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Losing Money: a controversial pioneer in gender studies

By Gwendolyn Ann Smith

I had an interesting thing happen to me the other day: I found myself almost agreeing with Bob Knight of the Culture and Family Institute.
You see, early in July of this year, Dr. John Money passed away. In many ways he did pioneering work around gender identity, and the school he was affiliated with, John Hopkins, was a ground breaker when it came to trangender-related care in the post-war era. Of course, Mr. Knight takes Dr. Money to task, and attacks one of the most controversial parts of Dr. Money's work: the piece that, had the outcome remained the same as it has been for decades, Dr. Money's passing would be little more than a footnote.
It was the 1960s when Dr. Money met his most well-known patient. A young boy named David — one of a pair of twin boys — was put in his case: this boy had suffered a horrific accident during circumcision, and had lost a substantial part of his genitalia. Dr. Money's "treatment" was for David to be castrated, and for his parents to raise him as a female. Dr. Money's argument being that gender was a social construct, and David would do quite well as a girl and a woman if he was simply raised as such.
In relatively early studies of his star patient, Dr. Money was glad to report that David apparently took to his new gender role with ease, helping to prove that gender was indeed a social construct. This study would be used by may for decades, and served as a basis for how many still view gender identity.
It was also all terribly wrong.
David Reimer did not socialize as well as Dr. Money would have liked you to believe. In the book "As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl," author John Colapinto takes us inside Davie Reimer's life, laying bare a person who never accepted his new gender, and was never truly accepted within it by others.
David Reimer did not continue to live as a woman: he transitioned back to male, and live as a man until taking his life a handful of years ago, a sad coda to this tragic tale. Yet to the end, Dr. Money seemed at least partially willing to believe that he was in the right with Mr. Reimer.
So, Bob Knight lambastes Dr. Money, and I have to agree. Dr. Money's work was shoddy at best, and criminal at worst. Yet I can't completely agree with Mr. Knight.
You see, in attacking Dr. Money, Knight attempts to use it to show how the "Gender Identity Movement" has a "faulty foundation." It seems to me that Dr. Money's downfall proves quite the opposite.
A year or two before David Reimer went public, I sat with a close friend of mine, and we briefly touched upon Dr. Money's findings. Basically put, we could not shore up this idea of gender as a socially constructed item with our own experiences as transgender women. If it was all simply social, we pondered, why would any of us feel any need to physically alter our bodies? Why not just live our preferred social role and be happy?
It seemed as if our own experience contradicted Dr. Money, in a slightly similar fashion to Mr. Reimer: none of us were so easily socialized into gender roles that did not fit ourselves, in spite of being brought up to believe that we should be the gender everyone told us we were.
Dr. Money is gone, but there seem plenty willing to take his place, those who seem to be willing to put their own arrogance in the way of honest work in understanding the ins and outs of gender identity. So few really make an attempt to ask a transgender person – or even a non-transgender male like David Reimer – what they think it's all about.
In the end though, Dr. Money remains dead, as does David Reimer. Only one of those deaths is tragic, and only one contains the real lessons of gender.

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Topics: Opinions
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