There's a moment in the film An Officer and a Gentleman which anyone who saw it in a theater can never forget. Richard Gere is kickboxing with Louis Gossett and just when he gets the upper hand, Gossett kicks him in the groin...hard. The reaction from the crowd at the showing I attended was uniform : every guy in the place crossed his legs and groaned, as if they'd been kicked themselves, while the women just oohed. To the females, it looked like it probably hurt, but wasn't life threatening or anything. For the men it was a moment of primordial dread. Similarly, there's an episode of Cheers where Sam wrecks Diane's rare copy of The Sun Also Rises, because he's reading it in the bathtub when he gets to the part explaining the unusual nature of Jake's injury, and he's so shocked he drops the book like a hot potatoe. Now, it may not be the case that our identity is inextricably bound up with our genitalia, and it may not even be true that the purely physical differences between men and women are what make them men and women. But it is certainly true that healthy, normal, functional genitalia are something that men have a particularly strong attachment to and an almost absurd fear of losing. So be warned, this book is like watching that scene in Officer and a Gentleman or reading that passage from The Sun Also Rises, over and over and over again.
In 1965, a young Canadian couple, Ron and Janet Reimer, gave birth to healthy twin boys. When the babies were eight months old, the Reimers took them in to the hospital for routine circumcisions. Through a series of mishaps, baby Bruce Reimer had his penis practically burned off by an electric cauterizing machine. Bruce was left badly damaged and the Reimers were naturally quite concerned about how this deformity would affect him. Watching television one night in 1967, they received new hope for the boy when they saw Dr. John Money, a Harvard Ph.D. working out of Johns Hopkins, describe the success he had been having with sex change operations, and the ease with which his patients were adjusting to their new genders. Janet Reimer believed that it would be easier for Bruce to grow up in the more gentle world of girldom, while Ron was certain that Bruce would have unimaginable difficulty facing life as a man without a penis, so they contacted Dr. Money and unwittingly set in motion a process that would not only have a horrific impact on their child and their family, but which would put baby Bruce at the very center of the culture wars of the 1970s and 80s.
Unfortunately for all concerned, Dr. Money had been awaiting just such a case. He was a behaviorist, whose theory it was that gender differences were almost entirely a function of culture, rather than of biology. He believed, and argued that his transgendered patients showed, that nature could be overridden and that with the help of a little surgical adjustment and the subsequent adoption of a different gender role, humans could truly change their sex. What he needed now was a set of identical twins, upon whom he could experiment, leaving one it's original sex, but altering the other, in the expectation that as one was raised a boy, the other raised a girl, it would be proven that the eventual behavioral differences between the two were entirely a function of the masculine or feminine environments they grew up in and the relative expectations that family and society imposed upon them. The Reimer twins were exactly the guinea pigs he needed to test out this theory. And so, Bruce was castrated, became Brenda and was raised as a girl.
However, Brenda was an extremely reluctant girl. She didn't like dresses or dolls or any of the other things that a girl should. She wanted to play with trucks, roughhouse with her brother, and shave like her father. Despite these obvious manifestations of continuing masculine tendencies, Dr. Money repeatedly counseled the Reimers that they had to be unwavering in their child rearing, that they had to continue to treat Brenda like a girl, because she now was one. All of this is painful enough to read about, but what is really infuriating is to read about the techniques that Money, a self described "missionary of sex", would use in his own annual sessions with the twins. Part of his program of getting them acclimatized to their sex roles included having them act out sexual play with each other, and things just get stranger from there. Sadly, the twins were too young to inform anyone of what he was doing and the Reimers, overawed by Money and unprepared for this kind of situation by their Mennonite upbringing in rural Canada, continued to go along with Money's suggestions (though they, thankfully, refused to copulate in front of the children, as he wished them to.)
Predictably, Brenda and the rest of the Reimers suffered from all kinds of emotional and behavioral problems, with Brenda's worst trouble coming in school, of course; Ron developing a drinking problem; and Janet battling depression. Finally, at the urging of a therapist whom Brenda began seeing at age 13, the Reimers were convinced to explain to their son just what was going on. They did so in March 1980 and David Reimer--he chose the new name as a way of recasting himself as the diminutive hero facing overwhelming odds--began life for the third time.
The process of rebuilding was predictably slow and pain-filled, with stops and starts along the way. But finally, after having lived through experiences that would have crushed the spirit of a lesser man, David, for the first time in his life, prayed to God :
You know, I've had such a terrible life. I'm not going to complain to You,
because You must have
some idea of why You're putting me through this. But I could be a good
husband if I was given the
chance: I think I could be a good father, if I was given a chance.
I don't know if you could say his prayers were answered, if anyone ever deserved such a beneficence, it's David Reimer, but he did in fact find a woman, who already had three kids, and they married. That much of the story is sufficient for any one book, a truly amazing and uplifting tale of perseverance. But there's much more, chiefly, the rest of the horrifying story of John Money.
You see, unbeknownst to David, he had become something of an icon in the world of psychiatry, behaviorism, feminism and the like. For John Money had reported that baby Bruce's gender reassignment was a complete success and that Brenda had grown up as a happy, well-adjusted girl. The case was seized on, by people with their various political axes to grind, as proof that the psychological; traits and characteristics that we associate with gender are almost entirely social constructs, that they are not derived from biology. Money held up Brenda as the example, which many doctors unfortunately followed, of how easy and reasonable gender reassignment was and how beneficial it could be to babies born with genital abnormalities.
It was not until Milton Diamond, a sex researcher who had worked on projects as early as the 50s which Money was aware of and which showed that there was indeed a strong biological component to gender differences, finally found him in the late 90s that David realized how his case was being misused. Though justifiably jealous of his privacy, David allowed Diamond to write about the reality of the problems he had faced, which Diamond did, along with Keith Sigmundson in the March 1997 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
John Colapinto first wrote about David in a prize winning story for Rolling Stone. The relationship they established, and what seems to have been David's truly incredible willingness to share his story, in order that others might learn from it, led to this book length treatment. If it told only the story of David and his courageous struggles, it would be more than worthwhile. But it is the secondary story, of Money and of the political and ideological motives that drove him, and that drove his soulmates in the sexual liberation and women's movements, to deny biology and to try to remake human beings in an image they found more pleasing, that has broader implications for society.
Though Colapinto presents the case against Money in an admirably restrained
fashion, it is nonetheless devastating. What David was put through
is a human tragedy which can not be minimized. What Money did is
not only criminal, it is also a perfect example of what happens when people
warp science to try to fit their political ends and what happens when scientists
begin to view themselves as gods and the rest of us as little more than
clay to be molded into any image they can dream up. From mutilation
of babies to a young man punished as harshly as any of the Titans to a
charismatic man blinded by hubris, this story nearly has the elements of
an Ancient Greek drama. But in this instance, Money lives on, collecting
Federal grants, and preaching his gospel of sex. It is we in the
audience who are nearly driven mad. Were it not for the triumphs
of the story's heroes, David Reimer and Milton Diamond, the whole thing
might be unbearable.
(Reviewed:14-Aug-01)
Grade: (A+)
