John Money

John William Money (Morrinsville, New Zealand, 1921 – Towson, Maryland, 2006) was a New Zealand-born American psychologist and sexologist who worked for most of his career at Johns Hopkins University. His research, mainly from the mid-twentieth century onward, sat at the meeting point of psychology, paediatrics and sexology. He had a considerable influence on how gender and intersex conditions were understood, although his conclusions have been widely disputed.

Born into a Christian fundamentalist family of English and Welsh descent, he earned two master's degrees at Victoria University of Wellington in 1944 and then taught at the University of Otago. He moved to the United States in 1947 to study in Pittsburgh and completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1952. He joined Johns Hopkins in the early 1950s and stayed there until his death. Money introduced the term 'gender role' and promoted 'sexual orientation' in place of 'sexual preference'. He also developed the idea of the 'lovemap'. Although often credited to him, he did not coin the term 'gender identity'.

He held that a sense of being a boy or a girl was built largely through upbringing and education rather than given by biology alone. In his account, gender identity took shape in the first years of life through a system of interactions with parents. From this he advocated early medical intervention for intersex infants. He also described 'complementation', the process by which adults pass on to their children the behaviours that complement their own gender. He studied paraphilias and, in the 1960s, pioneered drug treatment for sex offenders.

The case of David Reimer became central to his career. After a botched circumcision in 1966 left him without a penis, Money advised his parents to raise him as a girl. He published reports of success, but it later emerged that Reimer had never identified as a woman and that the family had concealed his difficulties. Reimer lived as a man again in adolescence and died by suicide in 2004. Critics such as Milton Diamond and the journalist John Colapinto questioned both the validity of his theory and the ethics of his work. Money also helped establish gender-care services at Johns Hopkins. His legacy remains contested in psychology, bioethics and intersex advocacy.