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John Money

John Money (1921–2006), a New Zealand-American psychologist at Johns Hopkins, coined the term "gender identity" in 1964. His infamous Reimer experiment was scientific fraud: he knew it failed, concealed it for decades, and both twin brothers committed suicide. Nevertheless, his terminology became the foundation of modern ideology.

The thesis: gender as learned

Money worked on intersex patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He postulated "psychosexual neutrality" at birth: gender, he argued, would be learned in the first 18 months. On that basis, he recommended surgical "adaptation" of intersex children to an arbitrarily assigned sex — a social learning theory experiment on healthy bodies. This thesis clashes head-on with Stoller's innate "core gender identity," yet both hypotheses persist in contemporary activism, often simultaneously — a textbook example of circular reasoning and internal contradiction.

The Reimer case: a deliberately concealed failure

In 1965, the boy Bruce Reimer was mutilated during a botched circumcision. Money convinced the parents to castrate him and raise him as a girl ("Brenda") — a test case for his thesis. For decades, Money publicly reported that the experiment succeeded. This was a lie. Bruce/Brenda refused the female role from the very first moments and suffered severely under the treatment.

Worse: Money forced the young twins Bruce and Brian into sexual "role-playing" during consultations — documented in Colapinto's * As Nature Made Him* (2000). Bruce later lived as a man (David) and committed suicide in 2004. His twin brother Brian, also severely damaged by Money's "treatment," committed suicide in 2002. Two deaths, one fraud. Money himself was never held accountable and remained a professor until his death in 2006.

What the experiment really proved

The Reimer case refutes Money's core hypothesis: gender is not malleable by upbringing. Diamond & Sigmundson (1997) — who revealed the actual outcomes against Money's wishes — demonstrated that the entire theoretical basis was false. With this, the empirical ground for "gender identity" as a concept separate from the body also disappears: the central test case failed catastrophically.

Yet the term coined by Money was adopted in WPATH SOC , in DSM , in ICD , and in the Yogyakarta Principles . A concept built on fraud and two suicides has become the foundation of a global treatment industry. It is a textbook example of a metaphysical claim that remained unfalsifiable because the falsification was concealed.

Impact: from Baltimore to the whole world

Money's work in Baltimore directly inspired the first pediatric gender clinics (see spread from 1990 ) and the rollout in the 2000s . The Dutch VUmc protocols built on the same assumption that "inner identity" is the guiding principle — without taking the Reimer findings seriously. The Cass Review (2024) notes what the Reimer case should have taught us back in the 1990s: there is no evidence base , only ideology.

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