Abomination: The method of Robert Stoller, grandfather of the anti-trans movement

In early 1967, the head of UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) Dr. Robert Stoller received a typed letter: “Have been going to write you for some time about the article that was in the National Insider some time ago. The article was ‘How Women Make Men Become Transvestites’… What we male transvestites¹ can’t understand why you and the general public think a male transvestite is so bad.” The letter was signed in blue ink by "A Transvestite.”

Throughout the 1960’s Stoller theorized gender non-conformity, and his work was getting attention. One year after receiving this letter, he formalized his views in a book book, Sex and Gender. He proposed a dichotomy: Sex as a biological identity and gender as a psychological identity.

Over 50 years later, Stoller’s distinction remains popular, and in the last 10 years it has become weaponized. Anti-trans activists seek to replace gender-based rights with sex-based rights, a rhetorical sleight of hand meant to erase trans existence. This substitution has become popular in scientific and public conversations despite its tenuous grasp of basic biology.

As head of the GIC and Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, Stoller treated patients and conducted research. The latter was a major proposal of Sex and Gender - to turn trans people into laboratory subjects. After his death in 1991, Stoller’s papers were archived in UCLA Library Special Collections. Curious what other echoes they held, I spent two days in the reading room looking through a few boxes, mostly GIC research grants and presentations as well as Stoller’s correspondences.²

One detail immediately jumped out: Stoller’s office was in the same building where I now work as a neurobiologist. That part of the building hasn’t been renovated since Stoller’s time, and I now when I pass through I am reminded of the horrors contained in the pages that followed.

The archive revealed even more parallels between Stoller and today’s anti-trans pseudoscience movement. Like advocates of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), Stoller believed that most trans people were liars, and his preferred approach was conversion therapy. His clinic’s research turned trans people (including children) into subhuman laboratory subjects. Yet, these subjects can talk back. Exemplified by the anonymous letter, trans people fiercely resisted Stoller’s pathologizing - just as trans people today continue to advocate for rights and respect.

This is a story of anti-trans sexology, whose reanimated corpse rears its ugly head again today. May we not only learn this history but also rediscover our own agency within the sexologist’s laboratory of domination.

Stoller’s epistemological starting point was not scientific. It was theological. Nestled away in his administrative papers on the GIC, a handwritten note in Stoller’s writing bears Deuteronomy 22:5. “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment. For all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.”³

Stoller was hesitant to make abominations. In a 1967 letter to an official the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Stoller described his approach: “What we have had to do here when we have seen transsexuals is to offer them our interest in their condition but no specific treatment.” A psychiatrist by training, Stoller initially instituted restrictions on transition care and preferred conversion therapy to coerce people back into the closet.

One of his early patients was also most famous. Agnes reported a spontaneous feminizing puberty. Believing her to have a rare intersex condition, Stoller and the GIC helped Agnes get bottom surgery. Years later, Agnes returned and admitted that she had been taking her mother's prescription estrogen. She had exploited their twisted logic and deceived the GIC into approving her surgery.

Outwitted by Agnes, Stoller became even more anti-transition and even cautioned multiple institutions against offering trans care. In a letter to Stoller, the leader of a new clinic felt the need to clarify her position: “That does not mean that I have ‘learned to live with guilt.’” (That clinic eventually became the notorious Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, CAMH, in Toronto.)

By 1969, it became clear that therapy alone would not work, so Stoller added filters to transition care: “[If] the patients are selected with the greatest care, so that only those males who are the most feminine and who have been that way since earliest childhood are chosen, results are usually excellent.” Stoller’s deputy at the GIC, Dr. Richard Green, noted that these “most feminine” patients crossdress before the age of 4.

Essentially, they wanted to select transfemmes who could pass and assimilate into society, and it helped to be white and from a middle or upper class background. Clinical assessments often included standardized parent interviews (even for adult patients) to verify the trans person’s story. Stoller ultimately deemed his patients “true transsexuals.”

Stoller received a lot of letters from trans people seeking transition surgeries at UCLA. He usually responded with a terse denial and suggested they seek surgery abroad. Sometimes, he went out of his way to insult them by addressing them as Mr. when they signed as Miss. He didn’t want these would-be abominations on his conscience.

As the leader of the GIC, Stoller brought his contempt for trans people to the clinic’s research program, which included a team of medical professors growing from 6 to 20+ by the mid-1970’s. Stoller wanted to make trans people into laboratory models and identify the cause of gender. If a cause could be identified, so could an antidote for non-conformity.

One mainstay of the clinic’s research program was a regular Saturday meeting where the GIC doctors conducted a group interview with a person of interest. This was an opportunity to theorize on a topic, like the characteristics of true transsexuals. Interviewees ranged from children to someone who “discovered the joys of transsexualism at age 66.” Meeting notes are scarce except for one 1963 interview with a child (age unknown) who Stoller describes as follows:

Stoller also retained notes from the five other doctors (described as “probing adults”), and each speculated on whether the child was truly masculine or feminine. All the notes are revolting, describing the child in creepily objectified terms like “cute,” “charming,” “pink cheeked,” and “lovable”. Five medical doctors pointed to sexualized evidence debating whether a child was telling the truth about being a girl.

In 1972, Stoller and Green submitted an application to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, one of the NIH institutes) to fund a study of group conversion therapy to treat “boyhood femininity.” They proposed setting up sporting equipment and allowing the young subjects to play together and interact with a male therapist. The duo hypothesized that femininity would decrease over time due to the strong model masculine figure (i.e. the therapist). No control group was proposed. Federal records document that NIMH funded the grant from 1973-1976.

In whole, the GIC baked bias into the experimental design. A 1976 grant application from the GIC proposed to study “gender disturbed” children. Another student sent Stoller plans to compare gender non-conforming people and “normals” on an auditory stimulus-response test. Dripping with contempt for trans people, the GIC’s experiments were major acts of epistemic vandalism, destroying our self-knowledge and replacing it with a sterile facsimile of scientific thought.

Stoller’s GIC had impact far beyond the UCLA campus. Green created a new journal for the study of sex/gender: The Archives of Sexual Behavior began publishing in 1971. In this first edition, Green made clear the journal’s aim: “My focus will be what we might consider the prevention of transsexualism.” Green sent Stoller an early draft of the inaugural article, asking for his “PENETRATING” criticism.

Ultimately, Stoller and his GIC put forward an etiology for transness (at least for his “true transsexuals”): the parents. Invoking Freud, Stoller sometimes blamed closeted queer fathers and other times argued that anxious mothers (with a repressed need to create a “feminized phallus”) who trans their kids. This is, of course, asinine.

Among Stoller’s correspondences, the multitude of letters from trans people are unavoidable. Stoller kept a variety letters, both the defiant and the delicate. I sometimes wonder why he chose to keep these letters and which he discarded. Yet, these messages offer us insight into how some trans people of the era confronted the oppressive systems that produced vandalized knowledge about their own bodies.

Stoller’s most famous trans correspondent is Virginia Prince, who responded to sexology’s interest in trans bodies by influencing Stoller’s theory. Prince had a PhD in pharmacology and used her academic capital to present a series of lectures at UCLA titled “Sex and Gender” years before Stoller’s book of the same name. He kept vanishingly few communications from Prince except pamphlets mirroring his “true transsexual” language. While Prince was more nuanced Stoller, her endorsement of this exclusionary language perpetuated its harm in emerging trans communities.

Another cohort of letter writers emerged as Stoller gained popular prominence. Exemplified by the anonymous author opening this piece, these trans correspondents read his work on gender non-conformity and shared their thoughts. Some implored Stoller to solve their gender “problem”⁴ but many wrote to express their defiance:

“I am a transvestist, trans-sexualist, transmutation; These are the medical terms describing my Medical Condition. However! to the uninformed; such as the self-righteous they call me Bad; the smug call me Evil; and the so-called Wise call me Sick; these are terms or similar such terms that are applied to me — that is of course if the language is kept clean; but what difference does it make to me what anyone thinks or says about me; particularly in such a matter whereby they may not be familiar with my aspect of Human Endeavor.” [emphasis original]

“Abandon, awhile, your formal training’s limits, and the reinforcing confirmation your experience gives you. Otherwise, stop n0w… After much therapy directed at getting me to identify with boys, I met this girl one day, and found I liked her and she liked me, and there was a [connection]. Now she is growing up, and what we both are is getting blurred into one, and there is a measure of peace. Maybe I can help the hidden damned through you. A grown up girl is often a responsible citizen. She only thinks in passing about her underwear. She bears her responsibilities. Some of them surpass men in their accomplishments. When you imprison the 90 per cent that is female of a transvestite or transsexual, you do nazi horror to an innocent little girl.”

These letters date to 1967-68, around the time that Sex and Gender was published. Sender names have been omitted. In 1969, internal documents from the GIC admitted that conversion therapy is not effective at suppressing trans identities.

Echoes of Stoller’s medical and intellectual approach can be heard today in the rabid moralizing against trans lives in predominant sociopolitical discourse. Yet so can the impassioned efforts of trans people who wrote to Stoller to resist his medical classifications relegating them to abominations. The parallels between Stoller’s sexological approaches and today’s anti-trans movement practically leaped off the discolored pages and out of the archival storage boxes.

Perhaps the most glaring throughline is Green’s Archives of Sexual Behavior which he passed off to Dr. Kenneth Zucker in 2001. Under Zucker’s command, the journal has promoted conversion therapy and ROGD. In 2023, Archives published results from an IRB-less survey ran by a non-supportive parent of a trans child. Researchers and queer organizations called for a retraction and Zucker’s resignation. Springer Nature, the publisher of Archives, retracted the paper but kept Zucker as editor-in-chief.

Just as the GIC sought to use conversion therapy to rid themselves of their abominable patients, today’s anti-trans pseudoscientists have rebranded conversion therapy as gender-exploratory therapy, now with explicit permission from the United States Supreme Court. Zucker himself was fired from his role as head of the CAMH gender clinic in 2015 after an external review documented conversion therapy practices.

The eliminationist view that trans people should “explore” their assigned gender is buoyed by ROGD, a pseudoscientific theory that transgender identities are a fad that will fade over time. ROGD privileges the perceptions of parents over the testimony of their trans child. This page is right out of Stoller’s papers. He simply believed that many trans people are liars, and to prove it, he developed questionnaires to interview parents during clinical assessments of trans people.

This assertion of lying is motivated by a desire to turn us into laboratory subjects. Stoller’s GIC turned trans people into mere objects from which knowledge and professional capital could be extracted. Wellbeing was of no concern. Today, research like AYAGDOS (with Zucker as co-investigator) turn youth into political pawns for an agenda to eliminate their health care. And just as the NIH funded the GIC’s conversion therapy, last year President Trump directed the NIH to prioritize funding for “transition regret.”

This disregard for trans lives is, in part, driven by the mixing of religion and science. Stoller’s invocation of Deuteronomy foreshadows the personnel and funding connections between today’s academic pseudoscience organizations (like the American College of Pediatricians) and right-wing Christian nationalism. Additionally, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops last year enacted a total ban on trans health care at Catholic hospitals in the US because the late Pope Francis asked them to “fight gender ideology, which is repugnant to the Bible and our tradition.”

Yet, trans people today continue to resist the campaign to pathologize and strip us of our rights. When the Pediatric American Societies hosted a session on trans health care with a panel stacked with pseudoscientists, activists from Protect Trans Futures picketed and disrupted the panel. As some hospitals eliminated health care for trans adolescents, local groups across the country demonstrated in front of offending institutions including in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston.

It is critical to remember that Stoller could not sustain his hardline, anti-transition approach. Conversion therapy simply doesn’t work. As historian Jules Gill-Peterson notes in Histories of the Transgender Child, UCLA’s GIC eventually oversaw the most medical transitions of children of the first generation of gender clinics. But this shift required trans people to push back and demonstrate the cruelty committed by medical, educational, and political systems.

Every time I take a shortcut out of my workplace and walk through the sterile hallway that once led to Robert Stoller’s office, I feel my rage boil to the surface. I think of the child who was interviewed by six male doctors, whose face and body was objectified to discern their “true” gender. Which door leads to the room where powerful men reduced them to their sexualized aesthetics?

My abominable body was not meant to walk these halls without formal diagnostic permission. Nevertheless, my purple dress and blue leggings provide a much needed contrast to the drab hospital scene, splashes of color in an endless hall of gray. At once my agency crystalizes, and my rage begins to dissipate. I embrace my disruptive force and walk out of the old hospital, down the hill, and into the Village of Westwood.