Margaret Nichols
Therapist Margie Nichols is the founder and was the first executive director of the Institute for Personal Growth. She charts the therapeutic evolution of helping the LGBT community, and discusses the many LGBT and gay-lesbian organizations that she was a part of and founded, including HYACINTH, a social service organization for people with AIDS.
ANNOTATIONS
Learn More [3]: “What Are Therapeutic Communities?,” National Institute on Drug Abuse, July 2015.
Learn More [4]: “Substance Use and SUDs in LGBTQ* Populations,” National Institute on Drug Abuse, September 5, 2017.
Learn More: Christina Hanhardt, “Queer History,” accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More [2]: Livia Gershon, “How NOW Started Standing Up for Lesbians,” JSTOR Daily, March 5, 2021.
Learn More [3]: Bonnie Morris, “A Brief History of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Social Movements,” American Psychological Association, July 21, 2017.
Learn More [4]: “Bars & Nightlife,” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More: “Institute for Personal Growth History,” IPG Counseling (blog), accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More [2]: Ray Levy Uyeda, “How LGBTQ+ Activists Got ‘Homosexuality’ out of the DSM,” JSTOR Daily, May 26, 2021.
Learn More [3]: “Discrimination Prevents LGBTQ People From Accessing Health Care,” Center for American Progress, January 18, 2018.
Learn More [2]: “Gender Centers,” accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More [2]: Sara Jaffe, “Notes on Queer Conception and the Redefinition of Family,” JSTOR Daily, January 27, 2021.
Learn More [3]: “Facts about LGBTQ+ Families,” Family Equality, June 2020.
Learn More [4]: Travis Mitchell, “Marriage and Cohabitation in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project (blog), November 6, 2019.
Learn More: “History,” GMHC, October 9, 2020.
Learn More [2]: Dr. Dana Rosenfeld, “The AIDS Epidemic’s Lasting Impact on Gay Men,” The British Academy, February 19, 2018.
Learn More [3]: Tim Fitzsimons, “LGBTQ History Month: The Early Days of America’s AIDS Crisis,” NBC News, October 15, 2018.
Learn More [4]: Lisa Cisneros, “40 Years of AIDS: A Timeline of the Epidemic,” UC San Francisco, June 4, 2021.
Learn More: “The History of The National Health Law Program,” National Health Law Program, accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More [2]: “Timeline: History of Health Reform in the U.S.” (Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2011).
Learn More [2]: “Anti-LGBTQ,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More [5]: “2023 Anti-Trans Bills,” Track Trans Legislation, accessed June 30, 2023.
Learn More [3]: Aaron Wiegand, “Barred from Transition: The Gatekeeping of Gender-Affirming Care during the Gender Clinic Era,” Intersect 15, no. 1 (2021).
TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by John Keller
Highland Park, New Jersey
June 21, 2019
Transcription by Chrissy Briskin
Annotations by Michael Nazzaro
00:00
This is John Keller with coLAB Arts and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. It is Friday June 21, 2019 at about 9:30 in the morning. We’re located in Highland Park at the Institute for Personal Growth and we are interviewing today–
Margie Nichols, uh, I am the founder and I was the first, up until recently, the executive director of IPG.
Great. And Margie, if you don’t mind, would you mind sharing your birthday?
January 27, 1947
Great. And speaking of birth dates, where were you born?
I was born in New Jersey. I was born in Newark, uh, my parents both grew up in Newark, we lived there ‘til I was about five or six and then moved to Menlo Park Terrace which is a development in Woodbridge Township, not far from here actually, and that’s where I lived until I went to college.
Were your parents– had your parents always grown up in Newark?
Yeah, no they grew up, they both grew up in Newark. They knew each other in high school.
Mhm– and were their parents from Newark? How–
Um, my mother’s parents were both Italian immigrants, they were from a town near Naples in Italy and, uh, uh, immigrated to and settled in Newark and my father’s family, yeah they had been in Newark, they had been in New Jersey for quite a while.
And when you were, were there any, kind of like, family stories about the day you were born?
No, um, no family stories about the day I was born. My parents got married because my mother was pregnant. It was not a happy marriage, my father made it very clear he would not have married my mother, he was afraid because my mother was Italian obviously, he was afraid that my mother’s brothers were mobbed up, semi true, um, and that if he didn’t marry my mother they would kill him or beat the crap out of him or something like that, so, um, yeah I don’t know if that’s a story about the day I was born, but it’s some kind of an origin story, so yeah.
So when you were, ah, your mom’s side of the family was Italian, was your dad’s side also Italian?
No, Nichols, that’s my maiden name, uh, no they were, I think the term that’s often used is gentile poverty. They’d been in the country for generations and generations, they were from England and Wales and they didn’t really have much money, but they, um, they aspired enough to waspy pretensions that my father’s parents, um, completely disapproved of his marriage because he was marrying an Italian and, back then, Italians were really discriminated against.
3:23
So they were married ‘46-’47 right before you were born?
Right before I was born exactly so ‘47, no ‘46, yeah. Right.
So you spent those first five years in Newark, were you living with extended family?
Yeah, uh-huh. We were living with my mother’s family. They had a big house on Second Street in Newark. And my mother was one of twelve children, the youngest of twelve children, so by the time I came along, there were aunts and uncles that were adults and had their own children and so on and so forth, um, and it was one of those families where people lived there, it was multi generational– so–
And most of those aunts and uncles were staying in that immediate neighborhood?
At that point they did, eventually everybody moved out of Newark, but–
What are some of your earliest memories of that time, or do you have memories of–
I don’t really have memories of living in Newark, um, none of my early memories are particularly happy memories. It’s not something I tend to think about, or talk about much. Um, it was an unhappy family. My father was an alcoholic, uh, there was domestic violence, he– he, um, he was a philanderer, we actually had to leave the state for a while when I was five and a half because he got his boss’s daughter pregnant, you know, um, my mother was chronically depressed, not surprisingly, so yeah my early memories aren’t fun memories.
Did you spend most of your time with, uh, other– other– with your grandparents, or with your mom or?
I mean with both parents. They moved out when I was around five, I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with my mother’s family or my father’s family. I barely saw my father’s family. My mother’s family, once they moved out of Newark, we didn’t see them all that often. We saw them on holidays and so on and so forth, but it wasn’t a particularly close relationship.
What was the reason to move to, you said, Menlo Gardens? Menlo Park–
Menlo Park Terrace. 'Cause everybody wanted to move out of Newark. That was what was happening. It was white flight. Everybody left Newark and Menlo Park Terrace was one of those, you know, early, I think they called it tract housing where every house was the same and they were inexpensive.
And is that where you– you would have started school right around that time?
Um, yeah, I mean I think I had gone to school, I think I did kindergarten in Newark, but yeah that’s where I started school.
Yeah, would it have been the Edison public school system?
No, it was the Woodbridge public school system.
Yeah. Do you have any memories of that?
Yeah, I have lots of memories of it. I was– well let me put it to you this way: I ran away from home the day after I graduated from high school, so that should give you some idea of my childhood. I couldn’t wait to get out. And that included the school. I went to grammar school at a place that still exists, a place called Keasbey, New Jersey, I don’t know what it’s like anymore. At the time the primary industry was clay pits. So, um, my father was sort of downwardly mobile. He had gone to college on the GI bill, um, but because he wanted to reserve as much money as he could for alcohol, um, we lived in a blue collar area even though he was a college graduate. My mother wasn’t but she certainly aspirationally was what both parents had in mind for me and my younger brother. I really was out of place in the school system growing up. They skipped me a grade, um, I was always the smartest kid in the class, I was pretty socially awkward too, so I was bullied all the way through school. It wasn’t a fun happy childhood. It sort of predestined me to be a therapist.
8:15
So was it just you and your brother?
Yeah.
And what was the age difference?
Five and a half years.
Um, and so he must have been born right around the time you moved?
Yes.
Do you remember what that was like, suddenly having a sibling?
It was, well, what I remember was that it was also the time that my father making this girl pregnant was known and my mother plunged into a depression, um, and she always felt guilty because she was depressed when my brother was born and substantially for some time after that, so I sort of became my brother’s caretaker at a fairly early age.
You said that your father was on the GI bill. Where did he serve?
Well it was World War II, um, he never saw action, I mean he was overseas, but he never saw action.
When you kind of started school, were there any subjects that you gravitated toward as a little kid, when you got skipped was that purely for academic reasons, you were just kind of a little more advanced than the other kids?
Yeah, I was a lot more advanced because I got skipped and I was still bored to tears in school. Reading, English, Literature, for a long time I assumed I’d be a writer when I grew up.
You were living in a house, in tract housing at the time. Did you have friends in the neighborhood, did you make friends?
I had very few friends as a kid. When I look back on it now, I would have been given some kind of diagnosis, you know what I mean? Um, I was very socially awkward, very withdrawn, very sensitive, cried easily, that kind of thing, so I didn’t have a lot of friends, I was kind of a loner.
And what was the relationship like with you and your brother?
Um, it was a close relationship when we were growing up. He, you know, he related to me almost as another mother, 'cause that’s the role that I played.
Um, so let’s see, so when you were making your way through school, did you have any one-off relationships with other kids, did you do, sort of, any activities outside of school?
I played the piano, I played the coronet for a while actually, believe it or not, that was pretty much it. Back then, kids didn’t get shopped around to activities the way they do now, you know what I mean? You kind of did what was available at school, mostly sports and that was it.
11:17
Did you have a sense of, as you were kind of growing up, when you were ten, eleven, twelve, you started developing your own kind of personal identity, were you making any realizations about yourself?
Um, well I knew, I had my first sexual experience with another girl when I was eleven. Um, and we got caught by her mother, and so I had a very early experience that, um, being homosexual was the worst thing in the world, so I sort of repressed that for quite a while actually. I mean that’s the main thing I think about. The other big awakening for me was that in between my junior and senior year in high school, I won a, um, what the hell was it? It was like a National Science Foundation grant to go to a summer camp that was held at a private school in Massachusetts. It was the first time that I met other kids that I felt were like me. Meaning, all the kids that went to the camp were super smart and so on and so forth. Lot of New York City kids, um, I was awed by the New York City kids, so it was an interesting– it was a revelatory experience for me because when you’re a kid you think that whatever your environment is, is the world you know what I mean? Even if you see other stuff on TV you kind of think it’s the world, and that summer I realized that there was a world that was completely removed, different from the one that I was growing up in, and it was a world I might be happy in, so that was kind of pretty important, it was also, that summer, somebody told me I should apply to Radcliffe College. Now in my high school, they discouraged that. They said that no one from Woodbridge High School had ever gone to an Ivy League college, that was true at the time, and that I wouldn’t get in. But when I went to the summer school, they encouraged me, I was encouraged to do that and I applied and I got in so that was pretty, um, you know that certainly changed my life. It changed my life.
What was your family’s response?
Well they were happy, I don’t know that, I don’t know, even though my father had a college education, they weren’t that sophisticated. I’m not sure they recognized that Radcliffe was, it was then, it still is– is essentially Harvard. I don’t know that they recognized that it was as big of a deal as it was. But they were happy.
What was the, I mean you kind of talked about the experience you had when you were eleven, but as you were kind of making your way through puberty and having these experiences and getting the chance to go the summer camp, were there any other big kind of transitional moments for you?
Well I’m bisexual, so I also became sexually active with boys. And back then, I graduated from high school in 1964, so we’re talking early sixties, and I was pretty unusual. I mean that was pretty rebellious back then to be sexually involved with guys at that age. Now? Not so much.
Were you becoming– did you form any sort of political identity at that time?
Not ‘til I went to Radcliffe. Not ‘til I went to Radcliffe. I don’t think other than seeing somebody, on the– My graduating class, and this was a time of really baby boomer boom, my graduating class was eleven hundred kids. There probably were a couple of black kids in there but I never knew any. And I wasn’t interested in politics. It wasn’t ‘til I got to Radcliffe that that happened. That I got a political awakening.
15:39
So you had mentioned that you left home the moment you graduated from high school that you kind of got out. What did that look like?
Um, I was involved with a boy who at that time was also very unhappy, so we ran away together. We ran weirdly to New Haven, because it was close, we knew people weren’t going to look, we assumed people were going to look for us in New York and that was correct. We assumed nobody, we knew Yale was there so okay something has to be happening in New Haven. So yeah, it was true, we were there for two months and then the guy I had run away with decided he wants to go to college after all and so we came home, but they didn’t find us.
And that happened before you graduated or after you graduated?
No I graduated, I gave the salutatorian address at my high school graduation and the next day ran away.
Um so then what was the sequence of events that led you to go to school?
I came back and went to college. I mean the main consequence of that, which is sort of interesting is that I was going to room with someone I had met at this summer camp, and when her parents found out I had run away, they refused to let her room with me. So I got stuck. And that person who I was going to room with was Linda Greenhouse. She’s pretty famous; she was a supreme court reporter for The Times for many years. She’s still around. So yeah, I got a roommate randomly.
What was that movement into the Radcliffe world was like?
Oh I remember it vividly. It was– so I grew up in this very working class area and Radcliffe was all rich people, I mean mostly. It was ninety nine percent rich people. One thing I remember was that I, you know, a lot of the Radcliffe living rooms in the dorms had antique furniture and I remember thinking, “Why does this rich school have all this old furniture? Can’t they afford anything new?” I remember that, that’s how socially removed I was. I remember Wednesday afternoon sherry hours. That’s what they did at that time at Radcliffe. I was on scholarship at the time, I can’t imagine that they do this anymore, the girls on scholarship waited tables for the girls who were not on scholarship, so there was a very clear social demarcation. Very early on that I became aware of pretty quickly.
What was the academic life like?
Wonderful. I mean it was all Harvard classes. Very exciting.
Did you have– did you immediately, kind of, place yourself in a subject area?
Yes, oh subject area? Well, I actually gravitated toward, back then, I’m sure they still do, Harvard had a psychology department which was strictly Skinnerian experimental psych, and then they had a department called Social Relations which was what we would probably call social and personality psychology, so pretty early on I gravitated to that. Um, and I don’t remember exactly when, but within the first couple of years, knew that that’s what I wanted to specialize in. Then the other thing that I did within the first month was I joined SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Back then white people were part of SNCC. It didn’t become a sepratist organization for a few years after that. That was the other sort of huge revelatory, you know, once I joined SNCC and I met other people who had a lot of political consciousness, uh, you know stuff about social class, not just race, that was obvious, stuff about social class started making sense, um, so I developed a kind of radical left wing politics almost immediately. You know, went to sit ins in Boston, went to demonstrations, went down to Selma, you know, after– was it after my– when the march was– was it ‘65 or ‘66? Did a lot of stuff like that.
20:40
What was that like?
It was great, it was exciting, it was wonderful, um, it was terrific.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Did you have any particular– was there any anxiety that you had?
There was not enough. I’ve always been– people who know me will tell you that, um, I’m not risk averse enough, you know, I’ve always, I’ve just always had a tendency in situations where I should be frightened to not be frightened enough. So I did things I look back, well first off I got very heavily into drugs almost immediately, um, by the end of my freshman year I was shooting amphetamines, um, I got hooked up with a black boyfriend almost immediately when we drove through the south to get down to the march, um, you know I was a white girl with black guys in the car– should’ve been frightened. You know, I mean people did die, I should have been frightened, I don’t remember being particularly anxious, it was more exciting to me.
Um, what was your relationship with your family during your college years?
Um, well they were not fond of my having a black boyfriend. That just flipped them out. Well, my parents separated while I was a freshman. They separated the first semester of my freshman year. Um, and that really was the focus. My mother made a suicide attempt after that, um, my father was sort of gone, um, my poor brother was really devastated so that was really the focus of the family. I was not the focus of the family at that point.
Um, did you remain in contact with your brother when you went off to college?
I did but he was heartbroken because I was his support and then what happened was an awful time really. My mother made a suicide attempt and then afterwards she– she moved because she was isolated down there. I don’t even think she drove at that point, um, so she moved to um, West Caldwell? One of the Caldwells– she moved to one of the Caldwells with my brother. Um, because that was her family, I mean this is the exodus of Italians from Newark was up Bloomfield Avenue [laughter] you know by then they had reached the Caldwells, so, um, she had relatives very close by so that was helpful for her. It was devastating for my brother because he lost me, my father, and all of his friends and social life in a matter of a few months. It was really devastating for him.
So while you were in college, were you starting to formulate– what was– actually, let’s stay in college for a second, you had a couple of relationships, did you have any other same-sex relationships?
Um, no. Um, I was still, no. It wasn’t ‘til I was twenty, I didn’t finish at Radcliffe. I got kicked out 'cause, uh, I was shooting speed. Academically, I did really well, um, I was actually working at a folk music place. At the time it was a place that was probably, arguably, one of the couple most famous clubs, you know Dylan had been there and Baez and all that, it was called Club 47 in Cambridge, so I was working there and going to school, and I still got pretty much straight A’s, but I was shooting speed and I overdosed, went to the student– on speed, went to the student health center, and the doctors told the dean. I mean, you know, wasn’t supposed to happen, but the doctors told the dean. So I wasn’t actually kicked out, they allowed me to withdraw for medical reasons. Um, so that was in the middle of my junior year I withdrew.
25:09
What was it like working at that folk shop?
It was great. It was wonderful. I mean you probably have never heard of most of these, I mean you’ve heard of Arlo Guthrie, but Arlo Guthrie was there a lot, The Lovin’ Spoonful, um, The Chambers Brothers, um, I mean every, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, all of those old Blues, Folk people appeared there, and it was a little club and it held like a hundred, a hundred fifty people so, it was great, I got to know them all. It was fun, it was a wonderful time.
What kind of work were you doing there?
I was a waitress, it was a coffee shop.
Yeah?
Yeah.
So when did the– the– when you withdrew, was that during your first year, your second year?
No, no, no, that was my junior year. I had two and a half years in when I withdrew, so yeah.
Did you, were you always living on campus?
After my freshman year, I lived off campus, yeah, in an off-campus apartment.
What was Cambridge like around that time?
I was pretty great, I mean it was a pretty great time, it was the sixties, you know. Um, a lot of tie dye, a lot of drugs, a lot of psychedelics, um, it was right after Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert who later became Ram Dass, got kicked out of Harvard, I think in ‘63. But the legacy lived on, you know what I mean? There was a whole sort of subculture that was the early hippie movement. It was great.
What did you do during your summers?
Um the first summer I went home, 'cause it was right after my mother made a suicide attempt. I really needed to be home. I don’t remember, the second summer I went to California with my boyfriend. We met Lenny Bruce’s widow [laughter] and had a picnic at his grave site. It was a wild time. And I did LSD, LSD was still legal, it was the last summer that– the last year that LSD was still legal in California, it was a lot of fun. Dangerous, um, again, it’s one of those things when I look back on it now, I think, I certainly would never want my own children to do that, but, you know, I had a good time and I had some pretty great experiences. The LSD experiences were wonderful and it was pure, it was still pharmaceutical grade LSD you got, so it was great.
Were you traveling mostly by car?
Yeah, we drove across the country.
And then, so you withdrew from Radcliffe, what was your next step?
My boyfriend and I lived in Cambridge, we had a horrible, pretty much unheated apartment in Cambridge, um, that was January 1967. Um, and, um, he was using heroin, I started shooting heroin. We lived as junkies for about six or eight months, and then that summer, he got drafted. And, um, he didn’t eventually serve, he was a heroin addict, he had to go home to Minnesota, is that where the Twin Cities is?
Yeah.
He had to go home to Minnesota to deal with the draft board and I had no idea what was going to happen at that point and, um, and I went home. I went back to my mom’s place.
And what happened?
I knew I had a drug problem, I mean it was pretty obvious. I didn’t have heroin back in Jersey, but I was sort of– they used to call it at the time a garbage head, anything I could get my hands on. Um, I saw a commercial on TV for a drug program in The Village called Encounter, and I entered a drug program. It was back, do you know what therapeutic communities are? You ever hear of Synanon? Um, so back– back then, one of the primary drug treatment programs, maybe the primary drug treatment modality was called therapeutic communities and they were run by ex-addicts and mostly they were residential. But Encounter was an offshoot of one of those programs of a place called Daytop Village. And Encounter was a really unusual program in that it had been started by some young, white, middle class college students. So I gravitated to it immediately. Um, and I was– it wasn’t a residential program, but you went there five days a week and Saturdays. It was, I guess the analogy today would be an IOP, you know, um, and I got very involved after the first, after I went through treatment I became a staff member, um, that was my first, those were my first counseling experiences as a counselor. I was twenty one when that happened, um, I was involved for several years with Encounter.
30:50
So you hadn’t finished your college–
No I hadn’t but I went back to NYU and I finished at NYU. I went part time to NYU and finished.
And did you get a degree in was it liberal arts or was it–
Yeah it was liberal arts. I got a bachelor's degree in liberal arts.
Um, so what was the, how many years were you working at the facility?
I’m trying to think. I worked at Encounter for a couple of years, then I worked– some people from Encounter were then working– the City of New York had something called Addiction Services Agency. So I worked at Addiction Services Agency for a couple of years. I don’t remember exactly, but three or four years, and then I applied for and got into graduate school. Um in clinical psychology.
Where?
Columbia.
Um, were you still dating at this time?
Actually I had a very brief marriage to another ex-addict when I was twenty two. Um, and it was where– so that’s when I started to identify as bisexual. I was not– we were right around the corner from the firehouse, and all the activity after Stonewall, I wasn’t involved in any of that, but the atmosphere was at that point one in which I could start to acknowledge that I had attractions to women, so that’s when I started to identify as bisexual.
And were you acting on those attractions?
Yeah, yeah, we also, it was funny, we– I guess because the composition of the program was mostly people who were sort of college-oriented. There was still kind of a hippie ethos even though we were drug free. And so for a while I lived until, from like ‘72-’75, I moved with a group of people from Encounter out to New Jersey to Howell Township and we lived on a farm commune. We farmed twenty acres and everybody fucked everybody else. That was the ethos. And that was where I first started having relationships with women.
That sounds like an intense period of time. How did you set up the farm collective?
Um, just, I mean we had been–
It seems like a big move, that’s a big transition to say okay we’re leaving the city.
It was a big transition, especially since none of us had any experience farming, and of course we didn’t, I mean we failed miserably. Um, there was a lot of talk about– groups of us would get together and talk about moving to Vancouver and setting up a subsistence community. That was part of what was going on in the late sixties, early seventies, that was kind of part of what was going on culturally. There were– communes were a thing. You don’t really hear about communes anymore but it was a thing. It didn’t seem to be as big of a move as it actually was. Um, and we learned. We bought a tractor, an old tractor that had been built in the 1940’s and we painted it psychedelic colors and our neighbors were a little, you know, it was fun. It was a fun time. [laughter]
So when you were, kind of like, working with the center in New York, and then working on the farm, did you find that you were, your personality fit in some specific way? Were you one of the leaders, how did you–
I was probably always a leader, yeah. I mean we were pretty non-hierarchical, so that wasn’t something, there were no designated titles, but yeah I would say that, yes.
35:15
So what– when did the farm experience come to an end?
Well, it came to an end partly because we really couldn’t make money and I started graduate school in 1973. I was living on the farm when I started. It was commuting from Howell to Columbia. Um, and, you know, after two or three years we just had made no money, relationships were starting, all of this wonderful everybody fucking everybody else started getting a little, developing some issues, and then in 1975 I met Nancy Musgrave at a NOW meeting in Monmouth County [laughter] and I fell in love. That kind of ultimately kind of helped break it up too.
Were you regularly part of NOW at the time?
I had just joined NOW, right because I was feeling like I needed– I had been part of, in the city, of a early consciousness raising group, um, and I felt the need for some kind of feminist connection, so in Monmouth County, there were two NOW chapters, and one of them was fairly lefty radical. They called the chapter the Sojourner Truth chapter of NOW. And it was full of housewives who became lesbians, you know? Um, and so that’s where I gravitated and that’s where I met Nancy. She was not a housewife.
And what was that first meeting like?
Um, it was very romantic, it was love at first sight. We met because– at a meeting where I was speaking because– it’s a little complicated. I’ll see if I can explain this. Um, I was doing my internship that year, my clinical internship, and I was doing it at a facility in Monmouth County called Children’s Psychiatric Hospital, um, they got a mental, that was back in the days of community mental health centers. Right, there was a lot of funding for community mental health centers. So they got a community mental health center grant from the federal government, contingent upon them setting up some specific services for women oriented to rape prevention. So, long story short, I wrote that section of the proposal and, um, you were supposed to hook up with a community group to do it, and I was involved with NOW, so that was the logical thing was for NOW to somehow get involved. I met Nancy at a meeting where I was talking to people at NOW, it was a NOW meeting where I was talking to people about doing that, and that’s where we met.
What was your academic life at Columbia like? Did you enjoy that time?
They called me the ghost of Columbia [laughter]. I showed up as little as possible, I had an advisor that I was close to that I really liked, it was a funny department. The department was traditionally very psychoanalytic, so the thing about Encounter is, um, and it’s really sure shaped my clinical thinking forever, we were very anti-professional. Our attitude was professionals don’t know anything about drug treatment and drug rehabilitation, pretty much true. Psychotherapy was a useless modality for drug treatment. Also pretty much true. Also we had this head set that, uh, psychotherapists were elite, Park Avenue, out of touch with reality, et cetera, so I brought that attitude to Columbia, even though I got accepted to the program, I, uh, my joke is that I walked into Columbia with a copy of Thomas Saz’s Myth of Mental Illness under one arm and Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness under the other. That pretty much was the attitude, they tolerated me at Columbia. I was a good student, I was very smart, I was very articulate, and so I got through fine and I made friends, I was immediately taken under the wing of this– the one guy in the department who was not psychoanalytic, back then family therapy was just beginning to happen and it was very radical. The family therapy movement was very community-based and very radical. So I got involved with, um, Gerry Weinberger, after I got through all my coursework, he got fired, so I was sort of lucky that I latched on to him while I was still taking course work.
40:30
Um, so you were finishing up right around the time that you were submitting this proposal with NOW?
Yeah, so the way that Columbia worked then was that you took three years of classes and then you did an internship and then a dissertation. So I was done with my course work so, um, yeah I did the clinical internship and immediately, by then we had gotten the grant, and, um, I became the director of this women’s center in Monmouth County.
So, then, it seems kind of like it worked out pretty well, pretty nicely–
Yeah I’ve sort of been in my career, I would say I’ve been in the right place at the right time several times.
So what was it like launching that project?
It was pretty interesting. We tried to do it as a, kind of in a communal, non-hierarchical fashion like everybody on the staff got paid the same, the executive director, me, got paid the same as the secretary, um, we tried to operate as a collective. That did not work out so well. Um, but it was pretty, the day we opened our doors there were battered women, that’s who we, we became a battered women’s shelter because rape crisis hotline yeah, we got some calls, but that wasn’t that big a deal. What was a big deal was on the day we opened our doors, battered women started showing up, um, and almost immediately we became a battered women– we found some space and became a battered women’s shelter. And that was very, we opened our doors in September of 1976, uh, that period in the late seventies was when domestic violence was just beginning to be, people began to know about it, it became a political issue for feminists, um, we were, Nancy more than me was involved with the first legislation in the state, um, you know, to favor battered women, um, laws mandating that the cops take it seriously, 'cause back then, no police officers took it seriously. So it was pretty exciting, we got involved in forming a state-wide coalition of battered women’s shelters, it was pretty exciting.
Were you and Nancy living together at this time?
Yeah, mhm.
And what was that like?
It was great. I mean we had a great relationship.
Yeah, um, what was, how long were you at the center?
I was there for three years. And then I left and did my dissertation.
And then did someone– did someone else take up the mantle?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it still exists. It’s still there, in fact about ten or twelve years ago they had a dinner where they brought back the founders and brought us back and gave us plaques and made speeches [laughter].
Is their work still primarily–
Still primarily domestic violence, yeah. They’ve changed their name, I don’t remember what the name of it is now.
What do you think has been the evolution of that field of work in terms of domestic violence or helping women? It kind of started off in the seventies as a socially recognizable problem. What’s the evolution of it been since the founding of that center to today do you think?
I don’t know, I’m not really much involved with domestic violence anymore. I mean it strikes me that what’s happened is kind of what happens to everything that starts as a radical movement is that it gets bureaucratic, you know? But I don’t know, I’m not sure really beyond that. Certainly it’s much more, here’s an example: the American Psychological Association, shockingly, up until a couple years ago, did not require psychologists to take continuing education. Now they do. I just had to do this for my license renewal. Four hours on domestic violence for CE credits every two years. So it’s– it’s certainly become institutionalized as a recognizable problem that people need to address and people need to learn about. Um, that’s for sure.
45:03
So you did three years, you did your internship, you did your dissertation–
I did my– it took me a long time to do my dissertation besides working.
You were working, doing your dissertation, three years there and then what was the next–
I became– I went into private practice. I legally shouldn’t have, ah, the licensing laws were pretty new back then. I think the psychology licensing law in New Jersey only started in the late sixties, like ‘69 or something like that. Licensing laws were pretty new and pretty lax. I started a private practice, um, we had been running groups for lesbians at this center that was another very controversial thing that we did. By lesbians, for lesbians, you know, we ran a support group for lesbians and wound up doing quite a bit of counseling and so I started doing counseling on my own. Ten dollars a session, out of my house in Long Branch.
What was that– you’re running a facility that is providing services for, shall we say, a marginalized group in society? And you’re also living in essence in a marginalized group. What was your life– what was your personal life like during that time? When your personal life met the public life?
Didn’t meet the public life often. You know what I mean? We did everything we could to– I have lived in a LGBT bubble for most of my life and it started then. Actually, Nancy and I started a PRIDE group in Monmouth County, a gay group. We got very involved in the gay, back then almost every county had a gay organization that would have meeting, and that’s where you could, outside of the bar scene, that’s where you met people. So we were very involved in that, we were very involved in the gay community in New Jersey, and I sort of insulate myself as much as possible. I managed to have a life where I, after that, I never worked for anybody else, you know, um, and could insulate myself from the public. That was less true after Nancy and I got involved in gay stuff, I started to become pretty public and I started doing, like, I started doing trainings for the state, like, I would train alcoholism professionals about gay/lesbian, it wasn’t LGBT back then, it was just gay and lesbian, so I had that kind of interaction, um, which was, a fair amount of it was negative. But mostly I insulated myself. We had friends in New York and when we went to New York I kind of insulated myself from this great world.
Was this late seventies, early eighties or so?
Yup.
So you were in private practice? I guess my– I don’t know how to ask this, what do you like about counseling? What did you like about that? You’ve been doing it–
Forever.
Do you enjoy it?
Yes. I don’t know, there’s something about being engaged with people and their stories that’s always kept my interest. I have a short attention span. I lose interest in things, you know, my style was to become obsessed with something and then I’m done, I move on to something else. But that never happened with doing therapy. Now, the other thing about doing therapy though is you can change, you know, so my first clients were almost all lesbians. Then I started seeing gay men, well that was a whole different thing. That was interesting. Ah, ah, ah, in the eighties, I decided I was interested in sex therapy, so I got trained here at UMDNJ in ‘82, and ‘83 I was in a post doc, um, sex therapy program so that changed things up. I started working with “transsexual” clients. So you could change it up, you know, you can do therapy but you can change the type of people you work with. I learned to do hypnosis. That’s what I like about it, there’s enough– I do get very– I have a better memory for my clients’ lives. I remember the name of a client’s sister and I forget personal acquaintances. It engages me and you can really change it up a lot.
50:15
So you’re– you were in private–
And it’s political. The way I’ve done it is political anyway.
So what’s that mean–.
When– when I started doing private practice, there was nobody out. There were no out therapists. I mean homosexuality had only been removed from the DSM in 1973, um, everybody in practice had been trained back in the day when they were trained that homosexuality was a mental disease. Gay people could not get, they couldn’t get adequate counseling, they couldn’t get adequate counseling, so just doing therapy as an out lesbian was political. Starting IPG was incredibly political. That’s what I mean.
So I’m going to come back to that in a second. I was just curious, in this period of time, you’re in a relationship with someone over a long period of time, did you still have a connection with your family?
Yeah, I had a connection with my mother and my brother, sure.
And they were still living in Caldwell?
No, my mother had moved to Spotswood, she bought a place in a retirement community in Spotswood.
Then did your brother also go away to school?
My brother got involved with drugs when he was– soon after my mother moved to Caldwell. He started sniffing glue which was a thing back then. Um, in fact when he was sixteen, we, my mother and I, sort of conspired to get him arrested and court mandated to Encounter. And since, honestly his entire life he’s had, he had a long period for a while where he didn’t use drugs at all, he went to Rutgers, graduated from Rutgers, got into Rutgers Graduate School in psychology. He has a PhD in psychology from Rutgers, I’m sorry, not from Rutgers, the PhD is from Fairleigh Dickinson. Um, so he had a long period of time where he functioned pretty stably as a– and then he went off the wagon, so he’s been up and down and off and on with drugs ever since.
You had done the– it was like early eighties you had your private practice, but you had gone back, you talked about doing the sex therapy program. Around what time were you starting to think, “I want to try something different or I want to expand this a little bit.”
Well what was happening was, I was turning a lot of people away. Um, and I had enough of an entrepreneurial sense to think– and private practice was isolating. It would have been tough for me to stay in a solo private practice, it was really, there were days when I talked to clients and went home and talked to Nancy and that was it. I didn’t like it. And I was turning away clients like crazy. People came to see me from South Jersey, from North Jersey, 'cause there wasn’t anybody around. Um, so I got the bright idea to hire people to work with me, for me. And that’s how IPG started and that was 1983.
‘83. So where did you start off?
Highland Park. I had an– we actually started– I had an office in Highland Park, even though I was still living in Long Branch, Highland Park was central, I was getting clients from all over, Highland Park was a good place to locate. So we started by the days I wasn’t using the Highland Park office, another therapist– first I hired one person, then I hired a second person. When we got– we outgrew that office space, we rented another place in Highland Park so, other than a short period time where our offices were in New Brunswick, we’ve been in Highland Park since 1983.
Um, were there any challenges to starting your own–
It actually seemed pretty easy. Like I said, I’ve had a tendency in my career to be in the right place at the right time. And that was definitely the right time and the right place to start a gay oriented private practice.
What was the ethos? How did you bring–
They were people I already knew. Therapists I already knew.
55:19
So it wasn’t hard to recruit–
Not at all. No, I mean because if you were an openly gay therapist, you were feeling pretty isolated. Or if you were a therapist you wanted to be someplace you could be openly gay, um, so yeah, it wasn’t hard at all. Plus, I’ve always been like a laissez faire boss. I didn’t really– I don’t care what your background and training is, what your theoretical orientation is. If I get a sense that you’re a good therapist, just run with it.
One of the ways that I was introduced to IPG was kind of the moniker of the first gay-positive therapy group–
Yeah. We were.
In New Jersey. Did you have a sense of historic responsibility at all?
Yeah, I think we were all very aware that we were– we were proud of who we were. We really had a sense that this was new and historically important. The term gay affirmative therapy wasn’t around then, but when I look back on it, that’s what we were doing. We were creating gay affirmative therapy.
And what is that? What does that look like? What’s the structure of that?
Well, initially– so initially what it meant to be gay affirmative was really like we would just get hordes and hordes of clients who needed somebody to say, “You’re not sick.” Even though it was the eighties, it was ten years, more than ten years after the APA, I mean you have no idea how long that lingered. Um, how many years for IPG, I would say a significant chunk of our clients really came 'cause they needed validation. And we would give clients, I’ve been in therapy before I never told my therapist I was gay. Like, that’s pretty astonishing to think about, but that’s how frightened people were of the censure from, that’s how stigmatized it was to be gay.
Were you seeing clients around that point who were, using historical terms, identified as either transvestite or transsexual or–
Um, so yes. I always had– so back in the eighties the transsexual/transvestite people were not in any way connected to the gay community. Most “trans,” I don’t know how much you know about the history of how transgender people have been treated in the mental health system.
I know a fair amount based on both archived information and also a lot of the stories we’ve collected.
Yeah, okay. When I went to sex therapy program at Rutgers, they just shut down. So you know that Johns Hopkins, there was a period in the seventies where most major universities had gender clinics, and then everything shut down after 1979, and that what’s his face’s study came out and people got frightened, and so I went through that program right after Rutgers had shut down–
58:46
What was the study?
Um, oh God, it was a study that came out, and I just blanked, my age, I just cannot remember names. It was a guy, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins had done a study, he concluded based on this study that sex reassignment surgery, that’s what it was called at the time, that sex reassignment surgery did not help transsexuals. And he even intimated that it might increase the suicide rate. And so that’s all it took for all the clinics to shut down, it was terrible. But the reason I brought that up is the ethos about working with “transsexuals” was if you were transsexual, Renee Richards writes about this a lot, you were supposed to go stealth, you know, in fact you were encouraged to move to another area, cut all of your ties from people who had known you in your birth gender, um, and go stealth. Now we’re talking really exclusively about um, you know, assigned male at birth transitioning to female people. But the idea was you were supposed to, part of the criteria was, part of the criteria for accepting people was, is this person going to pass and be able to go stealth. And so the ethic was kind of if you were transsexual, you didn’t want to affiliate with a gay community in nothing, no contact with the gay community because you wanted to be a “normal heterosexual woman” and pass. People would brag about, “even my gynecologist doesn’t know.” I find that hard to believe, but, so um, so I personally always had referrals of transvestite and transsexual people because I had gone through the program, and there weren’t that many people in the state that were willing to work with them. But it wasn’t because of IPG, because they didn’t want to consider themselves as wanting to affiliate with a–
Interesting, um, so what was kind of the natural evolution of IPG during the eighties?
Um, we got bigger and bigger and bigger, we started out with me and one other person and, you know, we got much bigger, we, uh, we started working in the eighties with straight people because we were good therapists. We were good therapists. So inevitably, you know, a gay person would say to their straight friend, “Wow, I have a great therapist, you should call this place.” So we started to develop a non– there were obviously people that, I mean we had a rainbow flag in the window for many, many years, so there were obviously people that were okay with gay people, but we started to develop a straight clientele, we also, um, started to see people in the kink community, um, and people who identified as bisexual. I came out in the late eighties as bisexual. It was a big deal at that point in the gay community, so we kind of expanded in that way.
Um, what was your–
We were involved in starting HYACINTH Foundation.
What was that, yeah, so I would say, kind of like, my two next questions are, what was the evolution of your personal life and your family life, and what was HYACINTH like?
So the evolution of my personal life was Nancy and I had a kid in 1983. That’s Cory, the co-owner of IPG now, you spoke to Cory I think, I don’t know if you met him in person. Um, we had a kid and then we broke up a few years later and I’m not particularly interested in talking about all that, um–
What was it like becoming a mom?
It was great, actually. I had not, my whole life I was– I never was interested in being a mother, and yet, somehow decided we both wanted to do it and it was great. We loved being, we still do, loved being parents. So that part was great. And I, after Nancy and I broke up, I was single until the early nineties, um, and then I got involved with a man for a while, and then we broke up and I actually haven’t– Nancy and I consider ourselves life partners even though we don’t live together, she lives in Arizona, um, we’ve both been through many different kinds of relationship structures and, um, we’re more attached to each other than any other adults is what I can say. Um, and personally I got, I mean, we got involved with the kink community because I got involved with kink. Um, so I kind of went through a second adolescence in the late eighties, um, sexually, um, which was fun while it lasted, you know, between coming out as bisexual and coming out as kinky, I sort of expanded my horizons a lot. It was a lot of fun.
64:55
Do you think that was just kind of an evolution of, you know, having had the upbringing in a more closeted atmosphere?
I think today people would come out– I was kinky, I was kinky from the time I was sexual which was before I was ten. Um, but even more, I knew that lesbianism was taboo, but even more than that I knew that this was taboo, um, until, no, it started to become part of the lesbian community. There was an organization in New York, we moved to, Nancy and I moved to Jersey City in 1983 right before, um, right before we had Cory.
So from Long Branch to Jersey City–
Yes, right. We had wanted for a long time, we had always wanted to move back closer to the city. Um, because we always felt isolated in Monmouth County, um, so yeah I don’t remember where I was going with that.
So you moved to– I was going to backtrack a little bit. Did you have a social life in Long Branch? Did you hang out in Long Branch?
No, no.
It was where you lived–
It was where we lived. It was where we lived, yeah. We had some friends in New Jersey, we had a lot of friends– we had friends all over New Jersey because we had been involved in the gay community all over New Jersey. We also had friends in New York, you know? My best friend for a long time was a gay guy in Michael Shernoff in New York. That’s how we got involved in HYACINTH too, because Michael was one of the people on the ground floor of GMHC. Um, and–
When did that start?
GMHC?
HYACINTH–
1985. So, um, I was also involved in an organization called the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Health Professionals, and we had annual meetings all over the country, and so I heard about GRID, Gay Related Immunodeficiancy Disease in 1981 at a conference. Um, and I was at the conference the next year I think it was, I get a little fuzzy on these years, maybe it was ‘83. The conference was in Denver and, um, the people, PWA coalition, People With AIDS coalition started at that– so I was very familiar with what was first called– I remember people from the CDC coming to one of our meetings in, I guess, ‘82, to warn us that it was a sexually transmitted disease and many of the gay men in the audience shouted them down. Wouldn’t believe it. It was a plot by the US government to destroy the gay community. I mean Randy Shilts writes a lot about, you know, And The Band Played On. There was a lot of resistance among gay men to seeing it as a sexually transmitted disease. Um, for quite a while. Um, so I knew about it from very early on, by ‘84 or ‘85, GMHC in the city was desperate, I mean they just couldn’t handle the requests for help and they were handling a lot of requests for help from New Jersey. And so, my friend Michael Shernoff who was involved with GMHC there were other people I knew at GMHC as well, other gay men, and said, “If you start something in New Jersey, we’ll help you.” And at that, just at that time, there were other people in this area, Tom Johnson, who was in the mental health center at Rutgers, um, John Woods was also there, a bunch of other people in this area who were also having small meetings to see if anything could be started to help people, um, and we all got together and, um, again, I wrote a grant proposal to a foundation called The Chicago Resource Foundation, I think. We got a small grant, um, to fund one staff member and everybody else donated their time. And the first HYACINTH offices were in the IPG offices, we just used the, you know.
69:53
And what was the work of the organization?
Oh boy. We were a support, uh, we started a buddy system, we did legal services, free legal services, it was a social service organization for people with AIDS was what it was.
What was the buddy system?
Um, GMHC, a lot of places have that, the buddy system was used, a volunteer to become a buddy to a person who had AIDS. I mean everybody died then, usually within a year of diagnosis and died miserable deaths. But, they were isolated. Typically people who contracted AIDS were abandoned, abandoned by their families, often abandoned by friends, um, they needed– so the buddy system was, you became a buddy to somebody with AIDS, you’d visit them every week and we had meetings with the buddies and coordinators and stuff like that. We ran legal services clinics, um, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. We did volunteer training for the volunteers.
How was– what was the atmosphere like at that time in New Jersey in terms of how hospital systems worked?
Awful, just awful. Just terrible. You know those were the days when people left food on the floor outside the room because they were afraid to go into the room. There was so much hysteria, you cannot imagine the hysteria about AIDS in the eighties. And it wasn’t just New Jersey, it was New York, you couldn’t get funeral homes to take the bodies, it was just terrible. Um, it was hard getting– health professionals that I knew and respected were afraid to– I had a friend who was a therapist, a straight woman who was like, “I’m too nervous to have somebody come in my office whose got AIDS.” You know people, it took a long time for people to accept that AIDS is really pretty hard to transmit. It’s pretty hard to, it’s certainly not like measles. So it was awful. Those were years– I had lunch the other day with the guy who started the legal services part of HYACINTH and both of us were talking, we were crying, both, we got really burned out. It was terrible. I had a recurring nightmare for years that– where I was on a battlefield and everybody was dead but me. It was exciting work in the sense that it was really clear that it was needed and nobody else was doing it, but it was just so sad. So sad. Two of the people on the IPG staff died, I mean I’m still pretty young myself and to see thirty year olds healthy one day and six months later they look like concentration camp victims before they died, I knew a lot of people, I can’t remember the names of all the people that I know that died. Part of what I did for a while besides running the organization is I was the co-facilitator of a group for people with AIDS so, yeah. It was very hard work, very hard work. We were all a little crazy, you know what I mean? Most of my friends during those years were gay men, and we spent, I’ve spent a lot of time every summer on Fire Island, and it was kind of a work hard, play hard ethos, you know, and a lot of people, the ones that didn’t die, burned out. It was easy to do.
Did you get a sense at any point that there was, there was a shift kind of– when did the shift happen in culture suddenly, did you ever feel that there was a shift in culture and you were getting more support and more help from larger institutions?
Not while I was involved, not while I was involved. I mean it was gradual, it certainly wasn’t sudden. I mean, I remember the late eighties going to, um, one of my sexology organizations, the sexology organization I am most involved with is called AASECT, American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, and I remember going to their conference in New York, maybe ‘88 or’89 and the– Helen Singer Kaplan, who you may not recognize that name, she was like huge, next to Masters and Johnson, she’s the biggest name in sex therapy. Um, Helen Singer Kaplan and the president of AASECT, Teresa Crenshaw did a plenary in which they asserted that there is no such thing as safe sex. Even at the time one of the safe sex things that was being promoted was JO parties, um, it was not even safe to masturbate with, because what if you have a microscopic cut on your leg and some of the semen gets on your leg– just crazy shit. You can’t eat in restaurants with gay waiters because what if you know he cuts his finger and a drop of the blood gets on your salad? Really crazy, crazy irrational– Masters and Johnson came out and predicted, we’re sort of fear mongering, really people that should have known better were doing that so no, I don’t think much of a shift came until it stopped being a deadly disease. Which was 1996.
76:51
What was the– what was kind of like your span of work, your span of time doing that work?
I started in ‘85, um, I ran– I started HYACINTH, I was only director for a couple of years, of HYACINTH ‘til ‘88 or ‘89, something like that, and then for a couple of years I worked in New York at Woodhull Hospital. A friend of mine, um, ran a CDC research study and I worked there for a couple of years and I think ‘91 was the last year I did that work.
Was that– was it– what was the need– did you have a need to step away from it for a while?
Yeah, I was just fried. I was just fried, you know? And the guy, Paul Poroski, who ran the program in Brooklyn, died of AIDS and I was done. I was done.
Um, so I mean during that entire time IPG is obviously still–
Mhm. Yeah, God bless them. I was a pretty absentee director, but the place kind of ran itself for a long time. And then the nineties was when IPG really– was really the only time we had problems, and that was because of the change in the insurance industry, but by then I was back full time at IPG.
What was that?
We went to managed care in the nineties, the whole country went to managed care. And so all of a sudden, people couldn’t see us anymore and not only– every insurance policy. There was no such thing as out of network benefits. Everybody had to see somebody on a panel, and the panels were very competitive. I mean we got on plenty of panels, but the practice got turned upside down because people who wanted to see us, couldn’t see us. Um, that’s when the practice got to be, we are now majority non-gay and that’s when that happened. You have to see whoever– you went to see whoever was on your panel.
So was it most of the kind of– was the queer community didn’t have access to the same health systems that the hetero community had?
No, nobody did. Nobody had it. Yeah, right. New Jersey ultimately passed laws saying that every insurance company had to offer products that had out of network benefits, and that changed late nineties, um, and so by 2000/2001, we sort of got back on our feet, but, because the rates were fifty/sixty dollars a session all of a sudden. You know.
79:58
Were you seeing clients at this time, or was there an evolution of clients in the transgender community?
In the nineties, yes, I started seeing more transgender clients, still “transsexuals”. Started seeing more transgender clients. We ran a group for– we ran a support group, again all trans women, very few trans men around, but we ran a support group, it was a big deal because we ran it on a Sunday we were on 8 South 3rd, we ran it on a Sunday, and we opened the office an hour or two before the group started so that people could come to the office and dress. 'Cause back, you know, there really wasn’t a community and so that was a big damn deal that trans people had a place they could come and dress as who they were. I think that was probably more important than the group. So that started happening, and the other thing that started happening was, by the turn of the twenty first century, we started seeing college students from Rutgers primarily female to male, so the age got younger. So for many years, every transgender person I saw was a male to female fortyish or even older person, often married with kids before they came out, you know that was sort of the– then suddenly we started getting college kids coming in, so that was really different and that started happening right around the turn of the century.
What do you think was the–
It was starting to happen and it was when the transgender community started getting with the advent of the internet, people being able to connect over the internet, the community started to happen and it was all starting to happen. The revolution was starting to happen.
Were the folks you were seeing coming to the support groups– were they predominantly of a specific socioeconomic group or a racial or ethnic group?
Pretty much mostly white, um, mostly white middle class, mostly white middle class I would say.
And were they coming from all over the state?
Yeah, yeah, 'cause, now, ultimately The Pride Center took over that group, um, but–
What was it called? Did you have a name for the group?
We didn’t have a name for it. They named it when it got there. I think, what do they call it? True Selves, TrueSelves, right they named it after the book.
And that’s actually the namesake of the project as well.
Oh really?
It’s the TrueSelves transgender archive.
Oh, that’s interesting. I need to take a break.
Absolutely. [recording stops]
[End of Recording One]
[Beginning of Record Two]
00:00
Um so I think you had said around 2001, you had started seeing more, kind of, drop-ins and college kids, younger generation, was there a difference in what they needed vs. the groups you had seen before?
Well, they were– so they didn’t have decades of hiding that they had to deal with. So the evolution has been a little bit parallel to the evolution of what I saw with gay clients. So the first gay clients we saw often had spent most of their lives hiding and being deeply closeted, and so there was shame and all that. Not to mention if you spent decades hiding, you may have constructed a heterosexual life, so when you came out, like, your life became a train wreck. So now we’re seeing these college students who have never done that, they hadn’t spent decades hiding, so they were proud, they were out, they were political, they were activists. Um, and they were also more likely to be non-monogamous, they were kinky and they were less conventional to begin with, probably because they were younger and college students.
Um, what was the, what kind of changes did you notice about how therapy evolved for the transgender community?
Um, well for us, the big shift was when we started getting young people which was around 2007. Um, we started getting our first high school-aged students and our first little ones, like, I remember within the space of a month getting the first fifteen-year-old and the first five-year-old. Um, so that was, I mean, that turned us all upside down, 'cause we had no clue how to deal with that. Um, fortunately there were other people who did know how to deal, so we got hooked up, in fact the person I’m talking to at five after eleven is named Arlene Lev who wrote the book Transgender Emergence, who is an expert, she’s been doing this for many years. So we got ourselves training and, um, that was a big shift and a big deal. For one thing, now you had to deal with parents. You know? You had to deal with people who didn’t really have the freedom to do what they wanted to do.
Speaking of parents, you were– you’ve been a parent this entire time while this was going on, what was life like raising a teenager and a young adult?
Um, well, when in 2004– so Cory was a tough teenager, and he’ll be the first to admit that, he was a tough teenager. When he was in high school, Nancy and I, our little mantra was, “Dear God please let him graduate without being incarcerated.” Um, he got busted for pot twice when he was still in high school, so it was tough, it was rough with him. But the thing that was rougher for me was in 2004, I adopted an infant from Guatemala. I’m sorry in 1994, in 1994 I adopted an infant from Guatemala, in 2004 she died. And that fucked me up, fucked Cory up, that really sort of turned our lives upside down. Um, and then in 2005, because I wasn’t done parenting, I adopted two older children, ten and seven from a Guatemalan orphanage, um, so parenting, I’ve been, like, really focused, parenting has been a lot of my life.
Is there anything else you want to say in terms of your family and what the last thirteen years have–
So I never thought I would– I spent the first couple years wishing I were dead after Jesse died, um, but you know I have a pretty good family life now. Nancy and I are very close, she’s very close to my girls Alejandra and Diana, um, the guy I was with in the nineties was Jessie’s father still, we’re all kind of part of a chosen family, we all have holidays together, um, I have a granddaughter now from Cory, both my girls still live with me, um, my life is focused a lot around my family now I would say, it’s focused a lot around it. And it’s good, it’s a good life.
5:22
Are there any, I want to be cognizant of your time, are there any things over the course of the whole journey that you find yourself reflecting on more times than others?
That’s a– I’m not sure I can answer that question, that’s kind of a vague question. Yeah, I don’t know.
You’ve had a– made your way through, to say the least, trying experiences as well, um, do you think there’s any kind of your own personality that you would say that’s what got me through?
Um, well I mean it’s pretty clear that I’m a survivor. That’s a part of my personality that’s, you know, I’m a fighter and I’m a survivor and that’s certainly got me through. I’ve had a lot of wonderful people in my life. I mean, to a certain extent what got me through after Jessie died was Cory, you know, knowing that I still have to be there for Cory. And Nancy helped a lot. So–
What’s the nature of IPG now? What is the work, what is the day to day, in terms of the evolution of it, what are you seeing now are the big issues?
So probably the big change– we now see as many people involved in the kink community or consensual non-monogamy as just plain gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. But the big focus is, has been now for a number of years on transgender youth, especially teenagers. I have the first and only malpractice suit of my life brought against me by the father of a transgender teenager who claimed I turned his daughter trans. That’s been my focus, too, I would say for the last number of years.
Um, you have a family that comes in and they’re dealing with this. A revelation’s been made, a conversation’s been started, what is the conversation you have with those parents or with those family members?
Well, first off, if they’re coming here, they’ve already selected themselves, you know, what I mean, we have a website, we’re very clear about being trans affirmative and so on and so forth. So if they’re coming here, it means by and large, the parents already want to support the kid, you know, we don’t really get Christian Fundamentalist parents who, you know, with the exception of this guy who is suing me, but he wasn’t one of the ones– it was his wife that brought– they’re divorced. It was his wife that brought the kid, not him. Um, so they’re already open, we run parents’ groups as well as groups for teenagers, we do a lot of work individually with the parents. I’m very sympathetic to the parents, it’s a– I think it’s a really tough thing to find out you have a transgender kid. I think we do really good work with the parents, um, you know, it’s obviously around educational, psycho-ed, helping them understand what this means, allowing them to go through a grieving process, again there’s parallels to parents finding out their kids are gay, um, you know.
Are you seeing any spouses?
Of transgender people?
Yeah.
We don’t see that many, so the population of transgender people who are middle aged and older really decreased and we don’t see them that often anymore, but when we do, we’ve always worked with the spouses, and it’s one of the advantages of having multiple therapists is that the spouse can see one therapist, and the transgender person can see another therapist and yet there can still be communication.
9:59
Um, are there any other questions that you thought I was going to ask you that I haven’t asked you yet?
I thought we would focus more on trans stuff, but I think that would have happened if we had more time.
A little bit, but that’s fine, but I also think it’s getting an understanding of the evolution of the therapeutic evolution, what the waves were– that was really interesting too. Um, yeah I mean I think the remaining trans questions are what are the common experiences, or what are some of the bigger issues that are coming across with younger kids, what is their natural process?
I do an immense amount of training about this, and writing about it. So the big controversies in the field I would say are early social transition, that’s one of them, use of puberty blockers, the age that you put somebody on cross-gender hormones and now there’s this thing– there’s a new– there’s always been, sadly, within the feminist movement, anti-trans people, TERFs, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, right? So the latest thing that has come from an unholy alliance between the Christian right and TERFs is this promulgation of this bogus disorder, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, have you heard of this ROGD?
I’ve heard of gender dysphoria, but not–
Yeah so it’s being pushed– one of my sexology organizations, [telephone ringing] that’s probably Arlene.
[End of Recording Two]
[Beginning of Record Three]
00:00
Um, just did a panel on it, you know, um, that’s– and it’s a difficult thing because all parents would like to believe that. So the idea is that Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is this theory of social contagion. It is now cool if you’re a teenager to be trans, so people are picking up trans identity when they’re not really trans. I’ve had, out of hundreds of kids that have come through here, maybe a couple, I mean there have been a couple where I wondered, right? And it’s kind of inevitable with something like this, that there’s going to be a few people that are picking up on trans identity when it’s not really authentic, but it’s certainly not a significant percentage. But unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that a parent really latches on to, so that’s been a new thing to kind of contend with, this idea that my kid is trans because it’s cool to be trans now, and that’s– I mean transgender is where the culture wars are being fought now, you know, not so much ga– I mean yeah gay and lesbian but really more around trans issues, so–
I’ll stop the recording there.
[End of Recording Three]
[Beginning of Record Four]
00:00
Yes, I have to say that right after we met, you sent an email with some follow up questions. Don’t even remember what they were.
Don’t worry about it. Um, so this is John Keller with coLAB Arts and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. It is Wednesday July 10, I am doing a follow up interview with Margie Nichols. And we are here at IPG in Highland Park. Great, so on that note, in terms of follow up questions, we had started talking a little bit last time about the experience of what it was like to be a parent. We talked a little bit more about parents in the therapeutic sessions in terms of a kid, you know, has started to identify themselves, we talked a little about the, what would we say, the history of kind of how you observed trans patients were coming into the space, started support groups and started with individuals in their middle age and then it kind of slowly started getting younger and younger.
Yes, right.
And I was curious if you, if you could take me maybe step by step through a patient presents themselves and maybe it’s very early on. What are the steps you go through with an individual who is starting to express feelings or express– or maybe their families have brought them in if they’re younger kids, their families have brought kids in because they’re starting to exhibit some behavior that parents want to have–
Right, right, so it really– the steps that I go through, or any clinician would go through, it really varies more on the age of the person than anything else, so, um, for one thing, if they’re under eighteen, they can’t get treatment without parental consent, um, so by definition, if they’re under eighteen and they’re coming here, their parents already know, their parents may have initiated it, but at the very least their parents are willing to bring them here and have them in therapy. That’s a totally different issue than if they’re over eighteen when they can come by themselves. Um, and if they’re– I actually have a twenty-two year old client now, that I just started seeing about two months ago, coming on her own, well her parents are bringing her, but the parents never would have initiated this 'cause they’re really opposed to the kid transitioning. Um, so that’s a very different situation than the parent of a sixteen year old or a parent of a five year old bringing their kid in, because the parents of the younger kids, if they’re bringing their children here, they know who we are, they’ve gone to our website, they see that we’re gender affirming, blah, blah, blah, so they’re already trying to be supportive of their kids. This young person that I’m mentioning, the twenty-two year old, her parents are– I just got four emails last night actually, from her about, um, basically all the terrible things her parents are saying to her. Not only to dissuade her from being transgender, but basically to denigrate her, you know, to tell her that she’s crazy, to tell her that if she does transition, she is going to be miserable, she’s never going to pass, she’s never going to have a relationship, you know, her career will be ruined. So that’s a really different picture, right? From a sixteen year old who’s brought in where the parents are at least willing to– they want to be on board in some way, you know what I mean? They want to be on board in some way. They may still not really believe that their kid’s transgender, but they– they all know the suicide statistics, you know, and they’re all afraid to not be support– you know, look, I don’t want to– I– I– I think these parents are commendable, it’s not just that they’re afraid, but the point I’m making is that they’re very aware of the dangers of not supporting a transgender child and they want to be supportive. So that doesn’t really answer your question. I mean, I have to talk about, you know, like with this young woman, she was actually assigned male at birth, but identifies as female, the twenty-two year old is a totally different process than a teenager and even that is totally different than a younger kid.
5:11
Well, let’s start with a younger kid, so more and more younger kids are presenting themselves, or at least their parents are being savvy enough to understand what happens when a young child starts, you know, it’s in pop culture more and more, so what are the– what are the– what is the process, it’s probably more of a parental process, because the kid is just expressing a desire right?
Right, so there is some assessment involved with the kid, you, I don’t remember if we talked about this last time, you may know this anyway, um, when you get a prepubertal kid, it’s much more difficult to know sort of what you’re dealing with, right? Whether you’re dealing with a kid who’s truly transgender, um, I think I may have mentioned Diane Ehrensaft’s work, right, you know, whether this is what she calls a proto-gay kid that’s going to turn out to be gay, whether it’s simply a gender nonconforming kid, or whether it’s truly a transgender kid. That’s the assessment with the child that’s involved and it’s not that easy to do. There is some data indicating that kids that are truly transgender, that are going to persist throughout their lifetime, are more adamant about it in the first place. Right, that these are the kids, they don’t say, “I want to be a girl,” they say, “I am a girl.” You know, that sort of thing. But that’s not a– I mean there is some evidence to suggest that, nobody is saying that it is one hundred percent diagnostic. So that’s the work with the kid is to, not just assess where they’re at, but, um, over time, to sort of allow their gender identity to emerge, that’s how I think of it. To allow it to emerge, to allow it to sort of gel. Um, and typically with younger kids, we won’t see them necessarily weekly, or on a regular basis, but typically we try to keep in touch with them literally over a period of years right? To see how things emerge over a period of years. And with the parents, the process with the parents is, um, it depends on where the parent is coming in from, right? 'Cause some parents come in, there’s a certain amount of anxiety attached to not knowing whether your child is transgender or gender nonconforming. Everybody wants to know and wants it, right? And so there are some parents that come in and what they really want to do is push that the kid is transgender and they want to socially transition the kid. We’ve had a number of parents that have socially transitioned their young children when we didn’t think it was a good idea, um, certainly we wouldn’t have recommended it. I understand where they’re coming from though. Part of it is their own anxiety and part of it is that it is difficult to have a child that’s crying about not being allowed to wear a dress to school, or, you know, what I’m saying? Not to mention a child that’s being teased and possibly bullied for being gender nonconforming. And kids that are assigned male at birth that are gender nonconforming are horribly– those are the ones with a target on their backs, right? Those are the kids that are most victimized. So sometimes it’s trying to slow the parents down. Most parents I would say– our typical position, I don’t want to say it’s the wait and see position, but it’s sort of like, let’s not make any quick decisions here, let’s see how this unfolds, let’s, let’s try to give this child space, creative space, so that this child can feel, um, completely free to express themselves and their gender, um, but let’s make it– let’s first create a safe space in the home, right? Among people that are understanding rather than immediately socially transition a kid. So our first approach is that. Um, you know, find ways at home and among certain friends and family members for the child to be able to truly be themselves without transitioning sort of, let’s see how this emerges over not just months, but over years, one kid that I think of, can think of, brought in initially at age three, is now finally socially transitioning at age nine. But it took that long to really be clear, for everybody to really be clear on what the kid was going through.
10:12
Is there a kind of a– I think we kind of see it in culture too, there was that natural– there was that tension between trans identity itself, like transitioning from one gender to another gender, but it was still kind of binary.
Yes.
And it feels like culture got used to the binary and now there is this– there is a wider conversation about gender diversity.
Yes.
I mean, you know, is that tension kind of naturally built in, are you seeing that reflected too, in terms of how families are responding?
Well yeah, so, um, I mean actually, it’s not just families, it’s most transgender kids are not too happy with the nonbinary category either. Everybody wants certainty, right?
Yeah.
Um, parents have a really tough time with it. Although, I mean they do and they don’t, one thing about having a kid that’s nonbinary is that you’re possibly looking at a kid that isn’t going to want medical intervention and that usually comes as a relief to parents. But, yeah, everybody is having a tough time with that one. Everybody is having a tough time with the nonbinary thing. Um, you know, and it’s not just the parents, it’s also kids. I bring– I routinely bring that up to every transgender person that I see, I mean not every, there are adults where their gender identity seems so fixed and, you know, they’ve had it for such a long time that I don’t even bring it up, but for most adolescents and younger kids, I talk about the whole gender contiuum and gender spectrum and nonbinary and so on and so forth, and the initial reaction of most kids and adults is to reject that idea. It’s just too weird. It’s too weird for most people.
Do you think that, you know, some of the stories that you hear from individuals that do kind of live in that spectrum, or maybe have an expression on one day that’s different from their expression on another day. Are those individuals just come to it like they’ve come to it naturally or they’ve formed that expression on their own, or–
What do you mean? As opposed to–
As opposed to it being kind of presented as, you know sometimes it’s– if you have an idea in your mind of what you want your expression to be, it isn’t until you see it modeled for you that you can accept it, “Oh okay, I see someone else–”
That’s right.
So I’m curious, where does someone go who is feeling that– that doesn’t maybe see it represented in their local community?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the case up until recently, right? I mean, I would say in general, 'cause this is LGBT generation’s my thing, um, for a very long time, I have felt like people identify according to the identity labels that are available in the culture at that moment. Right? And so fifteen years ago nobody– even people who probably felt “nonbinary” they just weren’t identifying that way. The category did not exist. And as time goes on, 'cause now you can see it, there are people in the public eye who are identifying as nonbinary. Actors and actresses and so on and so forth. The more that happens, the easier it will be for people to identify as nonbinary. You know, they just sort of suppressed it years ago before it existed as a label.
How would you say– what is the relationship between, you know, culture, or even pop culture and then personal, you know, like, do you find that it is really meaningful and powerful when there are larger cultural conversations–
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean particularly when they’re people in the public eye, which usually means in the entertainment field, right? Yes, extremely important. Um, I mean Ellen Degeneres did more for gay– you know what I mean? People like that have done– on some level you can say that they’ve done as much for gay people as the, as activists. Yeah, it’s extraordinarily powerful to be– and that’s the big complaint that a lot of nonbinary people have is that nobody sees them. That they’re invisible, you know, that they’re not seen.
15:15
Yeah. Do you ever do any coaching, I want to get back to the age range of patients, but do you ever do any coaching in terms of, sometimes culture doesn’t see people, 'cause culture doesn’t have the vocabulary yet to understand what they’re seeing, and so maybe sometimes the tendency can be to be fearful or to react negatively or just not know what to say. One of the things that comes up so much in this round of interviews is from people wanting to know what is the right way to interact with someone who has a different expression. What are the right words, what is the right terminology, how do you– have you ever done coaching, or how do we get the rest of society to that place who maybe isn’t, doesn’t have a lived experience with a family member or a loved one, but still wants to try to understand it in some way. How do they do that?
Probably through the popular culture. RIght? I mean that’s really– I’ve never had anybody come and ask me about that. The only people who seem to be concerned are the people who are involved with someone who is transgender, or who think they may be transgender or nonbinary themselves, but I think through the cultural representations, you know? That’s, I mean that’s how people learn and that’s how people’s attitudes change, so–
Yeah. So one of the things that’s kind of a natural tension, and maybe tension isn’t the right word, within the oral history archive is there’s a group of individuals who said, “When I was three or four I had this moment, and it clicked. I knew.” It’s like the Christine Jorgensen moment. I saw Christine Jorgensen on TV and went, “Oh my God, there’s two of us,” verses individuals who go, “Well no, I was like in my twenties, it was after puberty.” And I was just curious in your perspective, what is the difference in those two journeys? Is there a difference in those two journeys? Is it– is it a journey of a realization or are individuals truly understanding at the age of three or four, this is who I am and not this–
Here’s the– it’s difficult, everybody rewrites their own history, so when someone says, “I knew when I was three years old,” for every person who says that, there are people who at three years old felt a certain way and then changed their mind, you know what I mean? So, um, I don’t, I take those narratives seriously in the sense that they’re important to the person and they’re important for the person to feel they have a cohesive– everybody needs to feel they have a cohesive story, you know, a cohesive narrative of their own life, um, and so I take it seriously from that point of view, but I don’t necessarily believe anybody’s story of the childhood origins of practically anything, you know what I mean? Because they change with the culture. The stories of how it happened change with the culture. Um, I don’t know that doesn’t really answer your question.
I think it does a little bit. I mean what is the difference between, I mean you kind of went through the journey of the conversation that happens with a young child, let’s say you have a preteen or a teenager, what is kind of like their sequence of events?
Okay, so if we see somebody who’s a teenager, who’s hit puberty, it’s a different headset from– my headset’s different from the beginning, because I know that the data shows that, um, virtually no one who believes that they’re transgender as a teenager changes their mind. So, uh, and that appears to be because there’s something about hitting puberty, um, and having those hormones start going through your body, the beginnings of secondary sex characteristics that tends to be the sort of a-ha moment for, um, there are a lot of young people who, um, may have been gender nonconforming before that, may have maybe not felt that comfortable in their assigned gender, but didn’t think about it that much and sort of pushed it away, and then at puberty it hits. And so I tend to– I’m not so worried with a teenager that they’re going to change their mind. Um, and it doesn’t, I mean some of these teenagers are teenagers who say, “Yes, I knew from the time I was three,” but a lot of them are kids who didn’t realize until they hit puberty, that they were transgender. So the process with them– now the other thing is, by the time they hit adolescence, it’s the potential for a lot of damage to already have been done. Um, through bullying, and through feeling alienated from parents and so on and so forth. So there’s that issue that you are often dealing with kids that are somewhat more traumatized to begin with. Um, so there is a fairly high rate of suicidality and self harming behaviors and so on and so forth among adolescents who are transgender before they have been supported, validated, acknowledged, etc. etc. So there’s that to deal with. The parents, it’s a little different, because with the parents of a teenager, I’m mostly trying to get them to accept that they have a transgender kid. Um, whereas with the parents of a six year old, I’m trying to educate them about the fact that they might have a transgender kid, they might have a gay kid, you know, etc. etc. Um, so that’s the difference with the parents is trying to hold their hands and lead them to accept what’s going on, and then there’s also the difference, like, if you get a kid that’s at the very beginning of adolescence, you’re going to put them on, send them to an endocrinologist for puberty blockers, etc, etc, if they’re older, they can consider cross-gender hormones, um, completely different interventions.
22:03
And kind of sticking with the teenager line, could you describe a little bit, what is the process of puberty blockers?
Ok, so, um, the most common puberty blocker is Lupron, which has actually been used for many, many years, um, for children who suffer from precocious puberty; the kids that start to go through puberty at five, six, seven years old, they put them on Lupron. It’s also a fertility drug, it’s used to stop hormones in certain fertility treatments. What it does is it shuts down all of the sex hormones in the body. It stops them. Um, and so, um, the process is, at least in theory, the process is at that, um, at the beginning of puberty– so puberty is measured in what’s called Tanner Stages, and Tanner Stage One is before puberty. Tanner Stage Two is the very beginnings of, um, I’m trying to remember what they are, exactly, maybe more, um, under arm and genital hair, that might be that. There are breast buds in young girls, I think enlargement of the scrotum in young boys, assigned boys, assigned males. Whenever they hit Tanner Stage Two, that’s when they’re supposed to go on puberty blockers. The idea here is to give the kid, number one, some relief from the distress from the body dysmorphia they’re experiencing by seeing themselves develop in a gender they don’t identify with, and number two, so the theory is you put them on puberty blockers and then you allow them to socially transition so they can live in their identified gender for some period of time, kind of to try it out, right? And if it works and it fits, then you go from puberty blockers to cross-gender hormones, um, technically the age is sixteen for cross-gender hormones, but that’s an area of controversy in the field because if you– because some kids can hit Tanner Stage Two very young. Assigned females at birth can hit Tanner Stage Two as young as nine years old, so if you put a kid on– and although– once you put a kid on puberty blockers, they don’t develop secondary sex characteristics, they do grow in height a little bit, but not as much as they would if they were in genuine– adolescence involves a big growth spurt, so they’ll grow in height somewhat, but not that much, so think about keeping a kid looking like a nine year old for seven years? It doesn’t make any sense, so there’s a push for some of these kids who have been put on puberty blockers at a young age to transition over to cross-gender hormones maybe as young as thirteen or fourteen instead of sixteen, and that’s an area of controversy in the field. But that was a little bit of a digression, but that’s what the progression is. You go on puberty blockers, Tanner Stage Two, you’re on them for a while, you socially transition, you try it out, you can change your mind and we’ve had kids change their minds, um, but if you don’t change your mind, after a while, after a few years, you can go on cross-gender hormones.
25:45
So what about, you know, if someone reaches adulthood, they’re out of high school, out of college, early twenties, they’ve reached adulthood and the expression is coming to them now?
It’s unlikely that the expression is just coming to them now, it’s more that the identity is just coming to them, do you know what I mean? I mean it’s more likely that it’s something that they’ve been turning over in their heads usually for years, but just weren’t quite sure about, for a variety of different reasons. So with someone like that, for one thing, if you’ve reached adulthood, there’s no rush anymore, you know what I mean? I mean with a teenager, with a kid that’s, let’s say, at the beginning of puberty, you really want to get them on blockers right away, um, with a kid that’s finished puberty, it’s not going to make any difference, it’s too late for blockers, and it’s not really going to make any difference when they start cross-gender hormones. It’s not like, um, you know, they’re going to be able to pass better if they start hormones immediately or if they start hormones a year or two from now. So there’s no rush, um, depending on where the person– like, with this twenty-two year old who sort of fits this pattern that I’m seeing, um, she– no one in her family saw her as gender nonconforming when she was younger, no one saw her as stereotypically male, but, um, she was more of a nerd, you know what I mean, so she was never involved in male sports or anything like that, but she also never played with Barbie dolls, so the family’s incredibly resistant because of that. Ah, she reports feeling never comfortable as a male, but it took her years before it occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t male, right? Maybe her discomfort wasn’t with being male, that she actually was female. And I would say that, she probably started contemplating that around the end of high school, beginning of college. It was the college experience at Rutgers that helped solidify it, because she met transgender people and she had some transgender people in her classes and so on and so forth, and that’s kind of what solidified it. This is also someone, and this is not, this is definitely a factor. One of the factors is how willing the person is to kind of buck parental and social norms. This is someone who was not eager to do that. Um, you get a more rebellious kid and they might declare themselves transgender at sixteen. And that’s a factor too. So, what– what– what the issue is with this person is that she wants to transition without totally alienating her family. And that’s going to be tricky because, um, I’m not sure that this family’s ever going to believe that she’s transgender. If they believe that she’s trans– they’re never going to give her permission to be transgender, I don’t think. They may come to accept it, if she pushes ahead anyway, I’m not sure she’s strong enough to do that right now, because I’ve already given her the information of, “You know you’re twenty two, you don’t need your parents, you’re an adult. You can go to Callen-Lorde Center and they’ll work on a sliding–” “Well I don’t have any money, they have to pay–” “No, actually they don’t, you can go to Callen Lorde and get sliding scale services. You can go to the PROUD Clinic and get sliding, right?” It’s really about her not wanting a rupture with her family. So it’s totally different issues.
30:08
Yeah. Um, one of the, um, just like getting inside some of the technical things, one of the things that’s come up in some of support groups that I’ve been sitting in is this, in terms of accessing healthcare, and then also accessing, sometimes accessing medications over the internet, accessing illegally purchasing, going after things, are you seeing that come up a lot?
No, less and less, I mean, I used to see that back in the old days much more because it was not that easy to get medication, let’s say through a physician. Back when the gate was kept tightly closed, people got medications illegally because they couldn’t– and it wasn’t even 'cause they didn’t have the money, it was because they couldn’t get a doctor to prescribe– I don’t see it that often anymore. I suspect there are probably populations where it’s more prevalent than– you know, I think in New York there’s some areas where I think you can get it on the streets, you know what I mean, you can get these med/drugs on the streets, it’s probably more common there, but I don’t see it very often here. Anymore.
What is the, how– in essence you’re in charge of not just your own therapeutic practice, but also you have a responsibility for other therapists who are operating under the IPG umbrella.
Mhm.
What is the process for an organization like this to ensure that the quality of what’s happening in individual rooms is up to the same standard–
Ok, so number one, we do a ton of training. Um, um, and on an on-going basis, right? I would say– so there’s inservice trainings at IPG, and I would say at least one of them a year is on transgender issues. Um, the other thing is that all new therapists at IPG get supervision for at least the first year from an older therapist. It’s, ah, if they– some of the therapists that come to IPG are still working on a provisional permit anyway and need that supervision, but even if the therapist isn’t legally required to get supervision, we have a supervisor for all new therapists for at least a year and that’s part of the reason I have on my laptop, I have a whole, I have a slew of articles that, 'cause I supervise GSAPP interns before they start, I have a slew of readings I give them to do, you know so we try pretty– and in addition to that we have group supervision. When there’s staff meetings, people are in supervision groups and it comes up there too. So a lot of training and a lot of supervision is the short answer.
Um, what is the, um, I’m trying not to look at my notes, but I probably will have to, the– oh that’s what I was going to ask, where is the most interesting research happening now, I mean who do you turn to when you need some like good, good information? You had mentioned a couple of times going back, “I know that the data tells me, or I know that the research tells me–” Where are you, are there major universities or major publications that you’re reliant upon?
Well most of this, I mean in terms of publication, I mean most of the sex therapy journals these days, I mean it’s hard to pick up a sexology journal, any issue of any sexology journal without seeing one article on transgender issues. It’s a very hot topic, so, um, you know, so in that sense it’s not difficult to access information. I mean I just– right before you came, I get emails, um, about publication of all of these journals– I was just looking at the Journal Of Sex Research, what do they have this month on, um, gender identity or transgender issues. Um, so it depends on the kind of research. Obviously it’s totally different places that are doing, let’s say, research on the long term effects of puberty blockers. It’s an area that I’m really interested in 'cause it’s important, you know? That’s going to be totally different than, let’s say, research on what happens to kids after they socially transition. So in terms of longitudinal research, outcome research– Kristina Olson is, you probably have been told about her project. She’s really the one that’s got the only– it’s prospective longitudinal study from a point of view of scientific research design, it doesn’t get any better than that, and she’s got the most interesting stuff coming out in terms of longitudinal outcome stuff.
35:49
And where is she in the process of that?
She started about three/four years ago I would say, maybe even five years ago– a while ago. She’s got some publications already, she’s got a lot of families that are enrolled, some of our families I believe are enrolled in her study, so– a few years old.
Um, you had mentioned this a little bit, kind of in the last interview, and you had sent me some points of reference, but where are the biggest– where’s the biggest push back happening, in terms of–
Oh God [laughter] push back from the scientific community?
From the scientific community, it could also be from culture–
Okay, so the biggest push back is coming from, I think I mentioned it to you, this coalition of, um, Christian Right fundamentalists, um, some of the researchers and clinicians, particularly those that were pushed out of CAMH and their followers, right? And TERFs, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, um, so that’s where the biggest push back is coming from. Um, and it comes in the form of things like this bogus ROGD, um–
And what’s their argument?
So the basic argument is that the– the field has been taken over by transgender activists who are pushing everybody to be transgender, basically. I mean not everybody, right? And they’re sort of irresponsibly, blindly accepting anybody who walks in the door and says they’re transgender, they sort of blindly accept that and refer them for medical interventions without any kind of assessment or, that would be their argument, that that’s what’s happening in the field, therefore we’re seeing a lot of kids and young people who claim to be transgender and aren’t really. That’s their basic position.
Um, the thing that, and maybe it’s a weird thing to relate to it, but I was thinking about the anti-vaxxers movement, um, and it seems to be, like watching some of those videos, the emotion that’s present in those, and it– there seems to be this emotional response they’re trying to hide behind scientific you know–
Mhm, mhm, oh yes the parents–
And I was wondering if you could respond to that, like what is that, it seems that it’s kind of a smart strategy in some ways–
What do you mean?
It’s saying, “Oh no I can’t get up and be emotional, I have to use some– I have to find some evidence somewhere,” and it’s like desperately seeking evidence even when all of the research and data is presenting itself to us– you’re talking about long term projects, we’re getting good information, the information is all pointing to, yes, transgender is a thing and, you know, but it’s that idea of, “I have to try to find some research that gives power to my feelings,” as opposed to the other way around.
Yeah, I think that’s true on the part of parents, and, unfortunately, that research exists, right? All of the old research shows these incredibly high desistance rates, so it’s not that difficult– and even though there have been countless rebuttals, and dissections, and analyses of that research about why it’s not relevant to today, it’s still out there.
40:03
Yeah.
And it’s still the most– if you look for research on rates of persistence and desistance among children who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming, that’s what you’re going to find. You’re not going to find Kristina Olson’s stuff, she doesn’t have that much stuff out, and she’s pretty careful and cautious about her conclusions. Um, so you’re going to find all this old stuff from Ken Zucker and some stuff from the Netherlands that’s twenty/thirty years old, but people still point to it as, “Well this is the research that we have.” And on one level they’re right, meaning that is the largest body of research we have. Unfortunately, it’s outdated. But, you know, that’s a different argument, to say it’s outdated. But yeah, I mean, I don’t know who the people who aren’t parents are– I mean I know where some of them are coming from. Um, in my opinion, Ken Zucker is still desperately trying to maintain his role as the authority on transgender, 'cause he was for many, many years, he was the authority, um at least in North America and he’s desperately trying to maintain his role, desperately trying to, um, justify why he was unfairly thrown out of CAMH, and he’s a powerful man in the sexology field. He’s the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which is the premier journal in the field, he’s really involved in most of the sexology organizations, he’s got lots of students and people in the field that he’s mentored and so on and so forth, um, when he was sacked from CAMH, many of my colleagues signed a letter protesting it, you know, because he’s so respected in the field.
And what does CAMH stand for?
Uh, Canadian, something, mental health. Yeah, right.
What role has WPATH played, what’s been the journey of WPATH?
Okay, so WPATH used to be the Harry Benjamin society, I think you know that, and that started in the 1970s, Harry Benjamin started it– The Harry Benjamin society was formed for wonderful motives, right? It was formed to champion the cause of transgender people, to see people as, to make people aware that it was a legitamite thing and that these people deserve medical care and medical attention. Um, but it was dominated by, for many, many years, by non-transgender mental health experts, um, so what happened in the aughts was a couple things. One thing that happened that really shook up WPATH was the publication, you should know this book if you don’t already, The Man Who Would Be Queen. Ever heard of it? This guy J. Michael Bailey, who was a buddy of Zucker’s, J. Michael Bailey is considered one of the top sexologists in the world, um, he’s at, I think, Northwestern. He’s in Chicago and I think it’s Northwestern. Um, J. Michael Bailey published this horrendous book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, about male to female transgender people and right from the– I have a copy, a hardcover copy of the book from when it first came out. The picture on the front is of the hairy leg in a fishnet stocking and high heels of someone who is obviously male dressed as female. So right from the cover it started out ins– and it was a horrible book. Basically, in the book, he promotes the idea, and this was, this is the Ray Blanchard theory, this is the theory that all of these people believe, there are two types of “transsexuals.” There are true transsexuals, and they’re talking only of male to female because they don’t– they’re not sure that they believe female to male transgender people really exist. Male to female there are two types and one is the true transsexual and that is the homosexual transsexual, meaning assigned males, gender nonconforming from an early age, attracted to males, um, who grow up to be transgender, those are true transsexuals, and the others are assigned males who are not attracted to males, and usually come to the conclusion that they’re transgender later in life, and those people are not really, those are “autogynephilic” transsexuals, yeah you should know the autogynephilia thing, 'cause that’s another big area of controversy, that’s Ray Blanchard’s theory. So autogynephilia, they are attracted to the image, they are– they have a sexual fetish and the fetish is that they are erotically attracted to themselves as women and that’s why they transition, because of their fetish. And maybe you should allow them to transition and maybe not, but they’re not really transsexuals. So Bailey publishes this book in the aughts, Bailey was a part of, he was a member of WPATH, all of these guys are a member of WPATH, but by the aughts there were also some, um, more progressive members of WPATH, and a couple of transgender people who were members of WPATH and there’s a huge uproar about this. My colleague Eli Coleman, I believe was the president at the time, and many of the people in WPATH were horrified by the book and really slammed it and there was a huge uproar about this result– and this wasn’t the only reason, but right around that time a bunch of people left WPATH, Ray Blanchard the author of this autogynephilia theory quit, uh, Bailey quit, and they changed their name from Harry Benjamin to WPATH. Um, and since then, there have been, I don’t know, two or three transgender presidents of WPATH, so WPATH, a lot of transgender people still consider WPATH too conservative. So eventually the other thing they did was issue their most recent standards of care, 2011 that were a radical departure from the old standards of care, another reason why these conservatives are sort of up in arms, right? WPATH has gone too far and they have opened the gate too wide because the WPATH current standards of care, those are the ones that start out by affirming that being transgender’s not a mental illness, that’s a whole other argument in the field, um, that the old guard is losing, it’s not a mental illness to be transgender or gender variant. That’s one thing that the new standards of care say, the other thing that they say is they loosened up the criteria for medical intervention, so you can get hormones through an informed consent procedure, they dropped things like, they used to have a real life test, they dropped that, um, they’re much more flexible than they were before, so WPATH has evolved enormously, a lot of people in the transgender community think they’re still too conservative, but compared to what they were like before, they’re much less conservative. There’s a convention, USPATH is having a conference in D.C. in September that I’m going to, um–
Do you ever go to the Philadelphia–
Yes I have, I haven’t gone for a couple years but yes.
49:27
I was looking at the Philadelphia conference and I’ve been to a couple smaller forums–
Yeah, Philly’s gigantic.
In terms of healthcare, the– I think New Jersey always suffers from its own kind of identity thing, are we Philadelphia, or are we New York, right? So sometimes New Jersey winds up relying on those two metropolitan areas to fulfill certain needs, whether they are cultural or scientific, or whether it be, healthcare wise, so it seems that there is this– for New Jersey does not have a full scale clinic or health space, and it seems like– but it also seems like the major healthcare systems are a little bit more conservative, things like counseling seem to have come a little bit further more quickly, so how would you describe that dynamic between what’s happened in the counseling profession versus what’s happened in the actual provision of medical services?
Um, I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, I mean–
So I mean Callen-Lorde in New York is kind of, that name comes up so quickly, one of the great things in doing all of the interviews is this realization that you have individuals living in central New Jersey who don’t want to step foot into Robert Wood Johnson emergency room because, let’s say they have an ulcer or they’re having heart palpitations for whatever reason, because they’re not understanding of what wrap around trans healthcare means, and it has nothing to do with their “transness,” they need medical support and they’re uncomfortable walking into a more conservative, more traditional medical center, so the realization that they have to get on a train to go into a major– to go to a doctor for a cold or anything– so it’s– what– why did that exist for so long when you have Philadelphia and New York being kind of pretty progressive in terms of you had institutions rising up, but nothing in the entire state of New Jersey for a long time.
Well in New York and Philly– Callen-Lorde’s been around since the 1980’s and when it started it had nothing to do with transgender care, it was named for Michael Callen and Audre Lorde and it was an LG, really a lesbian and gay health center. And was only a lesbian and gay health center, I would say that the places, in Boston there was the Fenway. So major cities have lesbian and gay health centers, run by lesbian and gay people around for decades usually, and those are the places that are the most progressive. So even in New York, Callen-Lorde was doing this years before anybody else was, it’s not like New York itself was so progressive, it’s more like Callen-Lorde kind of was the trailblazer and these other places followed along behind. New Jersey’s never had a lesbian and gay health center. I don’t know how else to explain it.
I guess, would you classify that there’s certain kind of generations of organizations, so like you have the trailblazer organizations that really are recognizing a need and deciding to do something about it.
Right.
And then you have a whole bunch of other places that still haven’t recognized–
That’s right. Mhm. That’s right. But New Jersey, the medical community in New Jersey has only recently recognized, only in the last few years, recognized the need.
Do you think that was more because of the scientific communities pushing it? Do you think that was a cultural, kind of a pop cultural shift?
You mean why they, why they recognized it? Or why they didn’t recognize it before?
Yeah, at some point, someone has to make the decision, “Oh okay, we’re going to do this now.”
Yeah, I mean I would say that probably had to do with– so Manhattan now has a ton of places. Almost every major hospital in Manhattan has its own gender identity clinic now.
Yeah.
Once that started happening, it was bound to permeate New Jersey. You know? Because those are medical establishments. Those are hospitals that are having these gender clinics. That’s I think, that’s what influen– I mean the New Jersey medical establishment was more influenced by the New York medical establishment changing than by therapists. We are insignificant, you know, to M.D's. It’s hard to get an M.D. to talk to a therapist. Seriously. And not just on this issue. On any issue. They just don’t take psychotherapists seriously. So–
54:55
I guess that answers my question, it’s like, what is the shift that makes, that someone makes–
Yeah I think the shift is when New York– when it mainstreamed in New York, it was sort of inevitable that it would– when it mainstreamed in New York medical, uh, settings, I think it was inevitable that it would transition to New Jersey.
Um, were there any other things after, kind of like, the first interview, were there any other things that came to your mind in terms of topics or conversation? And maybe the best way to frame this is, we’re putting together– the first piece was all about allowing the trans individual to express through a theatre piece what it means to be trans, what are the– what’s the psychological context, what’s the emotional, what’s the lived context, like what is it, you know, an audience to get them inside that story, right? And then to be able to answer or to have an audience ask questions through a play of things everyone wants to ask or is curious about but everyone knows is impolite or inappropriate to ask. On this side of the production, the idea is that the play is getting inside the experience of everyone who is surrounding that trans individual, right? So whether it’s the healthcare professionals, the parents, it could be adult children, you know, I was curious if there was anything else in the context of that story, that journey, that needs to be included in that.
You mean the sort of, the second tier of people affected? Um, well academic institutions I would say, schools, um, universities and schools. Um, because they’ve had to change, right? Um, I mean it’s one of the things I’m very aware of in New Jersey was, for example, in 2008 or 2009 we got a transgender kid in high school coming in, it was almost impossible to get a school to take seriously the idea that maybe this kid needed to be able to use the different name and, you know, be addressed differently. They need to not be forced to use the bathroom conforming to their birth gender and gym class and all that stuff. Almost impossible. And now, at least, I can’t speak for South Jersey which has, as you probably know, is–
A different landscape.
A different landscape. Yes. Below the Mason Dixon Line. Um, but in Central and North Jersey, most schools now are accepting and they’ll– they’re accommodating of changing gender names of kids, changing bathrooms and all that kind of thing so that’s the other, that’s the other major social institution that’s been enormously impacted by this that probably you should include.
Is there anything specific that we haven’t discussed or that I haven’t asked that you think– information that that audience should hear or understand?
Um, well one thing, 'cause I still see a lot of people that are ignorant about is, um, the idea that not everybody wants to fully change their body. That’s a concept that people have a really tough time wrapping their heads around, right? That there are going to be some trans women that want to keep their penises. There are some, you know what I mean? There are people who want a little bit of hormones, not a lot. You know, I’m on the WPATH listserv and they posted a case recently of a nonbinary person who wants an oophorectomy which is the removal of ovaries, but doesn’t want to go on hormones. And all the medical implications of having zero hormones in your body and the risk of osteoporosis and so on. And so I was reading about all of this and thinking, “This is not something that would’ve come up ten years ago and it still is something that most people don’t understand.” Most people can’t get that. Why you would either want to identify as transgender and not want medical intervention, or only want some medical interventions and not others. That’s something you should probably include, 'cause that’s going to increase. That’s going to increase as time goes on 'cause it was not an option before. It wasn’t anything that ever occurred to anybody that they could do and now it’s an option.
60:12
And I think those stories are being more represented in the archive, too. You know, individuals who are saying, you know, “If I’m trans male, I don’t want breasts, but I don’t want hormones.”
That’s right.
So it’s those kinds of journeys, and I think the challenge for us is making sure there’s a representation of what the essence of that is. Because I think it still goes back to the pop culture, pop culture now seems to understand the binary–
Exactly.
And it’s, I mean even if you look at religious institutions. Religious institutions even go, “Oh, okay.” One article I was reading, even something published by the Vatican is understanding that if someone is transitioning from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum, they can kind of wrap their brains around it, um, but it’s a full complete cultural, sexual–
But it doesn’t threaten the binary. Transgender people who want to fully transition don’t threaten the concept of the binary. 'Cause basically they’re saying, “A binary exists, I was just put in the wrong box.” Um, it’s the people who want only partial intervention that threaten the binary, 'cause they’re the ones saying, “I am neither fully male, nor fully female in your conventional cultural sense of the words.”
Yeah, and then I think what also comes out of this is the recognition of all the complexities that go into gender. That gender is not just what pair of shoes you wear and it’s not just a sexual organ, there’s so many considerations to be made and I think, I guess one of the other things we kind of talked around what happens when you have a young person who is trying to figure out and they suddenly realize all the considerations. Or the parents are saying, “You have to make a decision about this, you have to make a decision about this– we’ll support you but you have to make a decision about each and every one of those things.”
Mhm..
Um, what that kind of, that’s a lot of pressure.
Yes, it is a lot of pressure. It is a lot of pressure like my poor client whose parents just laid this whole thing of, you know, “You’re going to fail at your career, you’re never going to have a partner,” um, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah. Um, the school thing is really interesting too 'cause actually one of the other curators on this project, she’s a public middle school teacher.
Oh cool.
And she is trying desperately– she’s still in a school system that does not have– they don’t have a system, policy in place. And she goes, you know, 'cause she was involved with me, because we did a full oral history with Babs Siperstein and, you know, we kind of related that a lot to how the policies have changed and even kind of laws and all that oriented a lot of her information around that since the law is named after her, um, but it’s funny she became really savvy to it, really in tune with it, tried to have a conversation with her superintendent and the superintendent said, “Well we have a policy,” but it’s a cut and paste from the internet kinds of policies, and they haven’t actually considered what that means to be an educational institution.
Yeah right, right, it’s still early, it’s still pretty early. Like I said, ten years ago not only would they not have had a policy, they wouldn’t have been making accommodations even so–
Yeah, yeah, yeah, those were most of my follow up questions, do you have any questions for me?
So what’s going to happen with this stuff? This stuff will get archived, what’s going to happen?
Great question, why don’t I stop the recording.