No, Dr Money did not invent gender

10 min readMay 2, 2022

Citing him against “gender identity” is a smear tactic, not a logical argument.

**John William Money** PhD (8 July 1921–7 July 2006)

TL;DR — Yes, Dr John Money did unethical and abusive things in the 1960s. No, that does not invalidate the idea of “gender identity” — a term he popularised but not a thing he “invented”. Trying to cite him in this way is a cheap smear tactic.

Content warning: transphobia, conversion therapy, surgery, sexual abuse, suicide

Introduction

Dr Money is often cited, by those hostile to trans people, as some kind of “gotcha” to attack the idea of gender identity (and thus trans rights). For example:

“Gender is a pseudoscientific category invented by a pedophile and a fraud who drove two of his patients to suicide” (tweet)
“John Money, the father of “gender identity”. He was a pedophile advocate and performed messed up experiments on children” (tweet)
“…gender is a made up word by John Money who was a disgusting person. We need to stop using the term gender and everything that goes with it…” (tweet)
“…he’s the man responsible for Gender. A paedophile, degenerate charlatan. Between him & Simone De Beauvoir, they are responsible for the chaos, that is gender identity” (tweet)
“Money was a pioneer in the gender reassignment world & has forever stained the world because of his sick, perverted, harmful views on gender identity” (tweet)
“‘Gender’ does not exist. John Money made it up in the 1970 as an excuse to groom feminine boys” (tweet)
“Gender should be abolished because John Money is a piece of shit and his Gender Theory was based on him sexually molesting young children” (tweet)

All of these claims, whilst expressing some valid disgust at Dr Money, are fundamentally wrong.

John Money (1921–2006) was a psychologist and sexologist, who researched sexual identity and biology of gender, producing over 2000 publications.

However, he is notorious for the case of David Reimer. In 1966, following a botched circumcision that left the baby Reimer without a penis, Money was contacted by the parents, and convinced them that sex reassignment surgery would be in Reimer’s best interest, but did not explain the novel experimental nature of this approach. Reimer received surgery and hormone treatment, had his name changed, and was raised as female. Money repeatedly published papers on the “success” of this experiment. Reimer’s parents also initially hid their doubts and told the clinic that it was successful, but this was clearly untrue. Reimer did not identify as a girl and his parents told him the truth at age 14. He detransitioned and underwent surgery to reverse the female body modifications. He later married and raised three stepchildren.

During appointments with David Reimer and his twin brother Brian, Money forced the two to rehearse sexual acts, and to inspect each others’ genitals, as part of his approach to “program” gender identity. Dr Money was also an apologist for what he regarded as specific forms of “affectional” paedophilia.

The failure of the experiment was not revealed until 1997, when Milton Diamond (Money’s long-term rival) and Keith Sigmundson documented how the twin had struggled against his imposed girlhood from the start. Diamond critiqued Money’s “blank slate” theory back in 1965, and Money may have seized upon the rare opportunity of the Reimer twin experiment to prove his ideas and defeat his rival.

Many years later, the twins separately took their own lives in their late 30s; Brian in 2002 after suffering from schizophrenia; David in 2004 after losing his twin brother, job, savings, and separating from his wife; their parents blamed Money’s approach.

It’s a tragic and grim history, but in relation to trans people and gender identity, what’s the actual logic here? It’s rarely actually spelled out, and I believe this is entirely deliberate, because there is no logic: it’s a guilt-by-association smear designed solely to provoke an emotional disgust response.

I suspect that most of the people using it know this, and use it entirely cynically. So this article isn’t really aimed at most of the people citing Money, because I don’t think they care about the truth in the first place. If you’re one of those people, you can probably stop reading now.

Still here? OK…

The “argument” in the wild

The archetypical example of the lazy “Eww, yuck!” non-argument is a cartoon often posted by anti-trans trolls. It’s by “Mr Pumpkin Face” (a creator of racist cartoons, banned from Twitter).

I won’t dignify the cartoon by reproducing it here, but you can find a copy in the web archive. It tries to dismiss the idea of reading about gender or trans history by smugly citing the Money/Reimer story above, showing a gagging disgusted face, and… that’s it.

(Here’s a more accurate cartoon by Sophie Labelle).

The closest attempt I’ve seen to a serious explanation is an article by Anna Slatz (a writer for various transphobic and/or alt-right outlets, who once ran an unedited opinion piece from the leader of a white supremacist group, and is on at least her third Twitter account after being banned repeatedly).

I’m being very generous here because, whilst she sets out the history in reasonable fashion, lulling us into a false sense of security, her actual conclusions are slipped in as pure assertion with no basis in the facts she’s set out. She makes a series of untestable, unevidenced claims about how Reimer felt or acted as a result of surgical and hormonal transition. Her other claims are confused and only begin to make any kind of internal sense once you realise she starts from the premise that “gender identity” is tied purely to “biological sex”, and that trans people don’t really exist. But that is the very hypothesis she is supposed to be evidencing!

She also fundamentally mixes up being trans, transitioning, and gender presentation, then repeats a familiar anti-trans misrepresentation of “the Swedish study” on criminality. The author of the study has repeatedly denounced this misinterpretation. Further debunking here from jane fae.

A similar article, with even less pretence at neutrality, accuracy or logic, appeared more recently in Spiked magazine.

Giving the argument about Money the benefit of the doubt (!), it takes the general form:

Money invented “gender” (which is held to be a regressive patriarchal social construct), and/or “gender identity”, back in the 1950s
He carried out the unethical and abusive acts described above
Therefore… current ideas of “gender identity” should be rejected along with trans rights, medical transition, etc (eh?)

Hopefully you can already see how flimsy that is, but we’ll pick it apart in more detail. There are many glaring, fundamental problems:

The map is not the territory

The most fundamental issue is that things still exist before academics write about them and give them names. The idea that Money “created” gender identity (or trans people) rather than merely observing and describing it is absurd. It’s like claiming that gay people only existed once someone coined the term “sexual orientation”, and could be un-existed by discrediting that term because some academic turned out to be abusive.

Oh wait, that actually happened… because it was Dr John Money who introduced the term “sexual orientation” in place of “sexual preference”, arguing that attraction is not a free choice. He also takes credit for replacing the term “perversion” with “paraphilia”. Yet nobody seems to be using his story to discredit those terms.

This argument is not merely confusing map and territory but thinking that the map creates the territory.

Gender and gender identity are not the same thing

Conflating these concepts is a standard, shameless misrepresentation by anti-trans activists. This enables them to attack “gender identity” by exploiting valid feminist opposition to “gender roles” or “gender stereotypes”.

Any idea that Money created “gender” (in the wider sense of stereotypical roles, oppression, patriarchy etc) is also obviously nonsense. Clearly those things already existed in the 1950s, and naming them doesn’t change reality (beyond improving our ability to discuss it).

He argued that sex is defined by multiple variables: assigned sex and sex of rearing, external genital morphology, internal reproductive structures, hormonal and secondary sex characteristics, gonadal sex, and chromosomal sex — then blended his evolving ideas of “gender roles” and “gender identity” into this. A detailed analysis of his work suggests a process more of discovery of an existing concept than invention — by a man who “tended to assume his own originality or at least innovation in every endeavour”.

Bad people don’t invalidate good ideas

Another pretty fundamental issue is that an individual scientist’s behaviour is not relevant to whether the ideas they came up with (of which there were many, in Money’s case) are correct or useful (or not).

It might cause us to scrutinise them harder, for sure, and discard anything that was actually falsified — but gender identity was recognised by other researchers of his time, and many more in the decades since, plus countless trans people before, during and after his work. It’s one of those concepts that, if it didn’t exist, you’d be forced to invent anyway — trans people report a mismatch between their sex assigned at birth and… something else. That “something else” needs a name, just as “sexual orientation” needs a name when discussing the phenomenon of different people being attracted to different subsets of humanity.

If you want to be consistent and logical about this, you’ll need to go through the textbooks and strike out every term and theory ever worked on by an alleged pervert or criminal, throughout history.

David Reimer was not trans

His reassignment was forced upon him as a form of “conversion therapy”, and tells us nothing about trans people who voluntarily transition. Money changed someone’s body so it conflicted with their gender identity, causing dysphoria, with tragic results. Trans people already have a body that conflicts with their gender identity, so they transition to escape that conflict and reduce dysphoria.

Money’s publications were used to legitimize sex reassignment for thousands of intersex infants; a practice condemned by intersex groups, yet still ongoing despite the failure of his experiment.

Illogically, many of the people opposing trans surgeries in law specifically put in loopholes to permit surgery on intersex children. Almost as if it’s about enforcing gender norms rather than trying to protect people from harm.

Money probably didn’t even invent “gender identity”

“Gender” as a term relating to human sex, or masculine/feminine persons or names dates back many hundreds of years, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

“His heyres of the masculine gender of his body lawfully begoten.” (1474)
“Hire name, þat was femynyn Of gendre, heo turned in to masculyn.” (c1390)

(Thanks to James Billingham and @Pinguis410 for these references).

Money (2008) says “The term “gender role” appeared in print first in 1955. The term “gender identity” was used in a press release, November 21, 1966, to announce the new clinic for transsexuals at The Johns Hopkins Hospital”

However, Robert Stoller described the concept of “gender identity” at the Stockholm Congress in 1963, published in 1964. This history is discussed by Byrne, citing Haig.

Earlier still, in 1958, the Gender Identity Research Project was established at the UCLA Medical Center, and Stoller documented the findings from this project in his 1968 book.

There’s no evidence the term was coined by Money (pun unintended), not that it really matters:

Other researchers credit the very public transition of Christine Jorgenson in 1952 as “launching the modern era of gender identity research”; Bentley discusses gender roles in a 1945 publication, “Sanity and Hazard in Childhood”; Harry Benjamin wrote in 1963 of “the emotional stress of a female psyche being outraged by a male body” and “a decided masculine psyche in a female body” (and vice versa) in 1958, and this phrasing “the mind or psyche of one sex and the body of the other” is also documented in Sexology magazine, Feb 1952; in Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1910 book, Die Transvestiten, one subject states that “I am physically a man, mentally a woman”; clearly the ideas stretch back further, if not the exact terms.

Aside: for those who sometime claim that transgender people were only “invented” in the 1990s, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the term “transgender” back to 1974, and the term “transsexual” back to 1907.

Many historical examples exist to show the existence of trans people and the evolution of terms and ideas — decades or centuries before Money’s work.

Misunderstanding “social construct”

Those citing Money sometimes make (apparently contradictory) claims about gender being (or not being) a social construct. But “socially constructed” doesn’t mean “not real”. Social constructs can absolutely have groundings in empirical observations and scientific theory.

Money was wrong about gender identity

Money disproved aspects of his own belief (that gender identity is malleable). So painting him as the key to modern ideas about gender identity, when we now believe he got it wrong and have moved on, makes little sense. His theories on this topic were not “based on” the abuse of the Reimers, as some claim — if anything, it’s the other way round.

Who’s the daddy?

It’s a bad-faith rhetorical tactic to place a problematic individual scientist or activist on a pedestal as the sole “father” or “mother” of a particular body of knowledge or movement, so as to then knock them off. It’s a combination of various logical fallacies — strawman, ad-hominem, and guilt-by-association — that ignores the work before, since, and from other people round the world, and tries to dismiss a whole area of thought by linking it to one bad person.

Over five decades of research since

The scientific method is self-correcting over time. Incorrect theories are overturned by new evidence. Money’s original misconception (that gender identity is malleable) was overturned by his own work, much as he resisted admitting this. He started using these gender-related terms in the mid-1960s. We’ve had over fifty years of research since, much of it from scientists who were sceptical of, or even outright hostile to, the idea of gender identity and trans identities. And yet these concepts stand firm.