John Money introduces the concept of gender role

In 1955, psychologist John Money, together with psychiatrists Joan and John Hampson, published a series of articles in the Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In them, he was the first to use the word gender in the meaning it has today. Until then, gender had been a term from linguistics. More about him can be found on the page about John Money.

Research on intersex children

In Baltimore, Money worked with children born with bodies that were not clearly male or female, a condition then referred to as hermaphroditism. He compared their chromosomes, gonads, and hormones with the sex in which they had been raised. He concluded that upbringing carried more weight than biological characteristics.

What he meant by gender role

Money needed a new word for this distinction. By gender role, he meant everything a person says or does that shows whether they are a boy or man, or a girl or woman. In his view, this role was not fixed at birth but was formed during the first years of life. After about the age of two, it could no longer be changed.

The consequences for medical practice

For decades, doctors based their approach to intersex children on this theory: perform surgery early and then raise the child unequivocally as a boy or a girl. Its best-known application was the Reimer case, which later became known as a failure.

Who was John Money?

John Money was born in New Zealand in 1921 and moved to the United States in 1947. In 1952, he earned a doctorate from Harvard with a dissertation on hermaphroditism. Shortly beforehand, he had begun working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he remained for the rest of his career. There, he established his own research unit focusing on the psychological aspects of hormonal disorders. Money wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles and was the best-known sexologist in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. He died in 2006.

From linguistics to medicine

In English, gender originally referred to the grammatical gender of words. Money borrowed the term because sex had too many meanings at once in his research: chromosomes, gonads, hormones, external sexual characteristics, and a person’s behavior. Gender allowed him to refer to the last of these separately. In 1968, psychiatrist Robert Stoller further developed the distinction in his book Sex and Gender. In the 1970s, feminist thinkers, including sociologist Ann Oakley, adopted it to show that differences between men and women are partly shaped by society. In this way, a concept from a children’s clinic entered everyday language.

Criticism of the theory

The idea that a child is psychosexually neutral at birth was challenged at an early stage. In 1965, biologist Milton Diamond argued that hormones before birth partly determine the brain and later behavior. Money maintained his position that upbringing during the first years of life was decisive. Later, criticism also came from people with an intersex condition themselves: as children, they had undergone surgery without being able to participate in the decision, and often without being told the truth.

Significance

The concept of gender role made it possible to talk about sex as something that can be separate from the body. In the 1960s, the term gender identity followed, introduced in part by psychiatrist Robert Stoller. Both concepts form the basis of later gender care. See also the pages on the history of gender and gender and biological sex.