Australian Television
— A famous sex change still raises questions
about gender.
THE opening line is
shocking. "This is the story of a boy whose penis was
burnt off." What happened next imbues the nature-nurture
debate with personal and tragic significance.
Dr Money and the Boy
with No Penis, a British documentary to screen on
SBS, tracks the players in one of psychiatry's most
famous cases: the baby boy who was turned into a girl
then a boy again, his twin brother and the scientist
determined to prove his gender theories through
them.
The story of
Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer and his brother Brian - often
called the John/Joan case <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer>
- has been told many times. At first, research papers
hailed it a success. Later examinations revealed the pain
behind it. Following the sad end to the brothers' story,
this documentary, made 18 months ago for the BBC's
Horizon science program, is the final chapter and a
cautionary tale.
Producer Sanjida
O'Connell says the program's aim is to tell the family's
story and explore the science of conjecture. "Science is
supposed to put forward a theory that's proved or
disproved, then people move on," she says. "Whereas, of
course, scientists are humans too. They have their own
biases."
Louise Newman, chair of
the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of
Psychiatrists' <http://www.ranzcp.org/>
child and adolescent faculty, says the case remains
controversial.
"It's one of the biggest
questions in developmental theory: How much of our
personality and sense of identity, including sexual or
gender identity, is under biological control as opposed
to social and cultural."
In 1966 Canadian twins,
Bruce and Brian Reimer, aged seven months, went to a
hospital to be circumcised. During the procedure
electrical equipment malfunctioned and burnt off Bruce's
entire penis.
"It was like a little
burnt piece of string, right up to the crotch," remembers
their mother Janet in the documentary. "I said, 'Oh my
god, what are we going to do now?' "
Without modern plastic
surgery options, the Reimers remained uncertain until
they saw a television interview with Dr John Money
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money>,
a sexologist from Johns Hopkins University
<http://www.jhu.edu/>
in Baltimore.
The family were desperate
for guidance. He had a theory to prove; that a baby's
gender was neutral for the first two years and dependent
on whether it was raised as a male or female. In the
Reimer twins, he had a ready-made subject in Bruce and a
control subject in Brian. Bruce had surgery and Dr Money
instructed his parents to raise him as a girl, never
revealing his original gender.
In the years that
followed Dr Money quizzed the twins, now called Brenda
and Brian, on their differences. By 1972, Dr Money
declared the transition a success, trumpeting his theory
of gender neutrality in his book Man and Boy, Woman
and Girl.
"Dr Money can't be blamed
for coming up with a theory that many scientists now
believe was wrong," says producer Sanjida O'Connell of
the now retired doctor who declined to be interviewed for
the program.
Back at the Reimers',
young Brenda was displaying "masculine" and aggressive
behaviour, eschewing dolls in favour of cars and
trucks.
The program's dramatic
reconstructions show that Dr Money's interviews with the
twins grew more explicit and distressing. As adults, the
twins alleged that the doctor bullied them into stripping
naked and adopting sexual positions.
"If that happened then
it's obviously a terrible thing to do to a child,"
O'Connell says. "But I don't think he was a monster. He
was trying to do the best he could but wasn't flexible
enough to realise that his theory wasn't
working."
Aged 12, with Dr Money
pushing her to have surgery to construct a vagina, Brenda
threatened to kill herself. Her parents finally resolved
to tell her and Brian the truth. Brenda decided to live
as a boy, adopting the new name of David. He would later
have more surgeries, marry and become a stepfather. But
both twins remained traumatised.
With hindsight, says
Louise Newman, it's clear that the experiment was doomed
to fail. "This was a trauma that (David) never got over.
He was embittered, had no help, rejected help. Then he
had the permanent effects of having taken
hormones."
In 2000, John Colapinto's
book, As Nature Made Him, <http://www.amazon.com/>
revealed the painful extent of the experiment's failure.
The Horizon program includes interviews with David
conducted in 2000 for a film about intersex babies. By
2004, both brothers were dead.
Scientists are still
trying to determine what makes us male or female.
Associate Professor Vincent Harley, head of human
molecular genetics at Melbourne's Prince Henry's
Institute of Medical Research <http://www.phimr.monash.edu.au/>
is at the forefront of research into the genetics of sex.
"We're tackling (the question) at a number of levels. It
depends on what kind of sex you mean, whether you're
talking about their brains, their gonads or their role in
the world," he says.
Some genes have already
been identified as involved in controlling the
development of testes or ovaries. Genes expressed
differently in male and female brains, well before birth
and before hormones come into play, are "a starting point
to look for differences in gender identity".
Forty years after Brian
became Brenda, Professor Harley says that "the search
continues", adding that "people's gender identity is
unlikely to be as malleable as was thought
then".
A case like Brian
Reimer's would be handled very differently today, says
Louise Newman. "It's a terribly outmoded assumption, that
being a castrated male means being a female," she
says.
Gender identification
would also be measured against different yardsticks.
"What we have now are less rigid definitions of what's
gender-appropriate behaviour," Newman says. "It wouldn't
be a matter of 'You like Barbies, therefore you're a
girl. You like trucks therefore you're a boy.' Children
aren't like that. But in Money's day that wouldn't have
been acknowledged."
David Reimer had his own
theory about masculinity.
"What makes you a man is
you treat your wife well, you put a roof over your
family's head, you're a good father. Things like that add
up much more to being a man than just 'Bang! Bang! Bang!
Sex!'," he told author John Colapinto. "I guess John
Money would consider my children's biological fathers to
be real men. But they didn't stick around to take care of
the children. I did. That, to me, is a man."
Dr Money and the Boy
with No Penis airs Sunday, April 16, at 8.30pm on
SBS.
