As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  Williams and Smith expected their program to stir controversy and comment. It did not. “The reaction was curiously muted,” says Smith. “I was a bit surprised that print journalists didn’t take it up.” Diamond was similarly mystified at the failure of the documentary to provoke comment or follow-up from American programs like 60 Minutes.

  Determined to disseminate the BBC’s findings to North American physicians, Diamond wrote up the results of the documentary in a short scientific paper and submitted it to the American science journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Titled “Sexual Identity, Monozygotic Twins Reared in Discordant Sex Roles and a BBC Follow-Up,” the paper appeared in a 1982 issue of the journal. In it Diamond quoted Sigmundson’s and Moggey’s verbatim comments about Brenda’s problems as well as Sigmundson’s doubts that she would ever make the adjustment to being a woman. Speaking to the wider implications of the case and its apparently imminent failure, Diamond added, “As for the twin, it is scientifically regrettable that so much of a theoretical and philosophical superstructure has been built on the supposed results of a single, uncontrolled and unconfirmed case. It is further regrettable that we here in the United States had to depend for a clinical follow-up [on] a British investigative journalist team for a case originally and so prominently reported in the American literature.”

  Upon the article’s publication, Diamond was frustrated to see it meet with a reaction similar to that of the documentary. While some feminist scholars quietly dropped the twins case from new editions of their women’s studies textbooks, the academic, scientific, and medical communities were oddly silent about the findings. “They ignored it,” Diamond says. “It’s not what they wanted to hear.”

  * * *

  In the days and weeks following her glimpse of the mysterious man with the camera in the alley near her school, Brenda grew increasingly outspoken in her rejection of girlhood during her sessions with McKenty. She complained of how Brian had more friends because he wasn’t constantly being teased, and she railed about the fact that her brother could fight people without looking like a weirdo. “All girls do is make babies,” she said.

  At school, her “out” boyishness provoked escalating taunts and threats from her peers. One day shortly before Christmas, she was threatened by a classmate who brandished a knife. “I told my mother, ‘I’m not going to that school anymore. I’ll run away,’ ” David says. Janet supported Brenda’s decision, as did McKenty, who arranged for a private tutor paid for by the government.

  Away from the taunts and threats of her R. B. Russell classmates, Brenda continued to assert her boyishness in word, dress, and deed while at home. Janet, hoping that Brenda’s behavior was simply a “stage,” continued to look for signs of femininity in her daughter. “Any little sign—and I was in seventh heaven,” she says. “I misinterpreted a lot of things she did.”

  David remembers an incident from this period when Brenda found a pair of her mother’s black kid gloves in a closet. “They felt nice and soft inside,” David says. “I put them on. They reminded me of those cool Italian race car gloves that you see in the movies. I was thinking, These would give a good grip on the steering wheel. All of a sudden I realized my mother was behind me. I looked around and she was smiling at me, and she said, ‘Go ahead. If you want to wear them, go ahead.’ She thought I was trying to be feminine.”

  As the winter progressed, Janet found it increasingly difficult to sustain such fantasies. One night she had a dream that years later she recognized as a sign of all she was struggling to repress about her daughter. In the dream Janet was visiting a woman whose boyfriend had just moved out. The woman, distraught, opened a trunk and reverently lifted out of it a huge stuffed penis. “She held it out to me like it was a brick of gold,” Janet recalls. “And she said, ‘That’s what I’ve got to remember him by.’ ”

  That winter, Janet began to feel returning the mood of desolate hopelessness that had engulfed her during the family’s ill-fated sojourn in British Columbia. In late January her psychiatrist, Dr. Nona Doupe, recognized that Janet was descending into a serious depression and was once again a threat to herself. Dr. Doupe had Janet admitted to Victoria Hospital, where she remained for a month. Soon after her release, Janet spiraled back into despair—and life at the Reimer home fell into chaos. For Brenda, her mother’s continued vigilance for signs of girlishness became intolerable; for Janet, the sight of Brenda in her boy’s clothes and matted hair seemed an unspoken and unbearable rebuke for the decision she and Ron had made almost thirteen years earlier. In early March, McKenty noted Brenda’s complaints “that nothing she does pleases her mother who criticizes and yells at her all the time.” A few days later things reached a climax.

  “She told me to clean up the fridge,” David says. “I used as much elbow grease as possible, but it wasn’t to her liking. I shouted, ‘I’m doing the best I can!’ She threw a box of cereal at my face. I threw it back at her. She was ready to hit me. I grabbed her hand and shoved her. My mother said, ‘I’m going to tell your father!’ ”

  Ron, pleading exhaustion, withdrew from the fray, turned on the television, and poured himself a drink. Janet recognized a return to the fatal pattern that had trapped the family in British Columbia. She called Dr. McKenty, whose notes on the conversation register the turmoil into which the family had plunged: Ron was drinking unsettling amounts of whiskey; Janet and Brenda were constantly at each other’s throats; and now Brenda and Brian, too, were in open warfare, fighting all the time.

  By now it was impossible for McKenty and the other members of the local treatment team to ignore the obvious: after almost four years of trying to implement Dr. Money’s plan, Brenda and her family were only worse off. Dr. Winter was the only physician who still held out any hope. Convinced that the appearance of Brenda’s uncompleted vagina was the chief stumbling block to her psychological acceptance of herself as a girl, he had long been the most vocal advocate for the surgery. But now, even he began to waver. “Early on, I had . . . pushed for early surgery,” he wrote in a letter to Dr. McKenty. “I am not as convinced now that this is a good idea and therefore at the present time have no specific plans or opinions as to the proper time for the operation.”

  Ultimately Brenda forced the endocrinologist to come down off the fence. During an appointment at his office in mid-March, she refused to remove her hospital gown for a breast exam. The doctor asked again. She refused. The standoff lasted twenty minutes. “It comes to a point in your life where you say, ‘I’ve had enough,’ ” David says. “There’s a limit for everybody. This was my limit.”

  Dr. Winter had reached his limit, too. “Do you want to be a girl or not?” he demanded.

  It was the question Dr. Money had been asking her since the dawn of her consciousness, a question the local treatment team had badgered her with for years. It was a question she’d heard once too often.

  She raised her head and bellowed into Winter’s face, “No!”

  To Brenda’s surprise, Winter did not get angry. Instead he simply left his office for a moment, then returned. “OK,” he told her. “You can get dressed and go home.”

  Only later would Brenda learn that Winter had, in stepping out into the hallway, spoken with Dr. McKenty. He told her that in his opinion it was time the teenager was told the truth about who she was and what had happened to her.

  * * *

  It was Ron’s custom to pick Brenda up in the car after her weekly sessions with Dr. McKenty. The afternoon of 14 March 1980 was no exception. The only difference was that when Brenda climbed into the car, Ron said that instead of driving straight home, they would get an ice cream cone.

  Immediately Brenda was suspicious. “Usually when there was some kind of disaster in the family, good old dad takes you out in the family car for a cone or something,” David says. “So I was thinking, Is mother dying? Are you guys getting a divorce? Is everything OK with Brian?”

  “No, no,” Ron said to Brenda’s nervous questioning. “Everything�
��s fine.”

  It was not until Brenda had bought her ice cream and Ron had pulled the car into the family’s driveway that he found the words he needed.

  “He just started explaining, step by step, everything that had happened to me,” David says. “He told me that I was born a boy, and about the accident when they were trying to circumcise me, and how they saw all kinds of specialists, and they took the best advice they had at the time, which was to try to change me over. My dad got very upset.” It was the first time Brenda ever saw her father cry. She remained dry-eyed, however, staring straight ahead through the windshield, the ice cream cone melting in her hand.

  “She just sat there listening, real quiet,” Ron says, almost two decades after this extraordinary encounter between father and child. “I guess she was so fascinated with this unbelievable tale that I was telling her.”

  Today David says that the revelations awoke many emotions within him—anger, disbelief, amazement. But one emotion overrode all the others. “I was relieved,” he says. “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn’t some sort of weirdo. I wasn’t crazy.”

  Brenda did have a question for her father. It concerned that brief charmed span of eight months directly after her birth, the only period of her life when she ever had been, or ever would be, fully intact.

  “What,” she asked, “was my name?”

  12

  BRENDA’S DECISION to revert to the sex of her biological makeup was immediate. “When I’m eighteen I’ll be what I want,” she told McKenty in her first therapy session after learning the truth. “I’ll go from girl to boy.” The question was how to do it without creating gossip. She considered disappearing to Vancouver for a while and then returning as a male who had come to stay with the Reimer family. But there was an obvious drawback to this plan: “I look like Brian,” she said to McKenty. “People will know.” Then Brenda raised a still more agonizing problem. Trained her whole life to behave like a girl and to hide her impulses and feelings, Brenda wondered how her parents would take it when she revealed her true self. “What will they say,” she asked McKenty, “if I go out with a girl?”

  A month and a half later, the Reimers attended a large family gathering to celebrate Janet’s youngest brother’s engagement. Still living socially as a girl, Brenda had no choice but to go to the party in female attire: a dress, red shoes, panty hose, makeup, and a stylish, short, imitation white mink coat which Janet had bought specially for the occasion—and, perhaps, as a last inducement to Brenda to remain in the sex they had chosen for her. But the humiliation of parading herself publicly as a girl, now that she knew the truth, was too much for Brenda. Having vowed to change sex in three years, she now moved up the deadline. “In two years,” she told McKenty a day after the party, “I want to look like a boy. I’d like a mustache.”

  At her next session, Brenda again moved up the deadline for becoming a boy. She wanted to do it now, and she told McKenty that she had been thinking about a boy’s name for herself. She did not want to revert to her birth name, Bruce, which she considered a name for “geeks and nerds.” She’d come up with two options. She liked Joe because it had no pretensions; it was a name for Everyman. She also thought of calling herself David, after the biblical king and giant-slayer. “It reminded me of the guy with the odds stacked against him,” David says, “the guy who was facing up to a giant eight feet tall. It reminded me of courage.”

  Brenda left the final decision up to her parents, who chose the name David. Ron says it was easy to make the transition from calling their child Brenda and he cannot recall ever accidentally calling his son Brenda after that. Others, too, found Brenda’s transformation to David easier to accept than they had anticipated. David’s tutor, Dorothy Troop, says that she had initially been nervous when notified of the change, but when David arrived for his first tutoring session, Troop found that his maleness was far from an obstacle between them. Brenda had always been a sullen, depressed, angry child; as David, everything was different. “He was happier,” Troop says, “far more settled and alive to what was going on around him.” Troop gave David a chain with his new name on it. In return, David gave his tutor a gift: the imitation mink jacket he had worn to the family party. “He seemed to want to get rid of anything that reminded him of when he was Brenda,” Troop recalls.

  That August, one week after his fifteenth birthday, David made his big public debut as a boy among his extended family. The occasion was the wedding ceremony and reception of his uncle Dale. Using tape to flatten the breasts that still protruded from his chest, David donned a starched white dress shirt, a dark tie, and a charcoal gray suit identical to his brother Brian’s. It was not easy, David says, to step out as a boy for the first time in front of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends. He knew that the whole family had been informed long ago about his sex reassignment as a baby, but this knowledge did not make it any easier for him, trained for so long to play the little lady in front of relatives. Still, determined to get up in front of the crowd, he danced with the bride and several of her bridesmaids. “Happy,” Dr. McKenty wrote in her session notes with David two days later, “wedding a success.”

  David began to receive injections of testosterone. He soon boasted a growth of peach fuzz on his cheeks and chin, and he grew over an inch in height. On 22 October 1980 he underwent a double mastectomy, an intensely painful procedure that left him in agony for weeks afterward. He decided to wait until the following summer—until he finished tenth grade—before having any further surgery.

  In the intervening months, he fell to brooding on the accident that had set his life on its bewildering course. “At that stage in his life,” Dr. Winter says, “all he wanted was a gun to kill the doctor who had done that to him.” As the dismal Winnipeg winter progressed, David’s fantasies of revenge began to take on the contours of reality. With two hundred dollars saved from his paper route money, David bought an unlicensed 1950 Russian Luger on the streets of downtown Winnipeg. One February day he went to the Winnipeg clinic where Dr. Jean-Marie Huot had an office.

  “I had the gun in my pocket,” David says. “I opened the door to his office. He looked at me and says, ‘Yes, what can I do for you?’ I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ He said, ‘No. Should I remember you?’ I said, ‘Take a good look.’ Then he knew who I was. He nodded his head. I was intending to pull out the gun and blow his brains out, but he started crying. I felt sorry for him. He had his head down. I said, ‘Do you know the hell you put me through?’ He didn’t say anything, just sat there, crying. I walked out. I could hear him behind me saying, ‘Wait! Wait!’ But I left. I sat by the river, crying.”

  David smashed the gun with a rock and threw it into the Red River. A few days later he admitted to McKenty that he had gone to Huot’s office and “blasted him about the accident.” He did not say he had been carrying a gun in his pocket.

  I contacted Dr. Huot in the summer of 1997. He refused to speak about this encounter. “That was seventeen years ago,” he said, “a very long time ago.” Nor did he care to discuss the incident that had brought the murderously depressed fifteen-year-old boy to his office in the first place. Asked about the circumcision accident, Huot said in his heavy French-Canadian accent, “I’m not in a situation to start talking about that now, for sure, for sure, for sure.”

  * * *

  On 2 July 1981, a month before his sixteenth birthday, David underwent surgery to create a rudimentary penis. Constructed of muscles and skin from the inside of his thighs, the penis was attached to the small stump of remaining penile corpora under the skin. False testicles, made of light-colored plastic, were inserted into his reconstructed scrotum. The sensation of a penis hanging between his legs was odd and unfamiliar. And he soon learned the drawbacks to phalloplasties. Over that first year, he was hospitalized eighteen times for blockages and infections in his artificial urethra. He would continue to be hospitalized regularly over the next three years.

  Meanwhile, David tri
ed to come to terms with his new life, and to prepare for reentering the world. In some respects, he says, this proved less difficult than he had feared. For apart from her fleeting friendships with Heather Legarry and Esther Haselhauer, Brenda had suffered severe social rejection; this, along with her almost annual changes of school, had guaranteed that no one ever got close enough to her to remark on her sudden vanishing—and David’s sudden materialization. Still, after his reversion to his biological sex, David (fearing that he might run into someone who would recognize him as the former Brenda) took the precaution of lying low in his parents’ basement. He watched TV, listened to records, and mulled all that had happened to him, trying to absorb and process it. This period would ultimately extend to nearly two years, until gradually, around the time of his eighteenth birthday, he began to emerge from the house, hanging out at local fast-food joints, roller rinks, and bars with Brian and his friends. Brian’s buddies immediately accepted David as one of the guys, but there were inevitably kids who vaguely recalled that Brian had once had a sister named Brenda.

  Together the twins dreamed up a story to explain Brenda’s disappearance. They claimed she had gone to live with her boyfriend in British Columbia and had died in a plane crash. David was Brian’s long-lost cousin. As for David’s frequent hospitalizations, the twins said that they were to treat injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.