As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

Preface

ON THE MORNING of 27 June 1997 I paid my first visit to David Reimer’s home, a small, nondescript dwelling in a working-class neighborhood of Winnipeg, Manitoba. There was nothing about the house to suggest that its owner might arouse the interest of a journalist from New York City—not to mention the fascination of scientists and doctors the world over. On the well-tended lawn, a child’s bicycle lay on its side. At the curb was parked an eight-year-old secondhand Toyota. Inside the house, a handmade wooden cabinet in a corner of the living room held the standard emblems of family life: wedding photos and school portraits, china figurines, and souvenirs from family trips. There was a knock-off antique coffee table, a worn easy chair, and a sofa—which was where my host, a wiry young man dressed in a jean jacket and scuffed work boots, seated himself.

At thirty-one years of age David Reimer could have passed for more than a decade younger. Partly it was the sparseness of his facial hair—just a few blond wisps that sprouted from his jawline; partly it was a certain delicacy to his prominent cheekbones and tapering chin. Otherwise he looked and sounded like what he was: a blue-collar factory worker, a man of high school education, whose fondest pleasures were to do a little weekend fishing with his dad in the local river or to have a backyard barbecue with his wife and kids. He was the kind of rough-edged but affable young man whose conversation ran to such topics as his tinkering with his car engine, his work woes, or the challenges of raising three kids on less than forty thousand a year.

I had come to Winnipeg to learn all I could about David Reimer, but my chief interest was in his childhood—a subject that, when I raised it, brought an immediate and dramatic change in him. Gone was the smile on his face and the bantering tone in his voice. Now his brows gathered together above his small straight nose, his eyes began to blink with startled rapidity, and he thrust his chin forward like someone who’d just been challenged to a fight. His voice—a deep, burred baritone—took on a new pitch and rhythm, an insistent, hammering rhythm, which for all its obvious aggrievement and anger also carried the pleading edge of someone desperate to communicate emotions that he feared others could never understand. How well even he understood these emotions was not immediately clear. I noticed that when David described events that had occurred prior to his fifteenth birthday, he tended to drop the pronoun I from his speech, replacing it with the distancing you—almost as if he were speaking about someone else altogether. Which, in a sense, he was.

“It was like brainwashing,” he was saying as he lit the first in an unbroken chain of cigarettes. “I’d give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it’s torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind—with the psychological warfare in your head.”

He was referring to the events that had begun to unfold on an April morning three decades earlier when, at eight months of age, he lost his entire penis to a botched circumcision. As a result of that irreparable injury, his parents had taken him to see a famed expert in sex research at the renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore where they were convinced to submit their son to a surgical sex change. The process involved clinical castration and other genital surgery when he was a baby, followed by a twelve-year program of social, mental, and hormonal conditioning to make the transformation take hold in his psyche. The case was reported in the medical literature as an unqualified success, and he became one of the most famous (though unnamed) patients in the annals of modern medicine.

It was a fame that derived not only from the fact that his medical and surgical metamorphosis from boy to girl was the first infant sex reassignment ever reported on a developmentally normal child, but also from a stunning statistical long shot that lent special significance to the case. He had been born an identical twin. His brother and sole sibling provided to the experiment a built-in matched control—a genetic clone who, with penis and testicles intact, was raised as a male. That the twins were reported to have grown into happy, well-adjusted children of opposite sex seemed unassailable proof of the primacy of environment over biology in the differentiation of the sexes. Textbooks in medicine and the social sciences were rewritten to include the case, and a precedent for infant sex reassignment as standard treatment in cases of newborns with injured or irregular genitals was established. The case also became a touchstone for the feminist movement in the 1970s, when it was widely cited as proof that the gender gap was purely a result of cultural conditioning, not biology. For Dr. John Money, the medical psychologist who was the architect of the experiment, the so-called “twins case” became the most publicly celebrated triumph of a forty-year career that in 1997 earned him the accolade “one of the greatest sex researchers of the century.”

But as the mere existence of the young man who sat in front of me on that morning in June 1997 would suggest, the experiment was a failure—a fact not publicly revealed until that spring, in the medical journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. There, authors Dr. Milton Diamond, a biologist at the University of Hawaii, and Dr. Keith Sigmundson, a psychiatrist from Victoria, British Columbia, had documented how David had struggled against his imposed girlhood from the start and how, at age fourteen, he had reverted to the sex written in his genes and chromosomes. The paper had set off shock waves in medical circles around the world, generating furious debate about the ongoing practice of infant sex reassignment (a procedure more common than a layperson might think). The paper also raised troubling questions about the way the case had been reported in the first place, why it had taken almost twenty years for a follow-up to reveal the actual outcome, and why that follow-up was conducted not by Dr. Money or Johns Hopkins, but by outside researchers. The answers to these questions, fascinating for what they suggest about the mysteries of sexual identity, also brought to light a thirty-year rivalry between eminent sex researchers, a rivalry whose very bitterness not only dictated how this most unsettling of medical tragedies was exposed, but also may have been the impetus behind the experiment in the first place.

What was shaping up for medicine to be a highly public scandal involving some of the biggest names in the world of sex research was for David Reimer a purely private catastrophe. Apart from two television interviews that he granted in the summer of 1997 (his face obscured, his voice disguised), he had never told his story in full to a journalist. He had agreed to speak to me, for an article I was preparing on the case for Rolling Stone magazine, on the condition that I withhold crucial details of his identity. Accordingly, in the article I did not reveal where he was born, raised, and continued to live, and I invented pseudonyms for his parents, Ron and Janet, and for his identical twin brother, Brian. The physicians who treated him in Winnipeg, I identified by initials. David himself I called, variously, “John” and “Joan,” the pseudonyms given to him by Diamond and Sigmundson in their journal article describing the macabre double life he had been obliged to lead. So careful was I to provide not even the most oblique clue to David’s geographic whereabouts that I omitted even to mention the historic blizzard that paralyzed Winnipeg on the morning of his circumcision accident—a freak late April snowfall eerily evocative of those reversed natural wonders that always presage horror in Shakespearean and Greek tragedies.

My Rolling Stone article appeared in December 1997. At nearly twenty thousand words, it was as thorough a job as could be managed under the space constraints and deadline pressures of magazine journalism. But even as the piece went to press, it was clear that David’s life and the scientific machinations that played such a decisive part in shaping it were of sufficient complexity, scientific import, and human drama to require, for their fullest telling, a book. David, it transpired, had been thinking along the same lines and wanted me to be the book’s author. At which point I was obliged to reveal to him an important condition for my taking on the project: that he abandon the mask of John/Joan.

Quite apart from the fact that I could not imagine writing a book in which the central character, his family, friends, physicians, and others exist as pseudonyms moving against the indeterminate background of a “city somewhere in the North American Midwest,” I also knew that a knowledge of his specific geographic location and the people who inhabited it were considered vital to a proper understanding of the case. In a tale at the very heart of which lies the debate surrounding nature versus nurture, genetics versus environment, biology versus rearing, it was imperative that I be permitted to describe in detail the sociocultural milieu in which David was raised. Finally, as a writer, I knew how many of the story’s peculiarly poetic resonances would be lost should David insist upon anonymity. To stick to pseudonyms would mean forfeiting the story of how David, when beginning his laborious switch back to boyhood at age fourteen, had rechristened himself with a male name different from his original birth name of Bruce—one that not only had the kind of down-to-earth masculine directness he favored, but also evoked for him his accomplishment in triumphing over the array of forces that had conspired, for the first fourteen years of his life, to convince him that he was someone other than the person he felt himself inwardly to be. It was owing to this unlikely victory that he had decided to name himself after the child in the Bible story who slew the seemingly invincible giant Goliath. Here, and in myriad other instances, to retain pseudonyms was to sacrifice a fact that reflected not only on the saga as a whole, but on David’s own understanding of it.

Beginning with the interviews he had first granted to Diamond and Sigmundson in early 1993 for their journal article and continuing with the interviews he gave to me for Rolling Stone, David had been moving by degrees out of the shadows of shame and secrecy in which he had been living. By the time I spoke to him about abandoning the mask of John/Joan, he had already come a long way in that journey. After discussing it with his wife, parents, and brother, and sleeping on it for one night, David told me that he was ready to step forward as his true self.

For the purposes of my reconstructing his past, David closed no doors, shut down no avenue of inquiry. He granted me over one hundred hours of interviews spread over twelve months, and he signed confidentiality waivers giving me access to an array of private legal papers, therapy notes, Child Guidance Clinic reports, IQ tests, medical records, and psychological workups that had accumulated over the course of his remarkable childhood. He assisted me in finding the schoolteachers and classmates who had known him in childhood—a difficult task of sleuthing since he had kept no school yearbooks, remembered few of his peers’ last names, and had spent the previous decade and a half trying to forget and avoid anyone who had known him in his previous incarnation as a girl. Most crucially, David helped me obtain interviews with all of his family members, including his father, who because of the painfulness of these events had not spoken of them to anyone in more than twenty years. It is only through the Reimer family’s rare candor that the full story of John/Joan can finally be told. Although that story is primarily about David Reimer and his experience of living on both sides of the gender divide, it is also about the young couple who, barely out of their teens, made the momentous decision to submit one of their twin baby boys to this unprecedented, and ultimately doomed, experiment in psychosexual engineering.

“My parents feel very guilty, as if the whole thing was their fault,” David explained to me during my first visit to Winnipeg. “But it wasn’t like that. They did what they did out of kindness and love and desperation. When you’re desperate, you don’t necessarily do all the right things.”