The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [64]
Contained in this single paragraph are the seeds of the two most significant outcomes of Money’s research: first, the promotion of corrective surgery for intersexual persons, to normalize their genitalia and to save them from that “perplexed conclusion about the sex to which they belonged;” second, the support of sex-reassignment surgery for people whose “external genital morphology flagrantly contradicted … their gender role and orientation as boy or girl, man or woman.” Add to that the paper’s conclusion—that “the sex of assignment and rearing was better than any other variable as a prognostica-tor of the gender role and orientation established by the patients in this group”—and one sees a virtual blueprint for Money’s future career.
Throughout the next forty years, Money would continue to promote these themes in book after book, lecture after lecture. He insisted that “a person could not be an it”—neither male nor female, nor both male and female—and that psychosexual well-being was dependent on developing a core sense of oneself as either a man or a woman. He declared that an individual’s sense of being either male or female was heavily influenced by the way that one was perceived and treated by parents and other close family members in the first two years of life, and that the behavior of parents was in turn heavily influenced by the external genitalia of their newborn. Any ambiguity in the appearance of the child’s genitals creates doubt in the minds of the parents about their child’s sex, Money said, which is then transmitted to the child like a virus, poisoning his or her life with uncertainty. He avowed that gender role “becomes not only established but also indelibly imprinted” by around eighteen months, and that by the age of two and a half years, gender role is “well-established and inviolable.”
Using a metaphor that was to appear regularly in articles and books published throughout his career, in the 1955 paper Money compared the establishment of gender role “through encounters and transactions” with other people to the acquisition of one’s native language. “Once imprinted, a person’s native language may fall into disuse and be supplanted by another, but is never entirely eradicated. So also a gender role may be changed, or resembling native bilingualism, may be ambiguous, but it may also become so indelibly engraved that not even flagrant contradictions of body functioning and morphology may displace it.”
By the time that Money and the Hampsons published their next paper, “Imprinting and the Establishment of Gender Role,” in the prestigious Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, they not only had established the crucial importance of the sex of assignment and rearing but also had begun to promote the recommendations that were to have such a profound impact on the lives of intersexual persons. A decision as to the sex of assignment and rearing of an intersexual infant must be made as soon as possible after birth, with “uncompromising adherence to the decision” throughout the child’s life, they said. Moreover, the deciding factor in that crucial decision made in the first weeks of the child’s life should be “the morphology of the external genitals and the ease with which these organs can be surgically reconstructed