As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  Money also questioned Gordon closely about sex. Believing that Dr. Money’s interest in his erotic life was intended to help him cope with the difficulties associated with his condition, Gordon opened up without reserve, detailing the content of his sexual fantasies, describing his masturbation techniques, and recounting his experimental forays into ménage à trois and his childhood experiences of “playing doctor” with a neighborhood girl. Later, in his twenties, Gordon confessed to the insecurities that had gone along with his small stature, admitting that he had once sought relationships with girls many years his junior—some as young as fourteen. Only several years after he stopped treatment with Money did Gordon learn that Money’s interest in his sex life was not simply therapeutic in nature.

  This realization was brought home to him with particular force on a day in December 1989 when he was browsing in a bookstore and happened upon a copy of Money’s latest volume, Vandalized Lovemaps. The book detailed Money’s theory of how people develop sexual fetishes, perversions, and disorders, and it featured a number of case histories. The first one, entitled “Pedophilia in a Male with a History of Hypothyroidism,” caught Gordon’s eye. He began to scan the opening sentences and realized with amazement and horror that the case history being detailed was his own. He saw his sexual life laid out with extensive verbatim quotations culled from his taped interviews with Money and saw himself diagnosed as a pedophile on the evidence of his interest in teenage girls. More shocking still, says Gordon, was information published about his parents, which included a statement by Gordon’s father, who had allegedly told Money that Gordon’s mother had had an incestuous affair with her brother. Though Gordon and his family were not mentioned by name, he felt that the details of the case would be unmistakable to anyone who knew him or his family. Stricken, Gordon phoned Money, but he could not reach him. “He wouldn’t return my calls,” Gordon says. “His associate said, ‘He’s busy.’ ”

  In the spring of 1990, Gordon brought a formal complaint against Money and Johns Hopkins through the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office for Protection from Research Risks—a division of the National Institutes of Health. Gordon learned that scientists operating under federal research grants must adhere to stringent rules, which include gaining informed, signed consent from patients and research subjects about whom a researcher wishes to publish. Money had never secured consent from Gordon for the publication of the deeply private material in Vandalized Lovemaps. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that “given the nature of [the] information [disclosed by Money], the complainant could be identifiable by persons acquainted with [him].” That fall, DHHS cited the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for “serious noncompliance” with federal regulations for the protection of human research subjects. Calling for “strong corrective action,” DHHS required that the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department “republish departmental guidelines for safeguarding the identity of patients” and allow patients who did provide informed consent to review manuscripts before publication, and it demanded that Gordon receive an apology from Money in person and in the presence of his department chairperson, in this case Money’s nemesis, Dr. Paul McHugh. Gordon says that this apology was never given, but he felt vindicated by the other sanctions. In a statement that Gordon prepared for an October 1997 meeting of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission on human research subjects, he outlined his unhappy history with Dr. John Money and drew a parallel between his experiences as a research subject and those of the famous “John/Joan” whose story had broken in the press just eight months earlier.

  Despite this string of professional reversals, embarrassments, and punishments, Money remained defiant, combative, and uncowed. Indeed the setbacks seemed only to fuel his contentious spirit. Increasingly his published work appeared to be as much an opportunity for Money to settle scores and air grievances as it was to elucidate the subject of human sexuality. His preface to the 1987 book Gay, Straight and In Between, a volume ostensibly about the origins of sexual orientation, included an unusual digression into his then-recent ouster from Johns Hopkins. “In the spring of 1986,” he wrote, “I was delivered an edict: the space allotted to the Psychohormonal Research Unit . . . would be reallocated. The new space would be away from the hospital campus in a commercial building. No further explanation would be given. There would be no appeal. . . . My response was to write this book.”

  In a 1991 autobiographical essay included in the anthology The History of Clinical Psychology in Autobiography, Money continually veered from the subject of his contributions to sexology to revisit his battles with the Johns Hopkins administration. Angrily evoking the termination of his human sexology course, Money wrote, “What the students at Johns Hopkins have lost has become the gain of students around the world. For them I now have more time to write.” In the same essay, Money excoriated the (unnamed) Paul McHugh as “the most contentiously destructive person I have ever known” and gloated that “[h]is clandestine efforts to get rid of me failed.” Money portrayed his current diminished status in the grim and dangerous basement setting of the Psychohormonal Research Unit with not untypical grandiloquence. “Working as an off-campus exile,” he wrote, “in a green subterranean jungle that flourishes under artificial light, I have a sense of kinship with dissidents like Galileo, who by order of the Vatican lived as an exile under house arrest.”

  Inevitably, perhaps, in the same essay Money addressed those in the field of sexual development who had challenged his scientific theories over the years. Though he did not mention Milton Diamond by name, there was little doubt that the University of Hawaii professor was high on the list of those whom Money now castigated for “shamelessly” attacking him. Yet after lambasting these critics, Money segued into a tone of lofty Olympian remove, finally dismissing his academic disputants as beneath his notice. “My personal impression,” he wrote, “is that they are lacking in the special talent for original thinking, for formulating new concepts and hypotheses, and for making new discoveries.” Of his continued academic survival, Money wrote, “I have survived by putting into practice my own maxim and have not been lured into declaring a war that I had no possible chance of winning. Instead of mounting a direct counterattack, I would adopt a policy of disengagement and redirect my energies into an alternative channel of achievement.”

  Money put into effect just such a strategy of disengagement six years later, in the spring of 1997, when his career and reputation suffered their greatest blow to date, from the worldwide media response to Diamond and Sigmundson’s paper on the twins case. To the many news organizations that requested comment from him about the now-infamous case, the psychologist refused to speak, citing confidentiality laws. I was among the raft of reporters who sought an interview with Money (for the article I was preparing for Rolling Stone). In a letter, I urged him to speak with me, and assured him that I would treat the story with scrupulous objectivity. He declined, but over the ensuing weeks and months, we exchanged a number of e-mails in which he eventually offered to work with me as a kind of silent collaborator on what he called “a piece of investigative journalism.” He offered to supply me with the requisite reprints from his published work and to vet my unpublished article to “check the accuracy of some data.”

  This invitation was withdrawn in late August. Having returned from a second trip to Winnipeg, I notified Money for the first time that I had located and interviewed the patient and his family and had furthermore secured David’s promise of a signed confidentiality waiver freeing Money to speak to me about the case. Money’s tone changed abruptly. From would-be silent collaborator, he now grew ice-cold. “Thank you for your e-mail of August 24th, to which my reply is that my position has not changed and will not change,” he wrote. “I am not under any circumstances available for an interview regarding the Reimer case, and have no further comments to make. So please desist.”

  I did desist for the next t
wo months while I wrote my Rolling Stone story. In early November, with the article going to press, I phoned Money’s office to check some facts with his assistant, William Wang. I was surprised when Money got on the line. Although he refused to discuss David Reimer’s case directly, he claimed that the media’s reporting of it reflected nothing more than a conservative political bias. He was particularly incensed by the New York Times front-page story. “It’s part of the antifeminist movement,” he said. “They say masculinity and femininity are built into the genes so women should get back to the mattress and the kitchen.” As to his failure to report the outcome of the case, Money was unapologetic, repeating his claim that he had lost contact with the Reimers when they did not return to Johns Hopkins and that the opportunity to conduct a follow-up had been denied to him. Money sounded affronted when I suggested to him what various of his defenders had hinted to me: that the misreporting of the case was all the Reimers’ fault and that David’s mother, in particular, in her zeal to believe in the experiment’s success—and to please Money—had given him a “rosy picture.”

  “I was not being given a rosy picture,” he said irritably, as if stung by the suggestion that he would have failed to factor in any such maternal bias in his assessment of the case’s progress. “The only thing that was of importance to me was that I didn’t get any picture at all after the family simply stopped coming to Johns Hopkins.”

  He stood by his original reporting of the case and dismissed my suggestion that he “misperceived” what was going on with the child in their one-on-one sessions. Furthermore, he implied that David’s reversion to his biological sex might not have been entirely his own decision. “I have no idea,” Money said, “how much he was coached in what he wanted, since I haven’t seen the person.” He also hinted that Diamond and Sigmundson’s paper had a hidden agenda. “There is no reason I should have been excluded from the follow-up, was there?” he asked. “Someone had a knife in my back. But it’s not uncommon in science. The minute you stick your head up above the grass, there’s a gunman ready to shoot you.” Told of these comments, Diamond says that he had repeatedly invited Money to share or publish information on the twins over the previous fifteen years, always to no avail.

  When I asked Money about Diamond’s appeal to delay surgery on intersexual babies until they are old enough to speak for themselves, Money grew angry. Apparently forgetting the conclusions he had reached in his own Harvard thesis review of over two hundred and fifty untreated intersexes, he emphatically rejected the idea that a person could survive a childhood with ambiguous genitalia. “I’ve seen the people who were the victim of that,” he said. “I’ve heard these poor people describe how they had to sit in a locked room and not go out for fear that someone would see them.” Money insisted that surgical intervention at the earliest opportunity after birth was the only guarantee of the child’s future happiness. “You cannot be an it,” he declared, adding that Diamond’s recommendations would lead intersexes back to the days when they locked themselves away in shame and worked as “circus freaks.”

  Money refused to discuss any aspect of his personal life. “You’re trying to entrap me,” he said, darkly. “Just like my patients try to entrap me.”

  At this point Money seemed determined to get off the phone. Before he did so, I reminded him that his now classic text, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, was still in print and that it reports the twins case as a success. I asked if it would not be worthwhile for him to make changes in the text for a future edition. Money said flatly, “I’ll be dead by then.”

  * * *

  Despite its ring of finality, this proved not to be Money’s last word on the case. After the publication of my Rolling Stone story in December 1997, he again broke his press silence when he granted an interview to a sympathetic writer and friend, Michael King, in the New Zealand magazine The Listener. There Money dismissed both Diamond and Sigmundson’s John/Joan paper and my Rolling Stone article as part of a dark conspiracy against him. The Listener article furthermore hinted that David and his family were deliberately lying about Brenda’s life for financial gain, since David had decided to collaborate on this book, and moviemakers had expressed interest in the saga. King’s article described Money as “surprisingly resilient and sanguine” despite the controversy and ended with news of the undimmed status that Money still enjoys among U.S. funding agencies. “He has recently been recommended for a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a major new project, a classification and consolidation of contemporary knowledge of paraphilias or ‘perversions,’ ” King reported. I checked with the NIH in the summer of 1999 and learned that Money is still supported by the same NIH research grant that he was awarded in the mid-1950s. His most recent renewal was in the amount of $135,956.

  Nor does Money lack for defenders within the academic community—and in particular among professors of psychology, many of whose tenured positions and clinical appointments have been built upon the promulgation and dissemination of Money’s theories of psychosexual development. One of his more engaging and intelligent defenders is Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto and a longtime adherent to Money’s nurturist bias in gender identity formation. (In his clinical work, Zucker has for years attempted to modify homosexuality and transexualism in boy and girl children.) Several months after the publication of Diamond and Sigmundson’s article, Zucker wrote a paper entitled “Experiment of Nurture,” which was framed as a direct response to the John/Joan revelations. Showing his environmentalist leanings, Zucker suggested that the twins case had failed not because David possessed a male biology, but because of certain “psychosocial factors”—in particular “parental ambivalence regarding the initial decision to reassign the infant as a girl.”

  Efforts on the part of Money’s defenders to blame the failure of the case on Ron’s and Janet’s supposed lack of commitment were by no means exclusive to Zucker; many of Money’s acolytes have made the same charge to me in interviews. These charges might carry more weight if not for the fact that all the evidence shows that Ron and Janet were almost slavishly devoted to the experiment—not to mention that Money himself, in his reports on the case, repeatedly described Ron and Janet as particularly skilled and committed parents in the rearing of their daughter. To be sure, once news of the case’s failure emerged, rumors apparently originating with Money leaked into the scientific community that Ron and Janet were rural fundamentalists whose restricted religious and cultural values had made it impossible for them to accept their child’s sex change in the first place, and that therefore they unconsciously undermined it. In reality, Ron and Janet grew up and spent the majority of their lives in the modern metropolis of Winnipeg (except for the three teen years they spent on farms), and both had (like Money himself) thoroughly rejected the fundamentalist religion of their parents (so much so that they refused even to be married in a Mennonite church). All new claims to the contrary, neither Ron nor Janet labored under outmoded stereotypes of men’s and women’s roles which would have forbidden them from accepting a merely “tomboyish” daughter, nor was their surrounding community of 1970s Winnipeg—an eclectic, cosmopolitan mix of cultures, religions, backgrounds, races, and socioeconomic levels—predisposed to rejecting a girl who did not conform to rigid stereotypes of femininity.

  Zucker’s paper, however, did not concern itself solely with unnamed “psychosocial factors” that supposedly negatively influenced the case. He also presented a long-term follow-up on a second case of a developmentally normal baby boy who had been raised as a girl. In a shocking parallel to David’s case, this child (also, coincidentally, a Canadian) had lost his penis to a bungled circumcision by electrocautery and had subsequently been castrated and reassigned as a girl at seven months of age in 1971. Now twenty-six years old, the patient was described by Zucker as still living in the female sex. “She denied any uncertainty about being a female from as far back as she could remember,” Zucker wrote, “and did not
report any dysphoric feelings about being a woman.” At the same time, Zucker admitted that the case could not be deemed an unalloyed example of the efficacy of sex reassignment, for he was obliged to acknowledge that the patient, in childhood, had always enjoyed “stereotypically masculine toys and games”; that as an adult she works in a “ ‘blue collar’ job practiced almost exclusively by men”; and that she is currently living with a woman, in her third significant sexual relationship with a member of the female sex.

  Nevertheless, Zucker concluded, “In this case . . . the experiment of nurture was successful regarding female gender identity differentiation,” and he cited the case as convincing proof that her rearing as a girl “overrode any putative influences of a normal prenatal masculine sexual biology.”

  Struck by the seeming incongruity of these conclusions, I spoke with Zucker about the case at his office in Toronto in the summer of 1998. Our conversation only served to raise further doubts about the paper’s conclusions, for Zucker was unable to answer any of my specific questions about whether the patient might not have been telling the researchers what they wanted to hear when she stated that she had never harbored any doubts about her gender. By now I understood that this is a phenomenon endemic to all areas of sex research that rely on patient testimony, but particularly so in the fraught and sensitive world of sex reassignment, where as one ISNA member told me, “You feel so embarrassed and ashamed to be talking to someone that you’ll basically tell them anything so you can get the hell out of there.” Zucker agreed that such scenarios are not unfamiliar, but he couldn’t say whether such a dynamic was at work in the case in question. And for a simple reason. He had never met the patient and had based his reporting solely on information supplied to him by the people listed as coauthors of the paper. These included a gynecologist with no training in the assessment of gender identity, and a psychiatrist who had conducted only two interviews with the woman—the first when she was sixteen, the second when she was twenty-six.