Milton Diamond
I went to free classes Mickey held over lunchtime at the University of Hawaii from about 1993 to 1997. I didn’t attend every class due to conflicting work schedules, but I went as often as I could and each class was fascinating. Mickey was cutting edge. I’m happy to see his work is being referenced. The battle for human rights continues and has in fact accelerated at this time. We need to stand up and get the MAGA government out of our bedrooms and stop controlling our bodies.
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| Milton Diamond PhD | |
|---|---|
| Diamond in 2010 | |
| Born | March 6, 1934 (age 88) New York City , New York, U.S.[1] |
| Alma mater | City College of New York (BS) University of Kansas (PhD) |
| Known for | Following up the case of David Reimer |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | The study of human sexuality |
| Institutions | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa |
Milton Diamond (born March 6, 1934) is an American Professor Emeritus of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.[2] After a career in the study of human sexuality, Diamond retired from the university in December 2009 but continued with his research and writing until retiring fully in 2018.[3]
Contents
- 1Early career
- 2David Reimer
- 3Work, appointments and awards
- 4Selected publications
- 5References
- 6External links
Early career[edit]
Milton Diamond graduated from the City College of New York with a B.S. in biophysics in 1955,[1] after which he spent three years in the Army as an engineering officer, stationed in Japan.[4] On returning to the United States, he attended graduate school at University of Kansas from 1958–1962 and earned a Ph.D. in anatomy and psychology from that University.[4] His first job was teaching at the University of Louisville, School of Medicine where he simultaneously completed two years toward an M.D., passing his Basic Medicine Boards,[1] and in 1967 he moved to Hawaii to take up a post at the recently established John A. Burns School of Medicine. Milton Diamond had a long running feud with the psychologist Dr. John Money. In 1965 Diamond published “A Critical Evaluation of the Ontogeny of Human Sexual Behavior” a critique of Money’s work. In the early seventies, Diamond and Money were attending a conference on transgenderism in Dubrovnik. According to the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Raised As a Girl (p. 174)[5] at this conference Money initiated a loud and aggressive argument with Diamond. One witness claims that Money punched Diamond; however, Diamond himself said that he could not recall any physical contact during this encounter.
David Reimer[edit]
Diamond is known for following up on the case of David Reimer, a boy raised as a girl under the supervision of John Money after a botched circumcision damaged his penis beyond surgical repair.[6][7] This case, which Money renamed that of “John/Joan” to protect Reimer’s privacy, has become one of the most cited cases in the literature of psychiatry, anthropology, women’s studies, child development, and biology of gender.[citation needed] With the cooperation of H. Keith Sigmundson, who had been Reimer’s supervising psychiatrist, Diamond tracked down the adult Reimer and found that Money’s sex reassignment of Reimer had failed. Diamond was the first to alert physicians that the model, proposed by Reimer’s case, of how to treat infants with intersex conditions was faulty.[8]
Diamond recommended[9] that physicians do no surgery on intersexed infants without their informed consent, assign such infants in the gender to which they will probably best adjust, and refrain from adding shame, stigma and secrecy to the issue, by assisting intersexual people to meet and associate with others of like condition. Diamond similarly encouraged considering the intersex condition as a difference of sex development, not as a disorder.[10]
Work, appointments and awards[edit]
Diamond wrote extensively about abortion and family planning, pornography, intersexuality, transsexuality, and other sex- and reproduction-related issues for professional sex and legal journals, as well as lay periodicals. He was frequently interviewed for public media and legal matters, and often served as an expert in court proceedings, and was known for his research on the origins and development of sexual identity. He retired from teaching in 2009, but continued to research and consult concerning transsexuality, intersexuality and pornography until he retired fully in 2018.
Appointments[edit]
Diamond was based at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, from 1967.[4] He was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Reproductive Biology in 1971, and from 1985 until his retirement he was Director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society[4] within the School of Medicine.
In 1999 Diamond was appointed as President of the International Academy of Sex Research,[11] and in 2001/02 as President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.[12]
Awards[edit]
The awards Diamond have received include:
- 1999: the British GIRES Research Prize[13]
- 2000: the German Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for sexual science[14]
- 2005: the Norwegian Diversity Prize for his research efforts on behalf of transsexual and transgender people worldwide
- 2008: the first of a proposed annual award made by the German Intersex Society (Intersexuelle Menschen e.V.)[15] “for his decades-long commitment to the benefit of intersex people”;[16]
- 2009: the Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research by the University of Hawai’i;[17]
- 2010: the Kinsey Award for 2011, made by the Midcontinent Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.[18]
- 2015: the World Association for Sexual Health gold medal[19]
Selected publications[edit]
- Sexual Decisions (1980), ISBN 0-316-18388-1
- Sexwatching: Looking into the World of Sexual Behaviour (1992), ISBN 1-85375-024-7
- Sexual Behavior in Pre Contact Hawai’i: A Sexological Ethnography[20][21]
References[edit]
- ^ Jump up to:a b c “Scientific Advisory Board”. Archive for Sexology. Archived from the original on August 30, 2009. Retrieved September 16, 2009.
- ^ “Board of Regents’ Meeting, Thursday, September 25, 2014” (PDF). University of Hawaii. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
- ^ “Pacific Center for Sex and Society – Home Page”. University of Hawaii. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c d “An Introduction to Professor Milton Diamond Ph.D.” Changeling Aspects. Retrieved September 16, 2009.
- ^ Colapinto, John (2000). As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-092959-6
- ^ Colapinto, John (2001). As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. New York: HarperCollins. pp. 11-13. ISBN 978-0-06-019211-2.
- ^ “Health Check: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl”. BBC News. November 23, 2010. Retrieved December 19, 2014.
- ^ “Sexual Identity, Monozygotic Twins Reared in Discordant Sex Roles and a BBC Follow-Up”. Milton Diamond, Ph.D. Retrieved August 1, 2011.
- ^ Diamond, Milton; Sigmundson, H. Keith (October 1997). “Management of intersexuality. Guidelines for dealing with persons with ambiguous genitalia”. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 151 (10): 1046–50. doi:10.1001/archpedi.1997.02170470080015. PMID 9343018. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
- ^ Diamond, Milton; Beh, Hazel. (2008). “Changes In Management Of Children With Differences Of Sex Development”. Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology & Metabolism. 4 (1): 4–5. doi:10.1038/ncpendmet0694. hdl:10125/66380. PMID 17984980. S2CID 13382948.
- ^ “Meeting History”. International Academy of Sex Research. Archived from the original on March 30, 2009. Retrieved September 15, 2009.
- ^ “Society Presidents”. The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. Archived from the original on November 15, 2009. Retrieved September 15, 2009.
- ^ “Past awards for research”. Gender Identity Research and Education Society. Archived from the original on July 18, 2011. Retrieved November 24, 2010.
- ^ “Archive for Sexology”. HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT ZU BERLIN. Archived from the original on September 1, 2009. Retrieved November 11, 2009.
- ^ “Intersexuelle Menschen e.V.” Retrieved September 15, 2009.
- ^ “Zwischengeschlechtliche ehrten Milton Diamond”. Zwischengeschlecht.info. Archived from the original on September 20, 2009. Retrieved September 15, 2009.
- ^ “Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research awarded to outstanding UH faculty”. University of Hawai’i System. Retrieved September 15, 2009.
- ^ “Kinsey Award”. The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. Archived from the original on August 9, 2011. Retrieved August 1, 2011.
- ^ “WAS Newsletter 2015, Volume 12 Issue 1” (PDF). The World Association for Sexual Health. Retrieved October 4, 2015.
- ^ “Sexual Behavior in Pre Contact Hawai段: A Sexological Ethnography”. Archived from the original on December 27, 2008. Retrieved December 13, 2008.
- ^ “Sexual Behavior in Pre-Contact Hawai’i: A Sexological Ethnography”. Archived from the original on December 24, 2008. Retrieved December 13, 2008.
External links[edit]
| hideAuthority control | |
|---|---|
| General | ISNI 1VIAF 1WorldCat |
| National libraries | NorwaySpainGermanyUnited StatesJapanNetherlands |
| Biographical dictionaries | Germany |
| Other | Social Networks and Archival ContextSUDOC (France) 1 |
- 1934 births
- Living people
- Medical academics
- American sexologists
- Transgender studies academics
- Intersex and medicine
- University of Kansas alumni
- City University of New York alumni
- University of Hawaiʻi faculty
- People from New York City
- University of Louisville faculty
- University of Louisville School of Medicine alumni
- United States Army officers
THE BLOG
Professor Mickey Diamond: “Nature Loves Variety; Unfortunately, Society Hates It”
By
Executive Director, Gender Rights Maryland
Sep. 1, 2016, 02:39 PM EDT | Updated Sep. 2, 2017
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
I have for the past four years writing my columns avoided the issue which has, to a large degree, overdetermined my life – my life as an intersex person. There are a number of reasons for this – the complexity of the issue, the involvement of endocrine disruptors in the genesis of the condition which few still want to acknowledge, its causation of the most traumatic time of my life, and the political difficulty in dealing with intersex in the context of the growing acceptance of trans rights.
Starting with the last – the success of the trans rights movement – I see sufficient progress that the old tension between the two communities in the U.S. has resolved sufficiently that it’s time for the two to coexist, and there is no better underpinning to that political marriage than recognition that being trans is a form of human intersexuality. One example – now that we have open trans military service, the team that brought that about, led by Aaron Belkin, is turning its attention to intersex persons.
I believe there is no better time to discuss this than with the upcoming publication of Transsexuality in Theology and Neuroscience: Findings, Controversies and Perspectives, ed. by Gerhard Schreiber (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2016).
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I can see this evolution in our civil rights movement also helping to elevate the issue of endocrine disruption and its impact on sexual development into greater public consciousness. Efforts have been made, from those by Deborah Rudacille in her 2003 book, The Riddle of Gender, to the recent broadcast by Dion Lim at the Tampa affiliate of CBS News earlier this year. Endocrine disruptors (EDCs), the first and best studied of which is Diethylstilbestrol (DES), have profound effects on human health and development. Of greatest concern to me has been DES’s impact on sexual development, leading to intersex conditions, including transsexualism, as well as an increase in homosexuality, both male and female. DES exposure has also impacted me by causing renal failure and septic shock, and months of treatment that can be considered nothing but rape and torture, with resulting depression and PTSD. If that wasn’t already enough, it also probably caused both my mother’s breast cancers, with all the consequences from those experiences.
Intersex conditions are far more complex than basic transsexualism (I am not including the newer phenomena of genderqueer and non-binary identities), but I believe it’s time to begin the effort. The chapter in the aforementioned book called “Transsexualism as a Form of Intersex,” by our greatest basic science researcher on the subject, Professor Mickey Diamond, is the ideal source material. It is the distillation of a lifetime of work on his part which was last published in more primitive form in the 2006 paper, Atypical Gender Development – A Review. The title of this column is Mickey’s favorite aphorism
– “Nature loves variety; unfortunately society hates it.”
Here is Mickey’s abstract of the chapter:
This paper attempts to demonstrate that there are significant natural in-born sex differences found between the brains of those called transsexual people and others. It does so by showing the differences are due to normal genetic, hormonal and environmental forces that lead eventually to differences in the transsexual person’s brain. This development brings with it feelings of dysphoria regarding one’s gender identity. It is such feelings that lead to a desire for sex/gender change. These brain differences are sufficient enough to conclude that persons with a transsexual condition are intersexed. Simultaneously it is recognized that many intersexed persons will switch from their assigned gender, yet many will not.
Professor Diamond begins by touching on the biological underpinnings of transsexualism, quoting a paper from Coolidge, Thede and Young from 2002 where they reported a strong heritable component, and then referencing a paper of his from 2013 where he detailed his long years of studying twins, both monozygotic (identical) and dizogytic (fraternal), which points to a genetic component. I can personally recall being told by him of a set of trans triplets!
Mickey then discusses some basic human embryology, focusing on the temporal development of genitals vs. the brain. He concludes, “It thus is clear that the brain and genitals can develop independently and under different forces,” the main force being androgens, known as the primary male sex hormone. He quotes Professor William Reiner, formerly of Johns Hopkins, who famously proved the existence of human gender identity in 2004, saying,
The etiology of gender identity may be neither obvious nor easily conceptualized. Yet what is obvious is that the presence of androgen is critical. It is the determining factor in the development of […] behavioral sexual dimorphism in humans–genital structure, […] male-typical behaviors, masculinization of the brain […].
The Professor continues by defining sex and various terms relating to both trans persons as well as those who are intersex, either visibly or in an occult manner, explaining that “intersex” has been categorized by the medical profession since 2006 as Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD), or, as some prefer, Variations of Sexual Development (VSD). He describes various intersex conditions, such as Klinefelter’s Syndrome (47XXY, at times with a trans identity), Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (raised as female and with a female gender identity), Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (masculinized women, quite often lesbian-identified), and 5-alpha reductase deficiency (common in the Dominican Republic) and 17-beta hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency (common in Gaza) (raised as girls but masculinized at puberty).
He then briefly describes the history of the discovery of sexual dimorphism (sex differences) in mammalian brains, including humans, led by Drs. Gorski, Hofman, and Swaab, and then moves on to the anatomical differences in the hypothalamus of the human brain in transsexual persons discovered by Drs. Zhou, Swaab and Kruijver. Dr. Diamond concludes,
This work supports the paradigm that, for transsexual persons, sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go in opposite directions and points to a neurobiological basis of transsexualism and the accompanying gender dysphoria.
Other findings have piled up over the years, showing that brain anatomy correlates with gender identity, not sex assigned at birth. Studies performed by Swaab, Garcia-Falgueras, Bao, Simon, Yokota, Rametti, Zubiarre-Elorza, Taziaux, Govier and Luders, including further brain anatomy measurements with increasingly sophisticated instrumentation, dichotic listening and oto-acoustic emission measurements, kisspeptin expression, various olfactory tests, and even dental measurements, all add to the literature which demonstrates that trans persons reflect their brain sex, or gender identity, and not their genital anatomy.
Mentioning the 2013 paper by Saraswat (Evidence Supporting the Biologic Nature of Gender Identity) and the recent book by Bevans, The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism, Diamond concludes,
To this investigator there seems evidence enough to consider trans persons as individuals intersexed in their brains and scant evidence to think their gender transition is a simple and unwarranted social choice.
That is the bottom line. This investigator is not just any investigator, but a leading world authority (in contrast to Paul McHugh), who recognizes that being trans is a natural, biological phenomenon, a form of human intersex development, where the sex of the brain, manifest in many different regions, differs from genital anatomy. That is a literal definition of “intersex,” and while it might not seem politically relevant, it has the potential to be.
There is NO dispute within medicine that intersex persons exist. There may be embarrassment, though that has been fading, and a reluctance to discuss and study the phenomenon by physicians and researchers who are uncomfortable with their own sexuality, but the existence of, and the science underpinning, the multitude of intersex conditions is not in dispute. Even right-wing religious fundamentalist extremists like Professor Paul McHugh do not deny the existence of human intersexuality or the existence of gender identity.
They run into problems with trans persons when they try to reconcile the science with their faith. Since the intersex political movement in the U.S. has been quiet for the past decade and, even when storming the American Academy of Pediatrics garnered little media attention, the likes of McHugh just ignored that phenomenon. They have not ignored the trans experience, though, with McHugh on the attack since 1975.
Reconceptualizing transness as intersex interferes with their denial of science fact and undermines their assaults on trans persons, and particularly trans children and adolescents. Paul McHugh would never dare to shame a child born intersex, nor to claim that “God doesn’t make mistakes” when it comes to such children. The reactionary fundamentalists have no problem, however, making such claims about trans persons, simply because being trans is an occult form of intersex. And just as we find it easier to marginalize the brain-disabled compared to others whose infirmity is visible to the human eye, so do the fundamentalists find it easier to condemn trans persons whose intersexuality is often confined just to the brain. Well, God doesn’t make mistakes with trans persons, either. Believers can just check their Bible for confirmation.
Making this case, with due concern to maintaining the rights of those born genitally intersex and preventing any reconstructive surgery prior to the age of consent, will help educate the American population, and add confidence to federal judges, and possibly the Justices as well, when they decide cases dealing with trans persons. Equal protection means just that, and it includes the trans and, more generally, the intersex population. Just because you can’t see the differences doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and just as you’d accept differences that are visible to you the obligation continues even when they’re not discernible.
After all, when you know something to be true about yourself, you expect others to take your word for it, respect your dignity and not subject you to an MRI. Trans persons deserve the same consideration.
