Digital Transgender Archive

Camille Moran Papers: Folder 1

This item contains potentially sensitive content related to homophobic language, child abuse, suicide, and medical abuse. Folder 1 of the materials from the Camille Moran Papers. These are papers on Camille's experience of electroshock therapy when she was a child and her hope to end psychiatry and not have anyone else tortured by shocks and drugs that can permanently damage one just because they were born lesbian, bi, gay or transgender. Camille aimed to put a stop to kids getting classified under Gender Identity Disorder in Children and so spoke out about her own experience. This also includes clippings from articles mentioning Camille as well as Camille's own correspondence and poems. 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.