The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [73]
Paul McHugh, who was to close the Gender Identity Clinic at Hopkins shortly after he assumed the directorship of the department of psychiatry in 1975, confirmed in a 2002 interview that Money worked hard to persuade his colleagues to perform adult sex-reassignment surgery, in the face of considerable resistance. McHugh, who is adamantly opposed to sex-reassignment surgery, says that Money was “a powerful and never-ending advocate for transgendering as a real disorder, as a real thing.” His success in promoting SRS at Hopkins in the face of considerable institutional resistance was based on his scientific reputation and the institutional power it conferred. “Dr. Money is a very gifted scientist and psychologist who did superb work, pioneering work here before he became all taken up with sex,” says McHugh. “He did wonderful work on, for example, language disorders and reading disabilities and the psychological states of these individuals that had a variety of chromosomal abnormalities and the like. He did pioneering work in those areas.” As a result, says McHugh, his colleagues at Johns Hopkins “admired him” and were willing to follow him into the turbulent waters of adult sex reassignment.
McHugh, who is both scientifically and socially conservative, an avowed foe of psychiatric “fads” such as multiple personality disorder and repressed memory syndrome, calls Money “a victim of the sixties” whose views on the plasticity of gender were as much based in his politics as his science. “It was a very left-wing kind of view that we are fundamentally produced by our environment, almost Lysenkoist,” McHugh says. He characterizes Money’s decision to extrapolate the data and theories on gender fluidity that he had formulated working with intersexual people to all people as “a big mistake. It was a mistake driven in part, as I said before, by politics and being avant-garde at the time.” Money’s ideas were readily accepted by the public and fellow researchers for the same reasons, McHugh believes, because they meshed with the gestalt of the times, which encouraged a questioning of orthodoxies. “His science brought him so far, was bringing him so far, and then, like so many other people, the theme of Overthrow the patriarchy, make change, it’s the authority structures that are standing in our way’—I think that John bought that, hook, line, and sinker, and as a result, like so many others, came to suffer from it.”
The press release announcing the opening of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic came a year after the actual inauguration of the clinic, when news about the clinic’s work had begun to leak out. Money says in Gendermaps that though the clinic had been “informally known as the sex change clinic,” at “my instigation it had been formally named the Gender Identity Clinic, a name that should have broadened its scope beyond transexualism [sic] to the manifold issues of gender identity. The narrower meaning, however, would win the day. Gender identity disorder became inseparably linked with transexualism [sic].” The clinic was conceived as a research project, “a definitive study” of transsexualism. The press release quotes Dr. John Hoopes, chairman of the clinic’s staff, saying, “This program, including the surgery, is investigational. The transexual [sie] has never previously been given adequate medical attention. The most important result of our efforts will be to determine precisely what constitutes a transexual [sie] and what makes him that way. Medicine needs a sound means of alleviating the problems of gender identification and of fostering public understanding of these unfortunate individuals. It is too early in the program to be either optimistic or pessimistic. We are still in the process of collecting accurate observations on the results of treatment.” Hoopes also stated that the Erickson Educational Foundation “is the sole source of research support” for the clinic.
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