As Nature Made Him (4 page)

It was his confidence that was most striking. Even under the pressure of the staring television cameras and live studio audience, Dr. Money’s words, tinged with a highly cultured, British-sounding accent, issued forth with uncanny fluency. He did not stumble over a single syllable, even when the show’s interviewer—a bulldoglike young man named Alvin Davis—asked pointedly why psychiatrists were “so opposed” to the practice that Dr. Money was promoting.

“Well,” Money said, “I suppose it’s a self-evident fact that there are many people who feel that this is not the psychiatric way to treat these patients, since the usual definition of psychiatry is in terms of psychotherapy and the talking treatment. However, there are a small group of people who, like myself, believe that it’s thoroughly justified in an attempt to constantly increase our ability to help human beings and to see exactly what the outcome is when, let’s say, twenty or thirty people can be followed for five to ten years after having received this kind of treatment.”

“But isn’t it a fact,” Davis said, “that a homosexual will come to you and say, ‘I want to be castrated.’ And then
you
will make the judgment—or you and a board, a panel at Johns Hopkins will make the judgment—about whether to castrate that person?”

“Yes,” Dr. Money said, mildly. “If you want to state it that way, it’s true.”

“Not only to castrate that person,” Davis continued, his voice taking on the rising tone of a prosecutor, “but to inject hormones into the person and virtually change the person—
not
into a female, but into a male with female parts. Aren’t you arrogating to yourselves certain decisions that not only psychiatrists don’t want to have, but perhaps God doesn’t want to have?”

“Well,” Dr. Money said, the flicker of a smile underlining the martini-dry sarcasm in his tone, “would
you
like to argue on God’s side?”

“No,” Davis said. “I would like to know whether
you
believe God doesn’t belong in this.”

“Well,” Money replied, returning to his tone of unflappable calm, a tone ever so slightly shaded by patient condescension, “I’m not sure that’s really a particularly relevant question—although I’m aware that many would. May I,” he continued, “give you the answer of the group of ministers in Baltimore who were interrogated by the press at the time of the announcement in the papers there? The thirteen of them agreed that in terms of the magnitude of the problem—especially in terms of its magnitude in the lives of the people concerned—that this was ethically justifiable as an attempt to help them. There was one person who withheld an answer until a later date, and that was a representative of the Roman church.”

“Why isn’t the work being done here in Canada?” Davis demanded to know. And he repeated his earlier query: “And why are so many psychiatrists here so opposed to it?”

“Oh,” Money said, almost languidly, “I would think for the same reason that there tends to be a traditionalism in most places. I don’t need to tell you that in many branches of medicine, science—or even housekeeping or farming—there is a tendency to hang on to the past, to cling to the past.”

“And
you’re
the pioneer?” Davis asked.

“Well,” Dr. Money said, “perhaps in a small way.”

At this point the camera cut from Dr. Money and his questioner to a blond woman who walked out onto the set. Dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and a matching close-fitting jacket, she took a seat in the chair across from the two men. A close-up shot revealed that her round, pretty face was expertly made up, in the style of the mid-1960s, with heavy eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, her mouth thickly painted with lipstick.

“This is Mrs. Diane Baransky,” the show’s announcer said. “Until four years ago, her name was Richard.”

Ron and Janet gaped at the TV screen. It was their first glimpse, ever, of a transexual. It was one thing to hear Dr. Money talk about sex change in the abstract; it was another to see it with your own eyes. Ron and Janet could hardly believe it. If they hadn’t been told that Mrs. Baransky was born a man, they would never have guessed it. Even
knowing
it, it was hard to believe. She looked like an attractive, even sexy woman. The way she moved, walked, sat—even her voice, despite an ever so slight huskiness, had the timbre of a woman’s as she said hello to her host and fellow guest.

After a few preliminary questions from Davis, Dr. Money spoke up, deftly seizing the reins of the interview.

“Diane,” he said, “I think people would be extremely interested if you could give us a short sketch of the difference that it makes to have had this procedure—to compare the old life with the new.”

“Well, there is a tremendous difference,” Mrs. Baransky said. “It’s a way of finding yourself. You actually fit into society, you’re more accepted in a more normal society.” She explained that the discrepancy between her anatomic self as a male and her inward sense of herself as a female had been a trial to her growing up. “As a teenager—or being young—when you’re different from anybody else, it’s very hard.” Becoming a woman, Mrs. Baransky explained, had solved all her problems of being teased and “singled out.” Until her sex change, she had felt completely alone. Now she was accepted as a woman and had recently married her husband, a fellow hairdresser. “I was different,” she said. “I was never complete. I was neither a man nor a woman.”

“And now you feel complete as a woman?” Davis asked.

Her response was unequivocal: “Oh, yes, definitely. Yes. Completely—body and mind.”

The audience was then invited to ask questions. It was near the end of the segment that a young man asked the question that had been forming in Janet’s mind. He asked about “the other group of sex patients” whom Dr. Money treated—newborn babies with what Dr. Money had earlier called “unfinished genitals,” babies whose private parts were neither male nor female at birth. In replying to this question, Dr. Money explained that he and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins could, through surgery and hormone treatments, make such children into whichever sex seemed best, and that the child could be raised happily in that sex. “The psychological sex in these circumstances,” as Dr. Money put it, “does not always agree with the genetic sex nor with whether the sex glands are male or female.”

Despite the big words and the rapidity with which Dr. Money spoke them, Janet and Ron caught their meaning. Dr. Money was saying that the sex a baby was born with didn’t matter; you could convert a baby from one sex to the other.

Janet turned to Ron. “I think I should write to this Dr. Money,” she said.

Ron agreed. When the segment ended a few minutes later, Janet wrote a letter to Dr. Money describing what had happened to Bruce. Dr. Money’s reply was prompt. He expressed great optimism about what could be done for the Reimers’ baby at Johns Hopkins and urged them to bring the child to Baltimore without delay.

After so many months of grim predictions, bleak prognoses, and hopelessness, Dr. Money’s words, Janet says, felt like a balm. “Someone,” she says, “was finally
listening
.”

2

D
R.
M
ONEY WAS
indeed listening. In a sense, Janet’s cry for help was one that he might have been waiting for his entire professional life.

At the time the Reimer family’s plight became known to him, John Money was already one of the most respected, if controversial, sex researchers in the world. Born in 1921 in New Zealand, he had come to America at the age of twenty-five, received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, then joined Johns Hopkins, where his rise as a researcher and clinician specializing in sexuality was meteoric. Fifteen years after joining Johns Hopkins, he was already widely credited as the man who coined the term
gender identity
to describe a person’s inner sense of himself or herself as male or female. He was also known as the world’s undisputed authority on the psychological ramifications of ambiguous genitalia and was making headlines around the world for his establishment of the pioneering Johns Hopkins clinic for transexual surgeries.

As his unflappable appearance on
This Hour Has Seven Days
would suggest, Money was also a formidable promoter of his ideas. “He’s a terribly good speaker, very organized, and very persuasive in his recital of the facts regarding a case,” says Dr. John Hampson, a child psychiatrist who, with his wife, Joan, coauthored a number of Money’s groundbreaking papers on sexual development in the mid-1950s. “I think a lot of people were envious. He’s kind of a charismatic person, and some people dislike him.”

Money’s often overweening confidence actually came to him at some cost. His childhood and youth in rural New Zealand had been beset by anxieties, personal tragedies, and early failure. The son of an Australian father and an English mother who belonged to the Brethren church, he was a thin, delicate child raised in an atmosphere of strict religious observance—or what he would later derisively call “tightly sealed, evangelical religious dogma.” His sense of intellectual superiority developed early. On his first day of school at age five, he was set upon by bullies and took refuge with a female cousin in the girls’ play-shed, where boys would not be caught dead. “Having not measured up as a fighter,” Money would later write, “I was set on the pathway of outwitting other kids by being an intellectual achiever. That was easier for me than for most of them.”

Money’s childhood difficulties were compounded by his vexed relationship with his father. Six decades later he would write with barely controlled venom of this father, portraying him as a brutal man who heartlessly shot and killed the birds that infested his fruit garden, and administered to his four-year-old son an “abusive interrogation and whipping” over a broken window. This incident, Money wrote, helped establish his lifelong rejection of “the brutality of manhood.”

Money was eight years old when his father died of a chronic kidney ailment. “My father died without my being able to forget or forgive his unfair cruelty,” Money wrote. Not told of his father’s death until three days after seeing him carried off to the hospital, Money’s shock was compounded by the experience of being informed by an uncle that now
he
would have to be the man of the household. “That’s rather heavy duty for an eight-year-old,” Money wrote. “It had a great impact on me.” As an adult, Money would forever avoid the role of “man of the household.” After one brief marriage ended in divorce in the early 1950s, he never remarried, and has never had children.

After his father’s death, Money was raised in an exclusively feminine atmosphere by his mother and spinster aunts, whose anti-male diatribes also had a lasting effect on him. “I suffered from the guilt of being male,” he wrote. “I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality”—that is, the penis and testicles. In light of Money’s future fame in both adult and infant sex change, his next comment has an unsettling tenor: “I wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded at birth.”

A solitary adolescent with a passion for astronomy and archaeology, Money also harbored youthful ambitions as a musician, a goal doomed to disappointment once Money realized that he would never be more than a skilled amateur. As an undergraduate at Victoria University, in the New Zealand capital city of Wellington, Money discovered a new passion into which he rechanneled his thwarted creativity: the science of psychology. Like so many students drawn to the study of the mind and emotions, Money’s interest in the discipline was in large part as a means for solving certain troubling questions about himself. His first serious work in psychology, his master’s thesis, concerned “creativity in musicians,” in which, Money writes, “I began to investigate my relative lack of success in comparison with that of other music students.”

His decision soon after that to narrow his studies to the psychology of sex had a similarly personal basis. Having departed sharply from his parents’ faith, Money grew increasingly to react against what he saw as the repressive religious strictures of his upbringing. The academic study of sexuality, which removed even the most outlandish sexual practices from moral considerations into the “pure” realm of scientific inquiry, was for Money an emancipation. From his twenties on, he would be a fierce proselytizer for sexual curiosity and exploration. By the mid-1970s, with the sexual revolution in full rampage, Money would step out publicly as a champion of open marriage, nudism, and other more rarefied manifestations of the culture’s sexual unbuttoning. “There is plenty of evidence that bisexual group sex can be as personally satisfying as a paired partnership, provided each partner is ‘tuned in’ on the same wavelength,” he wrote in his book
Sexual Signatures
. Elsewhere, he has described his own private life as casual and eclectic—“a give-and-take of sexual visitations and friendly companionships with compatible partners, some women, some men.”

Reveling in his role as “agent provocateur of the sexual revolution” (as the
New York Times
dubbed him in 1975), Money rarely missed an opportunity to spread his gospel of sexual emancipation: extolling the heightened pleasures of sex under a black light to a student after a speaking engagement at the University of Nebraska; appearing in court as an expert witness to defend the 1973 pornographic film
Deep Throat
, which he praised as a “cleansing” movie that would help keep marriages together; penning op-ed pieces for the
New York Times
in which he called for a “new ethic of recreational sex.” A patient treated by Money in the 1970s for a rare endocrine disorder recalls the psychologist once casually asking him if he’d ever experienced a “golden shower.” A sexually inexperienced youth at the time, the patient did not know what Money was talking about. “Getting pissed on,” Money airily announced with the twinkling, slightly insinuating smile with which he liked to deliver such deliberately provocative comments.

Convinced that embargoes on certain words promoted prudery, Money inserted the words
fuck
,
cock
, and
cunt
into his regular conversation with colleagues and patients. Dr. Fred Berlin, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a colleague who considers Money one of his most important mentors, defends Money’s penchant for sexual outspokenness. “Because he thinks it’s important to desensitize people in discussing sexual issues,” Berlin says, “he will sometimes use four-letter words that others might find offensive. Perhaps he could be a little more willing to compromise on that, but John is an opinionated person who isn’t looking necessarily to do things differently than the way he’s concluded is best.”