The queer child - Or growing sideways in the twentieth century

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[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick's essay - part imperative, part elegy, as her title indicates - reports on a historical shift barely noticed despite its momentousness. In 1973, with fanfare, the American Psychiatric Association decided to drop from the next edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM-III) the diagnostic category "homosexuality," thus removing it as a pathology. By its next appearance in 1980, the DSM, sleight-of-hand fashion, had added an entry: "Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood," which, Sedgwick tells us, "appears to have attracted no outside attention ... nor even to have been perceived as part of the same conceptual shift." In essence, the DSM freed the homosexual only to embattle the child. It waged war against homosexuality precisely on a field where a war could be hidden: the protogay child. [...]

And these suspicions were underscored a while ago (in September, 2006) by the "Foley scandal," involving Congressman Mark Foley (R-Florida), who was mentoring congressional pages aged sixteen. When he "harmed" these "children" by talking with them about sexual pleasure, his and theirs, it became more evident what "harm" is, according to the public: anybody's pleasure, an adult's or the child's, that comes to children (even to their ears) before it is time. Harm is any form of premature ejaculation (a "sudden ... utterance," says the dictionary) involving children.

source: From the book 'The Queer Child - Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century' by Kathryn Bond Stockton; Duke University Press, Durham & London; 2009