
• 8 Masculinity, Femininity and the Development of Sexual Orientation in Women
• Index