Male. Female. John Money (1921–2006), a New Zealand–born psychologist, devoted much of his career to researching everything about the sexes and the various states in between. During his career as the director of Johns Hopkins University’s Psychohormonal Research Unit in Baltimore, Money coined the terms gender identity (a person’s self-classification as male, female, or in-between) and gender role (a person’s behavior that defines how they are identified as male, female, or in-between).

Money is perhaps best known—and most criticized—for his work advocating sex change operations for children with ambiguous genitalia (most often caused by genetic conditions, such as hermaphroditism) before the age of 3. This played out devastatingly in 1967, when a young Canadian couple asked him for help. One of their twin boys (born in 1965) had suffered a botched circumcision, and Money told them that with hormones and a sex change surgery, the boy could be raised as a girl. It was the first sex reassignment for a developmentally normal (nonhermaphrodite) infant, and the child was raised as Brenda. But even so, Brenda always identified with males—tearing off dresses, playing sports, walking with a swagger.

When Brenda’s parents finally explained his history to him when he was 14, he immediately decided that he wanted to be reassigned as a male, David Reimer. He stopped estrogen therapy, underwent surgery to construct a penis, and went on to marry a woman. But after a number of marital and professional failures, along with his brother’s suicide, David himself committed suicide in 2004. A few years before Reimer’s death, a paper and subsequent book drew attention to his case—and critics argued that Money had played the role of a scientist who strong-armed the results that he wanted to see. Colleagues said that the psychologist was devastated by the backlash and became withdrawn in his later years.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

  1. David Reimer’s (1965–2004) story became known as the John/Joan case and was documented in the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl.
  2. In his free time, Money collected anthropological art he gathered from traveling around the world. He later donated it to a gallery in Gore, New Zealand.