Many of you may have read my past diaries about intersex. In those diaries, I've mentioned Dr. John Money. In a way, he's the grandfather of the way intersex has been treated in the US and elsewhere for the past 60 years. As a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, he crafted a treatment model that included early surgery on those born with genitals that didn't match what is expected for standard male or female, and secrecy.
News of his death on Friday at age 85 has hit the wires this evening.
I've often joked about the bottle of champagne I have had waiting for this event. This evening, I'm not sure what to do but that is a personal issue for me as a result of the harm that man subjected me to. In a way, I feel that if I open it, I'm celebrating his life; I'm thinking I should probably go out to the street and fling it as far as I can with all my might so I can listen to it smash. I'm sorry if I sound bitter but his ideas had an impact on my life that few could imagine unless they were in my shoes.
Money was most famous for his gender "experiments". In the 1960s, he was approached by a young couple whose son had his penis burned off in a circumscision accident. At the advice of Money, John's parents raised him as a girl and his twin as the male he was born as until John made it clear as a teen that he was indeed male and rejected the female assignment. Eventually taking a new name, David Reimer eventually married and was a grandfather when he committed suicide in 2004. His twin brother committed suicide several years prior.
Until David's story was told publicly by John Colapinto in Rolling Stone magazine, Money persisted in claiming success with the case and going so far as to claim that Reimer was still identifying as female and that his great experiment was a success. His writings were held up by many, including noted feminists who used it to claim that gender was simply a construct and that any of us could be male or female with reinforcement in childhood.
He never again spoke about Reimer once Colapinto's article and subsequent book was released, including David's suicide. Perhaps that was because David revealed some of the key points of Money's "nurturing" like showing hardcore porn to the twins to see how they reacted or that he often had them naked in his office.
Money's teachings from JH are still held in high esteem by many physicians, and even neo-con assholes like Dobsen and Focus on the Family. Despite reams of research indicating that gender is not a result of nurture, there are those that continue to perpetuate the idea they are helping some "unfortunate child" by cutting their genitals in infancy or giving them sex hormones in puberty without their knowledge and consent.
Ironically, his doctoral thesis (never published but available from Johns Hopkins) was studying intersex people who never had any intervention. He found people who were quite happy and went so far as to describe them as "testaments to human survival". Sadly, he persisted in perpetuating his ideas of gender being the handiwork of nurture despite his previous research. One notable point from his work is coining the term "gender identity" whatever that means.
And so I sit here diarying this "event" in my life instead of cracking open that bottle of "Money" as I've often called it. I'm left wondering if anything will change, or if he will be hailed as a hero in death. He was no hero to me nor thousands of other children. Already, the news articles are calling him a pioneer.
It's a good thing I'm not an obituary writer; I'd probably call him the butcher of Baltimore. That wouldn't be correct, of course, as he was a psychologist. But at his urging he changed the way intersex is treated in America and tonight, there are probably thousands of people just like me reading about his death and in some ways celebrating it and it in other ways, mourning the fact that he influenced their history at all.
