Charles Socarides vs. transgender people
Charles Socarides was an American psychiatrist and anti-transgender activist. Socarides was a key historical figure in the conversion therapy movement. Socarides claimed “about a third” of gay patients became heterosexual after treatment. Socarides considered “transsexualism” to be related to the same “perversions” and “disturbance of gender role formation” that cause “homosexuality.”
Socarides co-founded the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in 1992. It was later rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI) in 2014.
Background
Charles William Socarides, Sr. was born in Brockton, Massachusetts on January 24, 1922. Socarides earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1945 and a medical degree from New York Medical College in 1947. In 1952, Socarides earned a certificate in psychoanalysis from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Socarides was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Socarides’ memberships included:
- National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality: co-founder and president
- Margaret S. Mahler Psychiatric Research Foundation: board member
- 1988 Second Delphi International Psychoanalytic Symposium: International Advisory Committee member
- American Medical Association
- American Psychiatric Association
- Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine
- International Psychoanalytical Association
- American Psychoanalytic Association: life member
- Royal Society of Medicine: affiliate member
Socarides wrote many books and made many media appearances to promote anti-LGBTQ views.
Socarides was married four times and had five children. Socarides’s gay child Richard Socarides was a White House advisor to United States President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1999. Socarides’ child Charles Socarides Jr. is an actor who played Richard Socarides in the 2017 ABC miniseries When We Rise.
Charles Socarides, Sr. died on December 25, 2005.
Anti-gay activism
Socarides considered homosexuality a “perversion” or a “neurotic adaptation” that develops before the Oedipal stage. Socarides argued that a boy who failed to separate psychologically from an overbearing mother, with a distant or ineffective father, never formed a secure masculine identity. Socarides claimed homosexual desire was a way of compensating, unconsciously trying to absorb the masculinity of sex partners. Socarides saw homosexuality as rooted in a damaged sense of one’s own gender, on a spectrum with transvestism and transsexualism.
Starting in the 1960s, Socarides was an expert witness for defendants accused of anti-gay discrimination.
In 1968 Socarides published The Overt Homosexual, which argued that gay people were often the products of a domineering mother and an absent father, a family dynamic Socarides believed distorted their sexual identity.
When the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973. Socarides and Irving Bieber led efforts to overturn the decision with a referendum that failed in 1974.
In a 2019 interview, Benjamin Kaufman described introducing Joseph Nicolosi to Socarides after reading about Nicolosi’s activism around anti-gay conversion therapy.
In a posthumous 2006 tribute to Socarides published on the NARTH site, Kaufman stated the group emerged “during the December 1991 Meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association. We were surprised that 25 people showed up including Dean Byrd, the late Harold Voth, and Toby Beiber. Our committee created NARTH.”
In 1992, Socarides co-founded the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) with Joseph Nicolosi and Benjamin Kaufman. NARTH became a central institution in the conversion therapy movement and supplied professional credentials to religious and political campaigns against gay rights.
In the 1995 book Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, Socarides said that the gay rights movement “takes deadly aim on the primary unit in society, the family. Second, it is eliminating one of the very obvious but very key factors in the making of a civilization: the fact that one generation succeeds another generation. Third, the very fact of AIDS is the same-sex movement’s terrifying contribution to this terrific century.”
After conversion therapy was banned in California. NARTH rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI) in 2014.
Anti-trans activism
Starting in the late 1960s, Socarides began applying anti-gay psychoanalytic beliefs to trans and gender diverse people:
“The sexual pervert, including the transsexual, has been unable to pass successfully through the symbiotic and separation-individuation phases of early childhood and this creates the original anxiety from which sexual perversions arise. The source of the pervert’s original anxiety emanates from this pre-oedipal period. Sexual perversion serves the repression of a pivotal nuclear complex: the urge to regress to a pre-oedipal fixation in which there is a desire for and dread of merging with the mother in order to reinstate the primitive mother-child unity. There is in Victor-Valerie an unrelenting wish to merge with the mother, to die, and to be rejoined with her.
The function of transvestitism is to achieve ‘femininity’ through cross-dressing, while retaining the penis (one sees here the crucial difference between the two), and to reassure against and lessen castration fear. The transvestite envies the mother and sisters, wants to be powerful like the mother, wants to have babies, and changes his external appearance by wearing feminine apparel while retaining the phallus.
The function of transsexualism is to achieve ‘femininity’ through radical surgical and plastic procedures and endocrinological manipulation designed to remove all traces of true anatomical gender and to promote enactment of a synthetic and assumed feminine role in the general environment and in the sexual act. Thereby one escapes visible homosexuality, undergoes the dreaded castration (‘riddance’ phenomenon), vicariously identifies with the powerful mother, neutralizes fear of her and consciously enjoys the infantile wish for intercourse with the father (the negative oedipus complex realized); escapes paranoid-like fear of aggression from hostile stronger men who could damage one in homosexual relations.
The psychosexual motivation of the transsexual, beyond orgastic desire: the wish to maintain optimal distance from and/or closeness to the mother without fear of engulfment; the conscious yearning for femininity and to enact it with anatomical reinforcement; the wish to displace mother with father. The sexual object choice (aim) is a person of the same sex prior to elective recasting.
Transsexualism is evident in the homosexual who, in attempting to resolve his emotional conflicts, fastens upon the idea of changing his sex through the mechanism of denial (a psychotic mechanism). He therefore abhors everything masculine about himself and develops an overwhelming desire to be a woman.
It is well known that most homosexuals will be content to keep their external genitalia intact. The homosexual activities of the transsexual serve the following functions: (a) through this delusional recasting of identity attempts to resolve the fact that he is suffering from homosexuality; (b) alleviates guilt as to his homosexual object choice; (c) is attempting to ward off a paranoid psychosis were he to engage in homosexuality in his true anatomical role. It is significant that in the delusional system of paranoid schizophrenics the idea that one has been transformed into a person of the opposite sex so that one may now freely engage in homosexual activities is rather frequent and spares the patient intense anxiety.
There is no question that the transsexual who belongs biologically to one sex but feels that psychologically he ‘belongs’ to the other experiences great suffering and his condition is a result of deep unconscious conflict originating in the earliest years of life. The origin of such a desire for change present in transsexualism arises from the same factors as are present in the other perversions.
References
Potok, Mark (May 25, 2016). QUACKS: ‘Conversion Therapists,’ the Anti-LGBT Right, and the Demonization of Homosexuality. Southern Poverty Law Center https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/quacks-conversion-therapists-anti-lgbt-right-and-demonization-homosexuality/
McDonough, Katie (April 8, 2013). Gay son of “conversion therapy” founder on coming out to his dad. Salon https://www.salon.com/2013/04/08/gay_son_of_conversion_therapy_founder_on_coming_out_to_his_dad/
Nash, Tammye (January 5, 2006). Psychiatrist who viewed gay people as mentally ill dies. Dallas Voice https://dallasvoice.com/psychiatrist-who-viewed-gay-people-as-mentally-ill-dies/
Staff report (December 28, 2005). “Conversion therapy” psychiatrist Socarides dies at 83. The Advocate / Outtraveler
Nelson, Valerie J. (December 31, 2005), “Charles W. Socarides, 83; Psychiatrist Said Gays Could Become Straight”, The Los Angeles Times
Paid Notice (December 27, 2005). Deaths: Socarides, Charles William, M.D. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/classified/paid-notice-deaths-socarides-charles-wil-liam-md.html
Fox, Margalit (December 28, 2005). Charles W. Socarides, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Is Dead at 83. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/nyregion/charles-w-socarides-psychiatrist-and-psychoanalyst-is-dead-at-83.html
Anti-trans coverage
Byrd, A. Dean (Spring 2006). A Tribute To Charles Socarides. NARTH https://archive.iftcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/6.-A-Tribute-to-charles-socarides.pdf
Kaufman, Benjamin (February 28, 2006). Dr. Charles Socarides, Lover Of Humanity. NARTH http://www.narth.com/docs/soctribute2.html [archive]
Selected writing by Socarides
Socarides, Charles W. (1995). Thought Reform And The Psychology of The Homosexual Advocacy. NARTH http://www.narth.com/docs/1995papers/socarides.html [archive]
Socarides, C. W. (1978). Transsexualism and psychosis. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 01 Jan 1978, 7:373-384
PMID: 738822
Socarides, C. W. (1970). A psychoanalytic study of the desire for sexual transformation (‘transsexualism’): The plaster-of-paris man. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 51(3), 341–349. PMID: 5503634
Socarides, C. W. (1969). The desire for sexual transformation: A psychiatric evaluation of transsexualism. American Journal of Psychiatry, 125(10), 1419–1425. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.125.10.1419
Books
Socarides, Charles W. (1968). The Overt Homosexual. Jason Aronson, Inc., ISBN 978-0876681626.
Socarides, Charles W. (1975). Beyond Sexual Freedom. New York Times/Quadrangle Books, ISBN 978-0812905328
Socarides, Charles W.; Kramer, Selma (1975). Work and Its Inhibitions: Psychoanalytic Essays. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823668663
Socarides, Charles W. (1977). The World of Emotions: Clinical Studies of Affects and Their Expression. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823668670
Socarides, Charles W.; Karasu, Toksoz B. (1979). On Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Observations. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823638574
Socarides, Charles W. (1988). Preoedipal Origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823642878
Socarides, Charles W. (1989). Homosexuality: Psychoanalytic Therapy. Jason Aronson, Inc., ISBN 978-0876688144. First published in 1978 under the title Homosexuality.
Volkan, Vamik D.; Socarides, Charles W. (1990). The Homosexualities: Reality, Fantasy, and the Arts. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823623471
Volkan, Vamik D.; Socarides, Charles W. (1991). The Homosexualities and the Therapeutic Process. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823623488
Socarides, Charles W. (1992). Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of Homosexuality. Association for Psychohistory, ASIN B0006RCH62
Socarides, Charles W. (1995). Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far. A Psychoanalyst Answers 1000 Questions About Causes and Cure and the Impact of the Gay Rights Movement on American Society. Roberkai, ISBN 978-0964664258
Socarides, Charles W.; Freedman, Abraham (2002). Objects of Desire: The Sexual Deviations. International Universities Press, ISBN 978-0823637317
Loeb, Loretta L.; Socarides, Charles W. (2004). The Mind of the Paedophile: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Karnac, ISBN 978-1855759701
Media
Alicia Johnston (October 21, 2022). The Psychoanalytic Roots of Conversion Therapy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npgkbe5icdk
Bozhidar Yordanov (August 21, 2020). Dr. Charles Socarides discusses Clinical Male Homosexuality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa3mypTbeWE
WGBH / The Advocates via LGBT Rights (1974; posted February 3, 2015). Gay Marriage Debate 1974. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDZROQDeZGk
CBS News with Mike Wallace via Armchair Television (1967; posted July 8, 2025). The Homosexuals – A CBS Reports Program with Mike Wallace (1967). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXvKbw99ptk
Resources
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
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