Fifty Years Since Stonewall

Guest editors Alexandra Rutherford and Peter Hegarty, with advisory editor Anne Kazak, discuss the implications of a special issue of American Psychologist (November 2019) that addresses changes in scientific and social attitudes to sex and gender issues over the last half century.

What is the special issue about?

This special issue explores how psychological research, practice, and policy influence have been entangled with changing social and scientific attitudes and theories about sexual orientation and gender diversity around the world over the past 50 years.

The articles in the issue range from a content analysis of the U.S.-based research literature on LGBTQI+ people of color since 1969 to analyses of the development of LGBTQI+ issues internationally, highlighting the varied ways in which professional psychology engages these concerns.

What is the significance of the issue?

Until now, the most detailed histories of these relationships have been centered on the U.S. Most have largely focused on sexual orientation, using the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as the end-point of a progressive narrative of depathologization.

The special issue takes a look at more recent events and places them in an international and transnational context. Particularly relevant is the way the focus has shifted from sexual to gender minorities in the last 10 years.

Tell us about a few key takeaways and practical implications.

These articles unravel the complex relationships between psychological research and practice, social movements, and normative beliefs that have influenced shifting understandings of and responses to sexually and gender diverse people from the local to transnational levels. The issue also highlights the histories of and continuing need for inclusion of diverse voices in narrating efforts to craft truly affirmative psychologies of gender and sexual orientation.

For example:

• One article challenges the popular narrative that the American Psychiatric Association single-handedly depathologized LGBT identities by highlighting instead the key role of frontline clinicians, psychologists, and social workers in creating new models of LGBT-affirmative care.
• Another article provides a more complex understanding of how the civil rights movement, LGBTQ rights movement, and trans liberation movement have been intertwined.
• Yet another article takes a transnational perspective identifying the contextually-specific ways that organizations have chosen to integrate LGBTI issues within professional psychology and emphasizes the unique role of the International Network for LGBTI Issues (IPsyNet) in providing resources and a shared platform for LGBTI concerns in psychology.

The remaining articles touch on: the impact of the DSM 5 and WPATH SOC on transnormativity; the importance of funding opportunities for and journal issues focusing on LGBT research; and the various influences — including cultural and political — on LGBTQI+ literature in Hungary, South Africa, and Britain.

Citation

• Hegarty, P., & Rutherford, A. (2019). Histories of psychology after Stonewall: Introduction to the special issue. American Psychologist, 74(8), 857–867. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000571

Special Issue

• View the table of contents with abstracts on APA PsycNET

Note: This article is in the Core of Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Core of Psychology topic area.

Alexandra Rutherford is a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto where she heads the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology graduate program. She is a feminist historian who publishes on the history of gender, feminism and the human sciences. She is an associate editor of American Psychologist, editor of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and the director of the Psychology’s Feminist Voices multimedia oral history and digital archive project.

Peter Hegarty is a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom where he leads the research group on Social Emotions and Equality in Relations. He is the author of two books on the history of psychology and sexuality; Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology: From Homophobia to LGBT (Routledge, 2018).