Talk:John Money

Gender role and identity

Is "Gender role is the public manifestation of one's gender identity, the things that one says and that one does that gives people a basis for inferring whether one is male, female, or fits neither of those categories.

Since the sex-arbitrary characteristics are matters of convention, and people may choose to flaunt the conventions of their society, people may at times incorrectly infer the sex of an individual on the basis of clothing, occupation, hair length, and other such characteristics that ordinarily serve to reveal the sexual identity that each person's clothing conceals by covering the primary sexual characteristics. In other words, people may incorrectly infer a gender identity (and therefore a sex identity) on the basis of one's gender role. So gender roles can meet the very real social need of people to identify each other by sex while maintaining modesty, yet these roles can be problematical because they can convey a false indication of an individual's sex. They can also be problematical when the gender role favored by an individual (and the individual's own assessment of gender identity) are discordant with that individual's genitalia. " necessary? Some links to gender identity and gender may suffice here. Dysprosia 03:17, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Actually, other people use these terms in a variety of ways, sometimes very carelesssly. They have become "buzz words" I guess, and get thrown around with abandon for that reason. Also, I suspect, some people may have things that they really need to say about their own sexuality and may sieze on some of Money's concepts without necessarily using them the way he would have.

Since Money invented "gender identity" and "gender role" I thought that it be appropriate to peg down the "locus classicus" of these terms. Actually what I based myself on today is only one of many books in which he defines and uses these terms, so "locus classicus" may not be the right name for it. Regardless, I thought it was well worth documenting the origins of these terms. I spent an afternoon working through mentions in one book, and was planning on refining the definitions if I find better formulations in any of his other books.

I included the last paragraph, which you quote above, because it is a development that seems to follow inevitably from Money's own position, and yet it sets up a kind of counter-current that disturbs the original formulation. For instance, Money discusses gender role as something that is entirely the expression of the individual, but other people now discuss gender roles as socially defined expectations that people can comply with or oppose. I don't think that idea is necessarily wrong, but as far as I know Money hasn't looked at the situation from that point of view. (Still looking.)

I discovered this afternoon that I had let my own understanding of these terms be pulled off beam by the self-assured way that others were using them.

The first line quoted above is a close paraphrase of something that Money wrote. I guess I could have quoted such a short thing without breaking fair use requirements for quoting copyrighted works...

I read the book on the botched circumcision and botched attempts to fix the situation by giving the child a normal appearance. (At the time the poor kid's penis was burned off with a cauterizing electric needle I think there wasn't any possibility of surgically creating a penis for him. Too bad he was castrated, however.) I hope I have improved your word choice in one place and brought in a couple of things from my own memory of the case. For what it's worth, I think the book demonized Money a bit. He has always been careful to say that no one factor in gender identity formation determines everything. In the case in question it appears that the brain sex was very firmly masculinized before birth. There was a case recently where a young woman had her Olympic medal taken away from her because she was XY when she took the prescribed sex test. She had no inkling that she was not an XX. Maybe the socialization in a case like that only works when the social environment at home is absolutely placid. It appears that in the case of the boy there was some turmoil. Getting a vagina installed would, in itself, have upset the infant very much. But that can only be speculation. I don't think anybody seriously doubts the gender identity gender role idea and the idea that the apparent (external genital) sex of a person can be discordant with the gender identity. I had a brief correspondence with Milton Diamond on the subject, and he is a major figure in the field who cannot be regarded as a follower of Money.

I put your critique and mine in a section at the bottom.

Patrick0Moran 04:41, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Blast! I see at least one more thing that I need to change in what I wrote. Well, it's late where I am. Later for that change.

Patrick0Moran 04:49, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Web links to add to article

I found the following links on John Money, and am including them here because it's a handy place to "park" them before making any changes to this well-researched article. I would also Iike to do some "cosmetic editing" for style rather than content, but would rather discuss with the main author of this page, as that seems right and natural.

• book review This is a review of a book that was highly critical of Money.

This is an interesting review of an interesting book. Both the reviewer and the book author have similar points of view. The problem I see is that there would be no easy way to balance the criticism of Money with a more sympathetic view because the reviewer is taking a bank shot at Money and probably nobody wrote what was ostensibly a review of the book in order to defend Money. In order to give a balanced account to defend Money, somebody would have to go through tne entire body of his work and show how his own views have changed since that early period in his life. (He seems to me never to say that he was wrong in decades past, he just writes another book that reflects his emended understanding, and then a few years later he writes a third book. I believe that he would now characterize his early understanding of the process of gender identity formation as overly simple.The book and the review do not take account of that fact.) P0M 02:50, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'll agree with that. This Psychology Today excerpt is merely a book review, and we don't know the author's credentials. It is a one-sided account of a book that is highly critical of Money. --Otto 19:31, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• The Kinsey Institute collection of Money's papers But...you cannot access them. I thought it would be nice for anyone who is seriously interested to know where Money's papers are.

I am going to add this to the article today, it seems appropriate. --Otto 19:31, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• a sample of Money's writing from heretical.com
• another sample of Money's writing from heretical.com
• [1] this is why I want to wait until I can input them intelligently.

I superimposed one link on top of another, by accident. I am not sure about adding this; it seems rather tangental to me and has nothing to do with Money, and is rather circumspect (ahem). --Otto 19:44, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

After researching the nature of this website, this can hardly be construed as an NPOV source for Money's writing, and unwittingly causes more controversy on a controversial subject. I won't add these "heretical" links. --Otto 19:31, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• the last may be a violation of copyright laws unless permission is requested from Johns Hopkins Uni.

I can't get to this article. Please check the link. P0M 02:50, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Not sure: are you referring to this one? The story of John/Joan It's the Rolling Stone article by John Colapinto. I feel strongly in favor of this, because Colapinto was the only person to ever interview Reimer. --Otto 19:31, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Or the AMA article I found? I had to sign up for a one-day guest pass to access the article. While it's important because it was written by the two doctors from John Hopkins who originally criticized Money for hiding the Reimer information for so long, I was reluctant to leave a potential copyvio on any page in Wikipedia. I'll have to dig it up again if I can send it to you via email?? Just not sure how to proceed...still new at this! --Otto 19:31, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Would appreciate input on this last one. Otto 00:23, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

When I mentioned not being able to access something I think it was the URL that you later removed (?) saying that you had superimposed two. P0M

The Rolling Stones article looks pretty objective to me. (I just buzzed through it very quickly.) Colapinto wrote an entire book on the subject. P0M

I think two things are important to keep in mind: (1) There seems to have been only one such controversial decision in his life, at least only one with any great magnitude. (2) John Money seems to be something of a lightning rod. As such, he probably gets more active detractors than active supporters. But it is always important to be as objective as possible about people and what they have done in life. So the question in my mind would be how to avoid wiping out all his contributions by overloading on the negative side. General MacArthur made a couple of very controversial moves in his career, but we wouldn't want to deny his military genius on account of those negative factors. In his case there are plenty of people who like him well enough to give him praise for the things he did well. I don't think we are going to find an objective career evaluation of Money that we can cite.

It probably would be beyond the scope of a Wikipedia article (and would surely involve original research, which is forbidden to us) to try to describe and evaluate Money's entire career. I think the important thing to do is to explain the intellectual products that have made him important to American life throughout his career. (Most people don't seem to realize that the concepts of "gender identity" and "gender role" that are widely, and frequently very loosely, used today were created by him.) P0M 04:09, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Notes

• Love and Love Sickness, pages 8-12, 12, 15ff, 24, 32ff, 68, 86-87, 98, 118, 129-131, 144, 146, 151, 167, 191, 192, 215. [ISBN 0-8018-2318-8]
• Paidika vol. 2, no. 3, 1991

I placed your original reference notes here, on the talk page, if someone should wish to check the information in the article. It seems like a more appropriate place, as it conforms to other articles for format. --Otto 19:05, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand why you think references should go on the talk page. Nobody will find them easily here, and if this talk page gets much longer it will get archived and hardly anybody would ever see the references then, even the people curious enough to look at the discussions. P0M 04:20, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Confusing sentence

For Money, affectional pedophilia is about love and not sex.

For money? Skinnyweed 20:59, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

"Money" is capitalised indicating it is a proper noun, obviously referring to John Money. 172.153.16.33 23:47, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Reversion

I've just reverted some recent changes, which seemed NPOV and outside the bounds of a reasonable critique. In particular, the addition of Category:Scientific Misconduct was misplaced. While, with the benefit of hindsight, much of what Money did was probably wrong, it was cutting-edge science at the time. Einstein's relativity theory didn't make Pythagoras guilty of scientific misconduct. Perhaps Money clung to his beliefs for too long; and maybe his work did have tragic consequences... BUT ....--Limegreen 03:42, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

RIP. :( Good work, Jokestress. JayW 16:00, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Money's Bisexuality

I put in a sourced statement about his discreet bisexuality which was reverted. The funny thing is, Money himself would have likely objected to that since he saw nothing shameful about homosexuality, bisexuality and other sexual preferences. The source of the fact was one of Money's closest friends who wrote about his sex life in a book, which I sourced. So, why the revert? Is the idea of a sex researcher and modern authority on sex being bisexual threatning to some editors? Money did not keep his bisexuality a secret. He was, however, discreet because of his prominence in the field. Nobody is outing him since he was never in the closet Lisapollison 03:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

FYI, The book that discusses Money's influence on the sexual revolution and his own bisexualtiy (which is all I said in my edit) is WHAT WILD ECSTASY The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution By John Heidenry.Simon & Schuster (March 22, 2002)# ISBN: 0743241843. Available on Amazon. Another independent reference to his bisexuality can be found in a review of this book by the NY Times who certainly would not have printed mere conjecture. Here is the quote:

John Money of Johns Hopkins University, a bisexual who helped make the world bearable for transsexuals by exploring concepts like paraphilia and lovemaps, was himself unable to form the erotic bond he craved after the painful end of a passionate relationship. ROBERT CHRISTGAU Published: April 27, 1997The Pleasure Seekers

I'm sure I can find many more such references. how many do you need? Lisapollison 03:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

As per my edit summary [2], there is no need to assume this was a political deletion. This is a topic on which people have strong feelings (as is obvious from your response). Thus, the need for reliable sources is heightened. An author paraphrasing another's beliefs about a third person published in a popular magazine republished on a website that appears to be about a contentious issue is fairly indirect evidence. Both of your subsequent sources remove several links in that chain. --Limegreen 05:14, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

I could get you the exact quotes and page reference from WHAT WILD ECSTASY but I won't fight an edit war. For whatever reason, you are strongly opposed to hasving this well known fact of his bisexuality in the article. Perhaps you feel it is not a fact but a slur. If you were to read Money's books from 1970 forward, you'd see he didn't consider the words Bisexual or Homosexual to be slurs. Clearly it's not about sources because you could simply look it up in WHAT WILD ECSTASY yourself if you cared to. I only added it because how he lived his personal life had a strong effect on his academic stances. Money was also an important figure in the sexual revolution and I'd like to see that covered in the article. if you want to do that work yourself, feel free. I'm done with this. Lisapollison 15:48, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

There is no edit war (or difference of opinion). I challenged your source. You provided one that would generally be considered reliable. You are thus free to re-add the content. This is a total non-issue. Please assume good faith. --Limegreen 00:32, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Discredited

The article should point out, in the opening paragraph, that Money's ideas are discredited. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.175.22.82 (talk) 17:27, 17 December 2006 (UTC).

I don't think that's entirely fair; much of his work on the socialogical basis of gender is discredited, but not absolutely.

I presume you are talking mostly about the David Reimer case, but it is important to note that in several other cases, (i'm trying to find a link) where gender reassignment was relatively sucessful. In that case, the reassignment was done at 6 months instead of 18 months. The grown woman identified as a bisexual woman, however did express "tomboy" traits.

Lwollert 02:51, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Transsexual Work

I believe that John Money did quite a bit of work with transsexuals, in particular with regard to advocating GRS and coining the term Gender Role
Does anyone have any information on this? Lwollert 02:51, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

His work in those areas and in the more general areas of Gender Identity can be found in some of his books which were cited, most notably:

1. Money, John, and Patricia Tucker. Sexual Signatures on Being a Man or a Woman. (1975) Little Brown & Co: ISBN 0-316-57825-8
2. Money, John. Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity. New York: Irvington, 1986. ISBN 0-8264-0852-4
3. Money, John. Gendermaps: Social Constructionism, Feminism, and Sexosophical History. New York: Continuum, 1995. ISBN 0-8264-0852-4
4. Money, John. The Lovemap Guidebook: A Definitive Statement. Continuum, 1999. ISBN 0-8264-1203-3
5. Money, John, and Anke Ehrhardt. Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1996. Originally published: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. ISBN 1-56821-812-5

I could go on, but he was so prolific. It's really beyond the scope of this article to try and summarize the evolution of his thoughts and transgender and transexuals. If you are really interested, I could try and compile you a list of academic articles written by others that address his impact in these areas. After his death, there was a an expected amount of looking back over his career and writing about his influence on current theory. Leave me a note on my talk page if you would like that.Lisapollison 22:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

removed claims

I removed:

The program was closed in 1979, following the controversial case of David Reimer. Money reported that Reimer was successfully reassigned as female in infancy after a botched circumcision. Money covered up that the reassignment failed, by failing to report the fact that Reimer assumed a male gender role at age 15, which Reimer maintained until his suicide at age 38. Money's theories about the malleability of children's gender identity were discredited by the scientific community, and a media exposé of the Reimer case ensued in the early 2000s.

Wikipedia has been rightly criticized for our willingness to publish unsubstantiated slander. Do you have evidence that Money "covered up" knowledge of a failed outcome? The outcome of Reimer's case was not publicized until Colapinto's Rolling Stone article in 1997, not "2000s". Even Colapinto's account from Reimer describes the last clinical contact with Money when he was around 9 years old in the 1970s. Do you have the slightest shred of evidence that Money covered up anything after that? Do you have a citation that the "sex-reassignment unit" was closed in 1979? If so, it could have had nothing to do with Reimer because no one knew there were problems with the reassignment at that early date. The primary thesis of Money's theory of gender identity formation was that it was primarily a product of social learning, after he saw numerous intersex cases with the same conditions raised successfully as either boys or girls. Reimer's case was a spectacular failure of an attempt to override normal male hormones and normal male rearing up to the end of the second year. The major shift since this case and the bladder exstrophy reversals is that most authorities are now cautiously allowing for the possibility of hormonal or genetic influence on gender identity. alteripse 03:48, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Alteripse, fancy meeting you here! "The major shift since this case and the bladder exstrophy reversals is that most authorities are now cautiously allowing for the possibility of hormonal or genetic influence on gender identity." You're understating the case. More later. Jonathan Tweet 14:03, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

The disputed statements regarding the Reimer case seem to be regarding the impact of the media exposé, and whether, when, and why Money's theories regarding the malleability of children's gender identity lost credibility in the scientific community. I have moved those concerns here, pending further discussion.

However, the Reimer case is extremely recognizable and perhaps one of the primary things people know about Money, so I have included a mention of it in the lede. More later. Joie de Vivre 18:27, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

It certainly belongs in the intro, but look at the difference between what was there and a more accurate account. I would also like to strip down the redundant Reimer story later in the article, which is entirely recounted in its own David Reimer article. It would be nice if this article actually reflected why Money was considered such a hero for so many years by those who did not think variant sexualities should be stigmatized and shamed. His concepts shaped progressive understanding of sexuality for at least 2 generations, and now everyone takes them for granted without remembering where they came from. In other words, both David Reimer and John Money warrant full, detailed articles. This awkward combination does justice to neither. alteripse 20:09, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

(undent) I have reverted Alteripse's account, for two reasons: such a lengthy description of the Reimer case does not belong in the intro, and it was very poorly written. Alteripse's phrasing, such as "[Reimer] had decided in his teens to become a boy again" is crude and inaccurate in comparison to either the section on Reimer in this article, or the David Reimer article itself.

I do oppose a plan to remove the Reimer account from this article. The Reimer case represents an integral component of Money's career. It is certainly notable. It is critically important to include what happened in the Reimer case, including but not limited to the context of Money's career.

I understand the importance of making this a "full, detailed article", but I don't see how removing or truncating an account of the Reimer case accomplishes that. Joie de Vivre 21:32, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

And tell us what phrase you would use to describe his decision to reassign himself in adolescence? Tell me what you considered "crude and inaccurate". Also, it is quite unfriendly to accuse me of saying things I did not as justification for your reversion. I explicitly said both above and in the rewritten intro that the Reimer story was the most important aspect of popular understanding of Money's career. That does not mean we need a detailed account here that is less detailed and less accurate than the main article. I wrote most of the Reimer article. Well? alteripse 22:05, 11 April 2007 (UTC)