I'd heard some fairly disturbing things about John Money, but I thought he was just a crank. He was no crank. He was a fucking demon wearing human flesh.
John Money had several things wrong with him. First, he hated men. He suggested (probably not seriously, but still) that baby boys should be castrated at birth to tame their wild urges. Second, he was utterly convinced of his own intellectual superiority. He would bully and intimidate any researcher that disagreed with him. He would act like a total shithead to his staff, just because he could. But if he wanted something from you, he would charm and subtly pressure you until you gave in.
Third, he was an actual fucking pedophile. Now I know Null doesn't like that accusation being tossed around lightly, so here's the proof. He publicly stated that a consensual relationship between a 12 year old and a 30 year old was totally fine. John Money would separate the Reimer twins from their parents as part of their therapy sessions. In private, he would force them to strip and hump each other. He said this was because of an experience with an African (I think?) tribe where he saw children doing that sort of thing, and observed that the tribe was mentally healthy with no neuroses such as homosexuality. Only problem is, that was bullshit. Experts in that tribe said no such behavior is commonplace, and they had sexual neuroses at about the same rate as everybody else.
Not directly pedophilia related, but Money himself probably participated in (adult) polyamory and orgies. He believed that if people would just get over their sexual hangups (like not fucking children) everything would be totally fine in the world.
David Reimer had his dysfunctional schlong cut off and was raised as a girl and not told about the botched circumcision. He constantly rebelled against his imposed gender. John Money simply lied about this in his publications, saying that David comfortably identified as Brenda. When he wasn't lying, he would pressure David in his therapy sessions, questioning over and over with increasing insistence until David gave the "right" answer. Several of David's other doctors thought maybe David should be told about his history, but either deferred to Money's expertise (not completely unreasonable at the time) or were straight up afraid of him.
But it didn't hold. David gravitated toward boy activities. He fought, he played war, he wore male clothes. His parents, doing their best to follow medical advice, pushed back against this. David was miserable, and terrified of Money, eventually just refusing to ever visit him again. After this refusal, Money hornswaggled the parents into letting him visit and stay at their house. Fortunately it was without incident, and the last time the twins ever saw him.
After it became clear that Money's theories were just making everything worse, eventually David's parents broke down and told him the truth, and for a while, his life did actually end up improving.
It's well known that both Reimer twins killed themselves. In all honesty I don't think this was DIRECTLY because of John Money, it was more a result of tragedies in their personal lives as adults. But John Money made a major contribution, and it's not unreasonable to think they would have survived otherwise.
As for Money? Well, when it turned out that his own experiments categorically disproved his theories, he quietly buried the whole thing and went right on preaching his theories, claiming that his haters were just jelly.
