MONEY, John and Anke EHRHARDT

MONEY, John (b. 8 July 1921), and Anke EHRHARDT (b. 20 Feb 1940), medical psychologists, sex researchers.

The controversial work of John Money and Anke Ehrhardt has had a profound effect on sex research as well as on the humanities and social sciences since the late 1960s. Money was born in Morrinsville, Waikato, New Zealand, into a conservative evangelical Christian family, a fact that, some claim, influenced his future research interests. He completed his undergraduate degree in psychology at Victoria University in 1943 and, in the mid-1940s, moved to the United States. He earned his Ph.D. in social relations from the Psychological Clinic at Harvard University in 1952. Since 1951, Money has been on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, where he founded the Psychohormonal Research Unit. In 1966, following his increasing interest in the phenomena of transsexualism and gender dysphoria, the term attributed to those individuals who believe that they were assigned the wrong gender at birth or who have the physical and psychological experience of being born into the wrong body, Money founded Hopkins's Gender Identity Clinic, the first of its kind in the United States.

Ehrhardt was born in Hamburg, Germany. Between 1962 and 1964 she earned degrees in psychology from the Universities of Munich and Hamburg. In 1966, while a doctoral student at the University of Düsseldorf, Ehrhardt traveled to the United States to work with Money at Johns Hopkins. Given Money's interest in the hormonal basis of gender dysphoria and Ehrhardt's interest in the relationship between sex hormones and gender, the established scientist and the budding graduate student made a highly compatible interdisciplinary research team.

Ehrhardt completed her Ph.D. in psychology in 1969 and, three years later, she and Money coauthored the groundbreaking book Man and Woman, Boy and Girl (1972). The book's centerpiece, for which it garnered international praise, was its study involving a set of fraternal twin boys from Canada. In 1966, at eight months, the boys underwent routine circumcisions, but one of the boys suffered a freak accident that destroyed his penis. Shortly thereafter, Money counseled the family and recommended that the parents raise their son, "John," as a girl, "Joan," complete with estrogen treatments and a surgicallyconstructed vagina to replace the damaged penis.

The supposed transformation of a biological-born male into a person with a female gender role affirmed Money and Ehrhardt's theories about the potential malleability of gender identity through sex hormones and behavioral training. Many feminists in the 1970s embraced Money and Ehrhardt's ideas as scientific proof of how gender roles, far from being solely determined by biology, are socially constructed. Not everyone was satisfied with the results of the "John and Joan" case, however. In the mid-1970s, biologists like Milton Diamond were not entirely convinced by the malleability of gender through surgical or hormonal intervention. Money and Ehrhardt had argued that it would have been impossible for a child without a penis to grow into a psychologically and developmentally healthy male and that the only reasonable option was raising the boy as a girl. Diamond, by contrast, believed that an individual's sense of gender identity was hardwired into the human brain and did not, as Money and Ehrhardt argued, rely on one's relationship to external physical traits such as the size or shape of one's genitalia. Despite Diamond's skepticism, Money and Ehrhardt's theories flourished, and even today they still influence pediatric surgeons confronted with ambiguous genitalia.

Following the scientific and professional triumphs of the twins study, Money authored such memorable treatises as Sexual Signatures (1975) and The Destroying Angel (1985), the latter of which described the secret antimasturbatory origins of Graham crackers and Kellogg's breakfast cereals. His later books included psychological interpretations of sexual behavior such as Venuses Penuses (1986) and The Breathless Orgasm (1991). Meanwhile, Ehrhardt continued her research on prenatal sex hormones, but she also became increasingly interested in health care issues within LGBT populations. Since 1977, Ehrhardt has been associated with the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, where she studies the psychological repercussions of sexual risk behavior among varied populations. She also serves as director of the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Since the 1980s, sex hormone research pioneered by Money and Ehrhardt has been increasingly challenged by new brain- and gene-based models for thinking about the origins of gender identity and sexual orientation. Biologists like Anne Fausto-Sterling and Ruth Hubbard, for instance, have advocated the acceptance of a much wider continuum of hormonal and genetic possibilities in human beings that calls for complexity rather than following a binary either-or system of gender identity. Furthermore, Money and Ehrhardt's ideas have also been challenged by intersex individuals and organizations seeking to prevent doctors from "correcting" individuals whose genitals do not conform to a two-note system of gender identity. The advent of queer theory has also confronted much of the scientific and ideological bases of gender identity and sexual orientation on which Money and Ehrhardt's theories were founded.

In 1997 journalist John Colapinto tracked down "Joan," only to discover that the adjustment to a female gender identity Money and Ehrhardt had described was not, in fact, permanent. Colapinto found that by the early 1980s, "Joan" had rejected the female role assigned to her and was now living as David Reimer, a man with a wife, adopted children, and a fully reconstructed penis. Apparently, for years Reimer's parents had complained that their son's gender reassignment was not working. But Money, according to Colapinto, had ignored any evidence that might contest his theories. For many, these revelations have undermined the authoritative stance for which Money and Ehrhardt's work had been originally celebrated.

Bibliography

Colapinto, John. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Kessler, Suzanne J. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Money, John, and Anke A. Ehrhardt. Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

David Serlin

see alsobiology and zoology; erickson educational foundation; erickson, reed; intersexuals and intersexed people; psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and sexology; transsexuals, transvestites, transgender people, and cross-dressers.