The True Story of John / Joan

But Money was not interested solely in intersexes. As he has stated often in his writings, he saw intersexual syndromes, which he called “experiments of nature,” chiefly as a way to learn about the sexual development of so-called normal humans. Thus, he immediately generalized his theories about intersexes to include all children, even those born without genital irregularities. “In the light of hermaphroditic evidence ” he wrote in a 1955 paper that would become a classic in the field of sexual development, “it is no longer possible to attribute psychological maleness or femaleness to chromosomal, gonadal or hormonal origins. . . . The evidence of hermaphroditism lends support to a conception that, psychologically, sexuality is undifferentiated at birth and that it becomes differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of the various experiences of growing up.” In simple terms, Money was advancing the view that all children form a sense of themselves as male or female according to whether they are dressed in blue or pink, given a masculine or feminine name, clothed in pants or dresses, given guns or Barbies to play with.

In a retrospective essay written in 1985 about his career as a sex researcher, Money offered crucial insight into the way he arrived at some of his more unusual theories about human sexual behavior. “I frequently find myself toying with concepts and working out potential hypotheses,” he mused. “It is like playing a game of science fiction. . . . It is as much an art as the creative process in painting, music, drama or literature.”

Money’s theory that newborns are psychosexually neutral was both unorthodox and against the current climate of science, which for decades had centered on the critical role of chromosomes and hormones in determining sexual behavior. But if his colleagues considered Money’s ideas to be science fiction, they weren’t prepared to say so publicly. His papers outlining his theory became famous in his field, helping not only to propel him to international renown as a sex researcher but also to speed his rise up the ladder at Johns Hopkins, where he ascended from assistant to associate professor of medical psychology, teaching his theory of infant sexual development to generations of medical students. By 1965, the year of John and Kevin Thiessen’s birth, Money’s reputation was virtually unassailable. He had for more than a decade been head of Hopkins’ Psychohormonal Research Unit (his clinic for treating and studying intersex kids), and he was shortly to help co-found Hopkins’ groundbreaking Gender Identity Clinic – a coup that helped earn him a reputation, says John Hampson, as “the national authority on gender disorder.”

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. As an undergraduate majoring in biophysics at City College of New York, Diamond became fascinated by the role of hormones in the womb and their possible role in defining a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation. In his late 20s, as a grad student in endocrinology at Kansas, he conducted animal research on the subject, injecting pregnant guinea pigs and rats with different hormone cocktails to see how pre-birth events would affect later sexual behavior. The evidence in Diamond’s lab suggested a link between the hormones that bathe a developing fetus’s brain and nervous system and its later sexual functioning. It was in an effort to raise funds for his continued research that Diamond applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation Committee for Research in Problems of Sex an application that required the submission of a research paper. For his topic, Diamond decided to write a response to Money’s now-classic papers on sexual development.

Diamond’s critique appeared in The Quarterly Review of Biology in 1965. Marshaling evidence from biology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and endocrinology to argue that gender identity is hardwired into the brain virtually from conception, the paper was an audacious challenge to Money’s authority (especially coming from an unknown grad student at the University of Kansas). First addressing the theory about the psychosexual flexibility of intersexes, Diamond pointed out that such individuals suffer “a genetic or hormonal imbalance” in the womb. Diamond argued that even if intersexuals could be steered into one sex or the other as newborns, this was not necessarily evidence that rearing is more influential than biology. It might simply mean that the cells in their brains had undergone, in utero, an ambiguity of sexual differentiation similar to that of the cells in their genitals. In short, intersexes have an inborn, neurological capability to go both ways – a capability, Diamond hastened to point out, that genetically normal children certainly would not share.

Even a scientist less thin-skinned than John Money might have been stung by the calm, relentless logic of Diamond’s attack – which, near the end, raised the most rudimentary, Science 101 objection to the widespread acceptance of Money’s theory of psychosexual malleability in normal children. “To support [such a] theory,” Diamond wrote, “we have been presented with no instance of a normal individual appearing as an unequivocal male and being reared successfully as a female.”

It was a year and a half after Diamond had thrown down the gauntlet that Dr. Money received Linda Thiessen’s letter describing the terrible circumcision accident that had befallen her baby boy.