‘As Nature Made Him,’ and attempts to undo him

Media portraits of a new book

Earlier this year, nurture versus nature reentered the public sphere, this time in a book commanding space on such unlikely mainstream bookshelves as the retail giant Target. It tells the haunting story of a boy, his twin, a botched operation, distraught parents, the world’s leading expert on transsexual surgery, and, perhaps most importantly, society’s assumptions about what makes a boy a boy or a girl a girl.

The book, “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl” (HarperCollins), relates the life of David Reimer, nee Bruce, a Winnipeg native who as an infant lost his penis in a circumcision accident.

Well known as the “twins” or the “John/Joan” case, the pseudonyms used in several articles previously published, the story goes like this: Told that their injured son would be made a pariah, the desperate parents turned to AASECT-member Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins University, who, along with other professionals, held that their one-and-a-half-year old son, with the help of surgery, hormones and gender-specific socialization, could become a daughter.

Ron and Janet Reimer heeded the advice. Thus began the remarkable transformation of Bruce to Brenda.

The experiment had ramifications well beyond one child’s sexual reassignment. Writes Pam Rosenthal on Salon. corn (Feb. 24),

“It was a researcher’s dream experiment, because Bruce was an identical twin, sharing DNA with his uninjured brother, Brian. If Bruce could be successfully reared as a girl, the case would serve as a dramatic illustration that socialization was the decisive influence in gender identity.”

Thirty-three years later, author John Colapinto recounts the effort to prove the plasticity of human sexual identity as an utter, nearly fatal, flop. And since its February release, it has spilled ink and filled the airwaves, sparking debates on gender and bringing the term “intersex” into new currency. The New York Times and Salon reviewed it, and interviewer Terry Gross, of WHYY’s Fresh Air, devoted an entire hour-long program to Reimer and Colapinto (Feb. 16). What makes the story so wince-worthy and fascinating is that it challenges what Colapinto calls “the fundamental building block of our identity…our sexuality.” In doing so, it roots itself squarely on the side of our genes. As a teenager, Brenda demanded to be surgically changed back to male and renamed himself David, as in David and Goliath.

“The fact that David exists as a man with an unequivocal sense of self, but grew up with no penis and the name of Brenda, the fact that … [not] … even a scintilla of feminine psyche would take hold, for me, it was just a wake-up call,” Colapinto told Gross.

“My book is not an argument that nature is the sole shaper of self and sexuality, but it’s certainly I hope a corrective to the notion that has prevailed since mid-century that environment rules it. There’s an interaction between the two factors. The deepest substrata of sexual identity is in the genes somewhere.”

Speaking to Gross, Reimer, 34, calls his adventure into girlhood a fiction, a sad and lonely one. “The only thing that made me a girl was my birth certificate was changed, my name was changed, my hair had to grow and I wore different clothes,” he said. “But the way I walked, the way I talked, the types of toys I liked to play with, the type of people I liked to play with, the kind of activities I liked to do, that was no different.”

Today, Reimer, who is a husband and father, claims to have no special insight into women. “I wish I did” he told Gross, in a lighter moment.

From the start, Brenda fiercely resisted medical and psychological intervention. “Dealing with [Money] was like dealing with a famous chess player” Reimer told Gross. “You always had to be one step ahead in the game and watch your front and your back. I was just terrified of John Money getting the upper hand.”

During the interview, Reimer recalled his objection at the age of 7 to surgery, advocated by Money, which would have created a uterus and fully formed vagina. He remembered feeling “horrified” at the notion. As a preteen, Brenda continued to fight the surgery. “I thought, ‘What’s the worst they can do? Kill me?’”

That was not the worst of fates, Reimer realized. Until his father broke the news to the 14-year-old over an ice cream cone, Reimer had thought himself insane.

Reimer has blocked out memories of sexual rehearsal play, the mimicking of sexual intercourse between himself as Brenda and his twin brother. This technique, according to Colapinto, was a “crusade” for Money. “It has become very obvious to me” Colapinto reported Money as saying on the Canadian TV show The Originals, “that sexual rehearsal play is part of nature’s absolute intention, in order to allow children to grow up to be sexually normal.”

In his research, Colapinto also reported that the twins were asked to examine and compare their genitals in an effort to show Brenda’s sexual inadequacy and, thus, need for surgery.

Money broke off contact with Colapinto early on, and the absence makes the sex researcher open to harsh interpretations. “If the book has any flaw” wrote Natalie Angier in The New York Times (Feb. 20), “it is that Money emerges as almost too evil to be believed. In addition to the ordinary scientific sins of arrogance, opportunism and bombast, he apparently added sadism and perversion”

Meanwhile, Salon’s Rosenthal called the doctor “crudely simplistic and overconfident” particularly in cooing that Brenda had become “daddy’s little sweetheart” which she most certainly had not. “Gender boundaries seem to harden under scrutiny. Money may have contended that gender was arbitrary and malleable, but he had no way of assigning gender identity except by imposing stereotypical behavior”

When CS called for a reaction to his critics’ assertions, Money, through a spokesperson, declined comment, his standard practice on the matter.

In her article, Rosenthal invokes the growing voice of intersexuals, people — 1 in 2,000 babies — born with genitals that are not recognizably male or female. Protesting early surgery that assigns them a gender before their own preferences are known, they face a difficult fight against a medical community uncomfortable with ambiguity.

Asked by Gross for his feelings about the intersexual movement, Reimer bristled, declaring himself a loner who holds deeply cynical views of organized groups and therapy.

“I’ve had years of so-called professionals look after my so-called best interests when they had their own interest at heart” he said. “If you go through the exact same experience as me, you’re lucky to be alive.”

By Diane Richard – ‘As Nature Made Him,’ and attempts to undo him. By: Richard, Diane, Contemporary Sexuality, Apr2000, Vol. 34, Issue 4.

page updated 7 January 2011