Book Excerpt: Out of Egypt: Leaving Lesbianism Behind

Related Entries

A Research Review of Gartrell et al.’s Sex Attraction, Sexual Identity, and Same-Sex Experiences of Adult Offspring in U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study

As noted by Schumm (2018), “For decades some, if not most, scholars have denied any relationship between parental and child sexual orientation” (p. 113). He later goes on to observe,
One might well assume that with so many absolute denials in place for over forty years of scholarship (not to mention the imprimatur of the U.S. government, if not U.S. courts) that there would be absolutely no evidence of any association (much less a causal connection) between parental and children’s sexual orientation in the research literature, other than random chance results. (p. 116)

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with a Homosexual Woman

A thirty-year-old, married, Orthodox Jewish woman complaining of same-sex attraction was treated with psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy after trying several other therapies, including sex therapy. Among the primary determinants of her presenting problem were alienation from her unpredictable, narcissistic mother, gender identity confusion, and impounded anger. After about two years of treatment, the patient achieved connection with feelings of affection and desire, improved and loving relationships with her children, regular orgasmic sex with her husband, and remission of pre-existing colitis.

A Review of Sheila Jeffreys’s Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

Sheila Jeffreys’s book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, provides the history of the construction of the transgenderism narrative, a discussion of the political relationship of transgenderism and feminism, and details of the psychological and physical harm that transgenderism inflicts on transgender-identified individuals and those in relationship with them. Chapter 1 lays out the thesis of transgenderism as a social construct, and Chapter 2 evaluates the key interactions between transgenderism and feminism. Chapters 3–6 review the harm of transgenderism from different perspectives and for diverse populations. Chapters 7–8 close the book with a more detailed analysis of transgenderism from a feminist perspective. The book is accessible to a wide audience and should be of interest to all who want to broaden their understanding of the development of transgenderism within a sociopolitical context as well as learn of the psychological and physiological risks associated with its medicalization.