SEX DIFFERENCES – JOHN MONEY FASCINATING CASE
March 11th, 2009John Money reports an illustrative and fascinating case which supports this view. Two identical male twins were circumcised at the age of 7 months. During the operation an accident occurred and one infant’s penis was inadvertently amputated, flush with his abdominal wall. Over the next year the parents consulted many authorities and pondered over what was best for their sexually damaged boy. Eventually, they made a decision: the boy would be treated by plastic surgery and reared as a girl. The first reconstructive operation was undertaken when he was 21 months old. This consisted in removing his testicles. The second operation, that of making a functioning vagina, would be delayed until puberty when the child would be given female sex hormones to produce breast development and the female distribution of fat.
Following the first operation the parents changed the boy’s name to that of a girl, and began to treat him as a girl. Dr Money has now followed up this family for twelve years and the rest of the story is based on his reports.
Within a year of sex reassignment, the child, now treated as a girl, behaved in a way which was markedly different from her brother’s behaviour. She became neater and cleaner. She preferred ‘feminine’ dresses, and preferred helping her mother in the home to helping her father. As time went on, she copied her mother’s behaviour to her father, while her brother copied his father’s behaviour to his mother. At Christmas she preferred girls’ toys, which emphasized a feminine maternal role, rather than the boys’ toys chosen by her identical twin, which emphasized a masculine work role. The only real difference between her and her girlfriends was that she sought to be dominant in the group, had a high level of physical energy activity, and was classified by her teacher as stubborn and tomboyish. These are characteristics Dr Money believes are due to pre-natal conditioning by testosterone.
Dr Money’s report, and many others, confirm that parents have different feelings to their children of different sexes and reinforce, both subconsciously and consciously, the sexual role the child is expected to play. A boy would be criticized for being unadventu-rous or unaggressive, while a girl would be criticized if she were.
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