Digital Transgender Archive

Camille Moran Papers: Folder 3

This item contains potentially sensitive content related to homophobic language, child abuse, suicide, and medical abuse. Folder 3 of a collection of papers related to Camille Moran including clippings talking about her experience and how electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) should not be allowed without proper informed consent since it's being misused against LGBTQ+ youth. Included in this folder are public hearing flyers, speech scripts, and replies from APA to her case about removing the Gender Identity Disorder in Children (GIDC) diagnose as well as not using ECT. She also included chapters from books about Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and how it's classified which explains the process for GID vs transsexual diagnoses. This folder also includes personal papers of hers including correspondence, some of which is more formal than others. Camille Moran was a transgender poet and painter, as well as an activist who works against psychiatric abuse of queer and trans youth. As a six-year-old child in the 1950s, Moran was institutionalized for years because her parents were disturbed by her femininity. She was given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which left her with headaches, memory loss, learning disability, and seizures. As an adult, Moran advocated for the removal of Gender Identity Disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), on the grounds that the diagnosis could easily lead to similar abuse. Moran was also a member of the San Francisco LGBT Community Center Project Board and served on the Transgender Task Force of the Human Rights Commission. This item comes from the Camille Moran papers at the GLBT Historical Society.