that it was a problem —because he knew everybody else was dumb.” By all accounts, Money had no compunction about letting others know his low opinion of their intellectual firepower. “Even when John asked for feedback, what he was looking for was agreement,” says Dr. Howard Devore, a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. under Money in the Psychohormonal Research Unit in the mid-1980s. Should that agreement fail to be forthcoming, Money was never afraid to let his displeasure be known. As early as the mid-1950s, Money had a reputation for tantrums among his coworkers, underlings, and students that preceded him throughout the academic world.
“Every center that I trained at after [Johns Hopkins],” says Devore, “when people saw on my résumé that I had worked with John Money, they would ask me to comment, off the record, what it was like working with him and was he ‘as bad as people say?’ I was just amazed at how consistent his worldwide reputation actually was. And frankly, John didn’t do that much to hide it. I once saw him stand up at an academic meeting and shout a presenter down because he didn’t agree with what she was saying.”
By February 1967—when Ron and Janet Reimer first saw John Money on television—his reputation was for all intents and purposes unassailable. Dr. Benjamin Rosenberg, himself a leading psychologist who specialized in sexual identity, says that Money was “the leader—the front-runner on everything having to do with mixed sex and hermaphrodites and the implications for homosexuality and on and on and on.”
Money’s reach and influence throughout the academic and scientific world would help to define the scientific landscape for decades to come—indeed, to the present day: many of his students and protégés, trained in his theories of psychosexual differentiation, have gone on to occupy the top positions at some of the most respected universities, research institutions, and scientific journals in the country. His former students include Dr. Anke Ehrhardt, now a senior professor at Columbia University; Dr. Richard Green, director of the Gender Identity Clinic in London, England; Dr. June Reinisch, who for years was head of the famed Kinsey Institute; and Dr. Mark Schwartz, director of the influential Masters and Johnson Clinic.
On the clinical side, Money’s influence was perhaps even more remarkable. His theories on the psychosexual flexibility at birth of humans form the cornerstone of an entire medical specialty—pediatric endocrinology. Professor Suzanne Kessler, in her 1998 book, Lessons from the Intersexed , suggests that Money’s views and their implications for the treatment of ambiguously sexed babies form among physicians “a consensus that is rarely encountered in science.”
----
There was, however, at least one researcher in the mid-1960s who was willing to question John Money. He was a young graduate student fresh from the University of Kansas.
The son of struggling Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents, Milton Diamond, whom friends called 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 the City College of New York, Diamond had become fascinated by the role hormones played in human behavior. Seeking a place to do graduate work, he chose Kansas, where anatomist William C. Young (famous for his hallmark studies of the 1930s on the role of hormones in the estrus cycle) ran a laboratory. In a stroke of serendipity, Diamond’s arrival in Kansas in the fall of 1958 coincided with the time when a trio of researchers on Young’s staff—Charles Phoenix, Robert Goy, and Arnold Gerall—stood on the brink of a discovery about the sex-differentiating role of hormones that would change the science and study of sexual development forever.
Disillusionment with earlier hormone studies had led many sex researchers, including Young’s team, to shift
“Every center that I trained at after [Johns Hopkins],” says Devore, “when people saw on my résumé that I had worked with John Money, they would ask me to comment, off the record, what it was like working with him and was he ‘as bad as people say?’ I was just amazed at how consistent his worldwide reputation actually was. And frankly, John didn’t do that much to hide it. I once saw him stand up at an academic meeting and shout a presenter down because he didn’t agree with what she was saying.”
By February 1967—when Ron and Janet Reimer first saw John Money on television—his reputation was for all intents and purposes unassailable. Dr. Benjamin Rosenberg, himself a leading psychologist who specialized in sexual identity, says that Money was “the leader—the front-runner on everything having to do with mixed sex and hermaphrodites and the implications for homosexuality and on and on and on.”
Money’s reach and influence throughout the academic and scientific world would help to define the scientific landscape for decades to come—indeed, to the present day: many of his students and protégés, trained in his theories of psychosexual differentiation, have gone on to occupy the top positions at some of the most respected universities, research institutions, and scientific journals in the country. His former students include Dr. Anke Ehrhardt, now a senior professor at Columbia University; Dr. Richard Green, director of the Gender Identity Clinic in London, England; Dr. June Reinisch, who for years was head of the famed Kinsey Institute; and Dr. Mark Schwartz, director of the influential Masters and Johnson Clinic.
On the clinical side, Money’s influence was perhaps even more remarkable. His theories on the psychosexual flexibility at birth of humans form the cornerstone of an entire medical specialty—pediatric endocrinology. Professor Suzanne Kessler, in her 1998 book, Lessons from the Intersexed , suggests that Money’s views and their implications for the treatment of ambiguously sexed babies form among physicians “a consensus that is rarely encountered in science.”
----
There was, however, at least one researcher in the mid-1960s who was willing to question John Money. He was a young graduate student fresh from the University of Kansas.
The son of struggling Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents, Milton Diamond, whom friends called 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 the City College of New York, Diamond had become fascinated by the role hormones played in human behavior. Seeking a place to do graduate work, he chose Kansas, where anatomist William C. Young (famous for his hallmark studies of the 1930s on the role of hormones in the estrus cycle) ran a laboratory. In a stroke of serendipity, Diamond’s arrival in Kansas in the fall of 1958 coincided with the time when a trio of researchers on Young’s staff—Charles Phoenix, Robert Goy, and Arnold Gerall—stood on the brink of a discovery about the sex-differentiating role of hormones that would change the science and study of sexual development forever.
Disillusionment with earlier hormone studies had led many sex researchers, including Young’s team, to shift
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