From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

The idea that gender is disconnected from sex was popularized by psychologist John Money. Perverted minds produce perverted ideas. Unfortunately, Money’s legacy of destruction continues.

The idea that sex drives come out of nowhere and have nothing to do with biology should be dismissed out of hand, given the countless generations of procreated human and even animal species. Yet, in 1961, Money claimed that “erotic outlook and orientation is an autonomous psychological phenomenon independent of genes and hormones.”

Money later said that “like hermaphrodites, all the human race follow the same pattern, namely, of psychological undifferentiation at birth.”

In other words, no one is born heterosexual, and there are no biology-based differences in how men and women act. By 1973, even Money had to acknowledge a wide body of research that showed “fetal gonadal hormones . . . have an influence on neural pathways in the brain.” Still, he emphasized nurture over nature.

Money had a chance to test his theories after the birth of Winnipeg twin brothers Bruce and Ron Reimer, born in 1965. A botched circumcision left Bruce’s penis almost severed, seemingly damaged beyond function. Their parents saw Money on TV in 1967 and went to his gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University.

The clinic was the first of its kind and specialized in cross-sex surgeries. Money convinced the parents to have Bruce’s penis and testes removed, rename him Brenda, and raise him as a girl. Both twins visited Money annually, and Money used their example on a lecture circuit to insist that gender roles were instilled and not innate.

This was complete fiction, but the truth didn’t come out until it was exposed by psychologist H. Keith Sigmundson and biologist Milton Diamond in a medical journal in 1997.

The twins’ mother Janet recalled how Brenda hated dresses, sewing, and dolls. Instead, the child preferred to play soldier, dress in men’s clothes, tinker with tools and gadgets, and even stand up to pee. When Brenda told doctors “she” felt she wasn’t a girl, they discounted it.

It turns out Money made the twins inspect each other’s genitals. His therapy involved forcing the twins into a simulation of sexual positions and motions, something Money justified as healthy childhood sexual exploration. Money photographed this while as many as six colleagues looked in person. If either child resisted orders, the doctor responded with anger and verbal abuse.

This disturbing account is not entirely surprising. Money participated in nudism and group sex as part of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. He advocated open marriages and even compiled a pornographic presentation for students at Johns Hopkins Medical School called “Pornography in the Home.”

In his 1975 book Sexual Signatures, Money wrote, “[E]xplicit sexual pictures can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education…. [to] reinforce his or her own gender identity/role,” Money explained.

By the age of 13, Brenda so dreaded the annual visit to Money that she threatened suicide. Her parents sent her anyway. Consultants at the Baltimore clinic recruited male-to-female transsexuals to convince Reimer it was better to be female and have a vagina. This so disturbed Reimer, that she ran away from the hospital and hid on the roof of a nearby building.

In 1980, Reimer begged her father to know the truth and he finally admitted her birth as a male. The family moved and the child took the name David. Next, endocrinologists, psychologists, and surgeons did their best to reconstruct Reimer’s manliness. Money stopped talking about the twins on the lecture circuit but did not confess how woefully wrong he was.

In 1979, Dr. Paul McHugh, chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, investigated whether their sex reassignment surgeries helped the psycho-social problems of patients. The answer was so clearly “no” that the clinic stopped doing them.

In 2004, McHugh recalled that those operated on “had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before.” He added, “I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”

When the gender clinic was shut down in 1980, Money started another clinic at Johns Hopkins for gender “paraphilias,” a polite term for deviancies. That year, he told Time magazine, “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.”

In 1991, Money told Paidika, a pro-pedophilia journal in the Netherlands that a mutually acceptable sexual relationship between a ten-year-old boy and a man in his 30s was not “pathological in any way.” He said efforts to keep children from sexual activity, including sexual consent laws, was “really a diabolically clever ploy to establish anti-sexualism on a big scale.”

David Reimer killed himself in 2004, while Money died in 2006. Too bad the psychologist’s warped ideas didn’t die with him. In practice, they lead to futility and failure.

Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Do teens going through cross-gender hormones and surgeries know what they’re doing? A leak of internal conversations by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health shows even some doctors administering the procedures have serious doubts.

The U.S. advocacy organization Environmental Progress, led by president and founder Michael Shellenberger, made the leaks public.

“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” Shellenberger said in a press release.

A short list of excerpts highlighted many telling comments.

Child psychologist Dianne Berg, who co-authored the child chapter of the 8th edition of WPATH Standards of Care, said young girls don’t understand what it means to get male hormones.

“[It is] out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair.”

Canadian endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger acknowledged, “We’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”

Metzger said neither he nor his colleagues were surprised at a Dutch study that found some young post-transition adults regretted losing their fertility.

“It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ew, kids, babies, gross,” Metzger said.

“I think now that I follow a lot of kids into their mid-twenties, I’m like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, is it?’ They’re like, ‘No, I just found this wonderful partner, and now want kids.’ … It doesn’t surprise me.

“Most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about [fertility preservation] in a serious way.”

While youth keeps some from grasping the lifelong consequences of their actions, mental illness does the same for others. But that doesn’t always mean the doctors refuse to transition them.

One gender therapist administered cross-sex hormones to a patient with dissociative identity disorder. The therapist said asking the split personalities if they approved the treatment was ethical. Otherwise, a lawsuit could follow.

In one case, a nurse practitioner struggled with how to handle a patient with PTSD, major depressive disorder, observed dissociations, and schizoid typical traits who wanted to go on hormone therapy. Somehow the clear moral dilemma was lost on Dr. Dan Karasic, lead author of the mental health chapter of WPATH Standards of Care 8.

Karasic replied, “I’m missing why you are perplexed… The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones if they have persistent gender dysphoria, capacity to consent, and the benefits of starting hormones outweigh the risks…So why the internal struggle as to ‘the right thing to do?’”

Testosterone injections carry cancer risks for those born female. In one case, a doctor acknowledged a 16-year-old had two liver masses, one 11 cm by 11 cm, and another 7 cm by 7 cm, and “the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones.”

The friend and colleague of one doctor received close to ten years of male hormones, leading to hepatocarcinoma. “To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment… it was so advanced that he opted for palliative care and died a couple of months later,” the doctor said.

Some female-born transitioning patients had terrible pain during orgasms, while males on estrogen complained of erections “feeling like broken glass.”

The future may be even stranger, according to one doctor.

“I think we are going to see a wave of non-binary affirming requests for surgery that will include non-standard procedures. I have worked with clients who identify as non-binary, agender, and Eunuchs who have wanted atypical surgical procedures, many of which either don’t exist in nature or represent the first of their kind and therefore probably have few examples of best practices,” the doctor said.

Unsurprisingly, some people regret their medical transitions and want to change back. Some WPATH members want to discount this altogether. WPATH President Marci Bowers admitted, “[A]cknowledgment that de-transition exists even to a minor extent is considered off limits for many in our community.”

An unnamed researcher thought it was just a matter of perspective, saying, “What is problematic is the idea of detransitioning, as it frames being cisgender as the default and reinforces transness as a pathology. It makes more sense to frame gender as something that can shift over time, and to figure out ways to support people making the choices they want to make in the moment, with the understanding that feelings around decisions [may] change over time.”

Should our physical being be substantially altered and re-altered according to our feelings? Is transitioning a matter of mental health or self-expression? At least Alberta is putting the brakes on these dubious practices for minors. Other provinces should follow.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.