In 1952 the British mathematician Alan Turing was convicted on a charge of homosexuality. Because of his wartime service the authorities dispensed with a prison sentence on the condition that he undergo compulsory treatment for his ‘sickness’.
The treatment consisted of mandatory consumption of female hormones. Turing had little choice but to go along with it and later, to his horror, discovered that he was growing female breasts, due to the high dosages he was forced to take. The treatment ceased after a year or so, but Turing never really recovered from the ordeal of the arrest and its consequences, and he committed suicide in 1954.
A terrible story, but what really puzzles me is the rationale behind giving female hormones in an attempt to cure homosexuality. Of course, the whole concept of a cure is ludicrous, but is there any logic, however twisted, to this? (One might have expected them to ram testosterone into him.)
According to the Wikipedia article, it wasn’t intended as a cure. He had a choice, go to gaol or have hormone injections to reduce his libido. He chose the hormone treatment.
Oddly, I have encountered the exact opposite theory.
A local (Panama-local) lad came out as a homosexual. His father forced him to take massive doses of the male hormone testosterone. It had the predictable results, lots of body hair, premature balding.
Hormones are much more powerful than most people think. It is remarkable that so many people monkey with them.
As you’d expect, Andrew Hodges’s highly recommended biography of Turing goes into the background in some detail. Since the Wikipedia article is, justifiably, mainly based on that, it’s right about the basic idea behind the threatment.
That originated in a 1940 paper by C.W. Dunn in the US (J.Amer.Med.Ass., 115, 2263). This reported on a trial in which oestrogen was given to men, the result being a loss of libido. Independently, but also in the US in 1940, S.J. Glass tried investigating the levels of androgen and oestrogen in gay and straight men (Glass, H.J. Duel and C.A. Wright, “Sex Hormone studies in Male Homosexuality”, Endrocrinology 26). The conclusion was that homosexuality was linked to relatively low levels of the male sex hormones and high levels of the female ones. Glass therefore drew the “obvious” conclusion that homosexuality in men could be treated by administering androgens to make subjects “more male”. This followup in 1944 (Glass and R.H. Johnson, “Limitations and Complications of Organotherapy in Male Homosexuality”, J.Clin.Endrocrin.) was hardly a conspicuous success. A majority of the subjects basically just became more horny.
Hodges identifies a 1949 paper by F.L. Golla and R. Sessions Hodge in The Lancet as the key shaper of British medical and legal thinking on the matter in the period. They could draw on both Dunn and Glass to conclude that oestrogen was likely to suppress sexual activity in gay offenders. This was envisaged as a means of controlling expression rather than a “cure”.
The effect was only supposed to be temporary, lasting only through the course of treatment, which satisfied various legal constraints in the UK. In particular, it was intended to avoid being a form of permanent castration. That the effects were supposedly temporary was also one of the reasons Turing privately gave as a reason for accepting the option.
Hodges also describes how these ideas fitted into wider attitudes about hormones at the time. Not to mention how the prevailing prejudices about homosexuality shaped the criminal justice system’s handling of Turing.
Will Repair, I’m not following whatever you’re trying to say, but maybe you need an explanation:
It was thought that administering male hormones would convert homosexual males into heterosexual males. But it didn’t, it just made them homosexual males with higher libidos.
Other scientists thought that administering female hormes to homosexual males would reduce their libidos. It did, but with unacceptable side effects.