Back in the playroom again, whenever Kraig touched a masculine toy, his mother was instructed over the earphones, " 'quick, look at him now,' or 'talk to him now.' " If the doctors had understood that one of the main reasons Kraig did not want to be a boy was that he did not want to go to war and be killed, perhaps they might not have provided such toys. As it was, for rehabilitation of his gender deviance, Kraig was offered miniature plastic soldiers, a submachine gun, a rubber knife, an army helmet, an army fatigue shirt and the army belt. In effect, to get his mother's love back, Kraig had to be aggressive, willing to play at war, to "die" or "kill" in a boy's toy land.

Kraig's deviance was also addressed within his home, creating what Rekers described as a "24-hour" program, with "investigators . . . 'on call' at all times," and frequent visits to his home by research personnel. The home phase of the behavioral treatment consisted of a token system: when he was good, his mother gave him blue tokens, and when he was bad, she gave him red tokens. Before the token system was put into place, Rekers and Lovaas decided to start with "non-gender" behaviors which would be "clinically safer." These included brushing his teeth for a blue token, tracking dirt on the carpet for a red token. After he stopped those behaviors which earned red tokens, they moved on to the feminine gestures, and initiated a system of consequences, or "back-up reinforcers," for the blue and red tokens. Blue tokens could be cashed in for favorite candy bars, watching television or other treats. Getting a red token for a feminine outburst such as "Oh my goodness," or playing with dolls, might result in Kraig's losing some of the blue tokens he had accumulated, getting a time-out, or not being allowed to watch television. For the first four months, a research assistant was sent to Kraig's home three times a week to be sure that his parents, particularly his mother, were fully implementing the token system. The most effective red token back-up reinforcer was selected in "consultation" with the doctors: "physical punishment by spanking from the father." Each red token earned Kraig one "swat," and Rekers and Lovaas concluded that spanking was the only red token backup reinforcer that successfully affected Kraig's behavior. The final feminine play behavior extinguished by Rekers and Lovaas, using the red tokens, was "plays with girls."

According to Rekers and Lovaas, Kraig experienced an almost miraculous turnaround, although there was some suspicion that "he was 'going underground' with his deviance, suppressing his femininity in the company of adults." By the beginning of session 56, Kraig would enter the playroom and say aloud, "I wonder which toys I will play with. Oh, these are girls' toys here, I don't want to play with them." Rekers and Lovaas actually refer to this as Kraig's "spontaneous verbal labelling." Here is a child whose every movement and voice inflection were being charted. He was probably dreaming of blue and red chips after a few months of this. As with Becky, Kraig is finally described, by session 60, as engaging in "exclusively" gender-appropriate play. Rekers, perhaps in a bid to continue funding for this type of treatment, claims in his 1995 Handbook that he would never want a child to have rigid gender play behaviors. Yet his two hallmark cases, Becky and Kraig, are respectively described in their posttreatment play as rigidly feminine and rigidly masculine.

In follow-up, twenty-six months after treatment had begun, Kraig's mother expressed concern that her son had become a "rough neck," and was acquiring the destructive behaviors of the boy next door. Rekers and Lovaas wrote, "We reassured the mother that such 'mildly delinquent' behavior was much easier to correct in future years than feminine behaviors would be." The doctors described how Kraig no longer cared if his hair was neat and, most significantly, no longer engaged in the deviant behavior of "color-coordinating his clothes." They do reserve some judgment, however, because it is their clinical impression "that he may still be less skilled in some desired masculine play behaviors (e.g., throwing, catching, and batting a softball) than his same aged peers." Again, the specter of poor hand?eye coordination is raised.

A disturbing aspect of Kraig's "turnaround" concerns how his relationship with his father is depicted. The father and son are described, post?treatment, as happily going off to Indian Guide club meetings and weekend campouts. Yet when Kraig was seventeen, and his mother was again interviewed by Dr. Green, she said that as a result of his experience at UCLA, Kraig and his father ". . . drew further apart." If anything, his son's diagnosis as gender deviant only served to intensify this father's rejection of his child. The mother went on to defend her husband, saying that Kraig "can really shut somebody out if he wants to." After the invasive treatment this boy received, the ability to shut someone out could be perceived as an instinct for selfpreservation.

Ten years later, Rekers continued to describe fifteen-year-old Kraig as the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy. Richard Green's follow-up interviews with Kraig paint a very different picture. Kraig became a young man terrified of his sexuality, worried that if he wore his hair wrong it might make him appear feminine, and obsessively alert to any kind of overture by a male. If Kraig thought a man might be gay, and was trying to make contact with him, Kraig was driven to feelings of physical violence, which he would soon turn against himself. At eighteen, when he called his own sexuality into question, he responded by taking fifty aspirins in a suicide attempt. The word "shame" runs throughout the dialogue he had at that point in time with Dr. Green: shame for "everything about UCLA," shame for playing with dolls, shame and confusion about his sexuality. He specifically remembers about the UCLA behavioral treatment experience at the clinic and at his home: "I felt really ashamed, and I didn't want anybody to know, and when the research guys would come to check on me, I didn't want anybody to see me with them."

Once again, there is evidence that much of Kraig's childhood behavior, specifically his avoidance of "rough and tumble play," the hallmark of boyhood legitimacy, was connected to a lack of hand-eye coordination. This subject was not addressed during Kraig's treatment, but Dr. Green asked him at eighteen, "If you were a woman now, magically, what advantage would you have?" Kraig replied, "I can't really think of any. Except for maybe since I am uncoordinated everything would fit my sex better if I was a woman."

Kraig's suicide attempt and subsequent confusion and anxiety about his sexuality do not affect Dr. Green's conclusion that none of the children in the feminine boy project were "harmed by treatment." Ironically, despite the publication of the follow-up studies with Kraig, George Rekers, in his 1995 handbook for pediatricians, continues to use Kraig's case history as a treatment model, although he has modified some of the initial case report. Gone is the statement "Kraig had been described by a psychiatric authority on gender identity problems as one of the most severe cases he had assessed." Gone is the description of Kraig as using his "mother's" clothing, which is now described as "girl's" clothing. Referring to Kraig's use of his "mother's" clothing would have been a way of backing up an extreme attachment to his mother, one of the popular theories at the time on the cause of gender deviance in boys. Now, however, that is no longer quite as fashionable, and it is "girl's" clothing that Kraig is described as wearing. Once again, although Kraig never is reported to have repudiated his anatomy, Rekers writes in 1995 that "Such boys exhibit many cross-gender behaviors in conjunction with a crossgender identity evidenced by persistent repudiation of their male anatomic status." The reason for Rekers' emphasis on the child's repudiation of his penis is that the specter of transsexualism is far more powerful at this point in time than the specter of homosexuality.

There was a long succession of boys in the UCLA study, and among them was an eight-year-old named Carl. He refused to go along with playing in a room with a one?way window, but his treatment was essentially the same, with one important addition: the red and blue tokens appeared in his classroom, under the control of his teacher. According to his case history, Carl's deviances included enjoying Flip Wilson, "a [black] male comedian who cross-dresses and assumes a female role." He also had a tendency to use such phrases as "Oh, my goodness" and "Goodness gracious." One of the "play acting" categories of behavior that Rekers and Lovaas included in deviances to watch out for was Carl's "feminine role" of "pretending to be his mother washing dishes." Observers went to Carl's home on the average of two evening visits each week, and they helped his mother to record Carl's masculine and feminine speech content, activities and body gestures. Carl's treatment lasted for fifteen months.

One of Carl's treatment components included athletic training, to cure his "deficits in throwing a football." At follow-up twelve months after the treatment program had ended, the parents' "only remaining concern was that Carl would occasionally make self-critical remarks about his athletic abilities." Hand-eye coordination problems were marching again under the psychiatric flag of gender identity disorder of childhood in boys.

Carl was another of Dr. Rekers' and Dr. Lovaas' miracle cures. We do not have the extensive cross-references about Carl that we have about Kraig. We do know that they found him at risk for transvestism, transsexualism and probably autopenectomy. They also wrote, "After our behavioral treatment, the two independent psychologists could find no evidence of feminine behavior or identification in Carl's test responses or interview behavior." Perhaps Carl's feminine behavior had gone underground, as the doctors suggested with Kraig, yet of all the things in this report, the most disturbing are Carl's own "volunteered" words, that he "used to be a queer, but not anymore."

One of the strangest phases of treatment for these boys involved their group therapy. Picture a large group of feminine boys on a playground with male coaches reinforcing any sign, however minuscule, however "inept," of masculine behavior, shouting constantly with deliberate emphasis on masculine nouns: "That's a good boy.” "Come on, guys." "You're getting taller; you're going to be a big man when you grow up." When feminine gestures are exhibited by a boy, the therapist/coach says, "Hey, don't run like that." We are told that "the boys know what the admonition refers to." Any type of female role taking, which typically surfaced during rest periods from sports or enforced "rough housing,'' was met with immediate negative reinforcement: "You don't look much like a stewardess. You look more like a pilot. I think you'd make a better pilot." According to Dr. Green, who supervised this arena of therapy, there was a particularly distinct advantage to this type of treatment. At first, the boys would allow each other to take on female roles, but soon, they turned on each other, and in Dr. Green's view, this was an important aspect of their rehabilitation. "For example, one boy with an effeminate lisp took severe exception to another boy's speech, citing a lisping quality. When the therapist wondered whether the criticizing boy had ever also had diffculty in his manner of speaking, this was adamantly denied."

These boys also turned on themselves, exhibiting what Green describes as "Identifying with the aggressor. A potentially feminine toy, such as a stuffed animal, may be, with great display, rejected as a 'sissy' object, a feminine boy thus identifying with the masculine boys who usually tease him." Oppressed individuals often turn on each other in frustration and shame, and they often try to take power by identifying with their oppressors. It is disheartening that the National Institute of Mental Health underwrote this treatment.

In the course of my research on UCLA's feminine boy project, the name of O. Ivar Lovaas was prominent. Dr. Lovaas still works at UCLA, where he is the head of the Clinic for Behavioral Treatment of Children. His specialty at present is autism, and he now dissociates himself from what now is known as Gender Identity Disorder of childhood. Dr. Lovaas agreed to be interviewed on the condition that he tape-record our conversation. During the conversation, Dr. Lovaas was defensive and frequently explosive. Like others in the field, such as Dr. Myrick in Florida, who treated Jerry, Dr. Lovaas wishes to distance himself from this work in regard to questions of sexuality.

Dr. Lovaas began by claiming that the feminine boy project took place in the early 1960s, and that his role in the project was minor. I refreshed his memory by pointing out that the National Institute of Mental Health grant checks to UCLA for all of the research on the children in 1973, 1974 and 1975 were written with the understanding that he was the principal investigator. He often interrupted, raising his voice as if being attacked, in a bid to prevent this simple fact from being acknowledged: over and above the funds that Richard Green brought with him from SUNY?Stony Brook, $218,945 went to UCLA from the NIMH with Dr. Lovaas as Principal Investigator (PI) in this project. For the early 1970s, this was an extraordinary amount of money for such a research grant, and because he was the PI, Dr. Lovaas was also the kingpin, the one whose reputation secured the grant, and the one who determined how the money would be allocated.

He now describes his role as tangential, explaining that he was simply on a committee that evaluated the research of a young assistant professor, George Rekers, who was working on gender deviation. Dr. Lovaas says that gender deviation was of absolutely no interest to him, which might be news to the National Institute of Mental Health.

When asked who speci~fcally examined the children's genitals before they were admitted into the program, he became enraged, denying that anyone had ever looked at the children's bodies in any way. When told that it was reported by the NIMH, and in Dr. Rekers' own studies, that the children's genitals were examined by somneone, along with other physical tests to rule out anatomical deviances in feminine boys, he denied knowledge of that.

He then explained that at the time this research was performed, UCLA was heavily involved in psychosexual reassignment. He believes that transsexualism results from living a life of rejection and accusation by peers, which drives these men to undergo hormonal treatments and genital changes, that they might live as women. Dr. Lovaas contends that these men were so seriously emotionally disturbed by the time they were thirty years old that they contemplated suicide, and wanted to have their bodies changed. Dr. Lovaas said that some of those who underwent the reassignment were pleased, and others were not. In the 1970s, he believed that if he could prevent the children from experiencing peer rejection, such as being called a sissy......

[and it goes on and on and on...everyone SHOULD read this book! _Gender Shock_ by Phyllis Burke ISBN0385477171]