As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  “At Agassiz Drive school there was this guy, Tubby Wayne. He was a male chauvinist pig. ‘Women are dirt; they can’t do anything men can do.’ He kept saying, ‘You don’t know anything. You’re a girl; girls don’t know anything.’ So I finally said to him, ‘You think you’re so tough? Then hit me. C’mon hit me.’ He says, ‘No, I’m not going to hit you; you’re a girl.“No. Hit me. I’m not going to put up with this.’ He wouldn’t, so I punched him—and he laughed at me. It was a good thing he didn’t hit me, I guess. But I was thinking, Don’t hide behind the ‘I don’t hit girls’ excuse.

  “The guys at work don’t know about what happened to me. I mean, I work in a slaughterhouse. All men. Can you imagine?—‘There’s the freak who wore dresses as a kid.’ They give you that male chauvinist crap all the time. Like they’re always saying that they’re the boss at home. They look at me and ask me, ‘Who’s the boss?’ I say, ‘Look, man, in my home it’s a partnership. It doesn’t mean I wimp out; sometimes I get my way, and sometimes I don’t get my way. But either way, it’s a partnership.’ I mean, who wants a woman with no brains, who follows you blindly? That’s more like a slave than a wife. You don’t want a slave, you want somebody with her own opinions, somebody who puts you on the right track, someone to show you the right direction. It’s very hard to talk to somebody who’s stone-cold stupid, who follows you blindly.

  “But you know, if I had had a normal life, and none of this had ever happened to me, I’d probably be one of these chauvinistic kind of guys, where the guy goes to work, breaks his back, comes home, and sucks down a beer and watches sports. And if I saw someone like me out on TV, I’d sit there saying, ‘Oh God that’s sick.’ That’s how I would be. So knowing that that person is me, you can realize how sick I feel looking back on all this. You wish to God you could switch places with anybody.

  “After I tried to kill myself, they put me in one of those psycho wards. Right away they want to put you in a group meeting. You can’t even face this by yourself, and they’re going to stick you in a room full of people so you can discuss this with strangers? There was this doctor there who kept telling me that it was wrong for me to try to kill myself. Well, it’s easy for him to sit there and say, ‘Shame, shame, shame.’ This guy’s been putting himself through college, he’s got a degree, probably living in a fancy house, he’s got 2.2 kids, got a normal life. Don’t compare that to me. Not the same.

  “I’m happiest when I’m alone. Doesn’t mean I’m not friendly. It’s just I’m more comfortable when I’m by myself. It’s not lonely. It’s relaxing. It’s soothing. It reminds me of my grandfather’s farm. If I go for a walk there, I’m in total peace. I’m never alone there. You always feel like you’re surrounded in a place like that. Surrounded by what, I don’t know. But you’re not alone.

  “I still wonder from time to time what it would have been like to have a biological child: to see how much of me that child would have. It’s not really an ego trip. It’s just . . . you feel that way. But I love my kids, and they’re my children—not just my stepchildren. I’m going to want to tell my kids about what happened. I couldn’t keep something like this away from them. I’d feel very uncomfortable about that. I already told my eldest, when she was fifteen. She had that look on her face, like, ‘You wore dresses?’ But all in all, she took it well. She said, ‘I don’t love you any less, Dad.’ I know my middle child would understand, but I won’t tell her for years. I have to wait until she’s a lot older. My son? I’ll tell him when he’s about fifteen.

  “I live my life through my son. Everything my son does, that’s me. When my son has a little crush on a girl, and he’s leaning on a fence, and the girl comes up and says, ‘Hi,’ and he’s got that blush thing happening; when he’s in Cub Scouts—that’s me. I live through him. When he succeeds, that’s like me succeeding. Some psychiatrist would disagree with me living my life through him, but I never had any kind of a childhood.

  “It’s going to be harder to tell my son than to tell my girls. You never know with boys and their fathers. He might think differently about me. You know: ‘My father wore dresses, my father had a girl’s name, my father lived as a girl.’ I mean that’s a lot to swallow. You can tell when it’s hard for somebody to accept something or is embarrassed. And for him to look at me sideways . . .

  “I’m sick to death of feeling ashamed of myself. That feeling will never go away. I did nothing wrong, but it’s like you’re conditioned to feel ashamed of yourself. The very thought that I was wearing a dress, having a girl’s name—the long hair and everything—I’m going to have to carry that for the rest of my life. You can’t erase memories like that. I just survive as best I can. Keep telling myself, ‘It’s not my fault. Not my fault what happened.’

  “Mom and Dad wanted this to work so I’d be happy. That’s every parent’s dream for their child. But I couldn’t be happy for my parents. I had to be happy for me. You can’t be something that you’re not. You have to be you.”

  * * *

  Embarking on my interviews with David, I had been warned by his former psychiatrist Doreen Moggey that I was engaging in a dangerous psychological process. She feared that David could not negotiate the leap from his current life to his former one without risk of serious mental upset, and urged me to tread gingerly when guiding him back to the memories and events he had tried, for so long, to forget. I heeded her advice, but in my conversations with David—which often stretched to six hours at a sitting, going deep into the small hours of the morning—I found that he bridled at the cautious circumspection of my questioning. He seemed to want nothing more than to charge fearlessly into the past, to speak without restraint about all that had happened to him, to put his true life story on the permanent record, and thus to reclaim it as his own. I also discovered that he wished to reclaim his life not only in the abstract form of interviews with me.

  In mid-January 1998 I located and spoke to his old friend Heather Legarry. She still lived in Winnipeg but was married now with a different last name, and she worked as a kindergarten teacher. As was the case in all the interviews I did with those who had known Brenda as a child (and to whom David had authorized me to tell his medical history), I did not at first tell her the truth of Brenda’s birth, so as not to color her memories and impressions of the girl; but when I did finally reveal to her that Brenda had been born a boy and now lived as a man named David, she said that she would like to see him. Recalling how David had once dodged a confrontation with Heather at the Go-Cart track fifteen years earlier, I wondered how he would greet this news. I was surprised when David said that he would like to see her, too. That Sunday they met privately and had lunch, while I stayed home with Jane and helped her nurse her mostly-mock jealousy—a jealousy that became a little more real when David failed to return home for almost four hours. When he did arrive, he (with typical thoughtfulness) bore a red rose for his wife, but he also bore an expression, on his face, that I had never seen before; it was a look of serene and somehow euphoric peacefulness. Asked by Jane what they had talked about for so long, David even got off a joke about his horrendous past. “Oh,” he said, “just girl talk!” In fact, he later said, he and Heather had discussed all aspects of his childhood, comparing notes on their shared memories, reexamining their old friendship in the light of what neither had known at the time. It was a meeting that had clearly removed from David a burden that had weighed on him for almost two decades.

  None of which is to say that revisiting David’s past with him for the purposes of researching this book was not without its painful, and precarious, moments—particularly when I stumbled upon one last family secret of the Reimers’ that had never been exposed: one of the white lies that Janet had constantly been obliged to concoct for Brenda in order to quell her daughter’s suspicions about her true identity; a white lie that had, through parental oversight, never been corrected with David, and which thus lay buried for almost twenty years, like an unexploded land mine.

  On my fi
rst ever trip to Winnipeg, eight months earlier, one of the first things David had ever told me about his mother was that she was a published poet. He described to me, with touching pride, how he had actually met the editors of the journal that had printed his mother’s work. I soon learned, of course, that the story of Janet as poet was a ruse. Wanting to learn from David his impressions of meeting the BBC reporters on that day in October 1979, I did not feel comfortable keeping up the fiction that they were poetry editors. I knew that I would have to explode the lie. I put it off for as long as I could, until close to the end of my monthlong stay in Winnipeg in early 1998. I tried to break the news gently, but David still reacted very badly to this jarring revelation.

  “Why did I have to find out this way?” he raged. “I’m a thirty-two-year-old man!”

  For the next two hours he railed against his mother’s “gutlessness” in not telling him the truth; he shouted that he had been lied to all his life, and said, “You don’t expect that from the people you trust and love!” His anger and upset were frighteningly intense, but thankfully David’s fury soon burnt itself down, and the next day he visited his mother and spoke to her about the deception. She apologized for having overlooked this final lie, and they made up over it. In the end, the exposure of that last, lingering falsehood had a positive effect, Janet said, in removing an obstacle that had persisted from David’s childhood of secrets and lies. I was glad, and relieved, of this outcome, but at the same time, glimpsing David’s apocalyptic rage made me wish, not for the first time, that he could bring himself to see a therapist, if only to vent the combustible anger that periodically built up in him over his past.

  But David’s dismal experience with the mental health profession as a child has guaranteed that he will never consult a psychiatrist in adulthood—unless it were his old friend, Mary McKenty, and that is impossible, given that she, at age eighty-three, has long since retired. Still, David and she have remained friends, and he accompanied me on a visit I made to her home in June 1998, on my final trip to Winnipeg. Though now in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease, and often unable even to recognize her own children, McKenty knew David immediately. She was a tiny woman with long, gray hair and the masklike expression typical of Alzheimer’s sufferers, but her face blossomed into a delighted smile when she saw David step over the threshold of her door.

  While David chatted with Mary’s live-in nurses, I retired with her to a small sitting room off the front hall. Fortunately, we had come on a day when Mary’s memory was particularly good, and her answers to my questions, though abbreviated, were spoken in a strong clear voice that left no doubt that she knew precisely what we were talking about.

  I asked Mary how she had handled Brenda’s difficult case. She shrugged. “I tried to be sensitive and supportive,” she said. I asked if Brenda had ever seemed at all like a girl. “No,” she said, “not like a girl at all.” I recalled to myself Money’s claim that Brenda must have been “coached” in rejecting girlhood; no evidence for this existed anywhere in the local treatment team’s notes, and David had been unequivocal in stating that McKenty had in no way “coached” him. But I felt it was my obligation to ask. Had Mary always kept Brenda’s true birth status from her? “Yes,” she said. I asked if she had tried to steer her gently away from being a girl. “No,” McKenty said. “The things were for her to realize and for her to do.”

  Impressed with what I had been able to glean about Mary’s special human touch with her patients—and especially with Brenda—I asked her about her general approach to psychiatry. In reply, she said “You have a parental attitude to your patients.” Then she glanced in the direction of the hallway, where David’s voice could be heard. “Just like a parent,” she added, “you often admire them.” I was moved by this word admire—so different from what one ordinarily expects to hear a psychiatrist say about a patient, or to hear a highly educated doctor like McKenty say about a slaughterhouse sanitation worker like David Reimer. But it was clear that her admiration for David was total.

  I asked if she had ever read any of John Money’s work. Her face, which had been eerily immobile, crumpled into a scowl. “Yes,” she said with clear distaste. I asked what she thought of it. “I thought it was unusual,” she said dryly.

  David came into the room. She immediately brightened. He crouched down on the carpet in front of where she sat on the sofa.

  “It’s been a long time, Mary,” he said gently.

  “How long has it been?”

  “Ten years at least.”

  “And it’s been almost twenty since Mary started treating you,” I said.

  David looked sheepish. Just that morning, he and I had been looking at Mary’s therapy notes with Brenda, and David had been aghast to be reminded of the cruel tricks he had played on her in their earliest sessions. He apologized to her now. “I drew a nasty picture of you,” he said. “I took you hostage with a toy gun.”

  “I didn’t mind,” she said.

  “I made a Death Warrant in your name!”

  Mary laughed and pretended to reach for her cane. “You’d better watch it!” she said. Then Mary grew serious and looked at David. His smile faded, too. For a moment it might have been twenty years ago, and the two might have been patient and doctor again. And indeed, Mary’s next utterance was a classic psychiatric inquiry, a question that went to the very heart of the psychotherapeutic enterprise, and to the heart, for that matter, of the universal enterprise of becoming a self-realized human being—the enterprise upon which we are all engaged.

  “Is there anything you want to change?” she asked.

  David looked down at his hands. He breathed a tired sigh. Then he looked at her. He smiled. “Everything I’ve wanted to do,” he said, “I’ve done.”

  * * *

  Among the things that David Reimer has done that give him greatest pride is his decision to speak out publicly about his ordeal, and the positive changes that have resulted from that act.

  For despite the brave efforts of Cheryl Chase, despite the three decades that Milton Diamond spent trying to warn doctors about the dangers in current management of intersex conditions, despite the long-term follow-up of sex-reassigned youngsters in Bill Reiner’s study, the medical establishment remained reluctant to address the issue. But in October 1998, amid the growing controversy ignited by Diamond and Sigmundson’s “John/Joan” article, the American Academy of Pediatrics invited Diamond to address its prestigious annual meeting of urologists. Diamond spoke about the failed twins case and spelled out his and Sigmundson’s revised protocols for the treatment of children with irregular or injured genitals. His speech was met with sustained applause from the physicians—the first tangible sign that the medical establishment as a whole might be prepared to alter what, for the past four decades, has been the accepted standard of care. It was a moment of triumph that Diamond declines to accept for himself, and instead directly attributes to the willingness of David Reimer to speak out about his extraordinary life as one of medicine’s most famous, if unwitting, guinea pigs.

  In speaking out, David has shaken to its foundations the clinical practice founded on John Money’s work; he has also raised profound questions about a theory that has held sway for most of the twentieth century: Freud’s theory that a child’s healthy psychological development as boy or a girl rests on the presence or absence of the penis—the ultimate reason that David was converted to girlhood in the first place. It is a notion that today is also being called into question by neurobiological research, which is leading scientists toward the conclusion that, as Dr. Reiner says, “the most important sex organ is not the genitals; it’s the brain.”

  David Reimer puts it another way when he speaks of his pride in his role as husband, father, and sole breadwinner in the family he never believed he would be lucky enough to have. “From what I’ve been taught by my father,” he says, “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. Things l
ike that add up much more to being a man than just bang-bang-bang—sex. I guess John Money would consider my children’s biological fathers to be real men. But they didn’t stick around to take care of the children. I did. That, to me, is a man.”

  Epilogue

  IT IS ONE OF THE FIRST MAXIMS of science that no theory can be based on a single experiment. This truism applies as much to Milton Diamond’s revelations about the failure of the twins case as it does (or should have) to Money’s original reporting of its success. While it is also true that Diamond cites David’s case not as an isolated one (he has repeatedly presented evidence to the same effect, both clinical and theoretical, in cases involving intersexes), it is only through continued study and follow-up on cases of developmentally normal boys turned into girls that medical science can confidently proclaim whether it is nature or nurture that predominates in the making of men and women, boys and girls.

  Such cases, which rely exclusively on genital accidents resulting in loss of the penis, are necessarily rare. Yet with the high-profile debate generated by David’s case, there are already signs that what cases do exist are being followed up and reported on with a greater rigor than previously. In February 1998 the Urology Times published a report by Dr. Bernardo Ochoa, former chief of pediatric and urologic surgery at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, on the case of a baby boy who, like David, lost his penis in an injury and was subsequently reassigned to girlhood by castration, vaginal surgery, and hormone treatment—with results strikingly similar to David’s. “She and her family received extensive psychosocial assistance,” Ochoa reported. “However, when she became an adolescent, 14 years later, she demanded to be reassigned as a boy because she didn’t feel she was a girl.”