The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  As early as 1959, Diamond had challenged Money’s view that the sex of assignment and rearing was the key to the formation of gender identity. Working in the laboratory of William C. Young at the University of Kansas as a graduate student, Diamond had participated in animal experiments that showed the awesome power of hormones on developing fetuses. Female guinea pigs treated with massive doses of testosterone in utero were masculinized, not just in anatomy but in behavior. “There was lots of older literature that clued us in so that this [data] wasn’t coming out of the blue,” Diamond told me in a 2003 interview, referring to the “chickens, the famous chickens” hormonally manipulated by Berthold in 1849. “ut people weren’t applying it to humans. Those were birds. This was the work that showed it could happen to mammals. That you could take a mammal, treat it in utero for a limited period of time, don’t touch that animal until it’s an adult, and then lo and behold it acts like a male.” Subsequent experiments by the researcher Roger Gorski and colleagues showed the same effects in female rats. “With rats, the critical period for that sort of brain differentiation is postnatally,” Diamond says. “So Gorski and others were able to give it after birth—a single injection! And that’s so remarkable to me. You give one injection, a single day, and you forever influence that individual’s life.”

  Over the next thirty years, Diamond’s animal experiments and work with human intersexual patients convinced him that human beings are not psychosexually neutral at birth, as Money had attempted to prove, but are psychosexually biased at birth, although social factors play an important role in how that biological predisposition is expressed. “I think that any behavior, whether it be sexual behavior, eating behavior or religious behavior, starts off with some sort of biological predisposition,” he says. “Some behaviors are more biologically oriented than others but they are always influenced by social and cultural factors.” Diamond, who prefers the terms “androphilic” and “gynecophilic” to “homosexual,” says that a gay person who lives in a society where homosexuality is brutally suppressed, for example, will probably not act on his feelings. “If you are a homosexual in Saudi Arabia,” he says, “you keep that to yourself. So that’s why I say that there is a biological predisposition, and society decides how it gets manifested.” In the case of David Reimer, the child (known as Brenda throughout his childhood) “was socially constrained from acting as the male that he wanted to be by his parents, Money, and others who said ‘oh no, you are a girl.’”

  Despite his early and repeated championing of the view that humans are not psychosexual blank slates at birth, Diamond found it difficult to gain a hearing until he and Sigmundson published the article that revealed that David Reimer had threatened suicide at age fourteen if he were not allowed to live as a male. His parents then told him the truth about his history, and he immediately began living as a male. By the time Diamond located Reimer’s former psychiatrist, Keith Sigmundson, Reimer was married and the adoptive father of three children. His life story became the basis of a best-selling book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, a book that understandably is narrated from the point of view of David Reimer and his family. John Money is depicted as a monstrous figure, an unsavory amalgam of evil scientist and sexual pervert, a voyeur in a white lab coat. The undeniable harm that was done to David Reimer is foregrounded, and Money’s theories are presented as bizarre fantasies shorn of social and scientific context. Though it is rather unpopular these days to defend John Money, some researchers are willing to say that the Colapinto book doesn’t offer a balanced presentation of either the man or his research.

  “The guy that wrote that book [Colapinto] is not a physican, and there are a lot of things in that book that are just wrong,” says neuro-scientist Ben Barres. “He never really understood Money’s core idea— that our brains have, in the first couple of years, a critical period, a plasticity, a period where they are very susceptible to environmental stimuli, a critical period when our brains are affected in a permanent way, and after that period that’s the way they are. Money said that in the first year or so, it’s a critical period for gender, and that there could be plasticity during that period, but then afterwards [gender] would be fixed. And Colapinto never related it that way. For him, it was all one or the other, all biological or all social. And I think that a lot of times he wasn’t really fair to Money or Money’s ideas. Money was a pioneer in many ways, and I think that it’s very easy in retrospect to kick him around.”

  Neuroscientist Simon LeVay agrees that the Colapinto book and the Reimer case in general do not provide a completely accurate picture of Money’s theories. “The funny thing about Money is that in the context of the Colapinto book and that whole study with that kid, he sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool socialization theorist, but in other aspects of his work he was actually pioneering biological approaches to some of these things,” LeVay told me in a 2001 interview. It is true that Money advocated replacing the traditional nature/nurture dichotomy with a more complex and nuanced “nature/critical period/nurture” paradigm that recognized the importance of biological and environmental triggers for sexual differentiation at key stages of development. In Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, he even goes so far as to suggest that “it is possible that some as yet unknown fetal hormonal factor influences the fetal nervous system in such a way as to increase the chances that transsexualism will evolve, perhaps in association with or in response to some other developmental event, in the course of psychosexual differentiation.” Milton Diamond thinks that this ambiguity in Money’s thinking is due to the fact that Money recognized the influence of biology even as he promoted the primacy of socialization. “He waffled,” Diamond told me in 2003. “He paid lip service to biology, but when push comes to shove he made his money, his reputation, on the idea that sex is socially constructed. You put them in the pink room and they are a girl; put them in the blue room and they are a boy. And I think that he didn’t want to lose his reputation.”

  The theory of psychosexual neutrality offered liberation to some. Feminists in particular were quick to seize on the promise that biology was not destiny, and that females were socialized to be “women.” “Especially when they homed in on John/Joan,” says Diamond. “ ‘Oh, he took a little boy and made him a girl. Isn’t that nice?’” he says sarcastically. “So we feminists know that gender differences are horseshit.” Money’s theory of gender plasticity not only offered scientific support for Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion that “women are made, not born,” but it also helped drive the second wave of feminism by convincing women that their supposed “differences” from men were, in fact, a social artifact, not a biological reality—a consequence of gender oppression, not a cause. In January 1973, Time magazine reported that Money’s research, and the John/Joan case in particular, “casts doubt on the theory that major sexual differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.” The magazine also noted that Money’s research “provides strong support” for “women’s liberationists.” This is ironic, considering that Money himself grew to rue the “neutering of gender,” “man-bashing,” and the “demonification of lust” of much feminist theory. “In postmodern social constructionist theory, which includes feminist theory, gender is socially constructed to be a neutered version of sex, and lust is socially constructed so as to be, in women, a spiritualized version of sex, and in men a demonized version,” he writes in Gendermaps.

  By the time Gendermaps was published, in 1995, Money was aware that the Reimer experiment had failed, and was publicly reasserting the link between gender identity and biological sex that his earlier research had called into question. “We now know that he knew more than he admitted,” says Paul McHugh, “in relationship to this boy.” Though Money never went nearly so far as to admit that he had been wrong, his writing from this period places greater emphasis on biological determinants of gender identity and the interaction between “nature” and “nurture” than his prev
iously published work. “I wrote to him telling him that the paper [about David Reimer] was coming out,” says Milton Diamond, “and he threatened to sue me. He said, ‘If you write that, I will sue you and I will sue the publishers.’ And Richard Green was the editor of the journal at the time!” Green, Money’s former student and coeditor on Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, published the paper that revealed that Money had perpetrated a fraud by concealing the fact that the “John/Joan” experiment was a failure.

  David Reimer committed suicide in May 2004, at the age of thirty-eight; in news reports, his mother said that she had never forgiven John Money for the harm he had inflicted on their family. (David’s twin brother, Brian, had committed suicide in 2002.) After hearing of Reimer’s death, Milton Diamond told the Los Angeles Times, “I hope people learn from it that you don’t do something that dramatic to someone without their informed consent. You also have to deal with people with honesty. He was lied to by physicians and parents, the two groups you want to trust the most.” Money refused to speak to reporters who contacted him after Reimer’s suicide, maintaining his decade-long policy of silence on the case.

  Many people have questioned why John Money hasn’t admitted that he was wrong about the treatment he advocated for David Reimer— and more generally wrong in his view that the sex of assignment and rearing is the most significant variable in the development of gender identity. Milton Diamond believes that Money would “have gotten more credit, not less credit” by admitting his mistake. “It takes a lot to admit that you are wrong,” he says, but ultimately “he would have gotten more credit for it.” However, reluctance to report negative results, data that conflict with a pet theory, as Ben Barres of Stanford points out, is not confined to John Money: “Well, now we’re talking about the psychopathology of science … and that’s not something that’s unique to him.”

  Today, the pendulum in gender research is slowly swinging back to biology. Hormones acting under the influence of genes are now thought to be the primary architects of gender identity, and the hypothesis proposed and vehemently defended by John Money—that gender is a mostly social construct—has been superseded by the biological school represented by Milton Diamond. However, the exact mechanisms by which a core gender identity (or sexual orientation) is developed remain unclear. Studies that seem to point to structural anomalies in the brains of gay men (like the studies carried out by Simon LeVay) or transsexuals (like those of Dick Swaab and other researchers) have produced tantalizing findings, but no definitive answers. Most of these brain studies have not been replicated. “People who look for things in the brain right now are shooting buckshot,” says Milton Diamond. “They don’t know where they are going to find the target and they look in a hundred places and they find one or two that are different and they say, ‘This must be it!’” The truth is, Diamond says, “we don’t know where to look. It might be in the biochemistry. It might be somewhere else.” Diamond thinks that the seat of gender identity will eventually be located in the brain, “but it doesn’t have to be something that’s morphologically obvious,” he says. “We’d like to see a little penis or a little vagina, so that we could say, ‘That’s it!’ But I don’t think we’re gonna see that. What they’re talking about now is bigger versus smaller, more cells versus fewer. Okay, so we may have to settle for that.”

  Of course, the very idea that the brain is sexed, that there are differences between male and female brains, makes some people suspicious. One doesn’t need to be a radical feminist to fear the social implications of such a theory, the way that it could be used to justify regressive views about the “lesser” spatial and mathematical capabilities of women, and the “natural” violence of men. That may be one reason why John Money’s theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth attracted so many people in the first place, because it seemed to offer a release from the limitations of biology and social norms. The work of John Money struck a chord with those who came of age in the sixties and seventies because, like the research of Magnus Hirschfeld half a century earlier, it provided scientific support for sweeping social changes then underway. “Like it or not, we are living in a sexual revolution and it is changing our lives,” Money writes in Sexual Signatures, published in 1975. “We dare not depend on old answers, nor can we afford to cut off the pioneers who are exploring for new ways to meet these un-precendented challenges.” The old order, which had imprisoned so many behind stone walls of racism, sexism, and homophobia, was crumbling. As they surged out into the streets to proclaim their liberation, their anger was exceeded only by their optimism. The revolution had arrived—and it would be televised, penetrating every home in America. The sexual anarchy of the fin de siecle had been a dress rehearsal; the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies was the main event, one in which the boundary between performers and audience, like so many other boundaries, melted into a rainbow-colored pool of candle wax.

  CONVERSATION WITH CHELSEA GOODWIN AND RUSTY MAE MOORE, PH.D.

  Chelsea Goodwin is an activist and was a founding member of Queer Nation. She worked at the Strand bookstore in New York City for many years and has also been a commercial sex worker. She currently works as a tele-marketer. Rusty Mae Moore is a soft-spoken college professor and a parent of three children, with whom she remains close. Goodwin is an extrovert, who says that her childhood ambition was to be a Catskills comic. Moore is quiet and thoughtful. They have lived together for over a decade. Goodwin and Moore underwent genital surgery together in Belgium in 2005. Together they operate Transy House, ashelterfor trans gendered and transsexual people in Brooklyn, New York.

  Q: You don’t like the word “trans gender”?

  CHELSEA: What I don’t like is that it’s based on a false premise. There is a transsexual community. There is a cross-dresser community. There is a community of people like Jasmine here, or like Sylvia, or like Melissa, which pretty much involves that kind of underground, prostitution-based thing. Those are three different communities, with three different languages, three different sets of mores and values and folkways—all those groovy anthropology words they taught me to use in college. If I were an anthropologist from another planet coming to study trans earth people, I would say that those are three different tribes that are unrelated.

  Q: So you don’t see any value, political or social, in all those groups working together as a single entity?’

  CHELSEA: Frankly I don’t, and I’ll tell you why. One, cross-dressers insist that transsexuals are somehow just extremist cross-dressers. They don’t understand. “You’re a kumquat and we’re avocados.” We’re not even in the same food group. You’ve got transsexuals. We’re a pretty diverse bunch, but there’s a commonality. A common language and culture which, yes, goes back to Benjamin and Christine Jorgensen and all that. And then you’ve got the street community, where there is a culture of trans street prostitute types. You’ve got the same thing in Brazil, in the Philippines, in Mexico. You’ve got it all over the world. It’s a real phenomenon. But it’s different than transsexuals like Rusty or me. I came out of the working class. Rusty came out of the middle class. But we’re still transsexuals.

  Q: I’m confused about the distinction between street queens and non-operative transsexuals. Isn’t the distinction based purely on access to surgery?

  CHELSEA: No, I think it’s a different community. It’s a different world. See Paris Is Burning. That is a different culture than you’ll see with people who have had or are about to have surgery. That’s a different track. A whole different world. And that’s totally different from people who like to wear a dress on weekends and go to conventions with their wives. It’s a whole different culture.

  Q: Does age play a part in this? It seems like older folks tend to prefer to identify as transsexual, whereas younger folks prefer transgender.

  RUSTY: I think that it’s an age thing in part because some of those people who say transgender are going to evolve [into transsexuals] and some are not going to evolve.


  CHELSEA: I think it’s an age thing in that you have a generation— and some of them are still left, people like April Ashley and Christine Jorgensen, even Renee Richards—that pretty much came out of a pre-Stonewall mentality and they were the people who first went through the Benjamin Standards of Care.

  Q: And they had a fairly hetero-normative view of gender? RUSTY: Right. CHELSEA: Right. And then you have a whole generation of trippies.

  I’m a trippie. Trippies are people that are of the right age that we were hippies and yippies and freaks in the sixties and seventies.

  Q: Testing all kinds of boundaries and gender was just one of those boundaries?”

  CHELSEA: Right. Transsexual is the least weird thing about me. I happen to be a transsexual. Aside from that, I’m way the fuck out there. So you’ve got that generation and then you’ve got the generation that Riki Wilchins represents, a generation that coincided in time, and then had a reaction to, that lesbian feminist crap from the seventies and eighties.

  Q: What about the whole feminist attack on transwomen in the seventies?’ What was that all about?

  CHELSEA: We met Janice Raymond. The short story is that Rusty came out to her minister in the Methodist Church. The minister said, “Take Chelsea out and shoot her. Just shoot her. She doesn’t have the right to live.” Then he said, “Read Janice Raymond’s book.” So I met this Janice Raymond. We were at this reading at some women’s bookstore. The thing is that Janice Raymond was wearing a pair of alligator Texas boots, a pair of jeans with an armadillo belt buckle, a cowboy hat, like “Howdy, Tex.” But she’s anti-trans?