experience. So his world was shaken by these results. But he was wonderfully adaptable, and the truth was more important to him than anything else. It’s very unusual in a scientist. Most scientists fall in love with their own ideas and theories, and you can’t shake them out of it. Will Young wasn’t like that.”
In fact it was Young who settled the debate that flared among the research team members when it came time to write up the results. Unsure precisely how to label the behavior of the treated female guinea pigs—the team toyed with calling it “masculine mimicry” or “pseudodifferentiation”—they were overruled by Young, who told them they had discovered not the role played by prenatal testosterone in creating a simulation of masculine behavior, but masculine behavior itself. Accordingly, Young advised the team to state unequivocally that they had discovered, in the fetal guinea pig, the organizing principle for adult masculine sexual behavior.
“Young was an anatomist,” Goy explained, “and if you understand the way anatomists use the term organization , it makes that choice of word inevitable. Anatomists believe that the organs of the body are organized by a set of tissues that are differentiated in a special way and combined so that they carry out a definite function or malfunction of that organ. And that’s the way he used the word organization . He meant that all of the tissues underlying sexual behavior—whether peripheral structures, brain tissues, blood, or muscles—are organized into a whole; and that that organization is imposed by exposure to hormones before birth; and that that organization is either masculine or feminine. And he believed that we had discovered the principle that organizes the tissues in a masculine form.”
Still, when the team came to write up their results, which would appear in a 1959 issue of the journal Endocrinology , Young urged caution in how directly they should extrapolate their experimental animal work to sexual differentiation in humans—largely out of Young’s respect for Money’s work with the Hampsons. The team agreed to soften their statements on the applicability of their research to humans. “We said there may be some way that the guinea pig picture will ‘complement’ or ‘supplement’ the human picture by accounting for ‘discrepancies,’ ” Goy said.
Not everyone in the lab was satisfied with that decision. The youngest member, Mickey Diamond, felt that Young and the others were being too cautious in failing to link their animal findings directly to the human situation. “I believe in evolution,” Diamond says, chuckling. “I didn’t see any reason that human beings would be different from other mammals in that regard.” He felt so strongly that when he was applying for a research grant in his final year at Kansas and was required to submit an original paper, he decided to write an essay taking on Money and the Hampsons’ theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth.
In that paper, entitled “A Critical Evaluation of the Ontogeny of Human Sexual Behavior,” Diamond rejected outright the Johns Hopkins team’s theory. Citing the guinea pig findings, Diamond described as “specious” a theory that said man is “completely divested of his evolutionary heritage,” and stated that prebirth factors “set limits” on how far culture, learning, and environment can direct gender identity in humans. 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 graduate student at the University of Kansas).
Addressing the theory about the psychosexual flexibility of intersexes, Diamond pointed out that such individuals had experienced “a genetic or hormonal imbalance” in the womb, and he argued that even if human
In fact it was Young who settled the debate that flared among the research team members when it came time to write up the results. Unsure precisely how to label the behavior of the treated female guinea pigs—the team toyed with calling it “masculine mimicry” or “pseudodifferentiation”—they were overruled by Young, who told them they had discovered not the role played by prenatal testosterone in creating a simulation of masculine behavior, but masculine behavior itself. Accordingly, Young advised the team to state unequivocally that they had discovered, in the fetal guinea pig, the organizing principle for adult masculine sexual behavior.
“Young was an anatomist,” Goy explained, “and if you understand the way anatomists use the term organization , it makes that choice of word inevitable. Anatomists believe that the organs of the body are organized by a set of tissues that are differentiated in a special way and combined so that they carry out a definite function or malfunction of that organ. And that’s the way he used the word organization . He meant that all of the tissues underlying sexual behavior—whether peripheral structures, brain tissues, blood, or muscles—are organized into a whole; and that that organization is imposed by exposure to hormones before birth; and that that organization is either masculine or feminine. And he believed that we had discovered the principle that organizes the tissues in a masculine form.”
Still, when the team came to write up their results, which would appear in a 1959 issue of the journal Endocrinology , Young urged caution in how directly they should extrapolate their experimental animal work to sexual differentiation in humans—largely out of Young’s respect for Money’s work with the Hampsons. The team agreed to soften their statements on the applicability of their research to humans. “We said there may be some way that the guinea pig picture will ‘complement’ or ‘supplement’ the human picture by accounting for ‘discrepancies,’ ” Goy said.
Not everyone in the lab was satisfied with that decision. The youngest member, Mickey Diamond, felt that Young and the others were being too cautious in failing to link their animal findings directly to the human situation. “I believe in evolution,” Diamond says, chuckling. “I didn’t see any reason that human beings would be different from other mammals in that regard.” He felt so strongly that when he was applying for a research grant in his final year at Kansas and was required to submit an original paper, he decided to write an essay taking on Money and the Hampsons’ theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth.
In that paper, entitled “A Critical Evaluation of the Ontogeny of Human Sexual Behavior,” Diamond rejected outright the Johns Hopkins team’s theory. Citing the guinea pig findings, Diamond described as “specious” a theory that said man is “completely divested of his evolutionary heritage,” and stated that prebirth factors “set limits” on how far culture, learning, and environment can direct gender identity in humans. 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 graduate student at the University of Kansas).
Addressing the theory about the psychosexual flexibility of intersexes, Diamond pointed out that such individuals had experienced “a genetic or hormonal imbalance” in the womb, and he argued that even if human
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