Richard Green

Richard Green

Richard Green (6 June 1936 – 6 April 2019) was an American-British sexologist, psychiatrist, lawyer, and author specializing in homosexuality and transsexualism, specifically gender identity disorder in children. Green was the founding editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior (1971), and served as Editor for 30 years until 2001. He was also the founding president of the International Academy of Sex Research (1975), which made the Archives its official publication. He served on the American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders, and played a pivotal role in the removal of homosexuality as mental illness from American psychiatry. In 2006, he was awarded the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for Sexual Research.

Green took great personal and professional risk in writing on sexual minorities in an either sympathetic/supportive, or non-sensationalist way. He took a supportive stance on homosexuality in published writing with the MAP ally criminologist Donald West (1997), and appeared on television alongside gay rights activist Frank Kameny. His professional career focused on studying children's everyday lives, with papers such as "Effeminacy in Prepubertal Boys" (1961, with John Money),. He wrote on stigmatized topics such as sadomasochism, and criticized the false notion of inherent harm in unlawful age-disparate sexual experience. During the Rind et al. controversy, the Rind team cited Green (1992), writing:

"After qualitatively reviewing the CSA literature, Green (1992) [...] stated the following:

Ultimately, scientists, if no one else, must be objective in their approach to this emotional issue. Judgmental terminology regarding intergenerational sexuality is more dramatic than that in the earlier psychiatric literature on homosexuality. There, patients were labeled perverts and psychopaths. Here, the experience is always abuse, the children are invariably victims, the adults are perpetrators, and those who later report childhood sexual experiences are, without apology to victims of the Nazi Holocaust, survivors. (p. 175).

Green also published a critical commentary on Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy's 2009 book The Trauma Myth, writing:

The headline, press release, book title message trumpeted here is: Most children who experience sexual contact with adults are not traumatized at the time of the experience. [...] [I]t is this aura of evil in the adult world that energizes the social construction of trauma that attaches to experience that was not traumatic. Contact morphs to abuse. This is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) without the T. [...]

But, is Clancy, when broadcasting the trauma myth while invoking the moral mantra, contributing to the problem or the solution? Might her finding be an argument to dilute societal condemnation so that delayed trauma would be diminished? If non-pedophile adults became less exercised about adult–child sexual contact that was not aggressive/violent, as with adult–adult-sexuality that is not aggressive/violent, could this reduce the nascent trauma?

Not condemning adult–child sex is not endorsing it. But, it has been around a long time. And, it is not going to go away, no matter what code number is attached in DSM-5 or how long the prison sentences that attach. (2010, p. 1205).

Pioneering positions on sexual and gender minorities

Green co-authored an early (1971) paper comparing adolescent exposure to pornography among a sample of rapists, pedophiles, homosexuals, transsexuals, with a control group, finding that "Adolescent exposure to erotica was significantly less for all deviant and offender groups compared to the nondeviants. [...] The nondeviant, non-sex-offender groups sampled had had significantly greater exposure to erotic materials during adolescence than the deviants, convicted sex offenders, or heavy adult users of pornography."

Is Homosexuality a mental illness?

During the APA's heated debate in the early 1970s about the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, Green argued forcefully in favor of declassification. He argued that the grounds for deciding the issue should be the "historical and cross-cultural groundings in homosexual expression, associated psychiatric features accompanying a homosexual orientation, the emotional consequences to the homosexual of societal condemnation, and behaviors of other species". Green applauded the eventual APA decision while strongly criticizing the fact that the administration put it to a vote, saying that such "a shotgun marriage between science and democracy" was "ludicrous".

Is pedophilia a mental illness?

Using the same criteria he had earlier used to successfully argue for the depathologization of homosexuality, in 2002 Green initiated a debate in a special issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior regarding the extent to which preferential attraction to people before puberty (i.e. pedophilia) should be classified as a mental disorder / mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Without impinging on the legal status of pedophilic age-disparate sexual contact, he argued that sexual arousal to pre-pubescent individuals is subjectively reported "in a substantial minority of "normal" people", that pedophilic sexual contact is normative in the animal kingdom via non-human primates, and reviewed sources indicating a much higher level of social acceptance of pedophilic attraction in the past. He stated that such observations do not entail cultural or legal acceptance today, and his article inspired a large number of replies from many of the most famous figures in sexual science: Robert Spitzer (the father of the modern DSM), Fred Berlin, Michael Seto, Bruce Rind, Paul Okami, and Vern Bullough. Their responses were collected and published in a single article entitled Peer Commentaries on Green (2002) and Schmidt (2002), and we at Newgon strongly recommend Okami and Rind's contributions. Green published a short reply to these commentaries in a "Rejoinder" article (2002).

The paper also raised specific concerns about the DSM-IV definition, some of which were later acknowledged by Ray Blanchard in his literature review for the DSM-5 workgroup, which proposed a more general distinction between paraphilias and paraphilic disorders. This has since been accepted in the case of pedophilia, where pedophilia (the attraction) is distinguished from pedophilic disorder ("acting on" sexual attraction). With revisions to the DSM-5-TR, the "acting on" criteria for pedophilic disorder now specifically refers to interpersonal, physical sexual contact, not individual activities such as viewing pornography intended to (or actually depicting) minors.

Sexual preference for 14-year-olds as a mental disorder: you can't be serious!!

In 2010, Green criticized Ray Blanchard's proposal to introduce hebephilia as a mental disorder in the DSM-5 (as a subtype the proposed pedohebophilic disorder). The proposal led to widespread criticism and was not accepted. In his criticism, Green pointed to the legal age of sexual consent in several countries of Europe, arguing that this proposal would declare 19-year-olds engaged sexually with 14-year-olds as having a mental disorder. His piece was titled "Sexual preference for 14-year-olds as a mental disorder: you can't be serious!!".

A friend to MAPs?

Green was a personal friend to pioneering 1st wave MAP Movement figure Thomas O'Carroll. Green invited O'Carroll to be a guest speaker at the International Academy of Sex Research's annual conference in Paris, June 2000 and to join the academic forum SexNet, wrote a legal defence for him, introdued him to the sympathetic ethics scientist Agustin Malon at a meeting in a London pub, and included his 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case as reading material for his teaching at the University of Cambridge, UK. Upon Green's death, Peter Tatchell and O'Carroll wrote obituaries for Richard (2019),, with O'Carroll writing:

After we met in Paris we continued to see each other whenever I was in London, where he was a professor of psychiatry until his retirement [...] He successfully proposed me for membership of psychologist J. Michael Bailey’s cross-disciplinary Sexnet forum, wrote to the court on my behalf when I was in trouble with the law, and gave a glowing pre-publication endorsement of my book Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons.

All those years ago in Paris, Richard and his wife Melissa Hines, a neuroscientist, put me at ease immediately, joining me on a conference-organised canal-boat excursion, where they introduced me to their ten-year-old son, Adam. More than anything else they could have done, this friendly gesture (fully visible to other conference participants on the trip) convinced me that neither of them shared the popular prejudice that paedophiles must be shunned as pariahs.

See also

• Research: Youth sexuality
• Alfred Kinsey
• Vern Bullough
• Ernest Borneman (fellow Magnus Hirschfeld Medal winner)
• Thomas O'Carroll
• Journal of Homosexuality