Money, Diamond and sexual examinations

[Beth Benoit]

Title: Money, Diamond and sexual examinations

TIPSpersons,
My computer seemed to hiccup when I sent this many hours ago, so I'm assuming it didn't fly through cyberspace.  Apologies if it's a repeat...

TIPSters,
(If the first two words of the subject heading don't get your attention, the last two probably will.  However, this actually has a serious question and isn't one of those annoying spams we all delete madly...)

I'm teaching about sexuality, GID and ambiguous genitalia in my Male and Female Gender Perspectives class.  I've been using the John/Joan case and have always been troubled by a statement by "John" (made in a "Frontline" show for TV) when he describes his childhood memory of how Dr. John Money examined him and his twin brother and had them "pose in sexual positions," and implies that there was something irregular about the examinations.  I explain to my class that while the twins may not have been carefully prepared for what a normal examination might entail in "sexual disorder patients," we may be jumping to conclusions in joining the innuendo that Money was a pedophile or a voyeur.

However, a new (to me) reference to this showed up in the "Taking Sides" series, which I've added to this course for the first time.  In it, there are opposing sides of the issue, "Does the John/Joan case prove that gender is innate?"  Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson take one side and discuss the expected points.  But in the opposing side, Bernice Hausman quotes Diamond and Sigmundson as having written: "At their yearly visit to Johns Hopkins Hospital, the twins were made to stand naked for inspection by groups of clinicians and to inspect each other's genitalia...John's brother, decades later, recalls the experience with tears." [italics mine]  (Her source:  Diamond and Sigmundson's 1997 article in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine)

Whoa, Pony!  Does anyone have any information that would prove/discredit any of this?  My tendency is to chalk this up to the confabulation of the twins' memories, but I wanted to check with fellow TIPSters.

Beth Benoit
University System of New Hampshire

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