
When I first suggested more than six years ago that paedophilia might help explain, at least in part, why drugs that keep children’s bodies immature were being so eagerly promoted I tried hard not to over-state the case. Nobody wants to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Even when they suspect there might actually be a conspiracy.
I assumed back then nonces had merely embraced blockers….after the event. In other words they’d noticed the work of Dutch scientists in the 1990s advocating the use of hormones to stop puberty and just leant their support. Why would they look a gift horse in the mouth after all? Especially an underage one.
Now I’ve changed my mind. The more I’ve uncovered the more it seems likely paedophiles did not incidentally benefit from the introduction of blockers but a pro-paedophile culture shaped the project to medicalise adolescents from the start.
Rather, the Dutch research was deeply influenced by a body of pseudo-scientific and markedly pro-paedophile ideas that run like whatever the opposite of a golden thread is all the way from the origins of the gay rights movement ….down to the present day.
This is the story of how a set of malign ideas baked into the gay rights movement at its birth led directly to puberty blockers. It’s a story that features some of the most iconic names in gay history from Oscar Wilde and André Gide to Magnus Hirschfeld.
The official story of gay rights has been told many times before. Every historian agrees the campaign to demand legal equality for homosexuals began in 1864 when a German lawyer by the name of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published the first of what would be twelve short volumes championing same sex attraction.
In ‘Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe’ or ‘Researches into the Riddle of Man-Manly Love’ Ulrichs argued homosexuality was neither a sin nor a disease. It was just a natural variety of sexual behaviour.
Ulrichs also had the option of clearing away the historical confusion between the two types of ‘Greek Love’. The one between adults and the other dodgy one between adults and boys. Ulrichs did neither.
The three ideas of Ulrichs …are:
i) children can have an inner sexual identity different from their outward biological sex.
ii) puberty can be a disastrous event that imperils something beautiful and precious.
iii) children are capable of consenting to hugely consequential changes being made to their bodies and minds.
Wilde was perhaps the most prominent intellectual who adopted the term Uranian after reading the work of Ulrichs.
It was the work of Ulrichs that inspired Wilde to become increasingly brazen about his sexuality.
Ulrichs was so influential it’s hard to find any pioneer of lesbian and gay rights in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries who did not embrace his ideas and terminology.
One of the reasons Ulrichs continues to be reverenced by today’s LGBTQ+ lobby is his work chimes so neatly with the central assumptions of ‘queer studies’ and the lobby’s obsession with gender fluidity.
Today, gender critical gays like me love to blame trans activism for promoting the ludicrous notion biological sex is unimportant. I hate to break it to my fellow GC gays but…it was Ulrichs, the eccentric founder of gay rights, who first came up with “born in the wrong body”.
This daft idea of Ulrichs runs through everything from ‘Well of Loneliness’ to the work of Edward Carpenter work and Havelock Ellis. It also formed the bed rock of the research by Magnus Hirschfeld, perhaps the leading historical hero of today’s LGBTQ+ lobby. Hirschfeld was a devotee of Ulrichs.
From the 1890s onwards Hirschfeld argued Uranians…(homosexuals) were indeed a mix of both sexes in books like ‘Sappho and Socrates’ (the Greek connection again) and ‘Causes and Nature of Uranism’.
In 1919 when he founded the Sex Research Institute in Berlin, Hirschfeld took the core idea from Ulrichs that homosexuals were born in the wrong body and medicalised it. He argued artificial sex hormones…a new pharmaceutical invention at the time… could help some Uranians who were “born in the wrong body” ….become their authentic selves. What could possibly go wrong? The scandal at the Tavistock…started here.
When Hisrchfeld visited New York in 1930 he stayed with a disciple of his called Harry Benjamin. The German-born Benjamin had met Hirschfeld back in Berlin where he’d studied under him.
Benjamin went on to create, with his friend and colleague John Money, the first “sex change clinic” at John Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1966. That year he also published ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon’ which sought to popularise “the changing of sex through hormones and surgery”.
Both the John Hopkins clinic and Benjamin’s book were funded by the Erickson Educational Foundation set up Reed Erickson, a trans identified female.
Later Erickson would also fund The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which Benjamin founded in 1979 to be -ostensibly- the world’s first global regulator of “gender affirming healthcare”. The Institute would in time be renamed WPATH. No organisation has played a greater role in trying to normalise the prescribing of puberty blockers.
[I]n 1976 Gooren travelled to John Hopkins to study under….John Money for a year. When Gooren became the world’s first Professor of Transsexual Studies in 1988…. Money flew to Holland to attend his inaugural lecture.
[I]n 1996 Louis Gooren was the lead author of the first paper in the world to propose using puberty blockers to medicalise children with gender dysphoria.
That same year another paper was delivered at a conference hosted by the Tavistock’s GIDS clinic in London at which Gooren’s Dutch colleague Peggy Cohen-Kettenis argued doctors should be,
“more aware of early hormone treatment as a reasonable and effective treatment option for adolescents with a transsexual problem, and of the potential damaging effects of delaying such interventions until adulthood.”
The Dutch Protocol was born.
It will probably be no surprise if I tell you Cohen-Kettenis and Gooren were both on the executive committee of Harry Benjamin’s Institute. Nor that John Money travelled to London to participate in the Tavistock conference where Peggy Cohen-Kettenis presented her paper recommending blockers.
In an era when females were considered second class citizens, at best, this Uranian notion that adolescent boys were really ‘female’ now licensed an assumption among powerful homosexual and bisexual men they had the right to prey upon them.
[C]horister obsession was just one of many ways Uranian men expressed their very spiritual interest in boys. What unites all of these expressions of perverse lust is a dread of puberty. For Uranian boy-predators puberty was viewed as a disaster.
One thing that always baffled me about Ulrichs’ influence was how quickly his rather bizarre made up name Uranian took hold. I’ve now gone back to his work and made an astounding discovery. The founder of gay rights activism….openly defended paedophilia. And it was his defence of child abuse that helped bring his work to popular attention.
On July 5th 1869 the trial of Ernst Wilhelm von Zastrow, a member of a powerful noble family, opened in Berlin. This remember was just five years after Ulrichs had published his first volume about sexual behaviour and introduced the world to the word Uranian.
Zastrow stood accused of the mutilation, rape and attempted murder of a five year old boy called Emil Hanke. Emil was brutally sodomised, bitten on the face and an attempt had been made to castrate him. Zastrow tried to strangle the boy and when that failed little Emil was pushed into a heating duct to try to suffocate him. It did not succeed. Zastrow was also accused of the rape and attempted castration of a 15 year old boy.
In his trial Zastrow defended himself by citing the work of the man we keep being told was a hero…. Karl Ulrichs.
In response to the trial Ulrichs decided to publish a book about sadistic pederasty. As you do. ‘Incubus’ published in 1869 is one of the most perverse books in the history of gay rights. And perhaps in history… period.
Ulrichs’ big beef in ‘Incubus’ is not how best to protect 5 and 15 year old boys but how difficult it is for Zastrow to get a fair trial.
Ulrichs, far from trying to put clear blue water between everyday adult on adult Uranians and boy-castrating, boy-raping lunatics, proceeds to insist Zastrow was right when he said his identity was… ‘Uranian’.
It probably goes without saying Ulrichs proves jaw-droppingly uninterested in the suffering of the boys tortured by Zastrow. He never once expresses empathy for the victims of Zastrow or of the other 14 sadistic offenders whose crimes he recounts.
Ulrichs’s support for boy-rape injected into the DNA of the gay rights movement a poisonous idea that continues to haunt it. This is the idea children can be trusted to make decisions that have huge and irrevocable effects on their bodies and minds.
John Money, who applauded the “brave” proposal to block children’s puberty with hormones, also defended paedophilia.
Money’s reputation was ruined when it was revealed he’d forced seven year old twin boys to act out “sexual” behaviour while he photographed them. The boys were made to get naked and one had to play the “female role” lying with his legs in the air while his brother played the “male role”. All terribly Uranian no doubt.
In an obituary for Money, his close colleague Richard Green recalled that at John Hopkins… “our meetings were highlighted by evening orgies organized by John and attended by some of sexology’s luminaries. He was a gifted participant.”
Money pioneered the use of drugs to treat paraphilias including paedophilia. Louis Gooren then took up the idea.
Gooren advocated the use of drugs on adolescents with gender dysphoria while simultaneously arguing these same drugs should be used on sex offenders like paedophiles. Go figure.
The other curious aspect of his simultaneous prescribing of identical drugs to adolescents and paedophiles…is that while his research on trans identified adolescents is presented as proof of his empathy for these children his research on paedophiles is never presented as proof of his empathy for paedophiles. Perhaps it should be.
When Louis Gooren retired he moved to Thailand, the lady boy capital of the world. A complete coincidence I’m sure.
For many paedophiles who inhabited this culture such as John Money who gave his global seal of approval to “gender affirming healthcare for children” ….puberty was almost certainly viewed as a crisis point. Like the men who identified as Uranians at the start of the 20th Century he saw a boy or girl hovering on the cusp of puberty as a beautiful mix of feminine and masculine that was precious.
I have no idea whether Stephen Ireland ever read the work of Karl Ulrichs or had even heard of him. In a sense he didn’t need to. He embodied the contemptuous attitude towards the safety of children he inherited from the founding father of gay rights.
It’s long past time we cast off the pernicious influence of Karl Ulrichs and his disgusting ideas.
Source: Puberty Blockers: a Paedophile Project?