As Nature Made Him (29 page)

McHugh’s tenure at Johns Hopkins also coincided with a sudden dramatic erosion in Money’s once secure status as the institution’s resident sexual revolutionary. In 1983, Money was informed that his controversial evening course in human sexology was being summarily dropped. Three years later, when Money turned sixty-five, he was notified that he would not be allowed to keep his Johns Hopkins office space—a privilege conferred upon some other retirement-age professors—but must remove himself from the campus. He was relocated to a shabby medical arts building four blocks from the hospital and university, across from an empty lot where the local homeless and addicts congregate. There, Money installed himself in one of the building’s low-ceilinged basement offices. With a staff now reduced to a single graduate student, Money affixed to the cheap plywood door of his new space the sign he had removed from his former office door. It reads: J
OHNS
H
OPKINS
P
SYCHO-HORMONAL
R
ESEARCH
U
NIT
.

Even after his physical removal from the institution, Money’s problems with Johns Hopkins were not over. In the early 1990s one of his former research subjects raised a complaint against him and against Johns Hopkins. This patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, has asked me to refer to him as “Charlie Gordon”—a pseudonym that he did not choose randomly. It is the name of the protagonist in the 1960s Daniel Keyes novel
Flowers for Algernon
, which was later turned into the Cliff Robertson movie
Charly
. The fictional story of a retarded man who, as an experimental research subject, was turned into a genius, Charly bears striking parallels to the life of the man I have agreed to call Charlie Gordon.

Born in 1947, Gordon showed early signs of hypothyroidism, a congenital endocrine disorder whose symptoms include severely stunted growth and retarded intellectual development—syndromes then classified as the condition “cretinism.” At age two, Gordon was referred to Lawson Wilkins’s pediatric endocrine clinic at Johns Hopkins where he underwent experimental treatments of hormone replacement by ingesting cow thyroid glands in pill form. The treatment increased not only his physical stature, but also his intellectual powers. At age five he became a psychological research subject in the newly created Psychohormonal Research Unit, where John Money would, for the next twenty-five years, conduct adjunct studies on Gordon’s adaptation to his changing bodily and intellectual stature. In an article published in the Journal of Pediatrics in September 1978, Money singled out Gordon as having demonstrated the largest increase in intelligence of all the research subjects. According to Money, he had gone from an IQ of 84 at age five to an IQ of 127 in adulthood: a 43-point gain that had taken him from low average to superior range—what Money called “a remarkable upgrading.”

Over the course of their association, Gordon became one of Money’s favorite research subjects and agreed to Money’s request that he appear at medical school grand rounds, in which he was studied by scores of Johns Hopkins student doctors. At the same time, Gordon was making regular annual visits to the clinic for in-depth interviews with Money. Gordon found the encounters unsettling. “He was always saying ‘fuck,’ all the time,” Gordon recalls. “ ‘Fuck this,’ and ‘fuck that.’ As a kid I was raised in somewhat a religious background. When I’d do church things, he’d say, ‘Oh, what do you do that shit for?’ ”

Money also questioned Gordon closely about sex. Believing that Dr. Money’s interest in his erotic life was intended to help him cope with the difficulties associated with his condition, Gordon opened up without reserve, detailing the content of his sexual fantasies, describing his masturbation techniques, and recounting his experimental forays into ménage à trois and his childhood experiences of “playing doctor” with a neighborhood girl. Later, in his twenties, Gordon confessed to the insecurities that had gone along with his small stature, admitting that he had once sought relationships with girls many years his junior—some as young as fourteen. Only several years after he stopped treatment with Money did Gordon learn that Money’s interest in his sex life was not simply therapeutic in nature.

This realization was brought home to him with particular force on a day in December 1989 when he was browsing in a bookstore and happened upon a copy of Money’s latest volume,
Vandalized Lovemaps
. The book detailed Money’s theory of how people develop sexual fetishes, perversions, and disorders, and it featured a number of case histories. The first one, entitled “Pedophilia in a Male with a History of Hypothyroidism,” caught Gordon’s eye. He began to scan the opening sentences and realized with amazement and horror that the case history being detailed was his own. He saw his sexual life laid out with extensive verbatim quotations culled from his taped interviews with Money and saw himself diagnosed as a pedophile on the evidence of his interest in teenage girls. More shocking still, says Gordon, was information published about his parents, which included a statement by Gordon’s father, who had allegedly told Money that Gordon’s mother had had an incestuous affair with her brother. Though Gordon and his family were not mentioned by name, he felt that the details of the case would be unmistakable to anyone who knew him or his family. Stricken, Gordon phoned Money, but he could not reach him. “He wouldn’t return my calls,” Gordon says. “His associate said, ‘He’s busy.’ ”

In the spring of 1990, Gordon brought a formal complaint against Money and Johns Hopkins through the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office for Protection from Research Risks—a division of the National Institutes of Health. Gordon learned that scientists operating under federal research grants must adhere to stringent rules, which include gaining informed, signed consent from patients and research subjects about whom a researcher wishes to publish. Money had never secured consent from Gordon for the publication of the deeply private material in
Vandalized Lovemaps
. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that “given the nature of [the] information [disclosed by Money], the complainant could be identifiable by persons acquainted with [him].” That fall, DHHS cited the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for “serious noncompliance” with federal regulations for the protection of human research subjects. Calling for “strong corrective action,” DHHS required that the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department “republish departmental guidelines for safeguarding the identity of patients” and allow patients who did provide informed consent to review manuscripts before publication, and it demanded that Gordon receive an apology from Money in person and in the presence of his department chairperson, in this case Money’s nemesis, Dr. Paul McHugh. Gordon says that this apology was never given, but he felt vindicated by the other sanctions. In a statement that Gordon prepared for an October 1997 meeting of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission on human research subjects, he outlined his unhappy history with Dr. John Money and drew a parallel between his experiences as a research subject and those of the famous “John/Joan” whose story had broken in the press just eight months earlier.

Despite this string of professional reversals, embarrassments, and punishments, Money remained defiant, combative, and uncowed. Indeed the setbacks seemed only to fuel his contentious spirit. Increasingly his published work appeared to be as much an opportunity for Money to settle scores and air grievances as it was to elucidate the subject of human sexuality. His preface to the 1987 book
Gay, Straight and In Between
, a volume ostensibly about the origins of sexual orientation, included an unusual digression into his then-recent ouster from Johns Hopkins. “In the spring of 1986,” he wrote, “I was delivered an edict: the space allotted to the Psychohormonal Research Unit . . . would be reallocated. The new space would be away from the hospital campus in a commercial building. No further explanation would be given. There would be no appeal. . . . My response was to write this book.”

In a 1991 autobiographical essay included in the anthology
The History of Clinical Psychology in Autobiography
, Money continually veered from the subject of his contributions to sexology to revisit his battles with the Johns Hopkins administration. Angrily evoking the termination of his human sexology course, Money wrote, “What the students at Johns Hopkins have lost has become the gain of students around the world. For them I now have more time to write.” In the same essay, Money excoriated the (unnamed) Paul McHugh as “the most contentiously destructive person I have ever known” and gloated that “[h]is clandestine efforts to get rid of me failed.” Money portrayed his current diminished status in the grim and dangerous basement setting of the Psychohormonal Research Unit with not untypical grandiloquence. “Working as an off-campus exile,” he wrote, “in a green subterranean jungle that flourishes under artificial light, I have a sense of kinship with dissidents like Galileo, who by order of the Vatican lived as an exile under house arrest.”

Inevitably, perhaps, in the same essay Money addressed those in the field of sexual development who had challenged his scientific theories over the years. Though he did not mention Milton Diamond by name, there was little doubt that the University of Hawaii professor was high on the list of those whom Money now castigated for “shamelessly” attacking him. Yet after lambasting these critics, Money segued into a tone of lofty Olympian remove, finally dismissing his academic disputants as beneath his notice. “My personal impression,” he wrote, “is that they are lacking in the special talent for original thinking, for formulating new concepts and hypotheses, and for making new discoveries.” Of his continued academic survival, Money wrote, “I have survived by putting into practice my own maxim and have not been lured into declaring a war that I had no possible chance of winning. Instead of mounting a direct counterattack, I would adopt a policy of disengagement and redirect my energies into an alternative channel of achievement.”

Money put into effect just such a strategy of disengagement six years later, in the spring of 1997, when his career and reputation suffered their greatest blow to date, from the worldwide media response to Diamond and Sigmundson’s paper on the twins case. To the many news organizations that requested comment from him about the now-infamous case, the psychologist refused to speak, citing confidentiality laws. I was among the raft of reporters who sought an interview with Money (for the article I was preparing for
Rolling Stone
). In a letter, I urged him to speak with me, and assured him that I would treat the story with scrupulous objectivity. He declined, but over the ensuing weeks and months, we exchanged a number of e-mails in which he eventually offered to work with me as a kind of silent collaborator on what he called “a piece of investigative journalism.” He offered to supply me with the requisite reprints from his published work and to vet my unpublished article to “check the accuracy of some data.”

This invitation was withdrawn in late August. Having returned from a second trip to Winnipeg, I notified Money for the first time that I had located and interviewed the patient and his family and had furthermore secured David’s promise of a signed confidentiality waiver freeing Money to speak to me about the case. Money’s tone changed abruptly. From would-be silent collaborator, he now grew ice-cold. “Thank you for your e-mail of August 24th, to which my reply is that my position has not changed and will not change,” he wrote. “I am not under any circumstances available for an interview regarding the Reimer case, and have no further comments to make. So please desist.”

I did desist for the next two months while I wrote my
Rolling Stone
story. In early November, with the article going to press, I phoned Money’s office to check some facts with his assistant, William Wang. I was surprised when Money got on the line. Although he refused to discuss David Reimer’s case directly, he claimed that the media’s reporting of it reflected nothing more than a conservative political bias. He was particularly incensed by the
New York Times
front-page story. “It’s part of the antifeminist movement,” he said. “They say masculinity and femininity are built into the genes so women should get back to the mattress and the kitchen.” As to his failure to report the outcome of the case, Money was unapologetic, repeating his claim that he had lost contact with the Reimers when they did not return to Johns Hopkins and that the opportunity to conduct a follow-up had been denied to him. Money sounded affronted when I suggested to him what various of his defenders had hinted to me: that the misreporting of the case was all the Reimers’ fault and that David’s mother, in particular, in her zeal to believe in the experiment’s success—and to please Money—had given him a “rosy picture.”

“I was
not
being given a rosy picture,” he said irritably, as if stung by the suggestion that he would have failed to factor in any such maternal bias in his assessment of the case’s progress. “The only thing that was of importance to me was that I didn’t get
any
picture at all after the family simply stopped coming to Johns Hopkins.”

He stood by his original reporting of the case and dismissed my suggestion that he “misperceived” what was going on with the child in their one-on-one sessions. Furthermore, he implied that David’s reversion to his biological sex might not have been entirely his own decision. “I have no idea,” Money said, “how much he was coached in what he wanted, since I haven’t seen the person.” He also hinted that Diamond and Sigmundson’s paper had a hidden agenda. “There is no reason I should have been excluded from the follow-up, was there?” he asked. “Someone had a knife in my back. But it’s not uncommon in science. The minute you stick your head up above the grass, there’s a gunman ready to shoot you.” Told of these comments, Diamond says that he had repeatedly invited Money to share or publish information on the twins over the previous fifteen years, always to no avail.