John Money

• 1. Introduction

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  John Money was a New Zealand American psychologist and sexologist whose name is attached to a phrase he never coined. Many writers credit him with the term gender identity. He did not invent it. What he did invent, and what he advised for one particular family, made him one of the most disputed figures in the study of sex and gender. Colleagues, ethicists and activists still argue about him. Some treat his work as foundational. Others point to the case of David Reimer, a boy raised as a girl on Money's advice, and call it a medical tragedy. This documentary asks where Money's ideas came from and which of his words entered everyday speech. It asks why intersex people, transgender scholars and fellow researchers judge him so differently. And it asks what became of the people who lived inside his theories.

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• 2. New Zealand Beginnings

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  John William Money was born on the 8th of July 1921 in Morrinsville, New Zealand. His family was Christian fundamentalist, of English and Welsh descent, and his parents belonged to the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. He attended Hutt Valley High School and then studied psychology at Victoria University of Wellington. In 1944 he graduated with a double master's degree in psychology and education. He then became a junior member of the psychology faculty at the University of Otago in Dunedin.

  Among his students at Otago was the author Janet Frame, who attended some of his classes as part of her teacher training. Frame was attracted to Money and eager to please him. In October 1945 she wrote an essay that mentioned thoughts of suicide. Money convinced her to enter the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Hospital, where she was misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. Frame went on to spend eight years in psychiatric institutions. She received electroshock and insulin shock therapy, and she narrowly escaped a lobotomy. When she later wrote her autobiography, An Angel at My Table, she gave Money a new name. In its pages he appears as John Forrest.

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• 3. A Language for Gender

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  In 1947, at the age of 26, Money emigrated to the United States to study at the Psychiatric Institute of the University of Pittsburgh. A year later he became a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, and he earned his PhD in 1952. That same year he began work at Johns Hopkins University as a professor of pediatrics and medical psychology. He stayed there until his death.

  Intersex people were the starting point for his vocabulary. In a seminal 1955 paper, Money argued that six variables define a person's sex. They were assigned sex and sex of rearing, external genital form, internal reproductive structures, hormones and secondary sex characteristics, gonadal sex, and chromosomal sex. In an average person all six agree. In an intersex person, one or more can point the other way. To these he added a seventh variable, the gender role and orientation as male or female that a person establishes while growing up.

  Gender role was his own coinage, and he preferred it to the older phrase sex role. He described it as everything a person says or does to show the status of boy or man, girl or woman. He judged it from mannerisms, play preferences, casual talk, dreams and fantasies, and a person's own answers to direct questions. He also introduced sexual orientation in place of sexual preference, arguing that attraction is not necessarily a matter of free choice. He coined lovemap as well, and he popularized paraphilia, a term that appeared in the DSM-III and would later replace perversions.

  Money's theories could be strikingly abstract. In his 1988 book Gay, Straight, and In-Between, he proposed the word bodymind. It was meant to help scientists move past old splits between nature and nurture, innate and acquired, biological and social. He also listed shared human concepts with names such as pairbondage, troopbondage, abidance, ycleptance and foredoomance. He argued that the idea of a threshold, the point where sexual behavior is released or inhibited, served sex research better than any concept of motivation.

  In 1972 Money set out his theories in a college textbook, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl. The book presented David Reimer as an example of gender reassignment.

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• 4. The Gender Clinic

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  In 1965 Money helped establish the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins, working with the endocrinologist Claude Migeon. The hospital began performing sexual reassignment surgery in 1966, and it was the first clinic in the United States to do so. Adult patients were screened for two years before Money granted them a medical transition. He reported that none of them regretted the procedure. In 1969 he co-edited the book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, which helped bring more acceptance to reassignment surgery and to transsexual people.

  His private theory of transgender people was far less welcoming. Money maintained that they held an idée fixe, a fixed idea unlikely to resolve on its own. He believed psychotherapists had failed to ease gender dysphoria through therapy. According to the scholar Goldie, many transgender people see him as a negative figure. In one paper, Money described trans women as "devious, demanding and manipulative in their relationships with people on whom they are also dependent." He added that they were "possibly also incapable of love."

  He also thought sex roles should be de-stereotyped, so that fewer people would feel pushed toward transition. Transgender scholars and activists have criticized this reasoning. Money put it in a single image. He wrote of "a tomboy-ish girl, prenatally androgenized," who "grows up to be a career-minded woman, not a transsexual who claims to need sex reassignment."

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• 5. The Twin Boys

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  In 1966 a botched circumcision left an eight-month-old boy named Bruce Reimer without a penis. He had a twin brother, Brian. Money persuaded the parents that sex reassignment surgery was in their child's best interest. At 22 months, the baby underwent an orchiectomy, the surgical removal of the testicles. He was reassigned to be raised as a girl, and his name was changed from Bruce to Brenda. Money also recommended hormone treatment, and the parents agreed. He then recommended surgery to create an artificial vagina, which the parents refused.

  Money published a number of papers reporting the reassignment as a success. He described the child as the "John/Joan case." The child was raised under the "optimum gender rearing model," then a common approach for intersex youth. Critics later attacked that model as sexist and as imposing an arbitrary gender binary.

  A darker account comes from John Colapinto's biography of David Reimer. According to Colapinto, when David and Brian were six years old, Money showed them pornography and told them to rehearse sexual acts. Reimer alleged that on at least one occasion Money photographed the two children. Colapinto speculated that Money acted on a belief that childhood sexual rehearsal play mattered for a healthy adult gender identity. Money was reportedly angered when the boys resisted.

  The Reimers recalled that Money was mild-mannered around their parents but ill-tempered when alone with the boys. David also described what he called genital inspections. He recalled being told to take his clothes off and refusing, until Money screamed "Now!" David said, "I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there shaking."

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• 6. Unraveling

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  At 14 years old, and in extreme psychological agony, David Reimer was told the truth by his parents. He chose to call himself David, and he underwent surgical procedures to reverse the feminizing changes to his body. By the time the true outcome came out, the idea of a purely socially constructed gender identity had become the accepted medical and sociological standard. So had medical intervention for intersex infants.

  In 1997 Reimer told his story to Milton Diamond, an academic sexologist. Diamond persuaded him to allow a report of the outcome, in the hope of dissuading physicians from treating other infants the same way. Soon afterward Reimer went public. In December 1997 John Colapinto published an influential account in Rolling Stone magazine. He expanded it into the New York Times bestselling biography As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, published in 2000.

  Colapinto described a childhood that contradicted Money's reports. Living as Brenda, Reimer did not identify as a girl. Peers ostracized and bullied him and nicknamed him "cavewoman." Neither frilly dresses nor female hormones made him feel female.

  In July 2002 Brian was found dead from an overdose of antidepressants. In May 2004 David died by suicide at the age of 38. His mother said he had recently become depressed after losing his job and separating from his wife.

  Money blamed the media response to Diamond's exposé on right-wing bias and "the antifeminist movement." He said his detractors believed "masculinity and femininity are built into the genes, so women should get back to the mattress and the kitchen." Intersex activists criticized him too. They argued that the unreported failure had led to the surgical reassignment of thousands of infants as a matter of policy. Colleagues said that privately Money was mortified by the case, and that as a rule he did not discuss it.

  Richard Green, who co-authored two papers with Money in 1960 and 1961, defended him. Green believed Money meant to help Reimer rather than to experiment on him. He said Money acted within accepted medical knowledge of the time.

  The case has since reached popular culture. The 2005 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Identity" was based on the lives of David and Brian Reimer and their treatment by Money. The 2023 documentary Every Body highlighted the case through intersex people describing their own struggles after their gender was misidentified.

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• 7. Contested Theories

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  Money's work on offenders began with a drug. According to a 1987 paper, he used Depo-Provera, whose chemical name is medroxyprogesterone acetate, on sex offenders at Johns Hopkins starting in 1966. The aim was to extinguish their sex drives. Money is considered a pioneer of this approach, which later spread across the United States and Europe.

  His writing on attraction to children drew some of the sharpest condemnation. In 1986 he coined the terms chronophilia and nepiophilia, the latter meaning sexual attraction to toddlers and infants. In two case studies published in 1983, he said pedophilia and other chronophilias could combine "devotion, affection, and limerence." He called them "comradeship with a touch of hero-worship" and ultimately "harmless... in most instances." He complained that researchers and the public failed to separate affectional pedophilia from sadistic pedophilia.

  According to Colapinto, Money gave an interview to Paidika, a now defunct Dutch journal of pedophilia. He said that if a relationship between a boy of 10 or 12 and a man in his twenties or thirties was "totally mutual," then "I would not call it pathological in any way." Also in 1986, Money described forms of erotic age-roleplaying that he named infantilism, juvenilism, adolescentilism and gerontilism.

  Money was also a leading advocate of the idea that sexual orientation develops through learning and gendered socialization. He believed boys surgically reassigned and raised as girls around birth would grow up attracted to males and live as heterosexual women. Reimer grew up attracted to women instead. A 2016 academic review found seven cases of boys surgically reassigned and raised as girls, after botched circumcision or cloacal exstrophy. All seven were strongly attracted to women, which contradicts the learning theory.

  Money further proposed that sexual rehearsal and play between children might be important for healthy heterosexual development. He pointed to aboriginal tribes where he apparently observed sex rehearsal between prepubescent children. He speculated that homosexuality could be prevented entirely if such a practice were embraced. In a 1975 opinion piece in The New York Times, he wrote that "the forces of antisex cry in moral outrage when confronted with the evidence of sexual disabilities, and blame the new freedom."

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• 8. Collector and Patron

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  For more than 40 years Money lived in a house in Baltimore near the Johns Hopkins medical campus. Friends described his lifestyle as eccentric. He bought only secondhand clothing and rarely threw away anything he thought could be reused. His walls held anthropological art gathered on his travels abroad, including his studies of aboriginal communities in Australia. He was briefly married in the 1950s, had no children, and was reportedly bisexual.

  Money was an early patron of several well-known artists. They included the New Zealand artists Rita Angus and Theo Schoon, and the American artist Lowell Nesbitt, for whom he supplied an x-ray used in an artwork. He also knew Yoko Ono. He visited her in London with Richard Green and fashioned some of her sculptures.

  Money died on the 7th of July 2006 in Towson, Maryland, one day before his 85th birthday. The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease. He was survived by eight nieces and nephews. His writing has been translated into many languages and totals around 2,000 articles, books, chapters and reviews. Over his lifetime he received around 65 honors, awards and degrees.

  Four years before he died, as his Parkinson's disease worsened, Money gave a substantial part of his art collection to the Eastern Southland Art Gallery in Gore, New Zealand. In 2003 the New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark opened the John Money wing there.

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