John Thiessen’s final contact with Dr. Money was almost 20 years ago, when the famous sexologist slipped him $15 in his parents’ living room. In the intervening years, John has often imagined what he might say, or do, to the psychologist if they were ever to meet face to face. As a younger man, his fantasies, he admits, ran to violence. But no more. “What’s done,” John says, “is done.” He refuses to dwell on a past that he cannot change. In their paper, Diamond and Sigmundson describe John as a “forward-looking person.” In conversation, Diamond calls him a “true hero.” John’s life today defies the dire prognosis of the local psychiatrist who, 31 years ago, declared that John would never marry and “must live apart.” John’s second phalloplasty allows him to have intercourse with his wife, and he is a strict but loving father to their three children, ages 15, 12 and 9. He has even mustered the emotional maturity to tell his eldest child about his painful history. And he prefers to focus on the positive changes that have resulted from his speaking out in public. For despite the brave four-year efforts of Cheryl Chase, despite the 30 years that Mickey Diamond spent trying to warn the medical establishment about the dangers of the current protocols for treatment of ambiguous or injured genitals, and despite the long-term follow-up of sex-reassigned youngsters in Bill Reiner’s study, the medical establishment remained unwilling to address the issue until John went public.

His story has shaken to its foundations the edifice constructed on John Money’s theories from the 1950s. And it has exposed a central flaw in a theory that has held sway for most of the 20th century. It was Sigmund Freud who first stated that a child’s healthy psychological development as a boy or a girl rests largely on the presence, or absence, of the penis – the notion central to Money’s theory of sexual development and the ultimate reason that John Thiessen was converted to girlhood in the first place. It is a notion that, today, has also been called into question by neurobiological research that, in the sexual realm, is leading scientists toward the conclusion that, as Dr. Reiner puts it, “the most important sex organ is not the genitals; it’s the brain.”

John Thiessen puts it another way when he speaks of his pride in his role as husband, father and sole breadwinner in the family that he never believed he would be lucky enough to have. “From what I’ve been taught by my father,” he says, “what makes you a man is: You treat your wife well. You put a roof over your family’s head. You’re a good father. Things like that add up much more to being a man than just bang bang bang – sex. I guess John Money would consider my children’s biological fathers to be real men. But they didn’t stick around to raise the children. I did. That, to me, is a man.”

next: Intersex Survivors of Domestic Violence