Gender

Several strains of research seemed to be important in challenging traditional bipolar assumptions: genetic or biological research, the study of hermaphrodites, investigation of transsexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The major subjects of Money's early studies were hermaphrodites. He was surprised to find that many who later were identified by chromosome analysis to have been raised in the wrong sex, preferred to remain in the sex in which they had been raised. This led him to posit that there was a critical stage in development where one's personal gender identity was set. While he was originally ambiguous on when this might happen, he eventually held that the age of two was critical. But such an assumption was difficult to prove.

Money felt he had found an ideal case in identical twin brothers, one of whom, while being circumcised at age seven months by an electric cautery gun, had his penis burned off. The parents, after considerable anguish, had the child's testicles removed and with Money as consultant and adviser, began raising the child as a girl at about twenty months. Initial follow-up articles pointed to a successful transition, and the case was widely used to emphasize the importance of social conditioning on sex identity. After the case disappeared from the literature, it turned out the "girl" had rebelled at her change in her teens, and after being finally told her story decided to become a boy. Such a change had been predicted by a critic of Money, Milton Diamond, and it was only through his long efforts to find the boy, who was then an adult male, that the full story came out, much to the discredit of Money's theory. But the issue even here is complicated by the fact that another boy who also had a similar background, continued as an adult to live as a woman, although as a somewhat masculine-looking and -acting one. The two cases together emphasize that there might be strong biological factors involved.

Some adults very much want to belong to the opposite sex than that associated with their genitalia. This issue came to national attention through the Christine Jorgensen case in the 1950s. Jorgensen achieved worldwide notoriety by having her penis and testicles amputated, and through the administration of hormones successfully made a transition into a woman. What gender confusion could make a man want to be a woman? Whatever it was, surgery and hormones could make it possible, and Jorgensen's path to the opposite sex has since been taken by tens of thousands of others, although there are somewhat fewer females who have undergone surgery to become males than of males to become females. There are also large numbers of transvestites who cross-dress and identity as women either for short periods or longer periods without benefit of sex-change surgery. Millions of people in the United States today identify as trans-gender, transsexual, homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual, and others like them exist all over the world and probably always have throughout human history. They represent one end of the continuum on gender development while the majority of the world lies elsewhere with many individual variations.

Some researchers like Diamond have argued that, in addition to chromosomes, prenatal hormones exert influence on neural pathways and the neural endocrine axis (the link between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and other endocrine glands). These neural pathways control future hormonal production and consequently influence sexual behavior and gender identification. He holds that there are separate neural pathways for sexual identity as a male or female, for sexual object choice, for sexual patterns of maleness or femaleness, and for the sexual response patterns.