Follow Doctor Money

There are people who are living relics of the 1960s/70s social revolution. One of those is Doctor Money. Reminiscent of Samuel Marsden, he has two histories. One, a noble one, belongs to his native land New Zealand. The other, an ignoble one, belongs to his adopted country Canada. Doctor Money is the same person.

The art patron and kind man in New Zealand did not put on a new hideous face upon departing those shores. But an obsessive self-righteous personality that appeared to shine in New Zealand turned to a dark catastrophic side in North America.

In New Zealand John Money will be indissolubly linked to cultural icon Janet Frame. In North America John Money will be indissolubly linked to the Reimer twins. His public charisma nurtured Frame into an internationally acclaimed author. It also directly brought about the the destruction and suicide of the Reimers.

I dare to argue Frame – very nearly, through Money's parallel behaviour – had the same fate.

There are some charismatic people in this world who, with often the best intentions, sow destruction upon others wherever they go. They choose a self-righteous path and the disturbed and the lame must follow them to nirvana or to hell.

In Michael King's autobiography of Frame, issues of Money are discreetly smothered over. But King is too fine an historian and biographer not to let reality hint itself.

Young student Miss Frame became obsessively attached to the psychology lecturer John Money at Canterbury University. He became alarmed and began to withdraw from her. She attempted suicide and wrote an essay about it for her idol. He promptly took action to have her committed to a mental hospital.

Thus began the long descent into institutional psychiatric care of Frame. She survived at least two decades of hospital treatment and only her literary reputation saved her from a lobotomy. To the remainder of her life she remained a fugitive from mental well-being and a settled life.

Reading the biography, I always inwardly shudder when Doctor Money, now a high-flying North American sexologist, makes his appearance. I feel he unintentionally always dragged her spirit down. Maybe my analogy with Marsden is not too foolish. He too dragged down the spirits of his Maori converts, alienating them from spiritual well being while they materially prospered and were turned into international celebrities.

The Reimer twins' story is horrific. Yet it is also sometimes spiritually affirming under Doctor Money's 'care'. The twin baby David had a tragic loss while being circumcised to cure a groin infection. The doctors now were stumped. The despairing blue-collar Canadian parents saw on television the charismatic psychologist Doctor Money. It was the 1960s.

On television, smooth-talking, apparently highly educated men, were shocking conventional middle-class mores. They were too young to have been World War Two servicemen. They were often hairy, and talked incessantly – frequently crudely – about astonishing cures to the post-war social malaise. They were cool.

Doctor Money assured his usually fawning media-interviewers that he alone could cure hermaphrodite cases. He could do it by a little snip in the right place and then years of painstaking hospital therapy. He argued it worked both ways. But he only ever meant to convert all transsexuals into healthy fully-fledged females. This was the dawn of the modern age of feminism. So Doctor Money very quickly became an icon of the social sciences. That there was nothing between males and females that a little convenient snip wouldn't cure.

So began a horror story as the well meaning parents came under the control of a man incapable of admitting a single fallibility. David was castrated by a medical doctor under Money's supervision.

In a myriad of medical reports, the therapy was progressing with dazzling success. Doctor Money wrote all of them. He soon progressed into many more cases and 'cures' in the Americas.

But within a few months, Mrs Reimer noticed that David seemed at heart a boy. Not only that, he was a particularly male-oriented boy like his twin brother Brian. A secret desperation by Money set in when the twins were forced to simulate heterosexual acts on each other. Many other men have gone to prison for much less sexual behaviour with children. So far even now Doctor Money seems immune from the law.

The twins developed a healthy terror of Money. When he once stayed at their home overnight, they hid all night in the cellar. David (Brenda) told a sympathetic woman therapist of his dreams.

Doctor Morgan was a magician with a cape and he said he could make us (Brian and himself) disappear – pouf – like that. I woke up and thought we had disappeared.

Something big seemed to be going to happen. There was a closet nearby. We have a closet like that in our house. I was scared because it seemed I could maybe get put in that closet.

Those dreams seem to come straight out of C.S. Lewis' children's Narnia stories. Doctor Money is the dishevelled evil magician/scientist Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew.

The published writings about the Reimer twins is always entirely polemical. But while the Reimer story is shocking, I noted that Money's desperate war on nature might not have been entirely in vain. While twin brother Brian is entirely macho-male and deadly boring, David possesses a curious female sensitivity. He even is mentioned incidentally as writing poetry! The secret was finally told to him. He promptly reconverted to a boy and became as dull as Brian.

The coup-de-grace delivered against Money is an unpublished academic monograph about hermaphroditism written in 1951. It says,

The youth is another living testimony … to the stamina of human personality in the face of sexual ambiguity of no mean proportions.

The tragic epilogue to this insightful and humane monologue is it was written by a thirty year old doctoral candidate named John Money.

As a private reflection on John Money, the art patron and the mad-monster sexologist, I think about the Scottish playwright James Barrie. I suspect he was a secret hermaphrodite. His marriage was a disaster from the wedding night and he was compelled to adopt boys from a tragic family. Out of those traumas he wrote the Peter Pan and boy-man David sagas. Yes, a man too can live a satisfactory life without a complete organ, even though it is his penis.