The worst academic fraud in Western history? Revisiting Starless, by Jacqueline Carey in the context of John Money and the Reimer twins

 A few years ago, when identity-focused books were a subcategory of science fiction and fantasy rather than the entirety of the genre(s), I wrote one of my sci-fi posts on what I thought (and still think) was among the better recent books at the forefront of the trend:  Starless, by Jacqueline Carey.  Fascinating book.  The gist of my commentary was that the construction of the world allowed Carey to run a thought experiment that obviously could never be run in the real world because of ethical concerns.  That is precisely what is best about literature in general, and sci-fi/fantasy in particular.  Contemplate the counterfactual that we cannot observe, just as state of nature theorists (Hobbes, Rousseau and others) did centuries ago.  I mean, obviously no one could ever do what the assholes in that book do, right?  Right?  And worse yet, misreport the findings, right?  Right?  Oy vey.  However cynical I may seem, remember.  I'm actually a pollyanna.

The premise of Starless-- the part that matters for our purposes today-- was as follows.  On the island nation of Zarkhoum, there is a royal family, and when a member of the royal family is born at precisely the same time as another child elsewhere on Zarkhoum, that child is selected as a protector for the royal child.  That protector, the "shadow," is trained in a desert monastery, in various martial arts.  The brotherhood only trains boys.  So what happens when the god who does the selectin' picks a girl, Khai?  As it turns out, there is a bit of a loophole.  Zarkhoum has a legal technicality on inheritance.  Inheritance is patrilineal, but if a couple only has a girl, they can declare the girl to be an "honorary" boy for inheritance purposes.  A "bhazim."  If they then have a boy later, well...  Carey got the idea from Afghanistan, actually, and the bacha posh.  Go.  Read.  Anyway, the trick is this.  The brotherhood says, OK, we'll train Khai, but only if Khai is declared bhazim.  So far, so good, right?  Here's where it gets really fucked up.  They don't tell Khai about the bhazim part.  (Big difference from the whole bacha posh thing.)  They just say, hey, you're a boy!  Certain privacy rules are strictly maintained in order to prevent him from seeing anatomical differences, 'n such, and this lie is a thing they can maintain.

Until puberty.

Hell of a book idea, right?

And obviously, this could never happen, right?  Right?  I mean, holy shit, if someone actually did anything like this...  So seriously, that's how I wrote about it.  I wrote a long post, and I shall return to how I assessed Carey here, but I wrote about it as "obviously" nobody could ever do this...

At the time I wrote it, my readings on gender and concepts of identity were rooted in Butler, West & Zimmerman, and that general literature.  I shall not attempt to summarize, but that was where my readings, and hence, my thoughts had been.  Accept or reject Butler, accept or reject West & Zimmerman, they give you a framework for thinking about a novel like Starless.

I had never traced anything back to John Money.  One of the reasons that it is important to understand how much you don't understand is that unless you are basically the top dog in your field, you don't know shit.  And even then, you probably still don't know shit, but basically, you should always understand that there are mountains of books and journals that you haven't read, and they "matter," if not for being right, then for having influenced others.

Understand how little you understand, or at least, how little you know.

John Money.  Holy shit.  So here's this guy, John Money.  He's the Xenu of postmodern gender.  You know how the Church of Scientology doesn't recruit you with Xenu?  They start with personality tests.  They wait until you are deep into it before they throw Xenu at you.  Why?  Because it's bonkers, and unless you are already fully committed, telling you about Xenu will drive you away.  That's John Money.

Anyway, so there's a couple in Canada-- the Reimers.  They had twins.  Twins!  Behold, the gold standard in psychology research.  Shortly after they were born, they were ready for the hospital to do the circumcisions.

Have you ever gone to the barber, and said, "just take a little off the top?"  And... he took off a little more than you wanted?

You're cringing right now, right?  It's so much worse.  So much worse.

Bruce was up first, and instead of a blade, they used an electric device, messed up, and burned off Little Bruce.

It gets worse.

So the Reimers hear about John Money, who adheres to a tabula rasa model of human psychology, most particularly as it applies to "gender identity."  Money believed that all humans are born gender-neutral, so all identity, expression and presentation are the product of how you are raised and socialized.

The Reimers hear about this, and they have twins.  One twin, as they'd say at a Philly Cheesesteak house, whiz-with, and the other, not so much.  This is also, for all practical purposes, random assignment, with twins.  In terms of research design, this is fucking perfect.

Also, not quite evil enough yet because Bruce still has a few more parts attached.  Money tells the Reimers to have Bruce's accidental surgery completed, if you catch my drift.  As an infant.

Yup.  An accident burned off Bruce's penis, so Money told his parents to remove his testicles too, and then raise him as a girl.  Brenda.  And not tell him, with his brother as a control.  Test subject, control subject, same parents, same household, same DNA.

From a research design perspective, you gotta hand it to John Money.  It was a very well-designed test of his ideas.  Evil as all fucking hell, but you have your random assignment to a treatment and control, everything else held constant, and if you really can just raise Bruce as Brenda, then that says a lot, right?

Including, among other things, that the rules for experimentation on human subjects in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s needed some tightening.  Seriously, when I wrote about Starless, it didn't occur to me that anyone in the Western world, under the auspices of modern "science" would try this shit.  Soviet Russia?  Maybe.  The modern, Western world?  Wow.

In 1975, Money rushed to publish.  When "Brenda" was nine years old, Money claimed that his experiment was a success.  Bruce was Brenda, and Brenda was, for all outward purposes, a girl, whereas Brian (the control) was a normal boy.  See?  Gender identity is... assigned.

But it didn't last.  Data reporting issues aside, by 13, Brenda was having major problems, and just didn't fit in as a girl, because Brenda was far more boy-like in general personality, all of this lead to social problems, ostracism, depression... The parents had to come clean, of course, and everything just went to shit.  Brenda had to just be "David," and give up that whole thing.  Depression was a lifelong problem (go figure), and David committed suicide.

John Money published in 1975 claiming "success," defined as making "Bruce" into "Brenda," a girl, by assigning the kid, ostensibly gender-neutral at birth (according to Money), to female.  Properly parsed, Bruce/Brenda was assigned female.  Not "assigned male at birth," but assigned female by John Money.  The thing that was an actual assignment process was when 1)  the doctors messed up the circumcision, 2) the Reimers, under Money's recommendation, followed that up with, well, finishing the job, and 3) telling Bruce/Brenda that "she" was a girl.  That is assignment.  Actual assignment at birth.

It just didn't work.  It did horrible damage, even beyond the hospital's original damage.

There are two ways this could be interpreted from a scholarly perspective, even from within the different sides of the trans perspective.  1)  Gender identity is fixed and intrinsic, and when it is out of alignment with physiology, problems ensue.  We call that gender dysphoria.  2)  Oh, fuck, we were trying to argue that "gender" is all a social construct, what do we do now?  Bury this, or at least, everything post-75.

Door Number 1 should have been tempting, or at least, might have been tempting if the right kind of scholar had been paying close enough attention.  One of the basic models of gender dysphoria is that there is internal sense of self (gender identity), there is physiology (sex), most of the time, they are congruent, and hence nobody bothers to think much about the former.  That's "comfortable in skin," or, CIS.  If, for whatever reason-- still not really well-understood-- someone has an internal sense that conflicts with physiology, the result is dysphoria.  If that sense of self is intrinsic and immutable, there's no conflict with Money.  He just sampled randomly, and hence had a near-zero chance of selecting a person who would have had no dysphoria with an assignment to female through the sicko experiment that he ran.

Rather, he unintentionally created dysphoria.  That would be compatible with one of the common models today.  Money's problem, and the problem with those who still want to adhere to his ideas, is that he was into the idea of "assignment."  Also, the extreme version of social construction which says that everything is socially constructed (postmodernism).

For that perspective, "Brenda's" 13-year old breakdown was a problem.  A big one.  Recall, after all, that this was a twin study with random assignment.  Actual assignment, by random chance, to gender.  If gender were all just a social construct, that should have worked, rather than been an abysmal failure.

So read the results in perhaps two ways.  First, can you induce gender dysphoria?  It looks like, yes, you can.  Money did it.  It was the exact opposite result of what he wanted to show, and claimed to show, after he initially reported his findings, hence the fraud in addition to the unethical practices, but yes, you can induce gender dysphoria, which in a sicko, disturbing way, says something interesting about sex, gender and the connection.  How would you feel in a different body and social context?  Well, go and read about it.

What this says about medical transitioning?  It would at least be points in favor for someone with gender dysphoria, by my reading, although I'll leave any discussion of the medical issues and tradeoffs to the real doctors, me being a Ph(ony) D(octor).  And this is the trick.  Properly parsed, Money's results actually contribute to some of the literature suggesting psychological benefits of transitioning for those with gender dysphoria.

The issue is that by rushing to publish (yes, in this case, age 9 was rushing to publish) and never retracting, Money put out a claim that the results supported his hypothesis when subsequent events refuted it entirely, and the hypothesis has somehow remained.  And Money/Xenu has remained.  You just have to dig to find him.

Now let's turn back to Starless.  The brotherhood says, OK, we'll train Khai, if Khai is declared bhazim, and not told about it.  Khai is assigned male.  Get your terminology right.  Khai is not "assigned female at birth."  Khai (presumably) has XX chromosomes, and female physiology, but the assignment process was what the brotherhood did, when they said, OK kid, you're a boy.  You're with us, learn how to fight and kick ass.

This leads to two questions.  First, does the "gender identity" take, and in the couple of years since I wrote that, something else has become a part of the political fight-o-sphere:  how tough is Khai?  Can Khai keep up with the biological males?

I didn't bother addressing that second question originally, but with the MMA thing being a thing, it seems worth considering now.

First, does the "identity" take?  In Starless, yes.  So much so that when the reveal is finally made, and the brotherhood has to admit to Khai what the deal is, Khai sort of has gender dysphoria because he "identifies," in some way, as male, has grown up looking around at big, buff dudes thinking, that's gonna be me, and is pissed when he learns that the reason he isn't filling out like that, and developing like that is, well, that's the difference between XX and XY physiology.  With respect to inducing male gender identity, it works in Starless, and consequently induces something like dysphoria.

In my original comments, I thought it was an interesting, if horrifying thought experiment.  But obviously one that could never be done in real life.  Except... that John Money did even worse.  He went so far as taking a boy who had that hospital accident, and telling the doctors to take even more.  With Khai, there was no surgery.  It was just a mindfuck, which is still bad, but what Money did to Bruce/David Reimer?  That's bad.

And of course, this means that Carey wound up getting it wrong.  Would it have worked?  Not likely.  Then again, Khai was touched by the god, Pahrkun, so maybe that plays a role.  She has that escape clause, but still.  Take a random girl, tell her she's a boy, raise her like a boy, and pose the following question:  will it take?  Will you have a person who is otherwise socially indistinguishable from a boy?

The follow-up results from Money's 1975 paper would say no.  And again, random assignment, twin study, raised in the same house at the same time... gold standard in research design.  Also, gold standard in ethics violations.

As for the Starless/MMA thing, it is worth noting that Khai kicks everyone's asses, but he channels the power of the god, Pahrkun to do so.  His mentor, Vironesh, tells him that among the Coursers of Obid (mercenary sea cops, basically) women and men fight together, and they basically don't care, which hints but does not state directly no biological difference in fighting, but Khai is implied to win fights against bigger, stronger opponents only because of the power of Pahrkun.

I actually know jack fucking shit about MMA, except that people fight about it, but I'll point out that this was there, and wonder if Carey would have written anything differently in a slightly different political climate.  That said, I so don't care about sports, and know nothing about MMA.

So I return to the novel, John Money, and how we assess this.  Carey did a lot of interesting world-building and back-research.  The concept of the bhazim actually does come from something real:  the bacha posh, and Carey took that and ran with it to someplace really interesting.  The likelihood that she had read about John Money and the Reimer twins is extremely low.  Zero?  No, but low.  I say that in part because the 1975 paper is buried amid the more prominent writings of Judith Butler, Candace West & Don Zimmerman, and a variety of more high-profile scholars, and in part because Carey would probably have written differently if she knew about the Reimers.  Perhaps not.  The postmodernists who remain acolytes of the Money school of thought continue to find ways to rationalize, which is always easy for a postmodernist, but given the risks that Carey took, that does not seem likely.

Of course, what happens in the novel is not a perfect analog to the case of David Reimer anyway.  Khai is completely isolated within the Fortress of the Winds for most of his childhood.  The only people he knows are men and boys, the only life he knows is the life of the warrior, and when you add in Pahrkun, sure.  Conduct the thought experiment, and even reading the full 13-and-older life of David Reimer, it does not necessarily beggar the imagination beyond the gods-and-magic that Khai would think and feel the way he does.

Yet that does not mean reading such books should be done divorced from knowledge of scholarship.  If we can call Money's work that.  We did learn something.  Just not what he wanted to show, nor claimed to show, because he was an ethical disaster, a liar and a fraud, which is pretty much par for the course in psychology.  (It's always psychology, isn't it?)

A good book?  Yes.  Interesting ideas?  Yes.  I thought the thought-experiment could never have been done.  I wrote about it that way when I initially wrote about the book, in a semi-series.  I assumed.  As it turned out, I was wrong.  About so much.  Never trust that psychologists won't do evil, vile things.  And then lie about it.

Mahavishnu Orchestra, "Vital Transformation," from The Inner Mounting Flame.