 |
Mother Nature Strikes Back
Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings
is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.
- Deborah Tannen
You Just Don't Understand
by John Colapinto
Journalist John Colapinto offers evidence that human sexual identity is not a social construct. Indeed, Tom Wolfe has said that Colapinto's shocking book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (HarperCollins), "stands as exhibit A" against the idea that nurture is more important than nature. It is the heartbreaking story of a baby boy whom an ambitious doctor changed into a girl.
John Colopinto:
My book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, is the story of an extraordinary and unrepeatable experiment in human sexual and gender identity. It is about a boy who was born developmentally normal in the mid-1960s and who, when he was 8 months old, underwent circumcision because of a minor problem with his foreskin. During the circumcision, the doctor used the wrong instrument, an electrocautery needle instead of a scalpel, and the p***s was badly burned and eventually sloughed off. Left with a baby who had a pair of normal testicles but no p***s, the parents searched everywhere for help in their community of Winnipeg, Canada.
Eventually they saw Dr John Money, a world famous sexologist from Johns Hopkins University, on television. Money was talking about his new clinic for sex changes. He had a theory that we are born psychosexually neutral, that we are, in fact, blank slates. Money believed that our gender identity is written upon us by society, by parental influences, and societal pressures. That viewpoint was popular in the 1960s, largely because of Money’s writings from the 1950s.
Like everyone who has ever heard John Money speak, the young parents were enthralled. He was charismatic. He was smooth, and he never stumbled over a word. They wrote him and asked if he could help. When Money read about this p***s-less boy, he replied, "Indeed I can help. Get down here to Baltimore immediately and let's get to work." So they went to Baltimore, and Money assured them that sex easily could be reassigned up until 3 years of age.
Money had worked with hermaphroditic children, children born with anatomical anomalies of the sex organs. He had never tested his theory with a developmentally normal child. So, this was a big moment for him. And there was another amazing wrinkle: the baby in question was born an identical twin. The other twin, who had not been injured, was being raised as a boy, Brian. That meant that Money had a perfectly matched control for an experiment to show that it is nurture, as opposed to nature, that defines us sexually. At the age of 22 months, the boy's two testicles were surgically removed, and a rudimentary v****a, which was to be completed later, was fashioned; Bruce Reimer became Brenda Reimer.
When the twins were about 6 years old, Money, who was already quite famous for his theories about gender identity, said, "It's going marvelously." He continued to say that through the 1970s, and then, interestingly enough, when the child was around the age of puberty, Money mysteriously stopped writing about the twins case. One scientist, however, Dr Milton Diamond, remained interested in it. Diamond suspected puberty would be the moment when we would know for sure, but Money seemed disinclined to speak about how it was going. He put Diamond off.
Through his own investigative methods, Diamond, in the early 1990s, found the twin who had been raised as Brenda, now an adult, living in Winnipeg. He did not find Brenda living with a white picket fence and a husband and children by adoption — the picture Money had painted. Instead, he found a man, 32 at the time, married with 3 children by adoption. He was employed as a slaughterhouse sanitation worker, a really rather ghastly environment where no women worked.
Diamond wrote a scientific paper that explained that this world famous, and supposedly successful, sex change had, in fact, been an abject flop. As it turned out, Brenda had been miserable from day one. The first minute she was put in a dress, she pulled it off. She seemed to have had an instinctual aversion to frilly clothing. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns. She was ridiculed in the schoolyard. She had a kind of pressing, aggressive need to dominate. She was relentlessly teased for her masculine gait, tastes, and behaviors. She complained to her parents and teachers that she felt like a boy; the adults — on Dr Money's strict orders of secrecy — insisted that she was only going through a phase. Meanwhile, Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide; her father lapsed into mute alcoholism; the neglected Brian eventually descended into drug use, pretty crime, and clinical depression.
We don’t possess good language for speaking about sex-behaviour differences. But there were indefinable things that people were picking up about Brenda, and that Brenda was picking up about herself. She had been put on a course of female hormones and had grown breasts. She was finally told the truth at the urging of a compassionate psychiatrist, who said to her parents, "You must tell her or she will kill herself."
Brenda then, at the age of 15, embarked on the remarkable journey of undergoing a sex change from girl to boy, which required a double mastectomy, a course of testosterone, and obviously a name change. He rechristened himself David, after David and Goliath. He felt he had done something similar to the biblical hero in slaying the Goliath of the medical establishment and society: the teachers, parents, psychiatrists and psychologists, the endocrinologists and surgeons, and everyone else who had been trying to press him into girlhood.
His decision and his ability to make that sexual change spoke to me more clearly and dramatically and movingly about his emphatic need to live in the gender that he felt himself to be more than any other aspect of this story. What was outrageous about the whole story was how readily Money's theories have been accepted, first of all, by the medical establishment, and then by the social sciences and the media. To hear David speak about sexuality is to feel that you're in the presence of an oracle. His words have a kind of horse sense. What I found so compelling about David's story is how incredibly stupid smart people can be.
Being Brenda
by Oliver Burkeman and Gary Younge
They were meant to show that gender was determined by nurture, not nature - one identical twin raised as a boy and the other brought up as a girl after a botched circumcision. But two years ago Brian Reimer killed himself, and last week David - formerly Brenda - took his life too. This is the tragic story of Dr Money's sex experiment...
Until a few years ago, the name David Reimer meant little to those outside his immediate circle, and by the time he killed himself last Tuesday in unknown circumstances in his hometown of Winnipeg, it was already slipping back towards obscurity - a name belonging to nobody more remarkable than a local odd-job man, a 38-year-old former slaughterhouse worker who was separated from his wife, and enjoyed shopping at flea markets and tinkering with his car.
In fact, to anyone taking an interest in the development of psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, Reimer's life story would have long been infamous, but also pseudonymous. Going by the name "John", and subsequently "Joan", David Reimer had been an unwitting guinea-pig - along with his identical twin brother Brian - in a medical experiment at first celebrated, then notorious. Masterminded by a prominent Baltimore physician, John Money, it was an attempt to settle, once and for all, the fraught nature-versus-nurture debate: to prove that gender was so fluid that by a mere change in childrearing practice, plus a little surgery, a boy could be turned into a girl, while his twin developed as a male.
It would split the world of sexual psychology in two. And after 12 years of traumatising treatment, followed by a further two decades spent attempting to repair the damage, it would drive David Reimer to his death. "It was like brainwashing," Reimer once said, having resumed his male identity after a childhood spent as Brenda. "I'd give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it's torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind."
The tragedy has its roots in what seemed like a routine trip to hospital in 1966 for Janet and Ron Reimer and their twin baby boys, Bruce and Brian. Doctors had recommended circumcision, a practice still routine in much of North America, but Bruce's operation went distressingly wrong. Like almost every detail of the story, what actually happened is still fiercely disputed but what is clear is that the electric cauterising machine being used by doctors caused burning to his p***s so severe as to render the organ unrescuable.
Reconstructive genital surgery was still rudimentary, and medical experts could offer only pessimism. So when the despairing parents happened to catch a television show, some months later, on which John Money was propounding his radical new theories about gender formation, it seemed to offer a lifeline. "He was saying that it could be that babies are born neutral, and you could change their gender," Janet Reimer later told John Colapinto, author of a book on the experiment entitled As Nature Made Him.
In photographs taken at the time, Money - then, as now, affiliated to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland - looks like a parody of a progressive "sexologist", turtlenecked and moustachioed, and his writings did nothing to dispel that impression. Raised in a conservative religious family in New Zealand, he had rebelled and become a self-described "missionary of sex", revelling in shocked responses to his tireless advocacy of open marriages and - a particular favourite - bisexual group sex.
At their most extreme, Money's public statements had appeared to endorse, or at least not to condemn, incest and ******, but there was no hint of that in the television show Janet and Ron Reimer saw. They wrote to him, and he wrote swiftly back. He was confident, he said, that Bruce could be successfully raised as a girl. From an experimental perspective, Brian Reimer would provide the perfect control: his genetic inheritance was identical to Bruce's. The only difference was that one would be nurtured as a girl, and the other as a boy.
Money's emphasis on nurture over nature played well with the progressive spirit of the times, and especially with the women's movement, its proponents eager to establish that women's traditional social roles were not biologically pre-ordained. "Postwar, in any case, there was a move away from people being innately, biologically, inherently anything," says Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College in London. "We'd just seen Nazism, and the emphasis had been put on the idea that certain people were innately evil - Jews and gypsies, among others - so the emphasis on culture and society fitted well with social democratic ideals." The Reimers did not engage in this kind of debate. "I looked up to [John Money] as a god," Janet said simply.
Bruce Reimer started to become Brenda on 3 July1967. Physicians at Johns Hopkins surgically castrated him, and the remaining skin was used to forge a "cosmetic vaginal cleft". Money sent the family back to Winnipeg with strict instructions. "He told us not to talk about it," Ron Reimer told John Colapinto. "Not to tell [Brenda] the whole truth, and that she shouldn't know she wasn't a girl."
Things started going wrong almost immediately. Janet Reimer recalled dressing Brenda in her first dress just before the child was due to turn two. "She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, she knows she's a boy and she doesn't want girls' clothing." Brenda was bullied viciously at school. When she urinated standing up in the school lavatories, she was threatened with a knifing.
Whether all the blame should lie with Money remains a matter of contention. His supporters argue that reconstructive surgery techniques of the time were such that trying to turn Bruce into Brenda might genuinely have been the least worst option. In public, Money advertised the "John/Joan" study as a resounding success. "This dramatic case," Time magazine reported, picking up on his salesmanship, "provides strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns on masculine and feminine behaviour can be altered."
In private, though, things were spinning into chaos. Brenda was required to attend regular therapy sessions with Money in Baltimore, in the company of her brother. According to Colapinto's account, they soon degenerated into horrifying encounters that deeply traumatised the two children. Showing the children "explicit sexual pictures" was seemingly central to Money's theories of gender reassignment. David Reimer later recalled, as Brenda, "getting yelled at by Money ... he told me to take my clothes off, and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed 'Now!' I thought he was going to give me a whipping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking."
In the children's grimmest recollection - one they found almost impossible to talk about years later - Money allegedly made "Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks", an element of Money's theory he referred to as "sexual rehearsal play". (The author John Heidenry, who wrote a recent review defending the sexologist, calls this charge "outrageous and offensive", and says Brian, the source of the claim, may have been suffering false memory syndrome.)
By the time Brenda reached her teens she had attempted suicide at least once; she refused further surgery but consented, though irregularly, to take œstrogen supplements to encourage the development of breasts. John Money gradually drifted from the Reimers' lives, but Brenda remained under constant psychiatric treatment. It was after one such session with a Winnipeg psychiatrist in 1980 that Ron Reimer collected his daughter in the car and, instead of taking her home, drove her to an ice-cream parlour, where he told her everything.
The upturn in Reimer's fortunes lasted several years. Brenda opted for a sex change within weeks of her father telling her the truth. Thanks to developments in phalloplasty, Brenda, taking the name David, received surgery that after five years left him with a reconstructed p***s resembling a real one, with limited sensation, and usable for sex. When he was 23 he met Jane, a single mother of three, and married her soon afterwards. In 2000, he went public with his story.
But his happiness didn't last. Two years ago, Brian Reimer apparently killed himself, taking an overdose of drugs he was taking for schizophrenia. David reportedly felt responsible for the death, and visited Brian's grave daily, weeding the plot and bringing fresh flowers. David was not easy to live with, given his explosive anger, his cyclical depressions, his fears of abandonment — all of which Jane weathered for almost 14 years. But with David spiraling ever deeper into sloth and despair, she told him on the weekend of May 2 that they should separate for a time. David stormed out of the house. Two days later, Jane received a call from the police, saying that they had found David but that he did not want her to know his location. Two hours after that, Jane got another call. This time the police told her that David was dead. He had retrieved a shotgun from his home while Jane was at work and taken it into the garage. There, with the terrible, methodical fixedness of the suicide, he sawed off the barrel, then drove to the nearby parking lot of a grocery store, parked, raised the gun, ended his suffering.
Despite Colapinto's claims that David made a large amount of money from the book, those who knew him said he was often hard up; at the Transcona golf club, in Winnipeg's eastern suburbs, where he did odd jobs, the members had a whip round for him so he could afford to eat. Friends say he had became particularly distraught during the last few months; Reimer had told them he had lost at least $47,500 last year in a shady pro golf shop investment. The Manitoba Securities Commission had warned potential investors last November that "your money may be at risk" if it was placed with shop owner Gary Perch.
The world of psychology learned of the failure of Money's experiment through a paper by a rival, Dr Milton Diamond, of the University of Hawaii, who eventually traced those who had taken over treatment of the twins. For Lynne Segal, the story of the experiment does not settle the nature/nurture debate one way or the other - her view, widely shared today, is that the dichotomy is false - but it shows the perils of psychologists trying to prove too much through research. "It's far too simplistic, and far too interventionist, this idea that we can control and model and shape people to prove one thing or another."
John Money remains an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins. "He's not commenting on this story," his assistant told the Guardian yesterday. "There is no comment to make."
Source: books.guardian.co.uk The Guardian Wednesday 12 May 2004
|
 |
