Kenneth Zucker’s racist analogy of gender variance |
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Reparative therapist Kenneth Zucker of Toronto’s infamous CAMH Clarke Institute has been trotting out an old chestnut to argue for his “therapy” that coerces gender-variant children to conform to society’s expectations for their gender. His argument? The racist analogy that transgender children are like black kids who want to be white:
Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? ... I don’t think we would. (Zucker 2008)
I call this the South Park argument, after the episode ” Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.” In this episode, Mr. Garrison becomes Mrs. Garrison, in the standard “man in a dress” stereotype used to mock older transitioners who don’t pass. That episode used two common arguments used to lampoon gender variance: race and species. Kyle gets a “negroplasty” to compete with black basketball players, and his father gets a “dolphinoplasty” because he loves dolphins.
You’d expect an irreverent comedy show to reduce an issue to an exaggerated and simplistic caricature. But when it’s used by the guy the American Psychiatric Association chooses to chair a group that will define our “mental illness” for the next decade or more, that’s pretty sad.
In Zucker’s rigid black-and-white world, you’re either one or the other. Ask any “mixed race” person or person who passes as another race, and they’ll tell you that racists are quick to say that phenotype is irrelevant, just like Zucker: you’re “really” black, etc. The defining and defending of racial distinctions is closely connected with the defining and defending of sex and gender distinctions. Zucker is part of the segregationist movement that wants to make sure there is no miscegenation of the sexes.
The same is true for anyone whose sexuality runs afoul of gay and straight separatists: bisexuals are “really” gay, etc. You can hear this from both gay and straight separatists all the time.
The same is true for people who pass as a gender not assigned at birth, or who blur those rigid lines: we are constantly told that we are “really” our sex assigned at birth. People like Zucker have found a few old “Mrs. Garrison” types who agree they are men with a mental or sexual disease. You’ll see their names come up again and again at sexology conferences, USENET, and anywhere else they can get their bizarre views published or validated.
Taking Zucker’s racist analogy again, we call white people who act “too black” wiggers etc., and black people who act “too white” oreos etc. We enforce race the same way we enforce gender. Only thing is the groups most active in race separatism are considered fringe element radicals. They don’t run race clinics in Toronto and chair committees on enforcing racial roles for the American Psychiatric Association.
For a great review of Zucker’s “race card,” see this nuanced analysis at Mad Melancholic Feminista
http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2008/05/disciplining-gender-pathology-is-not-in.html
I also recommend Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender by bioethicist Martine Rothblatt, which also looks at the race analogy of gender variance.
See also my two essays:
• “Illegal Immigrants” vs. the Border Patrol of Sex and Sexuality
• A defining moment in our history: Examining disease models of gender identity
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