The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [82]
Many people have questioned why John Money hasn’t admitted that he was wrong about the treatment he advocated for David Reimer— and more generally wrong in his view that the sex of assignment and rearing is the most significant variable in the development of gender identity. Milton Diamond believes that Money would “have gotten more credit, not less credit” by admitting his mistake. “It takes a lot to admit that you are wrong,” he says, but ultimately “he would have gotten more credit for it.” However, reluctance to report negative results, data that conflict with a pet theory, as Ben Barres of Stanford points out, is not confined to John Money: “Well, now we’re talking about the psychopathology of science … and that’s not something that’s unique to him.”
Today, the pendulum in gender research is slowly swinging back to biology. Hormones acting under the influence of genes are now thought to be the primary architects of gender identity, and the hypothesis proposed and vehemently defended by John Money—that gender is a mostly social construct—has been superseded by the biological school represented by Milton Diamond. However, the exact mechanisms by which a core gender identity (or sexual orientation) is developed remain unclear. Studies that seem to point to structural anomalies in the brains of gay men (like the studies carried out by Simon LeVay) or transsexuals (like those of Dick Swaab and other researchers) have produced tantalizing findings, but no definitive answers. Most of these brain studies have not been replicated. “People who look for things in the brain right now are shooting buckshot,” says Milton Diamond. “They don’t know where they are going to find the target and they look in a hundred places and they find one or two that are different and they say, ‘This must be it!’” The truth is, Diamond says, “we don’t know where to look. It might be in the biochemistry. It might be somewhere else.” Diamond thinks that the seat of gender identity will eventually be located in the brain, “but it doesn’t have to be something that’s morphologically obvious,” he says. “We’d like to see a little penis or a little vagina, so that we could say, ‘That’s it!’ But I don’t think we’re gonna see that. What they’re talking about now is bigger versus smaller, more cells versus fewer. Okay, so we may have to settle for that.”
Of course, the very idea that the brain is sexed, that there are differences between male and female brains, makes some people suspicious. One doesn’t need to be a radical feminist to fear the social implications of such a theory, the way that it could be used to justify regressive views about the “lesser” spatial and mathematical capabilities of women, and the “natural” violence of men. That may be one reason why John Money’s theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth attracted so many people in the first place, because it seemed to offer a release from the limitations of biology and social norms. The work of John Money struck a chord with those who came of age in the sixties and seventies because, like the research of Magnus Hirschfeld half a century earlier, it provided scientific support for sweeping social changes then underway. “Like it or not, we are living in a sexual revolution and it is changing our lives,” Money writes in Sexual Signatures, published in 1975. “We dare not depend on old answers, nor can we afford to cut off the pioneers who are exploring for new ways to meet these un-precendented challenges.” The old order, which had imprisoned so many behind stone walls of racism, sexism, and homophobia, was crumbling. As they surged out into the streets to proclaim their liberation, their anger was exceeded only by their optimism. The revolution had arrived—and it would be televised, penetrating every home in America. The sexual anarchy of the fin de siecle