Long-term interviews with some fifty-five children (some of whom Zuger would follow for thirty years) showed that in virtually every case the boys demonstrated very early feminine play preferences, interests, and behavior. The father’s efforts to bond over masculine interests were rebuffed by the child, and the father—rejected—would emotionally withdraw; the mother would move in to fill the vacuum, thus creating the observed pattern of a distant father and overbearing mother. Zuger suspected a biological basis for homosexuality that contradicted the universally accepted nurturist view—a view, as Zuger later wrote, that was founded to a remarkable degree on Money and the Hampsons’ prize-winning 1950s papers on hermaphrodites. It was in an effort to learn how the Johns Hopkins team had arrived at those findings that Zuger submitted their work to close review.
Like the Canadian team more than a decade earlier, Zuger found serious problems with the Johns Hopkins team’s methodology, interpretation of the clinical data, and statistical analysis. Noting that the papers were “lacking in such data as the ages when individual cases were observed, their subsequent course, and the part substitution therapy played in maintaining their gender role,” Zuger also referred to new biological evidence, which had arisen in the intervening fifteen years, that cast further doubt on the Hopkins team’s conclusions. Unlike the Canadian team, however, Zuger actually reanalyzed the Johns Hopkins data using what he considered proper statistical methods and in light of the new biological findings. In doing so, he meticulously dismantled case after case cited by Money and the Hampsons and showed how children who, according to the team, had been raised in contradiction to their prevailing biological sex had in fact accepted a gender assignment in keeping with one or another of the factors that constitute a person’s biological makeup as male or female: the chromosomes, the gonads, or the hormones. Summing up, Zuger wrote that of the sixty-five instances given as evidence for the dominance of rearing over biology, only four cases could be said to have escaped challenge—and even those were questionable. “The four cases,” Zuger wrote, “might be explained on the basis of the ‘flexibility’ which Diamond attributes to human sexuality, or perhaps even by specific biologic factors which more detailed studies might have brought to light.”
Slated for publication in a 1970 issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine , a prepublication copy of Zuger’s paper was shown by the journal’s editors to Money, who fired off a blistering response.
“It is difficult for the seeing to give art instruction to the blind,” Money began, before proceeding to accuse Zuger of “intentionally biased sampling” and lambasting his work as “argumentative,” and “very conjectural.” Declining to address any of the specific scientific, methodological, and statistical unorthodoxies Zuger had highlighted, Money instead issued a threat to the journal editors: “I am sure you have ascertained, by now, the strength of my feeling about Dr. Zuger’s manuscript. I do not want to take the easy way out and recommend simply that you do not publish it, because I know it would be equally easy, these days, to journal-shop and get the manuscript into print in another journal. What I really want is to ask Dr. Zuger to subject his manuscript to a very radical, total revision.” A revision, in Money’s exhaustive spelling out, that would bring Zuger’s conclusions into agreement with Money’s.
It was a measure of Money’s academic power that the editors took his advice. They asked Zuger to revise his paper along the lines suggested by Money. Zuger declined, pointing out that Money had made no criticism “carrying any substance whatever” and adding, “Dr. Money’s notion of a total revision, way beyond the scope of the paper, amounts to, of course,
Like the Canadian team more than a decade earlier, Zuger found serious problems with the Johns Hopkins team’s methodology, interpretation of the clinical data, and statistical analysis. Noting that the papers were “lacking in such data as the ages when individual cases were observed, their subsequent course, and the part substitution therapy played in maintaining their gender role,” Zuger also referred to new biological evidence, which had arisen in the intervening fifteen years, that cast further doubt on the Hopkins team’s conclusions. Unlike the Canadian team, however, Zuger actually reanalyzed the Johns Hopkins data using what he considered proper statistical methods and in light of the new biological findings. In doing so, he meticulously dismantled case after case cited by Money and the Hampsons and showed how children who, according to the team, had been raised in contradiction to their prevailing biological sex had in fact accepted a gender assignment in keeping with one or another of the factors that constitute a person’s biological makeup as male or female: the chromosomes, the gonads, or the hormones. Summing up, Zuger wrote that of the sixty-five instances given as evidence for the dominance of rearing over biology, only four cases could be said to have escaped challenge—and even those were questionable. “The four cases,” Zuger wrote, “might be explained on the basis of the ‘flexibility’ which Diamond attributes to human sexuality, or perhaps even by specific biologic factors which more detailed studies might have brought to light.”
Slated for publication in a 1970 issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine , a prepublication copy of Zuger’s paper was shown by the journal’s editors to Money, who fired off a blistering response.
“It is difficult for the seeing to give art instruction to the blind,” Money began, before proceeding to accuse Zuger of “intentionally biased sampling” and lambasting his work as “argumentative,” and “very conjectural.” Declining to address any of the specific scientific, methodological, and statistical unorthodoxies Zuger had highlighted, Money instead issued a threat to the journal editors: “I am sure you have ascertained, by now, the strength of my feeling about Dr. Zuger’s manuscript. I do not want to take the easy way out and recommend simply that you do not publish it, because I know it would be equally easy, these days, to journal-shop and get the manuscript into print in another journal. What I really want is to ask Dr. Zuger to subject his manuscript to a very radical, total revision.” A revision, in Money’s exhaustive spelling out, that would bring Zuger’s conclusions into agreement with Money’s.
It was a measure of Money’s academic power that the editors took his advice. They asked Zuger to revise his paper along the lines suggested by Money. Zuger declined, pointing out that Money had made no criticism “carrying any substance whatever” and adding, “Dr. Money’s notion of a total revision, way beyond the scope of the paper, amounts to, of course,
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