Danae2OOO's Full Review: John Colapinto - As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who W...
If the sex reassignment of "Brenda" Reimer had been successful, would the book have been titled, "As Nurture Made Him"?
Whether you're an M.D. or a bus driver, you may have wondered at some point in time, "What makes me the way I am?" The official term for this question is known in the psychological community as "Nature vs. Nurture." Are our personality traits inborn, or are we intelligent, deviant, sensitive, creative, or any other of our little "uniquenesses" because of the way we were raised?
Of particular concern in this case is a Harvard-educated sexual psychiatrist named Dr. John Money. Dr. Money has devoted his career to psychohormonal research; he has written numerous books and professional essays, and one of his most important studies has been the "John/Jane" case (or the "Twins" case), which centered around the treatment of a patient originally named Bruce Reimer.
Author John Colapinto has managed to successfully and objectively piece together the strange tale of the John/Jane case; perhaps the strangest bit of information is that it's not a "tale" at all. In 1967, Bruce Reimer, who was just shy of his second birthday, was sexually reassigned as a female and renamed Brenda.
When they were just eight months old, twins Bruce and Brian Reimer were admitted to the hospital to undergo a routine circumcision operation, wherein most of Bruce's penis was burned off accidentally. Embarrassed, and afraid that their son would be ostracized by his peers when he reached adolescence, parents Ron and Janet Reimer began to seek a way to repair the damage. They were given their options: they could construct for Bruce an artificial penis made from skin grafts, which would serve only a urinary purpose, and not a reproductive one. Or, according to maverick Dr. John Money, they could remove Bruce's undamaged testicles, create a rudimentary vagina, give him hormones, and raise young Bruce as a girl.
Although Colapinto seems to have his work cut out for him, the author dives into the material headfirst, giving the reader a heartbreaking view of the feelings of rejection and "not-rightness" Bruce Reimer felt growing up as Brenda. Colapinto also gives an exhaustive outline of the Reimer family's history (prior to Bruce and Brian's birth), of Dr. Money's career, and of the years of therapy Brenda required, both from Dr. Money and a team of therapists in her hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. Colapinto goes on to give us several accounts of the time Brenda found out that she was really a boy; at age fifteen, after years of torture at the hands of her classmates and several suicide attempts, Brenda reverted back to her birth sex and renamed herself David.
Colapinto also tells us about a few other "transgenders:" patients who, during the sixties and seventies, were born with abnormal genitalia, and thus were operated on to make them fit more neatly into a role as a man or a woman. Back then, because there had been little reliable research on the subject, it was generally considered that transgenders were to be operated on, rather than left alone until they were old enough to understand the situation and make a decision on their own.
However, Dr. Money found the perfect case with the Reimer twins; in his quest to prove that nurture trumped nature, he studied Brian and Brenda, using Brian as the "control" in the experiment; the conclusion seemed to be, "This is what Brenda would have been like as a boy, and this is what she's like as a girl. See how different they are? It's all in how you raise them." Money's idea was that humans, at birth, are sexually ambiguous, and can be molded like clay to fit into either role, the male or the female.
Because the author has covered all the bases here, we see how truly barbaric this "experiment" was. For one thing, Colapinto interviewed Dr. Money's rival, Dr. Milton Diamond, who revealed that according to his studies, the human fetus is immersed in certain hormones and chemicals which, according to their genetic makeup, will make them either male or female. The "guinea pig" himself, David, offers this insight: "From what I've been taught by my father, 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." Freud, who thought that the ownership or lack of a penis constitutes whether one is a male or a female, might have disagreed.
Interestingly, as a doctorate student at Harvard University, John Money had done a study on the long-term effects of being born with ambiguous genitalia. His findings were that most of the transgenders who were not operated on were happy, productive adults, as were the patients who were allowed to make their own decisions about their genitals when they were older. So why did he convince Ron and Janet Reimer to castrate their son, dress him in skirts, and call him Brenda? To see if his original results were just a fluke? A mad scientist tendency, maybe? The latter may be quite possible. Dr. Money was a sexual revolutionary; he defended the porn movie Deep Throat, as a tool to strengthen marriages. During his therapy sessions with Brenda Reimer, as well as other patients, he used words like f-ck, and c-ck, asked them about masturbation and sexual activity. Keep in mind that most of his patients were children and adolescents. Brenda Reimer herself was seven when she was asked to go on her hands and knees and have her twin brother get behind her and put his crotch up next to her rear end, in a mock act of copulation. Even more bizarre is that in articles and several of his books, Dr. Money insisted that Brenda was a successful girl, when in fact, she was distinctly masculine and incredibly miserable.
The story has a happy ending; David Reimer is a happily married thirty-six-year-old man, and his parents have recovered from the alcoholism and depression that resulted from the turmoil in their home as the twins were growing up. Through a series of exhaustive interviews, John Colapinto tells a cautionary tale of heartbreaking proportions. He also writes fluidly and matter-of-factly, while keeping the medical jargon to a manageable minimum. As Nature Made Him is an expansion of a story Colapinto wrote for Rolling Stone in 1997, with David Reimer's name and identifying details changed. However, the book is a sort of "coming out" for David. He has recovered from his childhood to be a well-adjusted adult, and he has allowed us to learn from his story. I, for one, am glad he did, although the photos of Brenda growing up were heart-wrenching.
So what did I learn from David Reimer's story? For one, that if I were to have a baby with an ambiguous set of genitals, I would definitely let the child make his or her own decision as to which gender they would rather be. And I also learned that when baby Bruce was castrated, the field of psychosexual behavior was relatively new, and the standard procedure in cases of gender ambiguity was to chop now, ask questions later. Boys with extremely small penises (a condition known as "micropenis") were castrated and raised as girls; girls with enlarged clitorises were raised as boys. Colapinto interviewed two adult transgenders who were operated on in such a manner as infants, and reading about their hardships has convinced me that just because a doctor says something, doesn't always mean it's right. (Obviously, since in the Middle Ages, they thought that the best way to cure a disease was to open up a vein in the patient's arm and let the sickness flow out with the blood.)
I guess what I'm trying to say is: if you must trust the medical profession and their S.O.P.'s do it with extreme caution. You could cause a lifetime of heartache.
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