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animal experiments and work with human intersexual patients convinced him that human beings are not psychosexually neutral at birth, as Money had attempted to prove, but are psychosexually biased at birth, although social factors play an important role in how that biological predisposition is expressed. “I think that any behavior, whether it be sexual behavior, eating behavior or religious behavior, starts off with some sort of biological predisposition,” he says. “Some behaviors are more biologically oriented than others but they are always influenced by social and cultural factors.” Diamond, who prefers the terms “androphilic” and “gynecophilic” to “homosexual,” says that a gay person who lives in a society where homosexuality is brutally suppressed, for example, will probably not act on his feelings. “If you are a homosexual in Saudi Arabia,” he says, “you keep that to yourself. So that’s why I say that there is a biological predisposition, and society decides how it gets manifested.” In the case of David Reimer, the child (known as Brenda throughout his childhood) “was socially constrained from acting as the male that he wanted to be by his parents, Money, and others who said ‘oh no, you are a girl.’”

Despite his early and repeated championing of the view that humans are not psychosexual blank slates at birth, Diamond found it difficult to gain a hearing until he and Sigmundson published the article that revealed that David Reimer had threatened suicide at age fourteen if he were not allowed to live as a male. His parents then told him the truth about his history, and he immediately began living as a male. By the time Diamond located Reimer’s former psychiatrist, Keith Sigmundson, Reimer was married and the adoptive father of three children. His life story became the basis of a best-selling book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, a book that understandably is narrated from the point of view of David Reimer and his family. John Money is depicted as a monstrous figure, an unsavory amalgam of evil scientist and sexual pervert, a voyeur in a white lab coat. The undeniable harm that was done to David Reimer is foregrounded, and Money’s theories are presented as bizarre fantasies shorn of social and scientific context. Though it is rather unpopular these days to defend John Money, some researchers are willing to say that the Colapinto book doesn’t offer a balanced presentation of either the man or his research.

“The guy that wrote that book [Colapinto] is not a physican, and there are a lot of things in that book that are just wrong,” says neuro-scientist Ben Barres. “He never really understood Money’s core idea— that our brains have, in the first couple of years, a critical period, a plasticity, a period where they are very susceptible to environmental stimuli, a critical period when our brains are affected in a permanent way, and after that period that’s the way they are. Money said that in the first year or so, it’s a critical period for gender, and that there could be plasticity during that period, but then afterwards [gender] would be fixed. And Colapinto never related it that way. For him, it was all one or the other, all biological or all social. And I think that a lot of times he wasn’t really fair to Money or Money’s ideas. Money was a pioneer in many ways, and I think that it’s very easy in retrospect to kick him around.”

Neuroscientist Simon LeVay agrees that the Colapinto book and the Reimer case in general do not provide a completely accurate picture of Money’s theories. “The funny thing about Money is that in the context of the Colapinto book and that whole study with that kid, he sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool socialization theorist, but in other aspects of his work he was actually pioneering biological approaches to some of these things,” LeVay told me in a 2001 interview. It is true that Money advocated replacing the traditional nature/nurture dichotomy with a more complex and nuanced “nature/critical period/nurture” paradigm that recognized the importance of biological and environmental