PEDIATRICS Vol. 36 No. 1 July 1965, pp. 51-55
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PSYCHOLOGIC EVALUATION OF THE CHILD WITH INTERSEX PROBLEMS

John Money Ph.D.1

1 Department of Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore

Psychosexual differentiation is a function of age. Therefore, the weight to be given it in hermaphroditic sex-assignment decisions is also a function of age. Psychosexual differentiation roughly parallels language differentiation and both are dependent on social stimulation and experience. By kindergarten age the critical period has been passed and the psychosexual identity, though not fully mature, fixed.

Psychosexual identity may contradict chromosomal, gonadal, or hormonal sex. It more generally agrees with the external genital morphology and the assigned sex. Rarely, psychosexual identity and assigned sex are discrepant, in which case a sex assignment is feasible in later childhood or adolescence. Otherwise, sex reassignment is for the most part contraindicated. It is not obligatory that assigned sex should agree with chromosomal or gonadal sex, but it should agree with external morphology, surgically corrected, and with hormonal sex correctly regulated at puberty.

Submitted on December 18, 1964
Accepted on January 15, 1965