Castrated Boys

In his essay “The Joy of the Castrated Boy,” Joon Oluchi Lee talks about “castrated,” or effeminate, boys as being “inadequately female and inadequately male” because they do not display traditional masculinity but are also not women. In a society that maintains the distinctions of male = man = masculine and female = woman = feminine, this “double inadequacy” serves to alienate them and also attract strong negative reactions from others.

Both Lee and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (“How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay”) essays discuss society’s hatred of these castrated boys. But Sedgwick goes on to emphasize that masculine girls encounter less pushback than feminine boys do, citing how much easier it is for a boy to be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood (the supposedly psychopathological condition of non-conforming gender identity during childhood) than it is for a girl to be diagnosed with the same. These circumstances reflect the cultural notion that it is acceptable for girls to show masculine characteristics but it is unacceptable for a boy to show any femininity whatsoever, a concept likely based in classical Western philosophy, which upholds the superiority of the male body and masculine behaviors over anything female and feminine. The writings of Hippocrates and Galen, for example, demonstrate these ideas, which were prevalent when they were recorded and still are today. This explains the phenomenon of the tomboy and the lack of a socially accepted male counterpart.

Sedgwick also discusses society’s “wish that gay people not exist.” If society hates castrated boys, and wishes that gay people did not exist, what does this say about the stereotype of the effeminate gay man? (N.B. effeminate men are not necessarily gay, but femininity in men and homosexuality are often conflated.) Just as the castrated boy is doubly inadequate, so too is he doubly ostracized: He is at best ignored by society and at worst loathed, while also being made into a joke and a stereotype—and nobody wants to be associated with jokes or, worse, stereotypes. Therefore, this is even more damning for the castrated boy’s prospects of acceptance. There is nowhere for him to fit in, which makes his predicament even more dismaying. Thus, he must find a niche for himself in not having a niche; as Lee says, he must “make something positive” for himself out of this situation.