From genius inverts to gendered intelligence: Lewis Terman and the power of the norm.

Abstract

The histories of "intelligence" and "sexuality" have largely been narrated separately. In Lewis Terman's work on individual differences, they intersect. Influenced by G. Stanley Hall, Terman initially described atypically accelerated development as problematic. Borrowing from Galton, Terman later positioned gifted children as nonaverage but ideal. Attention to the gifted effeminate subjects used to exemplify giftedness and gender nonconformity in Terman's work shows the selective instantiation of nonaverageness as pathological a propos of effeminacy, and as ideal a propos of high intelligence. Throughout, high intelligence is conflated with health, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Terman's research located marital sexual problems in women's bodies, further undoing possibilities for evaluating heterosexual men's practices as different from a normative position. Terman's research modernized Galton's imperialist vision of a society lead by a male cognitive elite. Psychologists continue to traffic in his logic that values and inculcates intelligence only in the service of sexual and gender conformity.

Cisgenderism in psychology: pathologising and misgendering children from 1999 to 2008

“…However, as documented by Bryant (2008), the 'Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood' (GIDC) model dates back to the 1960s. Indeed, related concerns can be seen in Terman and Miles's writings from the 1930s (Hegarty, 2007). Between 1980 and the present, various psychological approaches have been proposed to 'treat' children classified as having a 'GIDC' (Bryant, 2006).…”

The SPSSI Task Force on Sexual Orientation, the Nature of Sex, and the Contours of Activist Science

“…Rather than setting the limits of a person's potential due to their innate capacities, naturalization offered a route toward normalization and acceptance (cf. Hegarty, 2007). In 1977, Weinrich published a sociobiological analysis of heterosexual reproductive patterns in humans.…”

Sexuality, normality and intelligence. What is queer theory up against?

“…Elsewhere I have followed Andrew Elfenbein's (1998) intuition that the queer geniuses of the Victorian period continued to haunt the thought of twentieth-century psychologist Lewis Terman (Hegarty, 2007). Among the leaders of the IQ testing movement, Terman stands out for the singularity of his interest in the upper end of the intelligence distribution, and his work on gifted children is constituted by repeated statements that gifted children are anything but queer.…”

“…In an early paper, written under G. Stanley Hall's influence, Terman sought to normalise gifted children by naturalising the emergence of their intelligence (Terman, 1905). However, Terman also voiced a concern in this paper that intellectually precocious children might be most likely to fall under the strain of modern life, leading to such tragic outcomes as sexual inversion (see Hegarty, 2007). Terman (1915, pp.…”