trousers, Brenda in a sleeveless dress, white ankle socks, and white shoes. Money also showed a shot of Brenda alone, taken by Money himself. The child is seated awkwardly on the patterned upholstery of his office sofa. She wears a floral dress and running shoes, her bare left knee lifted self-protectively against the lens, her left hand deliberately obscuring her face. “In the last illustration,” Money told his audience, “you have a pretty persuasive example of feminine body talk.”
At his Nebraska lecture, Money also dropped a telling comment in summing up the case, when he told his listeners that Brenda’s successful sex change refuted charges that “Money studies only odd and atypical cases, not normal ones.” To those in the know, this was a not very veiled allusion to Money’s principal theoretical rival, Milton Diamond.
In fact, Diamond did not object to Money’s use of “odd and atypical cases” to study gender identity formation. He merely questioned the theoretical conclusions that Money drew from them. Since publishing his challenge to Money in 1965, Diamond had taken a teaching post at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, where he set to work studying intersexes himself. In his own interviews with intersexual patients, whom he met at the Louisville Children’s Hospital, Diamond found that an imposed sex assignment in early infancy was by no means the magical panacea Money’s writings suggested.
Instead, Diamond met several patients who contradicted the claim that rearing in a particular sex will always make a child accept that designation. There was the female baby exposed to excessive testosterone in utero, who was reared from birth as a girl but at age six stated to her mother that she was “a boy.” There was the genetic male born with a tiny penis and raised as a girl, who at age seventeen voluntarily came to Louisville Children’s Hospital requesting a change of sex to male—and was willing to endure more than twenty-five surgeries to construct an artificial penis, so vehemently was “she” determined to live in the sex of her genes and chromosomes. Even in those instances when an intersexual child did seem to accept a sex in contradiction to his or her biology, Diamond was not convinced that they had undergone a transformation in their core sexual identity. Such cases “should be considered a credit to human role flexibility and adaptability rather than an indelible feature of upbringing,” he warned in the book Perspectives in Reproduction and Sexual Behavior , published in 1968.
In the years following publication of that book, Diamond was heartened to see that his views were beginning to be noticed by a scattering of scientists, researchers, and clinicians. In England, a pair of physicians, Dewhurst and Gordon, who had been treating intersexual patients for a decade, published their book, The Intersexual Disorders , in which they specifically questioned Money’s assertion that rearing in a particular sex invariably led to a child’s identifying with that sex. They not only cited a nationwide survey of British physicians whose clinical experience with intersexes contradicted Money’s claim, but also referred to Diamond’s work with intersexes in Louisville. A year later, in 1970, a fellow American joined Diamond for the first time in challenging Money’s theory of human psychosexual differentiation.
Dr. Bernard Zuger was a Manhattan-based child psychiatrist whose work treating young male homosexuals and their families had caused him to question the prevailing view that sexual orientation results from rearing and environment. By exploring the family dynamics of his gay patients, Zuger discovered that in many cases the stereotypical pattern of an overbearing mother and a detached, hostile father did pertain; but by actually observing children in their family settings, Zuger came to believe that such a dynamic was not a cause of the child’s homosexuality, but an effect .
At his Nebraska lecture, Money also dropped a telling comment in summing up the case, when he told his listeners that Brenda’s successful sex change refuted charges that “Money studies only odd and atypical cases, not normal ones.” To those in the know, this was a not very veiled allusion to Money’s principal theoretical rival, Milton Diamond.
In fact, Diamond did not object to Money’s use of “odd and atypical cases” to study gender identity formation. He merely questioned the theoretical conclusions that Money drew from them. Since publishing his challenge to Money in 1965, Diamond had taken a teaching post at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, where he set to work studying intersexes himself. In his own interviews with intersexual patients, whom he met at the Louisville Children’s Hospital, Diamond found that an imposed sex assignment in early infancy was by no means the magical panacea Money’s writings suggested.
Instead, Diamond met several patients who contradicted the claim that rearing in a particular sex will always make a child accept that designation. There was the female baby exposed to excessive testosterone in utero, who was reared from birth as a girl but at age six stated to her mother that she was “a boy.” There was the genetic male born with a tiny penis and raised as a girl, who at age seventeen voluntarily came to Louisville Children’s Hospital requesting a change of sex to male—and was willing to endure more than twenty-five surgeries to construct an artificial penis, so vehemently was “she” determined to live in the sex of her genes and chromosomes. Even in those instances when an intersexual child did seem to accept a sex in contradiction to his or her biology, Diamond was not convinced that they had undergone a transformation in their core sexual identity. Such cases “should be considered a credit to human role flexibility and adaptability rather than an indelible feature of upbringing,” he warned in the book Perspectives in Reproduction and Sexual Behavior , published in 1968.
In the years following publication of that book, Diamond was heartened to see that his views were beginning to be noticed by a scattering of scientists, researchers, and clinicians. In England, a pair of physicians, Dewhurst and Gordon, who had been treating intersexual patients for a decade, published their book, The Intersexual Disorders , in which they specifically questioned Money’s assertion that rearing in a particular sex invariably led to a child’s identifying with that sex. They not only cited a nationwide survey of British physicians whose clinical experience with intersexes contradicted Money’s claim, but also referred to Diamond’s work with intersexes in Louisville. A year later, in 1970, a fellow American joined Diamond for the first time in challenging Money’s theory of human psychosexual differentiation.
Dr. Bernard Zuger was a Manhattan-based child psychiatrist whose work treating young male homosexuals and their families had caused him to question the prevailing view that sexual orientation results from rearing and environment. By exploring the family dynamics of his gay patients, Zuger discovered that in many cases the stereotypical pattern of an overbearing mother and a detached, hostile father did pertain; but by actually observing children in their family settings, Zuger came to believe that such a dynamic was not a cause of the child’s homosexuality, but an effect .
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