Book Review

Reviewed by Katherine Cummings

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As Nature Made Him

The Boy who was Raised as a Girl

by John Colapinto
Published by Harper Perennial, 2001
I.S.B.N.9780060929596

John Money was brilliant, arrogant and unscrupulous. He was also fallible. In 1951, studying for a psychology doctorate at Harvard, he submitted a study of Intersexed patients and came to the conclusion that despite lack of surgical intervention, the majority made an "adequate adjustment" to life. Fifteen years later he performed a classic backflip and joined the Psychohormonal Research Institute at John Hopkins which advocated surgical and hormonal intervention for intersexed infants.

Money was eccentric. He would pepper his conversation provocatively with words like "fuck", "cock" and "cunt" to shock the prudish and publicly espoused the practice of pedophilia provided the relationship was "totally mutual". He believed children should act out sexual behaviour and claimed to have observed "sexual rehearsal" play between Australian Aboriginal children of the Yolngu. This, he claimed, created a tribe entirely free of any psychosexual gender confusions or dysfunction. One of his colleagues claimed that this sexual rehearsal play never occurred and that the Yolngu have been treated for a wide variety of sexual neuroses.

In 1967 Money was contacted by Ron and Janet Reimer, parents of identical twin boys one of whom had suffered a severely damaged penis in a botched circumcision. Money recommended that the damaged infant, Bruce, be reassigned as a girl. This was the first time the John Hopkins unit had reassigned a child born with normal genitalia. For Money, the fact that Bruce was an identical twin was a godsend. For the first time children with identical gender profiles could be used to confirm his theory that nurture over-rode nature and that a child could be moulded by therapy, surgery and hormonal medication to conform to an assigned gender.

The Reimers accepted Money's recommendation and Bruce became Brenda. The family visited Money annually at John Hopkins and he would observe the twins and question them. He also forced them to indulge in "sexual rehearsal" therapy and bullied Brenda into affirming that she was female and enjoyed girlish pursuits.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Brenda was unfeminine, aggressive and a loner and never felt at ease with her assigned gender, although she tried to mollify her parents by appearing to go along with the charade. By the time she was nine she adamantly refused to visit Money and when told at the age of fourteen of her reassignment immediately opted to return to her male persona, adopting the name David.

Money and his medical colleagues in the Reimers' hometown of Winnipeg, had been determined to make the experiment fit the thesis, rather than test it. As one psychiatrist said "we were going to try to make this work because it was famous in the medical literature". Indeed Money cited the "twins" case constantly until Brenda's rebellion, after which he became progressively more defensive, blaming the media for intrusive distortion and the parents for failure to carry out his instructions.

Money does not let facts or failures get in the way of a good psychohormonal theory. As recently as 1988 he was claiming the infant boys can "with surgery and hormone treatments be turned into heterosexual women", demonstrating that he still does not understand the distinction between sexuality and gender identity.

The "twins" case has been cited for thirty years in the nature versus nurture debate, often inaccurately, thanks to Money's self serving and selective reportage. Colapinto's excellent book sorts out myth making from reality and the convergent histories of Money and the Reimer family are presented with clarity and in persuasive detail. His research has been thorough, although scatter-gun. He fails to make a clear enough distinction between intersexed people, the transgendered, and those with genitalia damaged by mishap who's sex and gender were presumably congruent at birth. Nor, understandably, given his focus on a single case, does he deal with related social and legal problems, including the human rights concern with documentation. This would have arisen if Brenda had matured as a woman and sought to marry. Some jurisdictions revise gender documents in every respect (e.g.. New Zealand) while others (like the Australian State and Federal legislatures) make half-hearted and selective revisions which leave post-operative transsexuals in legal limbo.

Colapinto emphasises that "no theory can be based on a single experiment" and that the Reimer case neither proves nor disproves the thesis that a person may be better off after being gender-reassigned. The case of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer does suggest, however, that it would be more humane to wait until an individual is old enough to make his or her own decision, rather than imposing an arbitrary gender in infancy for the sake of anatomical neatness. Neither genitalia nor chromosomes define gender. The brain is the arbiter and the brain usually follows the prompting of pre-natal hormonal influences.

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