David Gornoski: To Understand Local School Board Gender Proclamations, Follow John Money

In June of this year, Polk County School District—one of the largest in Florida—used its School Board meeting to make a proclamation of LGBTQ pride. The proclamation declared in part that “gender identity” and “gender expression” were an “innate status” of its over 110,000 students in attendance. Taxpayers of the conservative Polk County not interested in ideological declarations over their children were lectured on how they were part of a “global community” that expected such normative claims. As a graduate of this school district, it was surreal to see my local school board nonchalantly embracing loaded rhetoric derived from crank theorists with horrific experimental records and pro-pedophilia views—specifically John Money, the founder of gender identity theory.

That a rural conservative Florida school district would feel the need to tell parents of children ranging from preschool and up that trans gender identity is an innate status shows how ignorant public school bureaucracies have become. While I was in university in 2009 learning about the brutal gender identity experiments John Money performed on young children to derive his “gender identity” theory, the Polk County School Board bureaucrats expressed no interest in bringing his extremist ideas into the school district.

At that time, these ideas were still confined to the domain of university courses: future foot soldiers in public school ideological imposition had not received their mimetic social cues yet. In 2022, School Board members and bureaucrats only parrot ideas Money pioneered out of a naive desire to imitate the fashionable ideas of elitist, moneyed cultural enclaves far away from places like Polk County. Social engineering of children may be pathetic to average families but it comes with plenty of financial incentives and social currency in bureaucracies always in search of the next big thing around which to manufacture moralizing power plays. It is important that parents and second-hand peddlers in extreme ideas like school officials be made cognizant of their origins.

John Money was a sexologist and psychologist at John Hopkins University in the 1950s and 60s. He believed that gender was primarily constructed by society, separate from the biological sex with which one is born. In an infamous case experiment, he convinced the parents of a boy named David Reimer to demonstrate his hypothesis. The boy had suffered from a botched circumcision and Money thought he would be a great candidate to prove the fluidity of gender. The boy had a twin who would serve as a control. Money unethically convinced the boy’s parents to allow John Hopkins Hospital to surgically remove his testes and construct a crude imitation of female genitalia. He was then put on hormone therapy, given a new name, and dressed as a girl.

In clinical visits with Money and colleagues, David Reimer and his twin brother were forced to engage in sexual positions and motions specific to their gender. They were told to inspect each other’s pubic areas and were angrily reprimanded by Money if they objected. Money’s aggression to them was

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