NYTimes.com – Benedict Carey
John William Money, who helped found the field of sexual identity studies, died Friday in Towson, Md. He was 84.
The cause was complications of Parkinson?s disease, said Dr. Money?s niece Sally Hopkins.
A psychologist at Johns Hopkins University for over 50 years, Dr. Money brought a measure of scientific compassion to a field that through the 1950?s considered cases of sexual ambiguity as oddities, glitches in the natural order of biologically determined sexuality.
In papers on infants born with ambiguous genitalia and in later studies, Dr. Money challenged those assumptions, providing a systematic theory for understanding how sexual identity developed. He argued that social and environmental cues interacted with a child?s genes and hormones to shape whether the person identified as male or female.
?He was the first scientist to provide a language to describe the psychological dimensions of human sexual identity; no such language had existed before,? said Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker, psychologist in chief at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
Early in his career, Dr. Money coined the terms ?gender identity,? to describe the internal experience of sexuality, and ?gender role,? to refer to social expectations of male and female behavior. The two concepts still drive much research into sexual identity.
He was among the first scientists to study the psychological experience of sexual confusion and to grasp possible ways to relieve suffering. He was an early proponent of sex reassignment surgery for men and women who believed that their biologically given sex was at odds with their sexual identity.