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No one is better qualified to write on the “sissy boy” than Richard Green. He and John Money were among the first to recognize the possible importance of the condition and to describe it. For the last 15 years Green has also been following a group of such boys, studying their behavior and outcome in sexual orientation. He published the essential data on the outcome in an earlier paper (Green, 1985), which he has also included in this book. Two-thirds of the 44 “feminine boys” became homosexual or bisexual as against one of the 34 control boys, chosen from families comparable to those of the test subjects but, at the time of choosing, without knowledge of the presence of a “feminine boy” in them. These results were in general agreement with the retrospective (starting with known homosexuals) study of Saghir and Robins (1973) and prospective study of Zuger (1984).
The “sissy boy syndrome” book is Green's attempt to find out how the boys got that way. Green reviews the theories and research on how the child becomes aware that he is a boy or girl and how this awareness is reinforced by parents and others. He then examines what the facts are in the case of the “feminine boy.” The boys' femininity is first reduced to six principal factors: cross-dressing, aversion to rough and tumble play, wishing to be a girl, desire to be like his mother (not like his father), attention to his mother's dress, and female type doll-play. Based, presumably, on the assumption that the “femininity” must have been acquired during the first years of the child's life, Green proceeds to find out from the mothers and fathers how close they were to their sons in quality and quantity to explain subsequent identification, compared with similar data for the “masculine children.” For the mothers, questions included whether the sons were breast-fed, how physically near they were to them (sleeping alongside them?), how much they held and carried them—altogether, how much of available time they had given