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CELIA KITZINGER on the implications of intersexuality for the psychology of women.
INTERSEXUALITY - as biological reality, as lived experience and as a political movement - is an important issue in its own right and, as such, merits the serious and committed attention of psychologists, healthcare professionals, educators and human rights activists. It also has profound implications for those of us working within the psychology of women, and poses fundamental challenges for our field.
Ever since the pioneering work of psychologist John Money (Money et al., 1955a, 1955b) the study of intersexuality has been of interest to psychologists, in part for what it teaches us about gender identity more broadly. For Money and his collaborators, and for the many psychologists who drew on his work, its key contribution was to provide compelling evidence for the important contribution of 'nurture' or 'socialisation' in the development of gender. Drawing on his own empirical findings in which matched pairs of intersexed children were (apparently successfully) assigned and reared as different sexes, Money developed his theory of 'sexual neutrality at birth':
In place of a theory of instinctive masculinity or femininity which is innate, the evidence of hermaphroditism lends support to a conception that psychologically, sexuality is undifferentiated at birth and that it becomes differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of the various experiences of growing up. (Money et al., 1955b)
Money's work was welcomed and celebrated within the psychology of women as offering important (and scientifically credible) evidence for the possibility of changing oppressive gender roles. Being born with XY chromosomes did not, it seemed, necessitate aggression; possession of a uterus did not automatically destine its owner to passivity. Feminist psychologists relied on Money's discussion of the distinction between 'sex' (as biological) and 'gender' (as social) and rapidly incorporated that distinction into their own work. One of Money's case studies in particular has been, for the last 25 years, the centrepiece of psychologists' textbook presentations on behalf of 'nurture' (e.g. Archer, 1976; Lips, 1997; Nicholson, 1984).
Generally referred to as 'the John/Joan case', this is the story of a seven-month-old boy (not born intersex) whose penis was destroyed in a circumcision accident, and who was successfully reared as a girl. Psychologists routinely cited Money's follow-up...