John Money

John William Money John William Money, 84, Sexual Identity Researcher, Dies was a New Zealand-American psychologist, sexologist and professor who is most well known, and infamous, for his involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer. This was done in line with Money's view that gender/sex identity was largely due to environmental (nurtural) instead of natal–hormonal or genetic (natural) factors. Reimer ultimately committed suicide, and Money's experiment was recognized by his field as a "devastating" failure.
He had become a bludgeon that transphobes use against the transgender community in spite of the fact that he "has become such a negative figure for transsexuals",The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money by Terry Goldie (2014) UBC Press. ISBN 0774827939. and made derogatory comments about transgender people. Likewise, he was criticized by the intersex community because the Reimer case, as a result of Money's misrepresentation about the outcomes, served as justification for coercive, unnecessary sex assignment at birth surgically imposed on intersex infants.Phil Gaetano (November 15, 2017). "David Reimer and John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy: The John/Joan Case". Embryo Project Encyclopedia (ASU Center for Biology and Society / Arizona State University). Quote: "For over a decade, Reimer and his brother unknowingly provided data that, according to biographers and the Intersex Society of North America, was used to reinforce Money’s theories on gender fluidity and provided justification for thousands of sex reassignment surgeries for children with abnormal genitals."
==The David Reimer case==
Easily the thing Money is most infamous for is the medical experiment he ran on David Reimer.
In his infancy, Reimer was diagnosed with phimosis and underwent a botched circumcision causing his penis to be damaged beyond the point it could function. His parents contacted John Money, who told them the solution was to give the child a sex change operation and have him live as a girl.David Reimer and John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy: The John/Joan Case
Throughout his childhood, Reimer developed gender dysphoria and did not feel comfortable with the idea of being a girl. John Colapinto, the author of the first biography on Reimer, wrote the following regarding what it was like for David growing up, when he was called Brenda:
In a long term followup with Dr Milton Diamond, Reimer looked back at his childhood retrospectively, saying:
As puberty hit, David was also expected to undergo estrogen treatment in order to appear more feminine, which he flatly refused to do.David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He Was Raised as a Girl in Gender Experiment It was also at this point a local psychiatrist had convinced his parents to tell him what happened. From this point forward, David did everything in his power to reconstruct his male identity, including undergoing testosterone injections and getting a double mastectomy.
Sadly, this experience lead David with a large amount of trauma and several mental health issues, which would result in him taking his own life in 2004.
===Sexual abuse===
Money also engaged in sexual abuse of both David and his twin brother, with David recalling:
One source said that the two "were directed to inspect one another’s genitals and engage in behavior resembling sexual intercourse… which Money justified as the rehearsal of healthy childhood sexual exploration."
Both Brian and David reported a large amount of trauma from this experience, with Brain talking about it "only with the greatest emotional turmoil" and David downright refusing to speak about this publicly, although his wife did say that David told her the full story.As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl After both the twins died of suicide, their parents specifically blamed this treatment for their deaths.Born a Boy, Raised as a Girl Documentary, The Learning Channel
===Nature vs nurture===
Transphobes have latched onto this story in hopes of proving that transgender people are unnatural. Writing in 2020, Matt Walsh said the following while discussing the case:
The core argument made here is that, in the context of the nature vs. nurture discussion, people are not naturally wired to be transgender, and it's impossible to "nurture" someone into being trans. There is an inkling of truth here in that you can't force a cis person to be trans, and vice versa. However, this does not reflect the modern trans experience because modern-day trans people are not forced to transition, they do so entirely voluntarily. Reimer was forced into a girl’s gender roles at a young age and was given hormones basically at birth, unlike cases nowadays where trans people actively want to transition rather than being forced into it. Reimer’s case applies best to the edge case of people who are forced into transitioning despite not wanting it.
If anything, the Reimer case undermines anti-trans activists insofar that it shows the harmful impacts of being forced to live under a gender identity you didn’t choose for yourself. In this case, we see Reimer, a cis man, suffer from being forced into a trans identity against his will. This exact same situation could apply to a trans person being forced into a cis identity against their will - you just swap “cis” and “trans” with each other. This is a pro-affirmation and pro-trans argument.
Anna Slatz, writing for the TERF website Reduxx, summarizes this idea with the following:
Anna Munsey-Kano, writing for the blog Queer Guess Code, expands further on this point and makes note of numerous similarities between the experience of Reimer and that of those in the transgender community.DAVID REIMER’S TRAGEDY VS. THE TRANSGENDER EXPERIENCE
===Gender-sex distinction===
S.G. Cheah, writing in Evie Magazine, said this in an article talking about Money:
A lot of conservatives believe that the David Reimer case debunks gender as a concept, or the gender-sex distinction as a concept. They argue that because Money theorized gender as being a social construct, and because he abused Reimer, that this must debunk gender conceptually. However, Money's experiment was never really meant to prove or disprove that gender was a concept. Rather, Money's experiment sought to answer questions about the nature and nurture of transgender identity - he was asking if a person could be nurtured into a transgender identity, or if that identity was determined naturally. Just because Money, a bad person, introduced the distinction, that does not automatically make the distinction useless or bad.
The gender-sex distinction is actually helpful for analyzing the Reimer experiment. Here, we see that he has a male biological sex, yet is forced into the gender identity of a woman. The gender-sex distinction is pretty clearly in play with this analysis, proving itself to be useful.
===Medical community===
The true nature of the Reimer experiment was covered up by Money for years. John Money boasted that his experiment had been a success and the medical community accepted what he said as true for years,https://reason.com/2004/05/24/the-death-of-david-reimer/ until David Reimer collaborated with Dr. Milton Diamond and, in 1997, published a long-term follow-up for Money’s earlier experiments which rebutted Money’s research and got worldwide attention. Only then was the truth about Money’s experiment actually available to the medical community for them to respond to and learn from.
Once the medical community was aware of the truth, some changes were made in medical practice. This case reopened the discussion about "nature vs. nurture" while severely undermining the "nurture" side of the aisle. It also led to medical reforms on the issue of sex reassignment surgery for infants with certain defects (e.g. micropenis).https://t-vox.org/history/people/david-reimer
==Relationship with the LGBT community==
It is rather common for transphobes to mention Money as a point against those advocating for transgender rights. In a 2023 tweet, Walsh said that "the movement began" with Money, for example.It’s #TransDayOfVisibility and I agree that the trans agenda needs to be made visible. Please use the hashtag to inform the public about the truth of the trans agenda. Like the fact that the movement began with a demented pedophile named John Money: by Matt Walsh (3:32 PM · Mar 31, 2023) Twitter (archived from March 31, 2023). A few years before that, Walsh published an article for The Daily Wire with the headline "The Horrifying Origins Of Left-Wing Gender Ideology."
What is ironic about this is that not only was Money a transphobe by modern standards, but he actually began his fight against people expressing "incongruent" gender roles out of a fear that they were creating transgender people. A 1960 article co-authored between Money and Richard Green opined: 
In 1961, he co-authored another article with Green that would become influential as a justification for conversion therapy against gender-dysphoric or gender-nonconforming children; the paper basically theorized that "effeminate prepubertal boys" had a "gender-role problem" that needed to be corrected or else they might become gay and/or transgender. For a brief article summarizing this, see here. For a freely readable PDF of the journal article that was uploaded by its author, see here. In one article from 1977, for another example, Money wrote while arguing against the gender roles:
In his other writings, Money claimed that transgender people are “devious, demanding and manipulative” and “possibly also incapable of love.”A History of Transphobia in the Medical Establishment Many of his ideas about gender, specifically his view that gender identity is malleable early on and that it's preferable that it be made to conform to social norms, have been used to justify conversion therapy against transgender people.
Those who are intersex also have little nice to say about Money, given his belief that "without obviously male or female genitalia, the child could not function well socially."The story of John Money: Controversial sexologist grappled with the concept of gender Although the North American Intersex Society tells people not to blame Money for all the problems intersex people face, they also note that "a lot of doctors justified their work via Money’s own work," with said work involving doing "'normalizing' surgeries in an attempt to make intersex go away."MYTH #2: John Money is responsible for all of the troubles that have befallen intersexed people
Funnily enough, Milton Diamond, the man responsible for exposing just how abusive Money was during the David Reimer case, has not only expressed support for transgender people and their rightsDr. Milton Diamond Discusses Transgender Research With Truth Wins Out but has also written against the unnecessary surgery on intersex people.Management of Intersexuality: Guidelines for dealing with individuals with ambiguous genitalia.
===Creator of gender?===
One common right wing claim about John Money is that he was the man behind the terms "gender" or "gender identity" in some way. One biography about Money even deems him, in the book's title, "the man who invented gender", although the actual body text tells a different story. David Allsopp, writing on Medium, saw many transphobes arguing this, and gave several reasons that it's wrong. Put simply, the term "gender" existed long before Money came about, and people discussed the notion of a "gender identity" or even gender roles (without using that specific phrase) for quite awhile before Money first used the term.
One example among many could be Margaret Mead's Male and Female (1949) which used the term "gender" to describe behaviors/social roles."What is Gender?". That's Gender Dysphoria, FYI. Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) is cited as an early proposal for "gender as a social construct".Jennifer Tsang (July 28, 2019). "Four times that Margaret Mead challenged societal norms". Massive Science. A case study reported in 1894, twenty-seven years before John Money was born, mentions the subject (born 1844) stating: "at the age of twelve or thirteen, I had a definite feeling of preferring to be a young lady … I remember, when fifteen, to have first expressed to a friend the wish to be a girl. … even on my marriage-night, I felt that I was only a woman in man's form."
Of course, even if this were true, it holds no relevance to if the ideas Money proposed held any weight. The fact that Pythagoras was a cult leader who killed one of his followers for proposing irrational numbers doesn't mean The Pythagorean Theorem is incorrect.Three Minute Philosophy: Pythagoras In the same regard, transgender people being valid and gender identity being real has nothing to do with if John Money was a morally outstanding person. By arguing against these concepts through using the actions of Money, transphobes are quite literally engaging in the definition of an ad hominem, since they are attacking the people who propose an idea as opposed to the idea itself.ad hominem
==Pedophilia==
Another rather controversial aspect about Money is his opinion regarding pedophilia. Money believed there was a difference between "sadistic pedophilia" and "affectionate pedophilia,"Pervert or sexual libertarian?: Meet John Money, "the father of f***ology" and infamously told the Dutch pro-pedophilia journal Paidika:
==Antisemitic canard==
John Money was ethnically English and Welsh by ancestry.(July 24, 2015). "John William Money, PhD, 1921–2006". Program in Human Sexuality, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health (University of Minnesota), via the Wayback Machine. Despite this, and because many aspects of Money's work/life are controversial (with some very widely considered unethical), antisemites claim otherwise in an attempt to smear Jewish people by association, claiming John Money was Jewish.(April 7, 2022). "Conversion Therapy on Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children". Section: "John Money". TransEssays (Medium). Other than his factually Anglo/Welsh (overall, British) ethnic ancestry, Money's parents were both religiously Christian fundamentalists. In fact, the antisemites have it even more ass-backwards, because one of the key people who exposed Money regarding the David Reimer case was (the aforementioned in this article) Milton Diamond, whose parents were Jewish immigrants.John Colapinto (December 11, 1997). "The True Story of John / Joan". (Second URL). Rolling Stone, p. 54–97. Quote: "There was, however, at least one researcher who was willing to question Money. He was a young graduate student at the University of Kansas. The son of struggling Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant parents, Milton Diamond, whom friends call Mickey, was raised in the Bronx, where he had sidestepped membership in the local street gangs for the life of a scholar."Milton Diamond. "Transsexuality, Intersexuality and Ethics", extract from the book "Transgenders and Intersexuals", by Lois May (2005), p. 72-94. Via the Pacific Center for Sex and Society (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa). Quote: "On a personal level, I was born in the city of New York in 1934 to European Jewish parents who emigrated from the Ukraine right after the First World War." Money despised Diamond so much that he initiated an aggressive confrontation with him at an academic conference.Clay Risen (May 8, 2024). "Milton Diamond, Sexologist and Advocate for Intersex Babies, Dies at 90". The New York Times.
==Other facts about Money==
*He coined the term "gender roles."What Is Gender Identity? And Other Questions You May Have (Before this, the phrase "sex roles" was used.)
*He popularized the term "paraphilia" in the world of psychiatry, using it instead of the more stigmatizing word "perversions."Perverse Psychology
*He is considered one of the pioneers of chemical castration, or treating sex offenders through using drugs to get rid of their sex drive.Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts Get access Arrow
==External links==
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==Notes==
==References==
Category:Antisemitism
Category:Paedophilia
Category:Psychologists
Category:Sexologists
Category:Transphobes