Springfield, Virginia, USA. John Money died on Friday, a day before his 85th birthday, at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson of complications from Parkinson's disease, which he had battled for several years. Money was one of the nation's pre-eminent sex researchers who pioneered the study of gender identity and helped establish Johns Hopkins as the first hospital in the country to perform adult sex-change operations.
 

I discovered his writings way back in the dim days of the 1960’s and 70’s. He was the first legitimate researcher I had ever read who seemed to have a glimmer of what was going on inside of me. If you are of a certain age, you understand what I mean; if you are young, it is hard to imagine what transsexual life was like before the internet, cell phones, and the sex reassignment medical industry.

 

Like many of us back then, I knew I was born within the wrong body: I was a woman who was somehow born with male genitalia. John Money offered hope and a glimmer of a road map towards making myself whole.

 

In our desperation, we made Money a saint (not that he showed any inclination to decline sainthood).

 

Money was among the first to state that inward Gender Identity was more important than the outward physical sex organs. He described what it means to be male and female, and what it means to be in-between. He advocated sex reassignment surgery for people born transsexual.

 

For people like me.

 

It was only later that we found he fudged his research. His type specimen for successful sex reassignment surgery was a failure: at age 15 “Brenda” requested he be allowed to live as his birth sex. Money’s insistence that natural-born gender can be altered with little more than willpower and hormone treatments ignored his own findings on the supremacy of innate Gender Identity.

 

Money’s star began it’s long descent, stained with charges of purposeful, scientific fraud. John Hopkins, for better or worse, closed its Sex Reassignment surgical program,

 

But for one, brief shining moment, John Money was my savior and he gave me hope that personal happiness was a realistic possibility.