As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  There was, as well, further reason to feel uneasy about the paper’s conclusions, and this had to do with its murky provenance. It was only in the closing moments of my interview with Zucker, after I had turned off my tape recorder, that he let fall that the paper had another silent collaborator—an investigator who, when notified of the researchers’ efforts, had hastened to supply records he had gathered on the patient in her early childhood. The investigator was John Money, who had authorized and overseen the patient’s sex reassignment in infancy and who had, true to practice, conducted a number of annual follow-ups with the child until she (for reasons unspecified in Zucker’s paper) stopped returning to Johns Hopkins.

  16

  IT HAS BEEN TWENTY YEARS since Brenda Reimer made her transformation to David. That metamorphosis marked a turning point in the family’s fortunes. Ron, who had been struggling to get his business on its feet, began finally to build a faithful clientele of construction companies and factories. By the early 1980s he was earning forty thousand dollars a year, the best money he had made in his life. Janet continued to see her psychiatrist, and by the mid-1980s, with lithium treatment, her depressions had abated. “I found out what kind of person I really was,” she says. “And I went to my children and apologized to them. I said, ‘I know at times I was unreasonable and that you were wary of me sometimes because you didn’t know what was going to come up next, and you didn’t altogether trust me or feel you could take me into your confidence.’ I told them that I felt great remorse.”

  The improvements in Ron’s finances and Janet’s emotional health brought a harmony the couple hadn’t known since the earliest days of their marriage. “I would lay down my life for Ron,” Janet told me in the summer of 1998. “Actually, I remember something Dr. Money once said to me. He said, ‘I don’t know why people always say making love; it’s making sex.’ Back then I didn’t have an answer for him. Now I do. What I have with Ron is love. We make love.”

  Neither Ron nor Janet pretends that they can ever put the past behind them completely. Janet remains the more talkative on the subject of the guilt and grief that are the main emotions associated with their decision, thirty years ago, to turn their son into a daughter. Ron typically finds it more difficult to speak directly about these matters, but he communicates them nevertheless in his more spare and diffident speech.

  “I wonder,” I asked him in our first interview, “if you’ve ever got to a point where you forgot this had happened?”

  Ron shook his head. “No,” he said. “We never forget.” Then he said it again. “Never forget.” And once more: “Never forget.”

  I remembered a notation I had seen in Dr. Ingimundson’s psychiatric notes from the spring of 1977 concerning a private meeting with Janet and Ron. Under the heading “Counter transference” (the psychoanalytic term for the emotions experienced by the therapist toward the patient), Ingimundson had written, “Have a need to protect them.” I now felt something of the same need.

  “I know David doesn’t blame you at all,” I told Ron. “He attributes all the best things in his life to you and Janet.”

  Ron smiled weakly and blinked away the moisture in his eyes. “I’m glad he feels that way,” Ron said. “I don’t know if I feel like that.”

  Perhaps the greatest insight that Ron gave me into his emotions concerning the failed experiment came when our formal interview was over, and we repaired from the backyard to the house. Ron poured us a pair of Crown Royal rye whiskeys, then invited me to watch a tape of his favorite movie. It had been a long day, and I told him I would probably head back to my Travelodge and turn in early. Ron was strangely, and uncharacteristically, insistent. “This is a really great movie,” he said. “I got Brian to tape it for me off HBO. I’ve seen it maybe twenty times.” The movie, he said, was called Crossroads. I soon realized that it was pointless to resist; by now Janet (who also loved the movie) had joined Ron in his entreaties. So I followed them to the basement, where we settled down in front of the television set.

  I vaguely registered the movie’s plot as it played on the Reimers’ TV screen. Ralph Macchio plays a cocky young blues guitarist who befriends an eighty-year-old blues player, one Blind Willie Brown. Together the pair travel from New York City to Blind Willie’s Mississippi home, where he has some “unfinished business” to take care of. As Ry Cooder’s keening blues guitar soundtrack wailed over the opening credits, Janet turned to me and said, “We love this music. I think you have to have been to hell and back to love the blues.” In its detail, and in the thorny, affectionate relationship between the older and the younger man, the movie was better than I expected; but I still found myself fighting off sleep as the saga reached its final act, which occurs at a stark, dusty crossroads in the depths of rural Mississippi—at which point I began to grow alert.

  Drawing on the famous legend of blues guitarist Robert Johnson (who was said to have won his skills as a guitar player from a deal he signed with the devil at “the crossroads”), the movie now revealed that Blind Willie Brown had made a similar deal almost sixty years earlier, when he was seventeen years old. But Blind Willie had not become famous and celebrated. Instead he had ended up destitute in a Harlem old folks’ home. Now he had come for a reckoning. Standing in the shadow of a leafless tree at the crossroads, he watched as the dapper, smooth-talking, grinning man with whom he had struck his deal all those years ago materialized from nowhere. The two men face each other. Ron, who was sitting in an armchair to my right, set down his rye and 7-Up and sat forward a little, bringing his face closer to the screen.

  Confronting the man who had hoodwinked him into his bum deal, Willie Brown demands that the Man in Black tear up the contract between them—“and give me some peace.”

  The Man in Black laughs derisively. “Why on earth would I want to do that?” he asks.

  Willie is outraged at the man’s insouciance. “You sloughed up on your end of things,” Willie shouts. “I didn’t end up where I wanted. I didn’t end up with nothing—didn’t get nothing!”

  But the grinning Man in Black offers no apologies. “Ain’t nothing ever as good as we want it to be!”

  Both Ron and Janet hung on every word of this dialogue—as if they expected that on this viewing, the scene might finally play out differently. When the scene ended, Ron sat back in his chair, then glanced quickly at me and away. Several times during our long interview that day, I had tried to get Ron to speak about how he now felt about John Money and the momentous decision he had convinced Ron and Janet to make. He had made a few halting, stumbling efforts to answer my question but had clearly failed to say all that was in him. Now I felt I had my answer. Along with Ron’s grief and guilt there was an obvious admixture of outraged betrayal, which lay too deep for him to express in words.

  Nor were those emotions solely confined to the way Ron and Janet felt about the son they had agreed to convert into a daughter. For David was by no means the only casualty of that doomed experiment. The matched control, too, had suffered, and suffered badly, with results that were still being felt. Brian’s episode of shoplifting in the spring before the family’s flight to British Columbia proved not to be an isolated incident, but a precursor of more serious transgressions to come.

  “I was thirteen when I got involved with a bad crowd,” Brian explains. “It started with drinking and smoking, and it eventually wound up into stealing cars and dope and fighting. For me, personally, I never got into armed robbery and I never really hurt anyone that bad. . . .” Then Brian thinks for a moment and amends that. “One person I hurt pretty bad.” He is referring to a boy whose arm he broke so severely in a fight that he was called to court. Listening to the litany of Brian’s brutal and criminal acts as a teen and young adult, I was mystified. Even in adulthood he clearly demonstrated, in comparison with David’s more conventionally male attitudes, a greater aesthetic awareness and a sensitive side out of keeping with the endless tales of mayhem and brutality that filled his teens and twenties. “Th
at’s the side I couldn’t show to people,” he says. “The sensitive guy finished last. The tough guy gets the respect, and he gets left alone. That’s bad to say, but that’s the reality of it. He gets all the girlfriends; he gets invited to all the parties.”

  Being included by his friends was vitally important for Brian because of the abandonment he felt from his parents. “I had problems growing up, but they had to deal with my sister’s problems, which were so much bigger,” Brian says. “But try growing up all your life feeling that your problems are nothing.”

  Brian learned about his sister’s true birth status from Janet on 14 March 1980—the same day that Ron told Brenda.

  “My mother was working at the parking lot,” Brian says. “She called me and said, ‘Brian, I have to talk to you about something.’ So I visited her at work, in this booth where she sat. We were having coffee. She said, ‘It’s about Brenda.’ Then she says, ‘Brenda was really your brother.’ And I got upset.”

  Brian’s reaction was typically explosive. He jumped from his chair and smashed his fist into the booth’s reinforced glass window. “I broke both panes,” Brian recalls. “I was pissed off. Then I cooled down, and mother told me everything that had happened—about the circumcision and everything. I said, ‘Now I can understand. I can put the pieces of the puzzle together. It makes sense now.’ But I felt, ‘Shit, the first fourteen years of my life was a lie.’ ”

  And there would be other emotional hurdles for Brian to get over—which became clear later that same day, when he saw his twin for the first time since hearing the news. “Dave was wearing a suit,” Brian recalls. “He says, ‘What d’you think?’ I said, ‘Hey. You look good. I’m happy for you.” But Brian admits that David’s transformation brought mixed emotions. In the past, Brian had always had his status as the family’s only son to make him feel special. Now even that was gone. “I supported him one hundred percent,” Brian says. “I felt a sense of relief because now he finally fitted into society. At the same time, I’m not big brother anymore.”

  Just how deeply affected Brian was by this swift and emotionally bewildering turn of events was clear a year later, shortly before the twins’ sixteenth birthday and two weeks before David underwent his first phalloplasty, when on 17 June 1981, Brian was taken to the emergency room of St. Boniface Hospital to have his stomach pumped. He had drunk from a bottle of drain cleaner. At the time, Brian told his family that the suicide gesture was over a girl who had broken up with him. Today Brian admits that was not the truth. “Mom was worried sick about David,” he says. “Every waking moment was David. It was ‘Brian’s OK, he can take care of himself.’ Any problem I had seemed trivial compared to David’s. So it was almost like I had to do something to get a little bit of attention.”

  At sixteen, to his parents’ consternation, Brian quit school and took a job pumping gas. He moved out of the house and started living with a girlfriend. At nineteen, Brian married her, and had two children. The marriage proved tumultuous and ended in acrimony and divorce a few years later.

  Brian’s life reached its nadir after the divorce. Unemployed and trying to raise his children as a single father, he began to drink to excess and suffered bouts of severe depression. His children were temporarily removed from his custody and lived for six months with Ron and Janet. During that time Brian cleaned himself up and got control of his life. In the early 1990s he landed a well-paid union job working a lathe in a metal-spinning factory. He remarried, had a daughter, and moved into a house he bought in Winnipeg’s West End. Prozac has helped with his mood swings.

  Aside from his wife and children, Brian says that the person he knows best in the world is his brother. Despite the lingering rivalries that sometimes drive the twins, even in adulthood, to severe periods of feuding and dissension, they remain extraordinarily attuned to one another’s inner lives. Yet Brian admits that, like his parents, he harbors guilt about David. It is a guilt that dates back roughly to sixth grade at Agassiz Drive school, when Brian pulled away from his social pariah sister. “I had a choice,” Brian says. “I could be with my friends or with my sister. They made it quite clear—subtle but clear—that I had a choice.” He chose to have friends—a choice for which he has never fully forgiven himself. “I wanted to have a life,” he says. “I turned my back on Brenda.” Only many years later, after David had been living in his true sex for almost five years, would the brothers again grow close.

  At our first meeting, in late June 1997, Brian proudly cataloged the striking similarities between them, likening David and himself to those cases of identical twins separated at birth and who, when reunited in adulthood, discover that their lives bear uncanny parallels. “Both me and Dave married in September,” he told me. “Both have one dog and one cat. Both are factory workers. Both make around the same amount of money. We both like to watch Biography, 20/20, Fifth Estate, 60 Minutes. Both love Elvis. In a way, it’s always been me and my brother against the world.”

  * * *

  More than two decades have passed since David Reimer had his final contact with Dr. John Money, when the famous sexologist slipped him fifteen dollars in his parents’ living room. In the intervening years, David often fantasized about what he might say or do to the psychologist if they were ever to meet face-to-face. He admits that as a younger man his fantasies ran to violence. No more. Determined to get on with his life, he refuses to dwell on a past that he cannot change. In their paper, Diamond and Sigmundson describe David as a “forward-looking person.” In conversation, Diamond calls him a true hero. And indeed, David’s life today defies the dire prognosis of the psychiatrist who thirty-three years ago declared that he would never marry and “must live apart.” At the same time, it has been impossible for him to put the past away entirely. Over the course of our interviews together, David spoke with a blunt and unvarnished honesty about his extraordinary childhood and youth. He spoke without self-pity. His sufferings were extreme, his survival almost miraculous: both lend to his unschooled speech an aura of oracular wisdom.

  “I don’t blame my parents,” he told me. “A lot of people are going to be surprised by that. They’d have to put themselves in my situation and live out my life, knowing that my parents have sacrificed so much. My dad’s a very special man. He’s got a lot in his heart, and he doesn’t know how to express himself. But you know, you can see in the soul of his eyes that he’s hurting and that he cares and he loves you.

  “My mother is a lot better, she’s getting help. She admits that she did wrong things. Some people wouldn’t even do that. You know, as a very little kid I had a crush on my mother. I used to pick dandelions for her. She was the most beautiful woman in the whole world to me.

  “When I think of my brother as a kid, I see this little seven-year-old with a bean shave, puppy-dog eyes, asking for help. ‘Help me! Help me!’ He’d get into trouble, get into a fight, and I’d do my best to bail him out. He’d let the scrawniest guy beat the hell out of him. My brother hiding behind me! I’d look ridiculous fighting because of the way I was dressed—I didn’t look the part to bail him out. My dad gave me shit when I fought because he thought it put Brian in a position where he would have to try to protect me. ‘It’s unfair to put your brother in a position like that.’ I tried to explain: ‘This is not my brother’s fight, this is my fight.’ It didn’t do any good. I’m not going to take anything away from Brian: he had it rough because of me. But it was directed at me, not him. When they picked on him, they were making fun of me. ‘There’s your butch sister.’

  “My childhood. It comes to me. I don’t go and think about it. I’m trying to sleep, and these stupid thoughts come into my head, and I shake my head and I say, ‘I’m going to think about something else,’ but it will jump right back into my head. Memories of how I used to look. Memories of being belittled by my classmates. Memories of just trying to survive.

  “If I had grown up as a boy without a penis? Oh, I would still have had my problems, but they wouldn’t have been
compounded the way they are now. If I was raised a boy, I would have been more accepted by other people. I would have been way better off if they had just left me alone, because when I switched back over, then I had two problems on my hands, not just one, because of them trying to brainwash me into accepting myself as a girl. So you got the psychological thing going in your head. When I’m intimate with my wife it sometimes haunts me. From time to time it gets to flashbacks of you as a kid, and it makes you— I admit, sometimes I have to get up out of the bed and go to the bathroom and throw up.

  “You know, if I had lost my arms and my legs and wound up in a wheelchair where you’re moving everything with a little rod in your mouth—would that make me less of a person? It just seems that they implied that you’re nothing if your penis is gone. The second you lose that, you’re nothing, and they’ve got to do surgery and hormones to turn you into something. Like you’re a zero. It’s like your whole personality, everything about you is all directed—all pinpointed—toward what’s between the legs. And to me, that’s ignorant. I don’t have the kind of education that these scientists and doctors and psychologists have, but to me it’s very ignorant. If a woman lost her breasts, do you turn her into a guy? To make her feel ‘whole and complete’?

  “I feel sorry for women. I’ve been there. ‘You’re a little lady—go into the kitchen.’ Or ‘We don’t want you to chop wood—you might hurt yourself.’ I remember when I was a kid and women were fighting like hell to get equal rights. I said, ‘Good for them.’ I kind of sensed what position women had in society. Way down there. And that’s how I was portrayed. And I didn’t want to go way down there. I felt, I can do what anybody else can! But ‘Oh, you’re a girl—you might get hurt playing ball.’