Sexual Disorders of Gender: Childhood Gender Nonconformity, Medicine, and the Religious Right

This paper explores the writings of conservative medical practitioners and conversion therapists in the United States since the 1970s, asking how they have engaged with the category of gender identity to regulate the lives of gender nonconforming children. Though in recent years American conservatives have begun to reject the language of gender and gender identity, joining a global “antigender” movement spearheaded by the Vatican, this paper resurfaces a period in which gender identity was not only a key conceptual category for conservative psychologists, psychiatrists and other practitioners, but central to their conceptualizations of healthy and normal child development.

Foregrounding the work of James Dobson, Joseph Nicolosi, and George Rekers, whose writings toed the lines between psychology, religious moralizing, and political spokesmanship, I investigate how they repurposed what was then a niche sexological term to help articulate the vision of Christian parenting that became central to the religious right’s family values in the late twentieth century. I argue that they developed a conviction that childhood gender nonconforming identity predicted future homosexuality by repurposing sexological uncertainty about gender development and, in doing so, contended that homosexuality could be prevented through correct gender socialization in childhood. Transforming childhood gender into a harbinger of adult sexual disorder, thinkers like Dobson, Nicolosi, and Rekers claimed they could prove homosexuality’s nonbiological origins even after the American Psychological Association declared homosexuality a “natural sexual variant” in 1973. This paper ends by considering the legacy of these developmental arguments in debates over gender nonconforming children today.