stalling it forever.” Instead, through an arrangement agreed upon by both researchers, Zuger’s paper and Money’s letter of rebuttal were published in their entirety in the September-October 1970 edition of the journal.
Whatever larger debate might have been stimulated by the cumulative weight of the critiques by the Canadians in 1959, Diamond in 1965 and 1968, the British team in 1969, and Zuger in 1970 was effectively quashed by the fanfare that attended the publication, in late 1972, of Money’s magnum opus, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl , and in particular its remarkable chapter on the twins case.
Dr. Mel Grumbach, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a world authority on the subject, says that Money’s twins case was decisive in the universal acceptance not only of the theory that human beings are psychosexually malleable at birth, but also of sex reassignment surgery as treatment of infants with ambiguous or injured genitalia. Once confined principally to Johns Hopkins, the procedure soon spread and today is performed in virtually every major country with the possible exception of China. While no annual tally of infant sex reassignments has ever been made, one physician conservatively estimates that three to five cases of babies with incongruous genitalia requiring sex change crop up annually in every major American city—giving the United States alone a total of at least one hundred such operations a year. Globally that figure could be as high as a thousand a year.
“Doctors were very influenced by the twin experience,” Grumbach explains. “John stood up at a conference and said, ‘I’ve got these two twins, and one of them is now a girl, and the other is a boy.’ They were saying they took this normal boy and changed him over to a girl. That’s powerful. That’s really powerful. I mean, what is your response to that? This case was used to reinforce the fact that you can really do anything . You can take a normal XY male and convert it into a female in the neonatal period, and it won’t make any difference.” Grumbach adds, “John Money is a major figure, and what he says gets handed down and accepted as gospel by some.”
But not all. Mickey Diamond had continued his research into how the sexual nervous system is organized before birth, and his studies had only strengthened his conviction that neither intersexual nor normal children were born psychosexually neutral—a conviction that would make him view with alarm the burgeoning practice of infant sex reassignment. And he was more convinced than ever that converting a normal infant from one sex to the other would be impossible. “But I didn’t have any evidence to disprove the twins case at the time,” Diamond says. “I didn’t have anything except a theoretical argument to challenge it.” He vowed to follow the case closely—a decision, he says, that was made from purely scientific motives. If, however, Diamond also by now felt a degree of personal involvement in his theoretical dispute with Money, that was perhaps understandable. For in the chapter directly following his account of the twins case in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl , Money had lashed out at Diamond and the others who had challenged his classic papers. Restating his own position, Money had acidly observed: “It would not have been necessary to belabor this point, except that some writers still don’t understand it,” and he went on to say that the work of Diamond and the others was “instrumental in wrecking the lives of unknown numbers of hermaphroditic youngsters.”
At the time of Man & Woman, Boy & Girl ’s publication, Money and Diamond had limited their debate solely to published papers and books. That was shortly to change.
In September 1973, some nine months after the book’s publication, John Money chaired the Third Annual International Symposium on Gender Identity, held at the Hotel Libertas in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. The
Whatever larger debate might have been stimulated by the cumulative weight of the critiques by the Canadians in 1959, Diamond in 1965 and 1968, the British team in 1969, and Zuger in 1970 was effectively quashed by the fanfare that attended the publication, in late 1972, of Money’s magnum opus, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl , and in particular its remarkable chapter on the twins case.
Dr. Mel Grumbach, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a world authority on the subject, says that Money’s twins case was decisive in the universal acceptance not only of the theory that human beings are psychosexually malleable at birth, but also of sex reassignment surgery as treatment of infants with ambiguous or injured genitalia. Once confined principally to Johns Hopkins, the procedure soon spread and today is performed in virtually every major country with the possible exception of China. While no annual tally of infant sex reassignments has ever been made, one physician conservatively estimates that three to five cases of babies with incongruous genitalia requiring sex change crop up annually in every major American city—giving the United States alone a total of at least one hundred such operations a year. Globally that figure could be as high as a thousand a year.
“Doctors were very influenced by the twin experience,” Grumbach explains. “John stood up at a conference and said, ‘I’ve got these two twins, and one of them is now a girl, and the other is a boy.’ They were saying they took this normal boy and changed him over to a girl. That’s powerful. That’s really powerful. I mean, what is your response to that? This case was used to reinforce the fact that you can really do anything . You can take a normal XY male and convert it into a female in the neonatal period, and it won’t make any difference.” Grumbach adds, “John Money is a major figure, and what he says gets handed down and accepted as gospel by some.”
But not all. Mickey Diamond had continued his research into how the sexual nervous system is organized before birth, and his studies had only strengthened his conviction that neither intersexual nor normal children were born psychosexually neutral—a conviction that would make him view with alarm the burgeoning practice of infant sex reassignment. And he was more convinced than ever that converting a normal infant from one sex to the other would be impossible. “But I didn’t have any evidence to disprove the twins case at the time,” Diamond says. “I didn’t have anything except a theoretical argument to challenge it.” He vowed to follow the case closely—a decision, he says, that was made from purely scientific motives. If, however, Diamond also by now felt a degree of personal involvement in his theoretical dispute with Money, that was perhaps understandable. For in the chapter directly following his account of the twins case in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl , Money had lashed out at Diamond and the others who had challenged his classic papers. Restating his own position, Money had acidly observed: “It would not have been necessary to belabor this point, except that some writers still don’t understand it,” and he went on to say that the work of Diamond and the others was “instrumental in wrecking the lives of unknown numbers of hermaphroditic youngsters.”
At the time of Man & Woman, Boy & Girl ’s publication, Money and Diamond had limited their debate solely to published papers and books. That was shortly to change.
In September 1973, some nine months after the book’s publication, John Money chaired the Third Annual International Symposium on Gender Identity, held at the Hotel Libertas in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. The
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