As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  At the front desk, the transexual phoned Money at his office, gave a progress report on the search, then staked out the exit. Brenda appeared two minutes later heading for the door. The transexual intercepted her and offered to walk with her to calm her down. Brenda agreed only if they did not talk or come close to each other. “We walked,” the transexual’s notes continue, “Brenda about 4 feet behind me.” It was in this strange configuration that Brenda and her would-be counselor proceeded silently some eight blocks from the hospital, then back again.

  On their return to the hospital, they were met at the main entrance by Viola Lewis—one of the few unit workers Brenda even remotely trusted. Lewis escorted the child to the nearby Sheraton Hotel, where Ron and Janet had been convinced to go and wait for her return.

  Reunited finally with her parents and brother in their hotel room, Brenda told Janet that if ever again forced to see Dr. Money, she would kill herself.

  10

  UPON THEIR RETURN to Winnipeg from Baltimore, the Reimers found themselves enmeshed in a new crisis involving their daughter—although this time the drama did not directly include Brenda herself but rather the members of her local treatment team. Several weeks earlier, Dr. Ingimundson had terminated treatment with Brenda to take a leave of absence from her practice and have a baby. Ingimundson had referred Brenda to another psychiatrist, Dr. Sheila Cantor. An aggressive and outspoken woman, Cantor had taken a view of Brenda’s case quite out of synch with that held by the rest of the local treatment team. After taking a look at Brenda’s medical records and Child Guidance Clinic reports and having one joint session with Brenda and her parents, Cantor abruptly announced to the Reimers that Brenda’s sex reassignment was a dismal failure and that the child must be allowed to switch sex immediately to boyhood.

  Sigmundson says that such bluntness was typical of Cantor (who has since died of cancer). “She was a good psychiatrist, but so strongly opinionated about anything she touched that she would alienate people,” says Sigmundson. Cantor certainly alienated the Reimers, who still labored under Dr. Money’s instructions to suppress all doubts about the treatment.

  It was the ordinarily taciturn Ron who spoke up. “My husband got very angry,” Janet recalls. “He said, ‘First of all, we have to be sure that she wants to be a boy; don’t just assume this.’ He hadn’t yet accepted that Brenda was not to be.” Nor had Janet. Nor had Dr. Winter, who sided with the Reimers in their dispute with the psychiatrist. While Winter admits that, with hindsight, Cantor was correct in her assessment of Brenda’s condition, he thinks the psychiatrist erred in her approach to the problem. “Even if you’ve got the right answer in medicine,” he says, “part of this whole business is that you’ve got to wait for people to catch up and come along with you. And if you don’t do that, the best plans don’t work.”

  With Winter’s support, Ron and Janet appealed to Sigmundson, demanding that he remove Cantor from the case. Sigmundson did so, which left him in a serious bind. Having now run through three of the city’s senior female psychiatrists, and still determined to assign Brenda’s case to a woman in order to increase her feminine identification, Sigmundson was running out of qualified women.

  Even as the doctors struggled to find a way forward with the case, Brenda had settled on her own strategy for coping with her predicament. When Brenda started eighth grade at Glenwood Junior High that fall, Esther Haselhauer noted the stunning change that had come over her friend. Ordinarily Brenda was never seen in anything but jeans and a T-shirt, wearing no makeup. But something had clearly happened over the summer.

  “I remember she came into the classroom,” Esther says, “and she was wearing this matching checkered beige pantsuit with stripes, her hair was brushed, and she was wearing lipstick, rouge, and mascara, and she was carrying a purse. It was obvious that she was trying very hard to fit in as a girl.”

  Indeed she was. Following her last traumatic trip to the Psychohormonal Research Unit, Brenda had become convinced that the only way to avoid the surgery was to play along to the best of her ability; she would try to act the part of a girl; she would try to convince everyone that she was happy. That way, she reasoned, they might not force her to have the operation. And who knew? Perhaps they were all right: perhaps if she made a true effort at living as a girl, she would begin to feel like one. As David puts it, “I decided to play ball. I tried my guts out. I was miserable. I was unhappy. I was uncomfortable. I felt awkward as hell. But the pressure was on me. And I tried my hardest.”

  For Ron and Janet and the members of the local treatment team, Brenda’s behavior that fall was initially a cause for considerable joy. “Parents have found her to be much more enthusiastic about school this year,” social worker Downey noted in Brenda’s Child Guidance Clinic file in early September, “and she has apparently been out shopping with some other girls.” This expedition to a local department store had actually been at the suggestion of their teacher, Mrs. Bailey, who had taken some of the more sympathetic girls aside and asked them to help Brenda a little with her dress and grooming, which left something to be desired. Ordinarily her mother would have helped Brenda with her makeup and clothes, but Janet had recently taken a job as a parking lot attendant and was gone early in the mornings, leaving Brenda to fend for herself. Otherwise it is unlikely that Brenda would have been allowed to go to school in the ill-applied makeup and unfortunate beige pantsuit, which she had bought for herself while on a shopping expedition with Ron.

  “The pantsuit wasn’t exactly in style,” Esther says, “and the rouge was in circles on her cheeks. She came off looking more like a clown.”

  David concurs. “I remember these girls took one look at how I was dressed, and they said, ‘We gotta take you shopping!’ ”

  On a trip to the Hudson’s Bay department store, the girls combed the racks for Brenda and picked out a feminine-styled blue turtleneck sweater and a pair of designer jeans. After school, when her mother was back from work, Brenda asked Janet for some lessons on how to alter her angular, gunslinger’s stride, which since kindergarten had been a source of such hilarity among her peers. Janet showed Brenda how to balance a book on her head to practice straightening her spine and smoothing her stride. “It was unnatural,” David recalls. “I’d get all tensed up after a while. But you were expected to walk like that, so I tried to do it.”

  Glenwood Junior High held dances on Friday nights in the school gym. All the kids went; Brenda did, too. “I’d get dressed up in my unisex disco clothes—jeans and high-heeled boots—and tell my parents, ‘I’m going out to forget about my worries and my troubles.’ ” But Brenda discovered that her worries and troubles did not dissipate at the school dances, where the gym walls reverberated to the taped strains of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

  “I’d mostly dance with girls, in groups of four or five,” David says. But Brenda also danced with the occasional boy. “I was expected to dance with the boys, so I’d dance with a boy,” David says. “I’d ask some guy, ‘You wanna dance?’ They kinda look at you”—he wrinkles his nose—“and say ‘No, no, it’s OK.’ ” On a few occasions, however, boys did agree to accompany Brenda to the dance floor. “Sometimes it was a fast dance,” David says. “Sometimes a slow dance.” Circling the dance floor in the arms of a boy, it was painfully apparent to Brenda that she was not having the right sensations. Instead of any romantic flickering, she felt only embarrassment and excruciating awkwardness. One Friday night, David recalls, a boy in ninth grade who was one of the school’s main heartthrobs defended Brenda when she was being teased by a group of girls. Jokingly, the boy kissed her. “It was a peck on the cheek,” David says. “I went home and thought about it. I thought, ‘It doesn’t seem right. I don’t like this. This is how it’s supposed to happen, but it doesn’t feel right.’ ”

  Such feelings of doubt, which Brenda had long expressed in her therapy sessions, had always been dismissed by her therapists. “These psychiatrists and psychologists kept saying tha
t these were ‘normal confused feelings,’ ” David says. “You have a sense that it’s beyond that, but people are telling you what you’re thinking. And only you know what you’re thinking. It makes you feel even more crazy.”

  Still, Brenda persevered. That fall a group of girls invited her to a pajama party. “Someone sneaked in a mickey of booze,” David says. “I didn’t drink any. I faked it. I put it to my mouth, but I put my tongue on the hole so I didn’t get any. Everyone was talking about boys—‘Who do you have a crush on?’ and all this. So I said, ‘Oh yeah, OK, I got a crush on this person or that person.’ I mean, what do gay people do when they’re in hiding? They pretend they’re straight. You toe the line, like everybody else. Act like everybody else, and you’ll be treated like everybody else.”

  It was clear to Brenda that she did not feel like everybody else in the room. Especially when the other girls began to get ready for bed.

  “A girl got undressed in front of me,” he says. “I was so embarrassed I looked the other way. She said, ‘That’s OK, you don’t have to be embarrassed, you’re one of us.’ She showed me her bra and asked, ‘What do you think of this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. It looks beautiful; I like the lace.’ And I’m sitting there turning red. I felt like Mrs. Doubtfire in that movie.” Asked about any other involuntary physiological reactions that he might have experienced in the company of so many half-dressed girls, David smiles—and answers with an analogy. “If you lose your arm,” he says, “and you’re dying of thirst, that stump is still going to move toward that glass of water to try to get it. It’s instinct. It’s in you.”

  However, Brenda was now living a life in which every instinct had to be denied, repressed, hidden: at dances, at parties, in the classroom, and on the street. “I was like a robot,” he says, describing the playacting that his day-to-day, moment-to-moment survival now entailed. “You’re so careful to look normal, but you don’t want to go overboard. You’re saying to yourself, This looks like an appropriate time to smile. So you smile. This looks like an appropriate time to cross your legs. So you cross your legs. You’re always thinking one step ahead, like in a chess game.”

  It was a chess game Brenda was losing. Despite those few girls who had obeyed their teacher’s orders to be nice to Brenda, the majority of her peers continued to jeer and laugh at her. “It was sad, because it was like the harder she tried, the more she failed,” says Esther Haselhauer. “The ridicule became worse.”

  Of Brenda’s eighth-grade tormentors, Wendy Holderston, the popular and pretty daughter of a local singing star, remembers Brenda as an “odd duck,” a “tomboy” who had “a deep voice and really deep-set eyes”—characteristics that resulted in Brenda’s being dubbed “Cavewoman,” a name that soon caught on among their classmates. At first Brenda tried to absorb her peers’ ridicule in “ladylike” fashion, but one day she’d had enough. In the school hallway she rounded on Wendy, David recalls, grabbed her by the front of her shirt, smashed her against the lockers, and threw her onto the ground. Boys who teased her got similar treatment. “That’s what always impressed me about Brenda,” Esther says. “She’d actually fight with the boys who teased her. She’d haul off and punch them. I always wished I could do that.”

  David is more rueful when he recalls his habit as Brenda of beating up the boys who teased her. “It only made people think I was a bigger weirdo and ostracize me more.”

  By late November, the earlier note of optimism about Brenda’s social and academic life had vanished from her Child Guidance Clinic file. “She has no friends in class,” Downey wrote on November 27. More frighteningly, Brenda was also showing disturbing signs of deterioration in her intellectual functioning—a precipitous descent into a helpless, childlike regression. “She cannot spell the days of the week or the months of the year,” Downey noted in Brenda’s file. “As 5th grade spelling was too difficult for her, she had been placed back in a 4th grade program. She has not learned certain set routines in the classroom. . . . She has been waiting for other students to unlock her combination lock as she cannot remember her number.”

  David recalls the humiliation associated with his helplessness. “When you’re going through what I was going through, schoolwork is kind of low on your list,” he says. “The last thing on your mind is a test. You’re thinking about survival.” The Child Guidance Clinic’s Joan Nebbs uses the same term when she describes Brenda’s predicament: “It was survival,” she says. “To get through the day. To get through the hour.”

  As eighth grade progressed, Brenda’s continued ability to get through the hour became increasingly imperiled. The more her sense of the disjunction between her physical and mental selves increased and her feelings of entrapment and confusion escalated, the more her thoughts turned to the ultimate escape: suicide. “I kept visualizing a rope thrown over a beam,” says David.

  It was at this critical stage of Brenda’s adolescence that Keith Sigmundson finally succeeded in placing her in the care of a new psychiatrist, a particularly gifted and empathetic one named Dr. Mary McKenty.

  * * *

  Upon entering Dr. McKenty’s office at the Child Guidance Clinic for her first session on 2 January 1979, Brenda was surprised by the sight of the smiling, elderly, gray-haired woman who welcomed her. She was dressed in a tweed skirt and matching jacket and stood no more than five feet one inch tall. “She looked like she’d be baking cookies for her grandchildren,” David says. “She didn’t look like a typical psychiatrist.”

  And indeed, Mary McKenty was not a typical representative of the profession. McKenty had always eschewed the strict Freudian rules governing psychiatrist-patient relations—rules that frowned on excessive personal contact, or even warmth, between doctor and patient. She had always preferred to use a nurturing approach that was, in part, a reaction to the circumstances of her own childhood. Born in 1916, McKenty had been reared in an affluent home (her Scottish immigrant father worked for Richardson’s, the province’s most profitable grain company) but one lacking in introspection and overt displays of warmth. “Her Scottish upbringing was not attuned to psychiatry,” says Evelyn Loadman, who first met McKenty in 1934 when the two were among the first women pre-med students in Manitoba history. “But Mary happened to be the kind of person who was very sensitive to others and couldn’t really figure life out until she started to think about what we are made of.”

  It was in the early 1940s, in her first job at the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg, that McKenty’s unique gifts as a child psychiatrist emerged. McKenty made no apparent attempts to delve into the protected realms of her patient’s unconscious. Instead she would come down to the child’s level, playing games, encouraging her patient to draw, paint, and write. Thus lulled into a state of distracted absorption, children could reveal themselves by word and deed. Loadman recalls that McKenty’s nonpressuring approach lent an almost magical quality to her ability to rid her patients of neurotic behaviors—bed-wetting, hair-pulling—that had resisted the efforts of other therapists. “She was the only one who ever cured anybody as a psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital,” Loadman says with a touch of wonder in her voice.

  McKenty was hired by the Winnipeg Child Guidance Clinic at its inception in the late 1960s and quickly established a reputation for success with even the most difficult children. Indeed, when Keith Sigmundson first inherited Brenda Reimer’s fraught and complex case in late 1976, he initially tried to assign it to McKenty, but she was recovering from a double mastectomy and thinking about retirement, and she turned down the case. Sigmundson returned to her only in the fall of 1978, when he was unable to find any other female psychiatrist willing to take Brenda on. Recognizing that Sigmundson was desperate, McKenty finally gave in and took the case.

  Ron and Janet formed an immediate liking for the calm, grandmotherly psychiatrist. Brenda was, by necessity, more circumspect.

  On the one hand, Brenda was drawn to McKenty. She liked how the psychiatrist spoke in a kindly, conversational v
oice and refrained from scribbling on a pad. Brenda also liked that the bulk of her sessions with McKenty were taken up playing board games—Clue, Cootie, Basquetball, Sorry!—or drawing, painting, or playing tongue twisters. At times, Dr. McKenty would drop in an occasional question about how Brenda was feeling and sometimes would jot something on a pad, but somehow it was different when Dr. McKenty did it. “She’d be writing something down,” David recalls, “and I’d say, ‘Oh, you’re writing something down again—spying on me, huh?’ And she’d say, ‘Oh no, dear, this is just so I can make sure that we covered all the bases, so that I can help you.’ ”

  Yet on the other hand, Brenda could not afford to trust McKenty completely, since she had to remain alert to the nightmare possibility that the psychiatrist’s friendliness might simply be a more diabolical tactic to trick her into the surgery. As McKenty’s therapy notes reveal, Brenda used an array of strategies to see if Dr. McKenty’s friendliness was genuine. She drew a cruel caricature of the psychiatrist and showed it to her; she seized one of the clinic’s toy machine guns and took the doctor “hostage”; she wrote out a “Death Warrant for Mary McKenty.” The psychiatrist offered no resistance. She carefully preserved Brenda’s nasty caricature of her, even obligingly signing her name underneath it; taken hostage, she allowed herself to be marched at gunpoint around the office; and on Brenda’s “Death Warrant,” she dutifully filled in the areas where Brenda had left room for the condemned woman’s vital statistics.