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John Money has been a dominant voice in sexology in the last part of the 20th century, breaking new ground in a wide variety of areas. In the process, he has been cantankerous, outspoken, and ever willing to do battle, but also original and thought provoking. This paper begins with an examination of science in general, moves on to psychology and sexology, and then examines Money's contributions to sexology in some detail. The latter are many and varied, including the development of the concept of gender, his theory' of gender identity based on his work with intersex individuals, the John-Joan case, and his importance in establishing transsexualism as a diagnostic category and an academic discipline. Also important are his contributions to the development of the nomenclature of sexology, his importance to the sexology movement as a teacher, his significant research on a large variety of sexual topics, his ability to convince government agencies that sex was deserving of funding, and his association with the Erickson Educational Foundation. He also was a significant figure in the development of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) and in raising the standard of its journal (The Journal of Sex Research), and therefore it is only fitting that an award be named after him. Though Money remains controversial, he has contributed significantly to the development of sexology as a discipline.
John Money is one of the great pioneers of American sexology in the last part of the 20th century. He should be included in the pantheon of pioneer researchers such as Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, Virginia Johnson, and other individuals who changed the way Americans (and much of the world) thought about sexuality. Kinsey, the taxonomist, described the varieties of sexual behavior of Americans. Masters and Johnson described the physiological process of orgasm and sexual response, and in the process founded modern sex therapy. Money, a psychologist, took the next step and constructed a theory of sexual development, emphasizing the interaction and interdependence of social psychological and biological factors. All four helped establish sexology as a science, but John Money was one of the first to put his research into a theoretical framework.
This is an important contribution. Just recently Wiederman and Whitley (2002) decried the...