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This chapter analyzes child sex abuse as both a real and phantasmatic phenomenon in the West that has become prominent in the last 40 years. It theorizes the secular ritual of rehabilitation of child molesters in its relation to the changing legal and social regulation of adult child relations. Arising from this relatively new phenomenon are a set of significant issues: defining and diagnosing paraphilia, transforming taboos into illegalities, including sex in anthropological concepts of incest, understanding anew the significance of parricide in the Oedipal complex, redefining intimacy and perversion in the changing lifecourse of men, recognizing disgust in the transference with the phenomenon of child sex abuse, overcoming obstacles to knowledgeability about child sex abuse and child sex molesters, creating untouchability in definitions of transgressive sex, acknowledging evidence of the efficacy of treatment of child sex offenders.

Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter traces a genealogy from foundational nineteenth-century sexological “perversion” theory, wherein sexual deviance is posited as a dangerous symptom of a degenerate society, through twentieth-century psychoanalytic writing on “perversion,” to John Money’s authoritative writings on “paraphilia” in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that although Money’s texts explicitly reject the values and systems of their historical forebears, the logic and rhetoric of nineteenth-century sexology haunt Money’s thinking. Given the influence of Money’s involvement in the definition of the paraphilia diagnosis (such as his naming of scores of paraphiliac conditions; his contribution to the DSM-III-R in 1987; his pioneering and controversial treatment program for paraphiliac sex offenders), the chapter contends that the disavowed inheritance of nineteenth-century sexological values in twentieth-century psychiatry continues to play into formulations of “paraphilia” today.

Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that compromises the proper, life-giving “nature” of reproductive sexuality and thereby threatens the social order. It argues that, at the fantasy level of Money’s system, paraphilia is understood as leading to individual and social death, in the intellectual historical context of a biological and psychological worldview in which the theory of “biophilia” was proliferating. The chapter explores Money’s wish to attain a “paraphilia-free” society, alongside his paradoxical call for “a pluralistic democracy of sexualism,” showing that his writing on paraphilia reveals one of the tensions at the heart of his “sex-positive” liberalism and libertarianism. For Money, and many who influenced and follow him, the possibility of the figure of the “paraphiliac citizen” is not admitted. Using insights from queer citizenship studies, the anti-social turn in queer theory, and what Judith Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminism,” the chapter undertakes a critique of the bio-normativity of this premise and the conservative paradigm of health and harm on which it rests.

This co-authored introduction provides a biographical sketch of John Money; outlines the key characteristics of his work on “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia”; identifies the major controversies over his theoretical claims and clinical practice; and explains the trajectory and methodology of the book.

This co-authored conclusion identifies and examines some of the key features of Money’s textuality and practice that interconnect his interventions into the three diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” These features include Money’s metaphor and methodology of “mapping,” his insistence on the power of language acquisition, and his concomitant obsession with neologistic labeling, especially of gender. The conclusion critiques Money’s fears that without unanimity in language, sexology could collapse into “wasteful word games,” just as gender development might become “ambiguous” in the manner of “native bilingualism.” Yet, the conclusion shows too that Money’s unremitting invention of terms stoked these very fears, demarcating a private linguistic world in which he and his colleagues were the only native speakers.