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. In 2006, he was awarded the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for Sexual Research.

Green took great personal and professional , studying such things as "Effeminacy in Prepubertal Boys" (1961) and

Pioneering positions on sexual and gender minorities

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 relating to MAPs: 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).

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!!

Green, R. (2010). "Sexual preference for 14-year-olds as a mental disorder: you can't be serious!! (letter to the editor)". Archives of Sexual Behavior. 39 (3): 585–586. Full letter on Ipce.

See also

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