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By Root 2005 0

triggers for sexual differentiation at key stages of development. In Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, he even goes so far as to suggest that “it is possible that some as yet unknown fetal hormonal factor influences the fetal nervous system in such a way as to increase the chances that transsexualism will evolve, perhaps in association with or in response to some other developmental event, in the course of psychosexual differentiation.” Milton Diamond thinks that this ambiguity in Money’s thinking is due to the fact that Money recognized the influence of biology even as he promoted the primacy of socialization. “He waffled,” Diamond told me in 2003. “He paid lip service to biology, but when push comes to shove he made his money, his reputation, on the idea that sex is socially constructed. You put them in the pink room and they are a girl; put them in the blue room and they are a boy. And I think that he didn’t want to lose his reputation.”

The theory of psychosexual neutrality offered liberation to some. Feminists in particular were quick to seize on the promise that biology was not destiny, and that females were socialized to be “women.” “Especially when they homed in on John/Joan,” says Diamond. “ ‘Oh, he took a little boy and made him a girl. Isn’t that nice?’” he says sarcastically. “So we feminists know that gender differences are horseshit.” Money’s theory of gender plasticity not only offered scientific support for Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion that “women are made, not born,” but it also helped drive the second wave of feminism by convincing women that their supposed “differences” from men were, in fact, a social artifact, not a biological reality—a consequence of gender oppression, not a cause. In January 1973, Time magazine reported that Money’s research, and the John/Joan case in particular, “casts doubt on the theory that major sexual differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.” The magazine also noted that Money’s research “provides strong support” for “women’s liberationists.” This is ironic, considering that Money himself grew to rue the “neutering of gender,” “man-bashing,” and the “demonification of lust” of much feminist theory. “In postmodern social constructionist theory, which includes feminist theory, gender is socially constructed to be a neutered version of sex, and lust is socially constructed so as to be, in women, a spiritualized version of sex, and in men a demonized version,” he writes in Gendermaps.

By the time Gendermaps was published, in 1995, Money was aware that the Reimer experiment had failed, and was publicly reasserting the link between gender identity and biological sex that his earlier research had called into question. “We now know that he knew more than he admitted,” says Paul McHugh, “in relationship to this boy.” Though Money never went nearly so far as to admit that he had been wrong, his writing from this period places greater emphasis on biological determinants of gender identity and the interaction between “nature” and “nurture” than his previously published work. “I wrote to him telling him that the paper [about David Reimer] was coming out,” says Milton Diamond, “and he threatened to sue me. He said, ‘If you write that, I will sue you and I will sue the publishers.’ And Richard Green was the editor of the journal at the time!” Green, Money’s former student and coeditor on Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, published the paper that revealed that Money had perpetrated a fraud by concealing the fact that the “John/Joan” experiment was a failure.

David Reimer committed suicide in May 2004, at the age of thirty-eight; in news reports, his mother said that she had never forgiven John Money for the harm he had inflicted on their family. (David’s twin brother, Brian, had committed suicide in 2002.) After hearing of Reimer’s death, Milton Diamond told the Los Angeles Times, “I hope people learn from it that you don’t do something that dramatic to someone without their informed consent. You also have to deal with