The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [79]
McHugh is nonetheless willing to concede that researchers may someday find a biological explanation for at least some forms of gender variance. “If people are afflicted in fetal life by an abnormal hormonal thing, they can have all kinds of peculiar sexual attitudes when they come out,” he admits. But he is quick to distinguish between individuals who can prove that they were subject to “an abnormal hormonal thing” in prenatal life from those who, for whatever reason, choose to dress and live as members of a sex other than that dictated by their anatomy. And he remains adamantly opposed to any form of surgical intervention for the latter group. “This surgery is serious surgery and it’s a misuse of resources when I don’t think that the problem lies in the bodily structure.”
Despite the controversy surrounding sex-change surgery and his ongoing battle with adversaries within Johns Hopkins and without, John Money was continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for more than thirty-five years, from the start of his career to its ignominious end. In June 1997, Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmund-son published an article in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that cast doubt not only on Money’s theories but also on his credibility as a researcher. Sigmundson had for many years overseen the care of Money’s most famous patient, a twin boy named David Reimer, who had been raised as a girl after his penis was accidentally severed during a circumcision. Money had long used this case (identified as “John/Joan” in the Diamond article) as proof that the sex of assignment and rearing trumped all other variables in the formation of gender identity in normatively sexed, as well as intersexual, children. Despite her XY genotype and male genital and endocrine profile at birth, “Joan” was a normal little girl, Money asserted in scientific articles, books, lectures, and interviews, who “preferred dresses to pants, enjoyed wearing her hair ribbons, bracelets and frilly blouses, and loved being her Daddy’s little sweetheart.” Sigmundson, who had witnessed firsthand the acute misery suffered by the child and his family as the boy’s masculinity asserted itself in the face of repeated efforts to convince him that he was a girl, had been contacted by Diamond, who sought information about the child for many years.
As early as 1959, Diamond had challenged Money’s view that the sex of assignment and rearing was the key to the formation of gender identity. Working in the laboratory of William C. Young at the University of Kansas as a graduate student, Diamond had participated in animal experiments that showed the awesome power of hormones on developing fetuses. Female guinea pigs treated with massive doses of testosterone in utero were masculinized, not just in anatomy but in behavior. “There was lots of older literature that clued us in so that this [data] wasn’t coming out of the blue,” Diamond told me in a 2003 interview, referring to the “chickens, the famous chickens” hormonally manipulated by Berthold in 1849. “ut people weren’t applying it to humans. Those were birds. This was the work that showed it could happen to mammals. That you could take a mammal, treat it in utero for a limited period of time, don’t touch that animal until it’s an adult, and then lo and behold it acts like a male.” Subsequent experiments by the researcher Roger Gorski and colleagues showed the same effects in female rats. “With rats, the critical period for that sort of brain differentiation is postnatally,” Diamond says. “So Gorski and others were able to give it after birth—a single injection! And that’s so remarkable to me. You give one injection, a single day, and you forever influence that individual’s life.”
Over the next thirty years, Diamond’s