Pioneer or ‘pervert’: The strange case of John Money

Saturday, 11 July 2026

When New Zealander John Money died in July 2006, he was honoured in a public statement by then Associate Arts Minister Judith Tizard and local newspapers ran long obituaries, including one sourced from Money’s adopted hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.

“As director of the Psychohormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Money did groundbreaking research,” the Baltimore Sun wrote. “He developed hormonal treatment to improve self-control of sex offenders and dedicated research to the virtually unexplored topic of infants born with ambiguous sex organs.”

That was the US view. But Tizard’s statement made no mention of his scientific breakthroughs. Instead he was hailed as a philanthropist, an arts patron and a supporter of writer Janet Frame.

That points to the two faces or split lives of John Money. In the 20 years since his death, the split has only widened, while also taking on a darker dimension.

Apart from an unusual artistic afterlife in Gore, Southland, Money is largely unknown in his home country. If his name comes up at all, it is as a bogeyman in fraught online debates over transgender rights and identities.

Consider these examples. A Substack article recently reposted by the Platform website likened him to notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile. An article posted by lobby group Family First claimed he was guilty of medical malpractice and child abuse.

Those are in New Zealand, but there are many overseas examples. British magazine Spiked said in 2023 that Money’s work was “creepy, cruel and amoral”. Anti-transgender advocates GenSpect accused him of “playing God with other people’s children”.

Journalist and prominent UK critic of the trans community Helen Joyce spent three pages in her book Trans on Money’s career, although in an interview with The Press during a visit to Christchurch in 2025, she said Money’s theories did not really line up with what she dismissed as the “mishmash of ideologies” that make up contemporary transgender thinking.

“I don’t think they think about him very much,” she said.

Nor had Joyce heard about Money’s art and literary connections, illustrating the split reputation.

But Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) philosophy professor Alex Byrne debunked common myths about Money at the independent news site Quillette in 2024 in an article titled “In Defence of John Money”.

The Press wonders if Byrne thinks anything has changed for Money since he wrote his piece.

“As far as I can see, his reputation has, if anything, become worse over the last few years,” Byrne says.

He points to the Trump Government’s attack on paediatric gender medicine, the executive order that defined men and women and general opposition to the trans movement. He plucks a comment at random from X to illustrate his point: “The whole Trans Gender Identity was invented by Dr. John Money, a deranged pedophile who experimented on children. Trans is an Ideology by perverts, for Perverts”.

That is typical. And there is much that is even more hostile.

The gender inventor

So what did Money achieve? First, some background. Born in Morrinsville in 1921, he graduated from Victoria University in 1944, spent a few years in Dunedin, and then emigrated to the US, where he studied at Harvard. When he died in Baltimore, he was a day short of his 85th birthday.

Canadian academic Terry Goldie’s 2014 book about Money is titled The Man Who Invented Gender, because that is exactly what he did.

Money first used gender in 1955. New Zealander Jennifer Germon, author of Gender: A Genealogy, explains why it was necessary.

“The term that was doing so much heavy lifting was sex,” she says. “Sex role, sex identity, sexual practice, biological sex. Gender took some of the pressure off that.”

She says Money did not invent trans identity. The key theorist there was Robert Stoller, who was following in the footsteps of German researcher Magnus Hirschfeld.

In one way, Money’s name is being kept alive by the online controversies, she says. But in another way, he is too foundational to be avoided.

“The curious thing about Money is that many of his critics rely on his theories to make their argument against Money. The assumptions in their own understandings of gender are driven by his theories. I find that endlessly fascinating.

“It has something to do with gender being so embedded in our way of knowing the world, that his name is so detached from it now. There is a lack of understanding about the origin of a lot of concepts that are used to critique gender theory.”

What would Money have made of the current bill in Parliament to define men and women?

“He would be rolling in his grave because it’s just insane,” Germon says. “What I believe renders his understanding of gender as being among the most enduring sophisticated ideas is that he was absolutely adamant that gender was produced through an interaction of cells, environment and experience.

“Nothing was nature, nothing was nurture. It was always the interaction. And today we are still arguing about if it’s nature or nurture.”

In his time, Money was a media darling. Baltimore film-maker of Hairspray fame John Waters called him “the Duke of Dysfunction”, and that was a compliment. He was not just a sexual theorist, but a sexual libertine, which partly frames “his post-heyday reputation”, Germon says.

In other words, there can be something puritanical and conformist about the critics of transgenderism who seize on Money as their villain.

“Whenever there was an agenda in Money, it was usually towards sexual liberation,” Goldie wrote.

He was a creature of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. Playboy magazine championed him. Rolling Stone called him “the hot doctor”. He was an expert witness in the obscenity trial over the film Deep Throat.

He was even on the front page of The Press in 1977 in a story headlined “Sex appeal in eyes of beholders”.

From a conference in Melbourne, Money explained that eyes are “the primary organs of erotic attraction between two persons”. In other animals, it is the nose.

He went on: “The ears, of course, may play a part – but it is the visual image par excellence that initiates erotic arousal.”

That was the fun side of Money.

‘A kind of Frankenstein’

And then there was David Reimer. Everyone agrees this was an utterly tragic story from start to finish.

Twins Bruce and Brian Reimer were born in Canada in 1965. Bruce’s penis was severely damaged during a botched circumcision at the age of eight months. On the advice of Money, he had further genital surgery and was raised as a girl, Brenda. It was initially hailed a success and cited as proof that gender was dictated by environment rather than biology.

In fact, the reassignment did not take and by the age of 15 Brenda had reverted to being a boy and then a man, renamed David.

David was in his 30s when the story leaked in 1997 and journalist John Colapinto wrote about it, first in Rolling Stone and then at book-length in As Nature Made Him.

Fame did not help. Brian committed suicide in 2002 and David followed suit in 2004.

By then Money was in the twilight of his career. The Reimer case, and Colapinto’s account of it, came to overshadow everything else about Money. It still does. Spiked’s view of his “cruelty” was based entirely on this one case.

Experts still argue over Money’s culpability, and wonder what he could have done differently.

“For many reasons the Reimer case made him the example of the medical system forcing the individual to accept a gender that was not theirs, which is exactly the opposite of his intention and of his work in general,” Goldie says.

“I have no answer except that he got enmeshed in a case that was unlikely for many reasons and then his ego made it impossible for him to escape.”

“So much of it is sensationalised,” Germon says of Colapinto’s book. “I don’t believe he [Colapinto] did David Reimer any justice.”

New Zealand historian Michael King was also highly critical of how Colapinto “demonised Money as a kind of Frankenstein figure” while overlooking “the hundreds of patients and families who had found him over the years to be a skilled, generous and compassionate practitioner”.

In a strange New Zealand twist, film-maker Peter Jackson bought the rights to Colapinto’s book more than two decades ago, which horrified King. The current status of a film adaptation is unknown.

Colapinto could not be reached by The Press but posted on X in May that “my first non-fiction book, As Nature Made Him (2000), is still finding foreign publishers 26 years later. Poland is about to publish it in Polish and retitled (cleverly) Bruce, Brenda, David.”

There are other ways in which the story endures. And its impact is not always predictable.

Goldie says that while “As Nature Made Him has some effect on anti-trans backlash, it is also popular with the trans community and every year I have one or two students who know about Money only as a result of hearing about the Reimer case in a gender or women’s studies class”.

From this perspective, Money is not the father of trans identities but their enemy.

“Reimer fits both the assumption that biological sex is truth and the belief that the individual must choose their own gender.”

‘A generous man’

There was nothing about David Reimer in Judith Tizard’s statement about Money in July 2006. But is it fair to see a division between Money the scientist and Money the arts patron? Germon does not think so.

“He was an incredibly creative person. I don’t think he could have done what he did in terms of his theorising if he didn’t have that creative edge.”

He had aspired to be a pianist. Before he left New Zealand, he established lasting friendships with artists and writers. It was Money who contacted poet Denis Glover at the Caxton Press in Christchurch to have Janet Frame’s short stories published. When the book, The Lagoon, won a literary award, Frame’s impending lobotomy was cancelled.

As an intensely shy young woman, Frame became besotted with the young Money, played as a charismatic and charming figure by actor Colin McColl in Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table. Interestingly, Money seems more important in Michael King’s biography of Frame than in her own account, which Frame’s niece and chairperson of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Pamela Gordon attributes to “the myth of the male mentors” that has surrounded the writer’s career.

Yet Gordon remembers Money as “a much loved, lifelong family friend and when I was a child he always visited, a generous man, bearing gifts. He had a large close family and he seemed a very tribal person, keeping in touch with everyone and keeping up with everyone’s news.”

She adds: “It fascinates me that he also manages to be hated both by transphobes as well as many in the trans community. Some of the outrage is deserved but a lot is based on myth and slander and the tendency people have to embroider the facts to make them even more sensational.”

Money and Frame’s first meeting was in Dunedin in 1945. Their last was in Gore in 2003, just weeks before Frame’s death and on Money’s final visit to his home country. That was for the opening of the John Money Collection at the Eastern Southland Gallery.

The obvious question is how Money’s eclectic art collection “finished up in a town better known to outsiders for its porridge, trout and country music”, as Peter Kitchin wrote in the Dominion Post.

Money was looking for a place to house the entire collection rather than split it up. He wanted to send home 130 works by New Zealand artists, plus his collection of US art and contemporary Yolngu (Northern Territory of Australia) and 20th century West African works. The gallery’s local rūnanga are kaitiaki (trustees) for the latter.

Money was known to be frugal, buying his clothes at thrift stores and living in a converted corner shop in a tough part of Baltimore better known for the TV series The Wire, with its shuttered storefronts and drug gangs. As Eastern Southland Gallery curator Jim Geddes notes, he could easily have sold his collection for millions.

Geddes says there have been 450,000 visitors since the collection opened in 2003 and Money’s endowment has helped to grow the gallery’s collections, attracted substantial further gifts and supported a residency. Yet Money was determined he did not want text describing him or his work. It was all about the art.

But does Geddes ever feel the blowback in deepest Southland? Every two or three months he gets an email expressing a negative view of Money. He suggests they write formally to the gallery expressing their concerns in detail, and they never do.

He says both he and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage did due diligence on Money. What he heard contradicted some impressions from the Reimer story.

He met Milton Diamond, an academic critic of Money who helped make the Reimer story public. Even he seemed more respectful than you might gather from the coverage.

“Some of the stuff that was out and about was not right, and over the top,” Geddes says.

Yet it seems Money will soon become less visible, even in Gore.

“Going forward, and with input from guest curators, it won’t be the ‘John Money Collection’ as such,” Geddes says. “It will explore a much broader context, but those key holdings will still have pride of place.”

Money was ultimately a complex figure. Even supporters recognise his flaws.

“Staying true to the complexity without valorising or villainising is the challenge when writing about Money,” Germon says.

She sees that he had both an extraordinary capacity for kindness and was ruthlessly ambitious. For Goldie, the Reimer case offers a lasting lesson, or possibly a warning.

“Almost everything about what has happened to Money’s reputation is unfair and even wrong and yet the Reimer case proves that you cannot just believe in your own theories,” he says.

“There are so many intersex cases in which the early gender assignment has worked and so many in which it has not worked. Money’s own work with transgender cases should have taught him that individuals are individuals.

“The medical system needs to treat the person as they present and recognise at every stage that the treatment might be wrong. I never met Money but from all my research I would say that admitting he was wrong did not come easily.”