The psychiatrist Richard Green passed away earlier this April. In obituaries for The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Advocate, he was praised for his allyship to LGBTQ+ communities. In transgender communities, however, Richard Green is better known encouraging gender non-conforming youth — many of whom would be considered transgender — to identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. For many, this is the trans equivalent of gay conversion therapy.

Today, there is broad consensus that “[t]he job of the clinician is not to ward off a transgender outcome, but to facilitate the child’s authentic gender journey.” Richard Green disagreed, replying that he was “convinced that it is a helluva lot easier negotiating life as a gay man or lesbian woman than as a transwoman or transman.” The fact that trans people lead more difficult lives implicitly meant, for Green, that we were justified in warding off transgender outcomes. A more ethical view would be that you shouldn’t try changing who people are.

Image by lisa runnels from Pixabay

Patients of Dr. Green have spoken out against his clinical work. Sociologist Karl Bryant, who was a patient of Dr. Green in childhood, later said that: “The study and the therapy that I received made me feel that I was wrong, that something about me at my core was bad, and instilled in me a sense of shame that stayed with me for a long time afterward.” Although Karl Bryant grew up not to be transgender, the practices of Dr. Green’s UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic had a long-lasting negative impact on him.

Professor Sé Sullivan, who was also a patient of the UCLA clinic, dedicated their doctoral dissertation to “all those lost to suicide or other self-harming response to the violence born” out of the clinic and of those who followed similar practices at its behest. Their dissertation, “Conversion Therapy Ground Zero: Interrogating the Production of Gender as a Pathology in the United States” details the role of the UCLA clinic in shaping a conception of transgender and gender variant youth as mentally ill.

Richard Green played a role in removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but he also played a role in adding transness to it. In 1975, Dr. Green was asked to draft a document which almost certainly served as blueprint for the Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood (GIDC) diagnosis. The addition of the GIDC diagnosis to the DSM was controversial, as many scholars considered it “a backdoor mechanism for keeping homosexuality” in the DSM. In other words, Richard Green may have played a role both in removing homosexuality from the DSM and in keeping it there.

Adding a diagnosis for pre-pubertal transgender children to the DSM was unnecessarily pathologizing, casting those kids as having a mental disorder without any benefit to them. As experts of trans health noted, “this pathologising diagnosis [may] stigmatise the experiences of young children who are simply exploring their identity, and are learning to become comfortable being and expressing who they are — children whose diversity would hardly raise an eyebrow in a number of cultures worldwide.”

In more recent times, Dr. Green criticized laws banning conversion therapy because he didn’t think changing young children’s gender identity or gender expression was harmful, and thought that parents should be able to choose conversion therapy for their children for religious reasons. Though he argued against homosexuality being kept as a mental disorder, he didn’t seem to think it especially wrong for professionals to try to prevent kids from being gay, trans, or gender non-conforming.

As a scholar who has specialised in the law and ethics surrounding conversion therapy, I can’t help but see Green’s legacy as a troubled one. Despite positive contributions, it is difficult to call an ally someone who tried to prevent kids from growing up trans, labelled gender non-conforming kids with a mental disorder, and argued against laws prohibiting conversion therapy. As the expression goes, with allies like these…

Republication welcomed.