Ethel Person

Ethel Jane Spector Person Sherman Diamond (December 16, 1934 – October 16, 2012) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Her work investigated sexual fantasy via an epidemiologic disease model.

Ethel Jane Spector was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was a mathematician, and her father, a bar owner, died when she was 12. She earned a bachelor's degree from University of Chicago in 1956 and earned her medical degree in 1960 from the New York University College of Medicine. She married engineer Allen Person; they divorced after 10 years. In 1968 she married psychiatrist Barry Sherman, who died in 1976. In 1978 she married lawyer Stanley Diamond, who died in 2009.

Person and Lionel Ovesey examined the etiology of transgender people based on the developmental model of Margaret Mahler. Ovesey's model emphasized the child's separation-individuation anxiety producing a fantasy of symbiotic fusion with the mother which the transsexual tries to resolve by surgically becoming her mother. Because they viewed these identities and behaviors as psychosexual disorders, they sought evidence for their theories in pornography shops and similar venues.Stephen Burt observed that even in her later writings, she concluded that "cross-gender disorders are disorders," because they can cause distress even without social prejudice. Person also researched love triangles and women's sexual needs.

Person died of Alzheimer's disease at her home in Manhattan.

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