Frontier Centre for Public Policy
The Destructive Legacy of Gender Theory’s Popular Pioneer
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.
Agriculture
Time to End Supply Management
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
According to a 2021 report from the Montreal Economic Institute, Canadian families pay up to $600 more per year on dairy products alone due to supply management.
The New Democrats and the Liberals have pledged to tackle inflation, curb price gouging, and address child poverty. Leaders like Jagmeet Singh have railed against corporate greed while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has introduced programs claiming to feed your children.
But despite these announcements, food affordability remains a serious problem in Canada. If our political leaders are truly committed to making nutritious food accessible for all Canadians, they must confront the largely ignored factor: Canada’s supply management system.
Supply Management Hurts Families
Supply management, which governs the production and pricing of dairy, eggs, and poultry in Canada, was designed to stabilize farmers’ incomes. However, it now acts as an unnecessary burden on consumers, artificially inflating the cost of essential food items. Farmers are given strict quotas on how much they can produce, and sky-high tariffs—often more than 200%—are imposed on imports.
This creates a closed market that keeps prices far higher than in a free-market system. According to a 2021 report from the Montreal Economic Institute, Canadian families pay up to $600 more per year on dairy products alone due to supply management. This is no small sum to households already feeling the pinch.
To put it in perspective, a litre of milk in Canada costs between $1.50-$2.50, compared to USD 1.00 (around $1.35 CAD) in the United States, where such market controls don’t exist. The cost of other staples, such as eggs and chicken, follows the same pattern, with Canadians paying significantly more than their American counterparts.
These artificially high prices disproportionately affect families struggling. As inflation continues to drive up the cost of housing, fuel, and other essentials, paying extra for basic food becomes the tipping point between having three meals a day or skipping meals to cover rent or bills.
The Conservative Opportunity: Free Markets and Family Values
The Conservative Party has historically championed free markets and policies promoting family well-being, but they also support the food cartels.
In a genuinely free market, prices are determined by supply and demand, leading to lower consumer costs and more production efficiency. Ending supply management would achieve both goals.
While Conservatives have long supported free markets, they have been reluctant to challenge supply management, largely due to political concerns in Quebec, where the system is popular among producers. Being pro-trade and supporting supply management are incongruous political positions.
However, with the Conservatives drawing closer to forming government, potentially without significant electoral support from Quebec, now is the time for a strategic shift. Shedding the protectionist policies would be a bold and forward-thinking move to distinguish the party as serious about free markets and family welfare.
It would also send a powerful message to voters across the country, particularly in regions where food insecurity is rising. Conservatives could frame the policy change as a direct effort to reduce food prices, ease the burden on low-income families, and protect Canadian consumers from the high costs supply management imposes.
The Ethical Case: Dumping Food While Canadians Go Hungry
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of supply management is the appalling waste it produces. To keep prices high, in 2023 alone, tens of millions of litres of milk were discarded—wasted food that could have gone to Canadians in need. This is an unconscionable practice in a country where nearly 2 million people rely on food banks to survive. How can wasting food while so many families struggle to afford basic groceries be justified?
This waste flies in the face of compassion and fairness, and contradicts the principles of a free market.
The Bloc Quebecois’ Game
Given that the significant dairy industry in Quebec benefits immensely from supply management, the Bloc Quebecois is seeking to leverage the weakness of the Trudeau minority in exchange for a Bloc bill, Bill C-282, that would shield supply management from future changes. The Bloc Québécois Bill C-282 wants to amend the Trade and Development Act. Reportedly, it has support from all parties in Parliament.
One of the key setbacks is the restriction supply management places on open market access. It hinders the ability to fully embrace free trade agreements. A primary objectives of Bill C-282 is to prevent the Canadian government from making concessions in international trade agreements that could undermine the supply management system. This is particularly relevant in trade negotiations where foreign countries often seek increased access to Canada’s agricultural markets.
Consequently, this limits the potential for growth in agricultural exports. Central Canada benefits the most from supply management, and although its trade reverberations hurt everyone, they seem to hurt Western producers the most.
A Call to Action for All Parties
For New Democrats and Liberals, the solution to supporting families and children through food affordability lies in targeting alleged corporate greed and expanding social programs. But if they are serious about addressing child poverty and food insecurity, they would confront supply management. Likewise, for Conservatives, ending supply management is a natural extension of their free-market impetus and commitment to family values.
The time for change is now. Regardless of party, all political leaders should recognize that dismantling supply management would be a direct, meaningful step toward making food more affordable for all Canadians, as well as maximizing agricultural chances to expand Canada’s exports. With the rising cost of living pushing more families into food insecurity, we cannot afford to let outdated policies continue to inflate prices, immorally perpetuate waste, and curtail chances for greater growth in Agrifoods.
Dismantling supply management would offer tangible relief to millions of Canadian consumers, particularly low-income families. All other parties should start by killing Bill C-282.
Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice President of Research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Transition Troubles: Medical Risks and Regret Among Trans Teens
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.
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