Milton Diamond (March 6, 1934 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. He died on March 20, 2024, at the age of 90.
Early career
Milton Diamond graduated from the City College of New York with a BS in biophysics in 1955, 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 Who Was Raised as a Girl (page 174), 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. 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. that physicians should not perform surgery on intersex people without their informed consent,
Work, appointments and awards
Diamond wrote extensively about abortion and family planning, pornography, intersexuality, transsexuality, and other sex- and reproduction-related issues for sex-related scientific journals as well as legal journals. He also wrote for 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
Diamond was based at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, from 1967. and in 2001/02 President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.
Awards
The awards Diamond received include:
- 1999: the British GIRES Research Prize
- 2000: the German Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for sexual science
- 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.) "for his decades-long commitment to the benefit of intersex people";
- 2009: the Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research by the University of Hawaiʻi;
- 2010: the Kinsey Award for 2011, made by the Midcontinent Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.
- 2015: the World Association for Sexual Health gold medal
- 2025: Posthumously awarded by InterACT: the 2024 Anne Tamar-Mattis Advocacy Award.