The Gender Identity Jungle Expedition
In 1979 the man who coined the term 'gender identity' set out on an expedition to Papua New Guinea. It was a journey with profound and disturbing implications for today's debate about gender ideology.
This is the story of a quite extraordinary journey by two of the pioneers of gender ideology. When I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago I was flabbergasted I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s a story that crystallises many of my -and no doubt your- suspicions about this entire field. Yet, like so much of the history of the trans movement, this revealing episode has been pushed into the shadows, and a dust-sheet thrown over it.
The reason for that is simple. What Professor Robert Stoller and his academic companion recorded in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea was so morally perverse and troubling its association with the study of transgender identity has had to be hushed up.
Before I relate what happened on this field trip to observe a “Stone Age” tribe and why it matters, I want to express my grateful thanks to all my subscribers. You make it worth my while doing this research.
To my paid subscribers a particular thanks. Researching this story has taken weeks and a barrow-load of book purchases. It’s only with your support I am able to piece together a story like this.
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
- T S Eliot, Four Quartets.
In 1979, Professor Robert Stoller, the acknowledged doyen of the emerging discipline of gender medicine, who had coined the term ‘gender identity’, embarked on a journey of 7000 miles from his home in California to the island nation of Papua New Guinea.
It was no simple trip for the 55 year old. Even today a flight from Los Angeles to Port Moresby, the capital, can take anything between 20 and 44 hours, depending on connections. In 1979, Papua New Guinea was even riskier than usual. It was in the middle of a deep crisis. After widespread looting and rioting a state of emergency had been declared. As an article from the time, in the ‘Survey of Asia’, reported,
None of this drama dissuaded Stoller. He was determined to see for himself a tribe that had been studied since 1974 by a post-doctoral fellow he was supervising from his offices at UCLA Medical School in Los Angeles. Stoller was fascinated by accounts of the tribe’s behaviour and, in particular, the violent coming of age rituals it imposed on its boys. He hoped these might help confirm theories he’d been developing about the nature of sexual desire and the cause of transsexuality in men.
The researcher whom Stoller had come to Papua New Guinea to meet was Gilbert Herdt, who was 35 at the time. He’s now an Emeritus Professor of Human Sexuality and Anthropology at San Francisco State University.
If his name rings a bell that may be because Herdt was the anthropologist cited by Peter Tatchell in his notorious letter to the Guardian in 1997, which defended the pro-paedophilia book ‘Dares to Speak’.