The Riddle of Gender

misery suffered by the child and his family as the boy’s masculinity asserted itself in the face of repeated efforts to convince him that he was a girl, had been contacted by Diamond, who sought information about the child for many years.

As early as 1959, Diamond had challenged Money’s view that the sex of assignment and rearing was the key to the formation of gender identity. Working in the laboratory of William C. Young at the University of Kansas as a graduate student, Diamond had participated in animal experiments that showed the awesome power of hormones on developing fetuses. Female guinea pigs treated with massive doses of testosterone in utero were masculinized, not just in anatomy but in behavior. “There was lots of older literature that clued us in so that this [data] wasn’t coming out of the blue,” Diamond told me in a 2003 interview, referring to the “chickens, the famous chickens” hormonally manipulated by Berthold in 1849. “^ut people weren’t applying it to humans. Those were birds. This was the work that showed it could happen to mammals. That you could take a mammal, treat it in utero for a limited period of time, don’t touch that animal until it’s an adult, and then lo and behold it acts like a male.” Subsequent experiments by the researcher Roger Gorski and colleagues showed the same effects in female rats. “With rats, the critical period for that sort of brain differentiation is postnatally,” Diamond says. “So Gorski and others were able to give it after birth—a single injection! And that’s so remarkable to me. You give one injection, a single day, and you forever influence that individual’s life.”

Over the next thirty years, Diamond’s animal experiments and work with human intersexual patients convinced him that human beings are not psychosexually neutral at birth, as Money had attempted to prove, but are psychosexually biased at birth, although social factors play an important role in how that biological predisposition is expressed. “I think that any behavior, whether it be sexual behavior, eating behavior or religious behavior, starts off with some sort of biological predisposition,” he says. “Some behaviors are more biologically oriented than others but they are always influenced by social and cultural factors.” Diamond, who prefers the terms “androphilic” and “gynecophilic” to “homosexual,” says that a gay person who lives in a society where homosexuality is brutally suppressed, for example, will probably not act on his feelings. “If you are a homosexual in Saudi Arabia,” he says, “you keep that to yourself. So that’s why I say that there is a biological predisposition, and society decides how it gets manifested.” In the case of David Reimer, the child (known as Brenda throughout his childhood) “was socially constrained from acting as the male that he wanted to be by his parents, Money, and others who said ‘oh no, you are a girl.’”

Despite his early and repeated championing of the view that humans are not psychosexual blank slates at birth, Diamond found it difficult to gain a hearing until he and Sigmundson published the article that revealed that David Reimer had threatened suicide at age fourteen if he were not allowed to live as a male. His parents then told him the truth about his history, and he immediately began living as a male. By the time Diamond located Reimer’s former psychiatrist, Keith Sigmundson, Reimer was married and the adoptive father of three children. His life story became the basis of a best-selling book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, a book that understandably is narrated from the point of view of David Reimer and his family. John Money is depicted as a monstrous figure, an unsavory amalgam of evil scientist and sexual pervert, a voyeur in a white lab coat. The undeniable harm that was done to David Reimer is foregrounded, and Money’s theories are presented as bizarre fantasies shorn of social and scientific context. Though it is rather unpopular these days to defend John Money, some researchers are willing to say that the Colapinto book doesn’t offer a balanced presentation of either the man or his research.

“The guy that wrote that book [Colapinto] is not a physican, and there are a lot of things in that book that are just wrong,” says neuro-scientist Ben Barres. “He never really understood Money’s core idea— that our brains have, in the first couple of years, a critical period, a plasticity, a period where they are very susceptible to environmental stimuli, a critical period when our brains are affected in a permanent way, and after that period that’s the way they are. Money said that in the first year or so, it’s a critical period for gender, and that there could be plasticity during that period, but then afterwards [gender] would be fixed. And Colapinto never related it that way. For him, it was all one or the other, all biological or all social. And I think that a lot of times he wasn’t really fair to Money or Money’s ideas. Money was a pioneer in many ways, and I think that it’s very easy in retrospect to kick him around.”

Neuroscientist Simon LeVay agrees that the Colapinto book and the Reimer case in general do not provide a completely accurate picture of Money’s theories. “The funny thing about Money is that in the context of the Colapinto book and that whole study with that kid, he sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool socialization theorist, but in other aspects of his work he was actually pioneering biological approaches to some of these things,” LeVay told me in a 2001 interview. It is true that Money advocated replacing the traditional nature/nurture dichotomy with a more complex and nuanced “nature/critical period/nurture” paradigm that recognized the importance of biological and environmental triggers for sexual differentiation at key stages of development. In Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, he even goes so far as to suggest that “it is possible that some as yet unknown fetal hormonal factor influences the fetal nervous system in such a way as to increase the chances that transsexualism will evolve, perhaps in association with or in response to some other developmental event, in the course of psychosexual differentiation.” Milton Diamond thinks that this ambiguity in Money’s thinking is due to the fact that Money recognized the influence of biology even as he promoted the primacy of socialization. “He waffled,” Diamond told me in 2003. “He paid lip service to biology, but when push comes to shove he made his money, his reputation, on the idea that sex is socially constructed. You put them in the pink room and they are a girl; put them in the blue room and they are a boy. And I think that he didn’t want to lose his reputation.”

The theory of psychosexual neutrality offered liberation to some. Feminists in particular were quick to seize on the promise that biology was not destiny, and that females were socialized to be “women.” “Especially when they homed in on John/Joan,” says Diamond. “ ‘Oh, he took a little boy and made him a girl. Isn’t that nice?’” he says sarcastically. “So we feminists know that gender differences are horseshit.” Money’s theory of gender plasticity not only offered scientific support for Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion that “women are made, not born,” but it also helped drive the second wave of feminism by convincing women that their supposed “differences” from men were, in fact, a social artifact, not a biological reality—a consequence of gender oppression, not a cause. In January 1973, Time magazine reported that Money’s research, and the John/Joan case in particular, “casts doubt on the theory that major sexual differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.” The magazine also noted that Money’s research “provides strong support” for “women’s liberationists.” This is ironic, considering that Money himself grew to rue the “neutering of gender,” “man-bashing,” and the “demonification of lust” of much feminist theory. “In postmodern social constructionist theory, which includes feminist theory, gender is socially constructed to be a neutered version of sex, and lust is socially constructed so as to be, in women, a spiritualized version of sex, and in men a demonized version,” he writes in Gendermaps.

By the time Gendermaps was published, in 1995, Money was aware that the Reimer experiment had failed, and was publicly reasserting the link between gender identity and biological sex that his earlier research had called into question. “We now know that he knew more than he admitted,” says Paul McHugh, “in relationship to this boy.” Though Money never went nearly so far as to admit that he had been wrong, his writing from this period places greater emphasis on biological determinants of gender identity and the interaction between “nature” and “nurture” than his previously published work. “I wrote to him telling him that the paper [about David Reimer] was coming out,” says Milton Diamond, “and he threatened to sue me. He said, ‘If you write that, I will sue you and I will sue the publishers.’ And Richard Green was the editor of the journal at the time!” Green, Money’s former student and coeditor on Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, published the paper that revealed that Money had perpetrated a fraud by concealing the fact that the “John/Joan” experiment was a failure.

David Reimer committed suicide in May 2004, at the age of thirty-eight; in news reports, his mother said that she had never forgiven John Money for the harm he had inflicted on their family. (David’s twin brother, Brian, had committed suicide in 2002.) After hearing of Reimer’s death, Milton Diamond told the Los Angeles Times, “I hope people learn from it that you don’t do something that dramatic to someone without their informed consent. You also have to deal with people with honesty. He was lied to by physicians and parents, the two groups you want to trust the most.” Money refused to speak to reporters who contacted him after Reimer’s suicide, maintaining his decade-long policy of silence on the case.

Many people have questioned why John Money hasn’t admitted that he was wrong about the treatment he