>>11657810>John's Twin BrianIn the John/Joan saga, there existed one more unanticipated surprise. John was born with an identical twin brother named Brian. This provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe the course John's life would take.
>Will this case provide long-sought after answers to the classic nature vs. nurture conundrum?From the beginning of the experiment in 1967, Dr. Money reported that the experiment was an absolute success. According to Dr.Money, John became Joan, a successful girl with no emotional scars whatsoever. Apparently, John's body and mind became Joan’s body and mind. The experiment proved that gender, unlike the sex of a person, is determined by social influences rather than biology.
Everyone in the scientific community, feminists, and everyone interested seemed convinced. Everyone, that is, except John. When John finally agreed to speak out frankly about his torturous ordeal an entirely different picture emerged. Could Dr. Money, the zealous researcher who coined the term gender identity – describing a person's inner sense of self as male or female be driven more by his own subjective biases rather than by empirical research?
In truth, Joan was miserable as Joan. Unaware of John’s sex reassignment, Brian treated Joan as his sister, but he reported later, "She never, fit the part." Joan would always prefer Brian’s traditional boyish toys and refused to play with her own. "There was nothing ever feminine about Joan." Completely disillusioned with trying to live life as a girl, John simply gave up his torment, and 12 years later, in 1979 began to wear the clothes of a boy, which signaled his advance into the pre-wired gender of his "masculinized" brain. The road back to male gender identity behavior took many more years. Today, Dr. Money still stands behind his original beliefs in the case even in the face of John's account. Apparently, academic bias, like prejudice and discrimination, has a refractory stance.
