John Money (born 1921), Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of Johns Hopkins University. He has had a decades long career as a psychologist studying human sexology. He was born in New Zealand.
He has specialised in the study of sexual identity, gender identity and gender roles.
John Money's definition of gender depends on his understanding of sex differences among human beings. He calls the fact that one sex produces ova and the other sex produces sperm the irreductible criterion of sex difference. He adds, however, that there are other differences that follow in the wake of this primary dichotomy.
There are sex-derivative differences, e.g., differences in the way urine is sent outside the body. There are sex-adjunctive differences, e.g., the smaller size of females and their problems in moving around while nursing infants make it more likely that the males will do the roaming and hunting. And there are sex-arbitrary differences, i.e., differences that are purely conventional (baby blue for boys, pink for girls). Some of the latter differences apply to life activities (jobs open to men, jobs open to women, etc.)
The third category has so little to do with procreative sex that Money decided to create a new term, "gender role", to supplement the term "sex role." According to the way he defined these (at the time) new terms, the genital and erotic sex roles were included under the more general term "gender role," and "gender role" included all the non-genital and non-erotic activities that are defined by the conventions of society to apply to males or to females, e.g., females wear dresses and males do not. (And if somebody violates such a convention s/he is likely to be made aware that the mores of the society have been violated. Some such violations may be treated as violations of law as well.)
Gender, for Money, is a broader, more inclusive concept than sex. It is one's status as a man or a woman, as a matter of personal recognition, social assignment, or legal determination, on the basis of genitalia but also on the basis of other somatic and behavioral criteria that go beyond genital differences.
Gender identity is one's own categorization of one's individuality as male, female, or ambivalent as experienced in self-awareness of one's own mental processes and one's own actual behavior.
Gender role is the public manifestation of one's gender identity, the things that one says and that one does that gives people a basis for inferring whether one is male, female, or fits neither of those categories.
To stress the idea that gender identity and gender role are two aspects of the same thing, Money coined a new term: Gender-Identity/Role, which he frequently abbreviates as "G-I/R."
Money was first to define the term lovemap.
Money's ideas relating to gender and gender identity formation have come under much criticism by some. Money maintained that a child's gender identity is fluid up to a certain age, after which this gender would become consolidated and more-or-less immutable. This theory was applied in the case of a male child whose penis was totally destroyed due to a botched circumcision. The child was subsequently sexually reassigned to be female -- however despite the fact that this child was ignorant of his original status as a male, and despite the fact that he no longer had testicles, he nevertheless behaved in a masculine way appropriate to a boy and attempts to socialize him as a girl failed. When he reached an age sufficient to take his destiny more into his own hands, he requested and received surgery to provide him with the male genitalia to match his male gender identity.
Since sex-arbitrary characteristics are matters of convention, and people may choose to flout the conventions of their society, people may at times incorrectly infer the sex of an individual on the basis of clothing, occupation, hair length, and other such characteristics that ordinarily serve to reveal the sexual identity that each person's clothing conceals by covering the primary sexual characteristics.
In other words, people may incorrectly infer a gender identity (and therefore a sex identity) on the basis of one's gender role. So gender roles can meet the very real social need of people to identify each other by sex while maintaining modesty, yet these roles can be problematical because they can convey a false indication of an individual's sex. They can also be problematical when the gender role favored by an individual (and the individual's own assessment of gender identity) are discordant with that individual's external genitalia. Money's writings seem not to have taken these logical extensions of his own ideas into account.
For more information, see his many books, including:
Critiques and Comments
Further reading
