The True Story of John / Joan

At the time that the Thiessen family’s plight became known to Dr. Money, he was already one of the most respected, if controversial, sex researchers in the world. Born in 1921 in New Zealand, Money had come to America at about age 26, received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard and then joined Johns Hopkins, where his rise as a researcher and clinician specializing in sexuality was meteoric. Within a decade of joining Hopkins, he was already widely credited as the man who had coined the term “gender identity” to describe a person’s inner sense of himself or herself as male or female, and was the world’s undisputed authority on the psychological ramifications of ambiguous genitalia. “I think he’s a thoroughly ethical and professional person,” says John Hampson, a child psychiatrist who co-authored a number of Money’s groundbreaking papers on sexual development in the mid-1950s. “He was a very conscientious scientist when it comes to collecting data and making sure of what he’s saying. I don’t know very many social scientists who could match him in that regard.” According to Hampson, Money’s ability to persuade others to adopt his point of view is one of the psychologist’s chief strengths: “He’s a terribly good speaker, very organized and very persuasive in his recital of the facts regarding a case.” Indeed, Hampson admits that Money is almost too good at the art of persuasion. “I think a lot of people were envious,” says Hampson. “He’s kind of a charismatic person, and some people dislike him. As a person, he was a little bit . . . oh . . . flamboyant; he might have been a little glib.”

Money’s often-overweening confidence actually came to him at some cost. His childhood and youth in rural New Zealand had been beset by anxieties, personal tragedies and early failure. The son of an Australian father and an English mother, he was a thin, delicate child raised in an atmosphere of strict religious observance – or what he has called “tightly sealed, evangelical religious dogma.” At age 5 he was bullied by his classmates and took shelter with a female cousin in the girls’ play shed, where no boy would be caught dead. “My fate was sealed,” he wrote in an anthology titled How I Got Into Sex. “Having not measured up as a fighter, I was set on the pathway of outwitting other kids by being an intellectual achiever. That was easier for me than for most of them.”

He was 8 years old when his father, after a long illness, died. “His death was not handled very well in our family,” Money wrote. Three days after watching his father get mysteriously carried off to the hospital, the boy was told that his father had died. His shock was compounded by the trauma of being informed by an uncle that now he would have to be the man of the household. “That’s rather heavy duty for an 8-year-old.” Money wrote. “It had a great impact on me.” Indeed. As an adult, Money would forever avoid the role of “man of the household.” After one brief marriage ended, he never remarried, and he has never had children.

Following his father’s death, Money was raised by his mother and spinster aunts. A solitary adolescent with passions for astronomy and archaeology, he also harbored ambitions to be a musician. His widowed mother could not afford piano lessons, so Money worked as a gardener on weekends to pay for music classes and used every spare moment to practice. It was an ambition doomed to disappointment, partly because Money had set the bar so high for himself: “It was difficult for me to have to admit that, irrespective of effort, I could never achieve in music the goal that I wanted to set for myself. I would not even be a good amateur.”

Upon entering Victoria University, in Wellington, Money discovered a new passion into which he would channel his thwarted creativity: the science of psychology. Like so many drawn to the study of the mind and emotions, Money initially saw the discipline as a means of solving certain gnawing questions about himself. His first serious work in psychology, the thesis for his master’s, concerned “creativity in musicians”; in it, Money writes, “I began to investigate my relative lack of success in comparison with that of other music students.”

His later decision to narrow his studies to the psychology of sex had a similarly personal basis. Having lost his religious faith in his early 20s, Money increasingly reacted against what he saw as the repressive religious strictures of his upbringing and, in particular, the anti-masturbatory, anti-sexual fervor that went with them. The academic study of sexuality, which removed even the most outlandish practices from moral considerations and placed them in the “pure” realm of scientific inquiry, was for Money an emancipation. From now on, he would be a fierce proselytizer for sexual exploration. According to journalist John Heidenry, a personal confidant of Money’s and author of the recent book What Wild Ecstacy, which traces Money’s role as a major behind-the-scenes leader of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, the psychologist’s sexual explorations were not confined to the lab, lecture hall or library. An acknowledged but discreet bisexual, Money engaged in affairs with a number of men and women – “some briefly,” Heidenry writes, “others over a longer duration.” Indeed, by the mid-1970s, with the sexual revolution in full rampage, Money would step out publicly as a champion of open marriage, nudism and the dissemination of explicit pornography. His promotion of the culture’s sexual unbuttoning seemed boundless. “There is plenty of evidence that bisexual group sex can be as personally satisfying as a paired partnership, provided each partner is ‘tuned in’ on the same wavelength,” he wrote in his 1975 pop-psych book, Sexual Signatures. A former patient who was treated by Money in the 1970’s for a rare endocrine disorder recalls the psychologist once casually asking him if he’d ever had a “golden shower.” The patient, a sexually inexperienced youth at the time, did not know what Money was talking about. “Getting pissed on,” Money airily announced with the twinkling, slightly insinuating little smile with which he delivered such deliberately provocative comments.

According to colleagues and other former patients, such sexual frankness in conversation is a hallmark of Money’s personal style. Dr. Fred Berlin, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a colleague who considers Money one of his most important mentors, agrees that Money is aggressively outspoken. “Because he thinks it’s important to desensitize people in discussing sexual issues, he will sometimes use four-letter words that others might find offensive,” says Berlin. “Perhaps he could be a little more willing to compromise On that. But John is an opinionated person who isn’t looking necessarily to do things differently from the way he’s concluded is best.”