Dr. John Money Has Died

Dr. John Money, who became famous for his gender reassignment surgery, has died. He was in his eighties. His adult sex change operations were controversial. The Baltimore Sun described one of his more controversial cases, known publicly as the "John/Joan" case:

His belief that gender could be assigned to a child before age 3 played out in a radical experiment that proved devastating for him and the child upon whom it was performed.

Canadian parents of twin boys sought Dr. Money's advice in 1967 after one of their sons suffered a botched circumcision. Dr. Money advised them that with hormones and sex-change surgery, the child could be raised as a girl.

But by the time Brenda was a teen, it became clear the plan wasn't working. Brenda became known as a boy, David Reimer, who later was the subject of the 2000 book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, by John Colapinto. In the book, Mr. Reimer decried the experiment and spoke of his anguish. Mr. Reimer committed suicide in 2004.

Dr. Money refused to speak publicly on the subject, said niece Sally Hopkins of Baltimore.

John Money also gave a positive review to a book by Dr. Theo Sandfort, entitled "Boys on their Contacts with Men - A Study of Sexually Expressed Friendships", which praised pedophilia. Money had also been quoted in support of pedophilia. He has said this the Spring, 1991, vol. 2, no. 3 issue of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, on page 5: "If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who's intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual...then I would not call it pathological in any way." On top of that, Money was a Penthouse Forum consultant. According to Dr. Judith Reisman, Money "led for an organized crusade to end age of consent laws. It was John Money who promoted the word "paraphilias" in order to refer to aberrant sexual conduct such as necrophelia, sexual sadism, bestiality, coprophilia, urophilia and pedophilia in a manner less clear and offensive to readers."

That is some sick stuff.

Such praise for pedophilia didn't stop the Children's Rights Council from allowing Money to serve on its board of advisors. Money's name had been removed from CRC letterhead a long time ago, possibly due to the bad publicity from the John/Joan case, reviews such as the one for the Sandfort book, and his stance on pedophilia.