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| John Money: A Remembrance |
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| Opinion - Global Warning | |||
| Lisa Jain Thompson | |||
| Sunday, 09 July 2006 10:18 | |||
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de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est
Springfield, Virginia, USA. John Money died on Friday, a day before his 85th birthday, at St. Joseph Medical Center (Towson, MD, USA) of complications from Parkinson's disease, which he had battled for several years.
At one time, Money was one of the nation's pre-eminent sex researchers. He pioneered the study of gender identity and helped establish The Johns Hopkins University as the first hospital in the country to ewgularly perform adult sex-change operations.
I discovered his writings way back in the dim days of the 1960’s and 70’s. He was the first legitimate researcher I had ever read who seemed to have a glimmer of what was going on inside of me. If you are of a certain age, you understand what I mean; if you are young, it is hard to imagine what transsexual life was like before the internet, cell phones, and the sex reassignment medical industry.
Like many of us back then, I knew I was born within the wrong body: I was a woman who was somehow born with male genitalia. John Money offered hope and a glimmer of a road map towards making myself whole.
In our desperation, we made Money a saint (not that he showed any inclination to decline sainthood).
Money was among the first to state that inward Gender Identity was more important than the outward physical sex organs. He described what it means to be male and female, and what it means to be in-between. He advocated sex reassignment surgery for people born transsexual.
For people like me.
It was only later that we found he fudged his research. His type specimen for successful sex reassignment surgery was a failure: at age 15 “Brenda” requested he be allowed to live as his birth sex. Money’s insistence that natural-born gender can be altered with little more than willpower and hormone treatments ignored his own findings on the supremacy of innate Gender Identity.
Money’s star began it’s long descent, stained with charges of purposeful, scientific fraud. John Hopkins, for better or worse, closed its Sex Reassignment surgical program,
But for one, brief shining moment, John Money was my savior and he gave me hope that personal happiness was a realistic possibility. But then I came to understand the true value of my own initiative when his darker side emerged.
Lisa Jain Thompson is the Co-Founder & President of TS-Si, Inc. She also serves as a Contributing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. She maintains another site, StarPoet.com, for her poetry and literary works. Ms. Thompson's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. Lisa welcomes your comments. Use the form below or email via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission. To create link towards this article on your website, copy and paste the text below in your page. Preview :
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