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

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THE IRONY WAS that Ron and Janet Reimer’s life together had begun with such special promise. That it would survive its trials is attributable perhaps in part to their shared heritage in an ethnic and religious background virtually defined by the hardiness of its people in the face of suffering.

Both Ron Reimer and Janet Schultz were descended from families who were Mennonite, the Anabaptist sect founded in sixteenth-century Holland. Like the Amish, Ron’s and Janet’s Mennonite ancestors were pacifists who followed a simple, nonworldly life based directly on Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. During the Inquisition, Mennonites were tortured and slaughtered in the thousands, the survivors escaping to begin a three-hundred-year search for a country that would allow them to live as a culture and religion apart. The majority went to Russia and farmed, but in the late 1800s, large numbers began to migrate to the New World, some settling in Nebraska and Kansas. The densest concentrations, however, settled in Canada, where the federal government, eager to populate its empty western plains, offered to the Mennonites complete religious freedom, their own schools, and exemption from military service. The first Mennonites arrived in southern Manitoba in 1874. Within five years, over ten thousand had followed, transplanting entire Russian villages to the Canadian prairie. It was in this wave of immigrants that both Ron’s and Janet’s great-grandparents, who were Dutch Mennonites directly descended from the earliest followers of the sect, came to Manitoba.

Their arrival coincided with that moment when the Canadian Pacific Railway reached Winnipeg, and transformed the once tiny and isolated fur-trapping settlement and Hudson’s Bay trading post. Within three decades the settlement had become a major grain capital of the North American middle west. “All roads lead to Winnipeg,” the Chicago Record Herald reported in 1911. “It is destined to become one of the greatest distributing commercial centers of the continent as well as a manufacturing community of great importance.”

Though the city failed to live up to those grand predictions, Winnipeg did grow rapidly in size, sophistication, and importance over the first half of the twentieth century, establishing the country’s first national ballet company and symphony orchestra. Today its population is over 600,000, and the city’s downtown core, built around the meandering curves of the Red River, boasts an impressive stand of modern high-rises to complement its fine Victorian buildings.

The Mennonites on the surrounding prairies had long felt the lure of Winnipeg’s affluence, and after World War II the more assimilated families began to move into the city to take jobs in manufacturing, trucking, and construction. Among them were Ron Reimer’s parents, Peter and Helen, who in 1949 sold their farm in nearby Deloraine and moved to the Winnipeg neighborhood of St. Boniface, where Peter took a job in a slaughterhouse and Helen raised their four young children, of whom Ron was the eldest.

Even as a small child, he was dutiful and hardworking, a boy whose combination of personal privacy and dogged industry often amazed his own mother. “He was always so shy and quiet,” Helen Reimer recalls, “but he was also such a busy little boy. I had to think up ways to keep him out of trouble. I would show him how to cook. He always wanted to be doing something with food and cooking.” It was a passion that would stay with Ron. As an adult he would eventually support his wife and two children by running his own business as the operator of a coffee truck, supplying sandwiches and other prepared foods to construction sites around Winnipeg.

By 1957, when Ron was in his early teens, the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard had reached Winnipeg. Cars, girls, beer, and rock ’n’ roll music soon had strong claims on his attention. For Mennonites of Ron’s parents’ generation, the swift cultural changes of the late 1950s were threatening. Though not themselves especially devout, they had only a decade earlier moved from an almost exclusively Mennonite farm community where some of the day-to-day values and assumptions were still closer to those of nineteenth-century rural Russia than late-twentieth-century urban North America. In what would prove to be a kind of reverse migration, the Reimers were among many Mennonite families who, in an effort to resist the seismic cultural shifts taking place in the city, returned their families to their roots on the prairie. In 1959, Ron’s father bought a farm some sixty miles from the city, near the town of Kleefeld, in Mennonite country, and moved his family there.

Ron, fifteen years old at the time, hated the move. Kleefeld itself was little more than a ramshackle scattering of stores along a few hundred yards of gravel highway (grain store, post office, grocery), with nowhere for Ron to channel his formidable work ethic. He would pick two hundred pounds of saskatoons and sell them for twenty-five cents a pound—grueling labor for little pay; nothing like the money he was able to make in the city. And his father insisted on taking even those paltry sums from Ron for upkeep of the old clapboard farmhouse on its patch of scrubby land.

It was in this state of boredom, penury, and growing friction with his strict and authoritarian father that Ron, at seventeen, accepted the invitation of his friend Rudy Hildebrandt to visit Rudy’s girlfriend in the nearby town of Steinbach. Rudy’s girlfriend had a nice-looking roommate, a girl named Janet, whom Ron might like.

Like Ron, Janet Schultz was raised in Winnipeg, the eldest child of Mennonite parents who had joined the postwar migration from the prairie to the city. Growing up in the Winnipeg neighborhood of St. Vital, Janet was a lively and inquisitive girl whose passion for reading—first Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, then thrillers, and eventually books on psychology—opened up for her a perspective on life beyond the traditional Mennonite values of her parents—and in particular her mother, with whom she constantly clashed. “I wanted an education, but my mother wanted me to get out to work and bring home money,” Janet says. Eventually she was convinced to quit school after ninth grade and take a job at a sewing factory. Janet gave her paychecks to her mother, which did little to foster goodwill between them. A further gulf opened between mother and daughter when Janet, in her early teens, stopped attending the Mennonite church. “I found it was so restrictive,” she says. “I didn’t think it was biblical. They said it was a sin to smile. I didn’t think that way.” In fact, by age fifteen, Janet was given to joking about her parents’ religion. “Why don’t Mennonites ever make love standing up?” she liked to ask her friends. “Because someone might think they were dancing!” Janet herself loved to go dancing and roller-skating, and as an exceptionally pretty hazel-eyed brunet with a shapely figure, she never lacked for dates.

Convinced that their eldest child and only daughter was slipping dangerously from their control, Janet’s parents, like Ron Reimer’s, joined the migration of city Mennonites back to the farm. In 1960, when Janet was fourteen, the Schultzes relocated to New Bothwell, a tiny settlement amid the silos and grain fields forty-five minutes from Winnipeg. Janet missed the city’s movie theaters, restaurants, roller rinks, and dance halls—and soon began accepting dates from any boy who had a car and thus could offer her escape from the farm. Janet’s mother tried to curb her daughter’s social life but to no avail. Shortly after Janet’s fifteenth birthday, her mother told her to move out. Janet went gladly. She moved to the nearby city of. Steinbach, where she found work at a sewing factory and shared a small apartment in a rooming house with her cousin Tina. Not long after that, Tina’s boyfriend brought a young man over to meet Janet. He was a tall blond boy of seventeen with large blue eyes and a shy way of glancing at her. His name was Ron Reimer. “I was flirting with Ron,” she says, laughing, “and I was thinking he wasn’t flirting back, so I figured he didn’t like me.”

Ron did like her, but was too shy to reveal his feelings in front of the other couple. He invited Janet to have a look at his car on the street, then asked her out to see a movie on the weekend. He raised money for their date by taking the transmission out of a junkyard Ford and selling it to a friend for ten dollars. That weekend, Ron and Janet went to see Gidget Goes Hawaiian. “I don’t think I watched five minutes of that movie,” Janet laughs. “I was too busy eyeballing him. Oh, he was so sexy!”

Over the course of the summer they saw a lot of each other, joining Tina and Rudy on double dates—usually just a drive out to one of the isolated country roads where they would park, drink a six-pack, make out, and talk. As Ron and Janet compared their backgrounds, they were amazed to discover how much they had in common. Their similarities drew them together, but paradoxically enough so did their differences. Janet could compensate for Ron’s sometimes passive reluctance to take decisive action; Ron, on the other hand, with his slow, considered approach to life, could rein Janet in from her more reckless enthusiasms and impulses. Together they made up a single entity stronger than either one of them.

When Janet decided to move back into Winnipeg, there was never any question but that Ron would follow her. Though they did not rent an apartment together—this was the early 1960s, and such boldness would have been unthinkable for a pair not yet out of their teens—Ron did spend much of his time with Janet in her rooming house. It was there that they slept together for the first time. Both had been virgins. And not long after that, Janet missed her period. She had just turned eighteen. Ron was nineteen, soon to turn twenty. It was young to marry, but they had talked about marriage before. This was simply a sign that they should bless their union sooner rather than later. The two were married on 19 December 1964 in the city of Steinbach. In acknowledgment of the emancipation they now felt from their disapproving parents, they deliberately declined to be married in one of the city’s twenty Mennonite churches.

The newlyweds moved into a tiny cold-water flat in downtown Winnipeg. They couldn’t afford better. Janet was getting minimum wage working as a waitress at the Red Top diner; Ron was toiling for low pay at a factory that made windows. That they would have to bring in more money was obvious—especially when, during one of Janet’s checkups with her obstetrician, she learned that she was pregnant with twins. Ron was nervous, but Janet refused to be anything but optimistic. “I was so excited,” she says, “because all my life I’d been dreaming, Oh wouldn’t it be wonderful to have twins?”

That June, when Janet was five months pregnant, Ron landed a union job at one of the city’s biggest slaughterhouses, and his pay more than doubled, enabling them to move into a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Dubuc and Des Meurons Streets. Then the couple had a scare. When she was in the latter stages of her pregnancy, Janet developed a serious case of toxemia—a pregnancy-related form of high blood pressure that, untreated, can be harmful to the fetus. Her doctor recommended that she have her labor and delivery induced.

On 22 August 1965, some four weeks before her projected due date, Janet was admitted to St. Boniface Hospital. During his wife’s labor, Ron sat in the visitor’s lounge nervously awaiting the outcome. After several hours, a nurse came and announced that everything had gone fine and that he was the father of identical twins. In his relief and excitement at hearing that Janet and the babies were alive and well, Ron failed to take in anything else. So as he hurried through the doorway toward the nursery to see his children, he was brought up short by a smiling nurse who called out to him, “Boy or girl?”

“I don’t know!” Ron called back. “I just know there’s two of ’em!”

They named the twins Bruce and Brian. They were so similar in appearance that people could not tell them apart, but Janet and Ron, like the parents of most identical twins, could soon distinguish the children easily. Bruce, the elder of the two by twelve minutes, had been born slightly underweight and as a result had had to stay in the hospital a few days to be fattened up. But by the time he joined his twin brother at home, it was clear that he was the more active child, tending to writhe and wriggle and to wake in the night with greater frequency than his brother Brian, a peaceful, less rowdy baby. Both bore a striking resemblance to Janet, with their upturned noses and small round mouths.

By the time the boys were six months of age, Janet felt like an old hand at pacifying, feeding, and changing them. Ron had received another raise, and the family moved to a still bigger and nicer place to live—an actual house on Metcalfe Street, not far from their former apartment. Life seemed to be shaping up beautifully for the young family.

Which is what made it so unsettling when, shortly after the twins were seven months old, Janet noticed that they seemed to be in distress when they urinated. At first she thought it was just the wet diapers that made them cry; then she noticed that even after a diaper change they would scream and complain. She examined their penises and noticed that their foreskins seemed to be sealing up at the tip and making it difficult for the boys to pass water. She took the babies to see her pediatrician, who explained that they were suffering from a condition called phimosis. It was not rare, he said, and was easily remedied by circumcision. After talking about it with Ron, Janet agreed to have the children circumcised at St. Boniface Hospital.

The operations were scheduled for the morning of 27 April, but because Ron was working the late shift at the slaughterhouse, he and Janet decided that he should drive the kids in to be admitted the night before. Apart from the normal concern any parent would feel on the eve of such an operation, Ron and Janet felt no particular trepidation about the circumcisions. Nor should they have. St. Boniface was an excellent, fully modern general teaching hospital. Housed in a seven-story building, it had seven hundred beds, a cardiac care unit, and a children’s hospital where, in the mid-1960s, some 2,600 babies were delivered annually and roughly a thousand circumcisions performed each year, all without mishap.

“We weren’t worried,” Janet says. “We didn’t know we had anything to worry about.”

Ordinarily, pediatricians experienced in circumcisions performed the procedure at St. Boniface Hospital, but on the morning of 27 April 1966 the usual attending physician, for reasons lost to history, was not available when the Reimer twins were scheduled for their operations. The duty fell to Dr. Jean-Marie Huot, a forty-six-year-old general practitioner.

When a nurse was dispatched to collect the first of the children, it was pure happenstance that she lifted baby Bruce from the bassinet first.

With the baby fixed and draped on the operating table, Dr. Max Cham, the anesthesiologist, administered gas to put Bruce to sleep. (Though newborns were routinely circumcised without anesthesia, a child of eight months, like baby Bruce, could not be operated on while conscious.) Sources differ slightly on what happened next. Court papers later filed against the surgeon, hospital, and three attending nurses refer to an “artery clamp” that was used to secure the piece of foreskin that was meant to be cut away. An artery clamp, however, would be a most unusual choice for such a procedure. According to Dr. Cham, with whom I spoke in the winter of 1997, Dr. Huot used the standard Gomco clamp. Designed specifically for circumcisions, the clamp is used to prevent excessive bleeding: the foreskin is stretched over a bell-shaped metal sheath; a round clamping device then closes over the stretched foreskin and compresses it against the bell, squeezing the foreskin and thus making it blood-free for excision by scalpel.

Regardless of which clamp was used, it is not in doubt that Dr. Huot elected to use not a scalpel to cut away Bruce’s foreskin, but a Bovie cautery machine. This device employs a generator to deliver an electric current to a sharp, needlelike cutting instrument, which burns the edges of an incision as it is made, sealing the blood vessels to prevent bleeding—a quite superfluous consideration if Huot had indeed used a Gomco clamp, and a dangerous one, since it would bring perilously close to the penis a current that could be conducted by the metal bell encasing the organ. If, at the same time, the current to the needle were to be turned up almost to the maximum, the results could be cataclysmic.

According to the later testimony of operating room personnel, the electrocautery machine was turned on, and the hemostat dial, which controlled the amount of heat in the needle, was set at the minimum. Dr. Huot lowered the needle and touched it to Bruce’s foreskin. Subsequent testing of the machine revealed that it was in proper working order. Whether through temporary mechanical malfunction, user error, or some combination of the two, the needle failed to sever the flesh on the first pass. The hemostat control was turned up. Once again the instrument was applied to the foreskin; again it failed to cut. The cautery machine’s current was increased. The needle was once again brought into contact with the foreskin.

“I heard a sound,” recalls Dr. Cham, “just like steak being seared.”

A wisp of smoke curled up from the baby’s groin. An aroma as of cooking meat filled the air.

A urologist was quickly summoned. On duty that morning was Dr. Earl K. Vann. He cleared the instruments and inspected the organ. It appeared oddly blanched in color. He felt the penis with his gloved hand and noticed that it had an unusual firmness. Vann took a probe and attempted to pass it through the urinary meatus—the hole at the end of the penis. The probe would not pass through. Vann told the operating room personnel that he would have to perform an emergency suprapubic cystotomy to place a catheter and thus enable the baby to pass urine. He made an incision below Bruce’s belly button, then threaded a length of tubing into the incision, through the muscle wall, and into the bladder. This was sewn into place. A bag to catch the child’s urine was affixed to the free end of the catheter. The baby was then wheeled out to the burn ward.

It was decided not to attempt to circumcise his twin brother.

On nights when Ron worked the late shift, the Reimers’ normal routine was for Janet to prepare dinner, which they would eat together when Ron got home from work shortly after midnight. They would talk about their day, maybe watch a little TV, and often not make it to bed until two or three in the morning. They’d usually sleep until noon or one. They were sleeping on the morning of 27 April when the phone rang.

Janet answered. It was the hospital calling.

“They said to come in and see the doctor,” Janet recalls. “They said there was a slight accident, and they needed to see us right away.” Ron took the phone and asked the person on the other end of the line what was going on. “They just said they wanted to see us,” Ron says. “They didn’t say there was anything wrong.”

But Ron and Janet could tell by the person’s tone of voice that something unusual was happening. They dressed and headed out to their car. Opening their front door, they discovered that the city, which for some weeks had been in the full delicious flood of early spring, had been hit by a freak blizzard. The pathway to the curb was completely obliterated by snow; the car was buried up to its bumpers. Flakes continued to sift down thickly from a bleached sky.

Ron dug the car out, and they began the slow journey through streets clogged and snarled with snowbound traffic. Five blocks north on St. Mary’s Road, then a right turn onto Tache Avenue and the eight blocks up to the hospital. Over the car radio they heard that the airport had been closed down. Seven inches were expected to fall over the course of the day. Already the weathermen were proclaiming it one of the worst blizzards in the city’s history. Longtime residents would recall the storm clearly more than thirty years later.

Having finally made it the one mile from their house to St. Boniface Hospital, Ron and Janet rushed inside, only to wait in the doctor’s office for what seemed a very long time. Dr. Huot entered. In a businesslike voice he told the Reimers that there had been an accident while circumcising baby Bruce.

“What do you mean, an accident?” Janet said.

Dr. Huot said that Bruce’s penis had been burned.

“I sort of froze,” Janet recalls. “I didn’t cry. It was just like I turned to stone.” When she finally gathered her wits enough to speak, Janet found herself asking if they had also burned her other child.

“No,” Dr. Huot replied. “We didn’t touch Brian.”

Ron and Janet asked to see their injured baby right away. The doctor said that Bruce was recovering from a surgical procedure to install a catheter. The Reimers were told not to worry, that they could see the child tomorrow. They collected their uninjured son, Brian, and drove home through the steadily falling snow.

The next day Ron and Janet returned to the hospital. Dr. Vann took them to see the baby. Janet’s first glimpse of her son is a memory that even three decades later causes her face to drain of blood. Standing over Bruce’s bassinet in the burn unit, she looked at his penis—or what was left of it.

“It was blackened, and it was sort of like a little string. And it was right up to the base, up to his body.” To Ron the penis looked “like a piece of charcoal. I knew it wasn’t going to come back to life after that.”

Nevertheless, Janet asked the urologist, “Will it still grow, and he’ll just have a little penis?”

The doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”

Over the next few days, baby Bruce’s penis dried and broke away in pieces. It was not very long before all vestiges of the organ were gone completely.

Bruce remained in the hospital while Ron and Janet watched a parade of the city’s top local specialists examine him. The doctors gave little hope. Phallic reconstruction, a crude and makeshift expedient even today, was in its infancy in the 1960s—a fact made plain by the plastic surgeon, Dr. Desmond Kernahan, when he described the limitations of a penis that would be constructed from flesh farmed from Bruce’s thigh or abdomen. “Such a penis would not, of course, resemble a normal organ in color, texture, or erectile capability,” Kernahan wrote in his consultation report. “It would serve as a conduit for urine, but that is all.” Even that was optimistic, according to Dr. M. Schwartz, a urologist who also examined the child: “Insofar as the future outlook is concerned,” he wrote, “restoration of the penis as a functional organ is out of the question.” Dr. G. L. Adamson, head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the Winnipeg Clinic, evaluated Bruce’s projected psychological and emotional future. “One can predict,” Adamson wrote, “that he will be unable to live a normal sexual life from the time of adolescence: that he will be unable to consummate marriage or have normal heterosexual relations, in that he will have to recognize that he is incomplete, physically defective, and that he must live apart.”

Pediatrician Dr. Harry Medovoy was also called in to consult on the case. Though Medovoy had spent his entire career practicing in Manitoba, he had an international reputation. He was a member of the editorial board of the American journal Pediatrics and founder of a children’s hospital at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Center, which bears his name today. Though he was a relentless booster of Canadian medicine, it was Medovoy’s opinion that the child should be seen at one of the major American medical centers. He recommended the Mayo Clinic, a mere half-day’s train ride away in Rochester, Minnesota. Thus, upon Bruce’s release from the hospital on 7 June—six weeks after he was first admitted to St. Boniface—Ron and Janet took him on the train to Rochester.

At the Mayo Clinic the baby was examined by a team of doctors. They recommended that Bruce have an artificial phallus constructed at some time shortly before he began school. Like the Winnipeg doctors, the Mayo Clinic physicians explained that phalloplasties were by no means foolproof: they required multiple surgeries through childhood, and the cosmetic and functional results were not promising.

Ron and Janet could hardly believe that this was all the Mayo Clinic doctors could offer them. They wondered why they had bothered to go to the expense and trouble of coming all the way to this famous medical center merely to hear what they had heard back in Canada.

Feeling that they had now exhausted all their options, Ron and Janet returned to Winnipeg and tried to reconcile themselves to raising a son who, no matter how successful the phalloplasty, “must live apart.”

The Winnipeg Free-Press and its rival, the Tribune, soon got wind of the story. The newspapers each ran an article about a child whose penis was burned off at St. Boniface Hospital. The press did not print the Reimers’ name, however, so Ron and Janet were able to keep secret from their neighbors the dreadful accident that had befallen their child. When Janet accepted invitations from other young mothers in the neighborhood to come over for coffee, she sat silently while the others happily traded information about their babies. Only when she got home did she burst into tears and wail, “I hate you, God!” Her taciturn husband, typically, permitted himself no such outpouring of emotion. Ron had once tried to confide in a couple of friends at work about the accident, but the guys joked about it. “I stopped talking to those people,” Ron says. “I stopped talking to everybody, pretty much.” It only added to the young couple’s misery that Brian’s phimosis had long since cleared up by itself, his healthy penis a constant reminder that the disastrous circumcision on Bruce had been utterly unnecessary in the first place.

The twins’ first birthday, on 22 August 1966, passed in gloom for Ron and Janet. By January they felt like prisoners in their house. They could not even go out together to see a movie (if they had felt so inclined), since they were afraid to hire a baby-sitter who might gossip about the tragedy. By February, Ron began to wake in the middle of the night from dreams that he was strangling Dr. Huot.

Then on a Sunday evening in mid-February—some ten months after Bruce’s accident—Ron and Janet saw something that jolted them from their despondency. Their small black-and-white TV happened to be tuned to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular current affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days, where a man identified as Dr. John Money was a guest. A suavely charismatic individual in his late forties, bespectacled and with the long, elegantly cut features of a matinee idol, Dr. Money was talking about the wonders of gender transformation taking place at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Today, with the subject of transexual surgeries a staple of daytime talk shows, it is difficult to imagine just how alien the concept seemed on that February evening in 1967. Fifteen years earlier, in 1952, a spate of publicity had attended the announcement by American ex-GI George Jorgensen that he had undergone surgical transformation to become Christine. That operation, performed in Denmark, had been roundly criticized by American hospitals, which refused to perform the surgeries. The subject had faded from public view—until now, when Johns Hopkins announced that it had not only performed two male-to-female sex changes, but had established the world’s first clinic devoted solely to the practice of converting adults from one sex to the other. The driving force behind the renowned hospital’s adoption and promotion of the controversial procedure was the man who now appeared on the Reimers’ TV screen: Dr. John Money.

The name rang a distant bell for Ron and Janet. Shortly after Bruce’s accident, one of the Winnipeg plastic surgeons had said that he had mentioned Bruce’s case to a leading sex researcher at a medical meeting in the United States; the man had suggested that Ron and Janet raise Bruce as a girl. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic had also said something to Ron and Janet about a man in Baltimore who could help them raise Bruce as a girl. While the Mayo Clinic doctors had not themselves recommended the procedure, they had said that the Reimers might like to get a second opinion. At the time, Ron and Janet had not even considered the idea of a sex change. Or so they had thought. As they watched Dr. Money on television, they realized that the idea had never completely left them; it had lodged in the backs of their minds, as Ron puts it, “like a seed that had been planted.” Now, as they watched and listened to Dr. Money speak, it was as if that seed had grown and burst into full flower.

It was his confidence that was most striking. Even under the pressure of the staring television cameras and live studio audience, Dr. Money’s words, tinged with a highly cultured, British-sounding accent, issued forth with uncanny fluency. He did not stumble over a single syllable, even when the show’s interviewer—a bulldoglike young man named Alvin Davis—asked pointedly why psychiatrists were “so opposed” to the practice that Dr. Money was promoting.

“Well,” Money said, “I suppose it’s a self-evident fact that there are many people who feel that this is not the psychiatric way to treat these patients, since the usual definition of psychiatry is in terms of psychotherapy and the talking treatment. However, there are a small group of people who, like myself, believe that it’s thoroughly justified in an attempt to constantly increase our ability to help human beings and to see exactly what the outcome is when, let’s say, twenty or thirty people can be followed for five to ten years after having received this kind of treatment.”

“But isn’t it a fact,” Davis said, “that a homosexual will come to you and say, ‘I want to be castrated.’ And then you will make the judgment—or you and a board, a panel at Johns Hopkins will make the judgment—about whether to castrate that person?”

“Yes,” Dr. Money said, mildly. “If you want to state it that way, it’s true.”

“Not only to castrate that person,” Davis continued, his voice taking on the rising tone of a prosecutor, “but to inject hormones into the person and virtually change the person—not into a female, but into a male with female parts. Aren’t you arrogating to yourselves certain decisions that not only psychiatrists don’t want to have, but perhaps God doesn’t want to have?”

“Well,” Dr. Money said, the flicker of a smile underlining the martini-dry sarcasm in his tone, “would you like to argue on God’s side?”

“No,” Davis said. “I would like to know whether you believe God doesn’t belong in this.”

“Well,” Money replied, returning to his tone of unflappable calm, a tone ever so slightly shaded by patient condescension, “I’m not sure that’s really a particularly relevant question—although I’m aware that many would. May I,” he continued, “give you the answer of the group of ministers in Baltimore who were interrogated by the press at the time of the announcement in the papers there? The thirteen of them agreed that in terms of the magnitude of the problem—especially in terms of its magnitude in the lives of the people concerned—that this was ethically justifiable as an attempt to help them. There was one person who withheld an answer until a later date, and that was a representative of the Roman church.”

“Why isn’t the work being done here in Canada?” Davis demanded to know. And he repeated his earlier query: “And why are so many psychiatrists here so opposed to it?”

“Oh,” Money said, almost languidly, “I would think for the same reason that there tends to be a traditionalism in most places. I don’t need to tell you that in many branches of medicine, science—or even housekeeping or farming—there is a tendency to hang on to the past, to cling to the past.”

“And you’re the pioneer?” Davis asked.

“Well,” Dr. Money said, “perhaps in a small way.”

At this point the camera cut from Dr. Money and his questioner to a blond woman who walked out onto the set. Dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and a matching close-fitting jacket, she took a seat in the chair across from the two men. A close-up shot revealed that her round, pretty face was expertly made up, in the style of the mid-1960s, with heavy eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, her mouth thickly painted with lipstick.

“This is Mrs. Diane Baransky,” the show’s announcer said. “Until four years ago, her name was Richard.”

Ron and Janet gaped at the TV screen. It was their first glimpse, ever, of a transexual. It was one thing to hear Dr. Money talk about sex change in the abstract; it was another to see it with your own eyes. Ron and Janet could hardly believe it. If they hadn’t been told that Mrs. Baransky was born a man, they would never have guessed it. Even knowing it, it was hard to believe. She looked like an attractive, even sexy woman. The way she moved, walked, sat—even her voice, despite an ever so slight huskiness, had the timbre of a woman’s as she said hello to her host and fellow guest.

After a few preliminary questions from Davis, Dr. Money spoke up, deftly seizing the reins of the interview.

“Diane,” he said, “I think people would be extremely interested if you could give us a short sketch of the difference that it makes to have had this procedure—to compare the old life with the new.”

“Well, there is a tremendous difference,” Mrs. Baransky said. “It’s a way of finding yourself. You actually fit into society, you’re more accepted in a more normal society.” She explained that the discrepancy between her anatomic self as a male and her inward sense of herself as a female had been a trial to her growing up. “As a teenager—or being young—when you’re different from anybody else, it’s very hard.” Becoming a woman, Mrs. Baransky explained, had solved all her problems of being teased and “singled out.” Until her sex change, she had felt completely alone. Now she was accepted as a woman and had recently married her husband, a fellow hairdresser. “I was different,” she said. “I was never complete. I was neither a man nor a woman.”

“And now you feel complete as a woman?” Davis asked.

Her response was unequivocal: “Oh, yes, definitely. Yes. Completely—body and mind.”

The audience was then invited to ask questions. It was near the end of the segment that a young man asked the question that had been forming in Janet’s mind. He asked about “the other group of sex patients” whom Dr. Money treated—newborn babies with what Dr. Money had earlier called “unfinished genitals,” babies whose private parts were neither male nor female at birth. In replying to this question, Dr. Money explained that he and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins could, through surgery and hormone treatments, make such children into whichever sex seemed best, and that the child could be raised happily in that sex. “The psychological sex in these circumstances,” as Dr. Money put it, “does not always agree with the genetic sex nor with whether the sex glands are male or female.”

Despite the big words and the rapidity with which Dr. Money spoke them, Janet and Ron caught their meaning. Dr. Money was saying that the sex a baby was born with didn’t matter; you could convert a baby from one sex to the other.

Janet turned to Ron. “I think I should write to this Dr. Money,” she said.

Ron agreed. When the segment ended a few minutes later, Janet wrote a letter to Dr. Money describing what had happened to Bruce. Dr. Money’s reply was prompt. He expressed great optimism about what could be done for the Reimers’ baby at Johns Hopkins and urged them to bring the child to Baltimore without delay.

After so many months of grim predictions, bleak prognoses, and hopelessness, Dr. Money’s words, Janet says, felt like a balm. “Someone,” she says, “was finally listening.”

2

DR. MONEY WAS indeed listening. In a sense, Janet’s cry for help was one that he might have been waiting for his entire professional life.

At the time the Reimer family’s plight became known to him, John Money was already one of the most respected, if controversial, sex researchers in the world. Born in 1921 in New Zealand, he had come to America at the age of twenty-five, received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, then joined Johns Hopkins, where his rise as a researcher and clinician specializing in sexuality was meteoric. Fifteen years after joining Johns Hopkins, he was already widely credited as the man who coined the term gender identity to describe a person’s inner sense of himself or herself as male or female. He was also known as the world’s undisputed authority on the psychological ramifications of ambiguous genitalia and was making headlines around the world for his establishment of the pioneering Johns Hopkins clinic for transexual surgeries.

As his unflappable appearance on This Hour Has Seven Days would suggest, Money was also a formidable promoter of his ideas. “He’s a terribly good speaker, very organized, and very persuasive in his recital of the facts regarding a case,” says Dr. John Hampson, a child psychiatrist who, with his wife, Joan, coauthored a number of Money’s groundbreaking papers on sexual development in the mid-1950s. “I think a lot of people were envious. He’s kind of a charismatic person, and some people dislike him.”

Money’s often overweening confidence actually came to him at some cost. His childhood and youth in rural New Zealand had been beset by anxieties, personal tragedies, and early failure. The son of an Australian father and an English mother who belonged to the Brethren church, he was a thin, delicate child raised in an atmosphere of strict religious observance—or what he would later derisively call “tightly sealed, evangelical religious dogma.” His sense of intellectual superiority developed early. On his first day of school at age five, he was set upon by bullies and took refuge with a female cousin in the girls’ play-shed, where boys would not be caught dead. “Having not measured up as a fighter,” Money would later write, “I was set on the pathway of outwitting other kids by being an intellectual achiever. That was easier for me than for most of them.”

Money’s childhood difficulties were compounded by his vexed relationship with his father. Six decades later he would write with barely controlled venom of this father, portraying him as a brutal man who heartlessly shot and killed the birds that infested his fruit garden, and administered to his four-year-old son an “abusive interrogation and whipping” over a broken window. This incident, Money wrote, helped establish his lifelong rejection of “the brutality of manhood.”

Money was eight years old when his father died of a chronic kidney ailment. “My father died without my being able to forget or forgive his unfair cruelty,” Money wrote. Not told of his father’s death until three days after seeing him carried off to the hospital, Money’s shock was compounded by the experience of being informed by an uncle that now he would have to be the man of the household. “That’s rather heavy duty for an eight-year-old,” Money wrote. “It had a great impact on me.” As an adult, Money would forever avoid the role of “man of the household.” After one brief marriage ended in divorce in the early 1950s, he never remarried, and has never had children.

After his father’s death, Money was raised in an exclusively feminine atmosphere by his mother and spinster aunts, whose anti-male diatribes also had a lasting effect on him. “I suffered from the guilt of being male,” he wrote. “I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality”—that is, the penis and testicles. In light of Money’s future fame in both adult and infant sex change, his next comment has an unsettling tenor: “I wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded at birth.”

A solitary adolescent with a passion for astronomy and archaeology, Money also harbored youthful ambitions as a musician, a goal doomed to disappointment once Money realized that he would never be more than a skilled amateur. As an undergraduate at Victoria University, in the New Zealand capital city of Wellington, Money discovered a new passion into which he rechanneled his thwarted creativity: the science of psychology. Like so many students drawn to the study of the mind and emotions, Money’s interest in the discipline was in large part as a means for solving certain troubling questions about himself. His first serious work in psychology, his master’s thesis, concerned “creativity in musicians,” in which, Money writes, “I began to investigate my relative lack of success in comparison with that of other music students.”

His decision soon after that to narrow his studies to the psychology of sex had a similarly personal basis. Having departed sharply from his parents’ faith, Money grew increasingly to react against what he saw as the repressive religious strictures of his upbringing. The academic study of sexuality, which removed even the most outlandish sexual practices from moral considerations into the “pure” realm of scientific inquiry, was for Money an emancipation. From his twenties on, he would be a fierce proselytizer for sexual curiosity and exploration. By the mid-1970s, with the sexual revolution in full rampage, Money would step out publicly as a champion of open marriage, nudism, and other more rarefied manifestations of the culture’s sexual unbuttoning. “There is plenty of evidence that bisexual group sex can be as personally satisfying as a paired partnership, provided each partner is ‘tuned in’ on the same wavelength,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures. Elsewhere, he has described his own private life as casual and eclectic—“a give-and-take of sexual visitations and friendly companionships with compatible partners, some women, some men.”

Reveling in his role as “agent provocateur of the sexual revolution” (as the New York Times dubbed him in 1975), Money rarely missed an opportunity to spread his gospel of sexual emancipation: extolling the heightened pleasures of sex under a black light to a student after a speaking engagement at the University of Nebraska; appearing in court as an expert witness to defend the 1973 pornographic film Deep Throat, which he praised as a “cleansing” movie that would help keep marriages together; penning op-ed pieces for the New York Times in which he called for a “new ethic of recreational sex.” A patient treated by Money in the 1970s for a rare endocrine disorder recalls the psychologist once casually asking him if he’d ever experienced a “golden shower.” A sexually inexperienced youth at the time, the patient did not know what Money was talking about. “Getting pissed on,” Money airily announced with the twinkling, slightly insinuating smile with which he liked to deliver such deliberately provocative comments.

Convinced that embargoes on certain words promoted prudery, Money inserted the words fuck, cock, and cunt into his regular conversation with colleagues and patients. Dr. Fred Berlin, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a colleague who considers Money one of his most important mentors, defends Money’s penchant for sexual outspokenness. “Because he thinks it’s important to desensitize people in discussing sexual issues,” Berlin says, “he will sometimes use four-letter words that others might find offensive. Perhaps he could be a little more willing to compromise on that, but John is an opinionated person who isn’t looking necessarily to do things differently than the way he’s concluded is best.”

While Money’s conclusions about the best approach to sexual matters merely raised eyebrows in the mid-1970s, they provoked outrage at the dawn of the more conservative 1980s, when Money ventured into areas of which even some of the most adventurous sexual explorers were leery. In 1986, Money published Lovemaps, an exhaustive study of such practices as sadomasochism, coprophilia, amputation fetishes, autostrangulation, and various other behaviors that he called, not perversions, but “paraphilias,” in an effort to destigmatize and decriminalize them. The topic of pedophilia became a particular interest, and one that Money took obvious delight in publicly espousing.

“A childhood sexual experience,” he explained to Time magazine in April 1980, “such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” He granted an interview to Paidika, a Dutch journal of pedophilia, which carries ads for the North American Man-Boy Love Association and other pro-pedophile groups. “If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or twelve who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, and the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way,” he told the journal, and added, “It’s very important once a relationship has been established on such positive and affectionate grounds that it should not be broken up precipitously.” In 1987, Money wrote an admiring foreword to an unusual volume published in Denmark entitled Boys and Their Contacts with Men. By Dutch professor Theo Sandfort, the book presented what purported to be verbatim testimonials of boys as young as eleven years old rhapsodically describing the delights of sex with men as old as sixty. “For those born and educated after the year 2000,” Money wrote, “we will be their history, and they will be mystified by our self-important, moralistic ignorance of the principles of sexual and erotic development in childhood.” Money concluded his foreword with the proclamation “It is a very important book, and a very positive one.”

Money’s response to criticism for the public airing of such views was always to launch counterattacks of his own, ridiculing his critics for their adherence to an outmoded sexual Puritanism. In an autobiographical essay included in his 1985 book of collected writings, Venuses Penuses, Money dubbed himself a “missionary” of sex, proudly proclaiming, “It has not been as easy for society to change as it had been for me to find my own emancipation from the 20th-century legacy of fundamentalism and Victorianism in rural New Zealand.”

Money’s experimental, taboo-breaking attitude to sex found its echo in the way he pursued his professional research career. Eschewing the more trammeled byways of sex research, Money deliberately sought out exotic corners of the field. He found just such a relatively undiscovered realm of human sexuality in 1948, while in the first year of study for his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard. In a tutorial called Fieldwork and Seminar in Clinical Psychology, Money was presented with the case of a fifteen-year-old genetic male born not with a penis, but with a tiny, nublike phallus resembling a clitoris. At puberty, the boy had developed breasts. It was Money’s first exposure to hermaphroditism—also known as intersexuality—a term of classification for a variety of birth anomalies of the internal and external sex organs. Often described in lay terms as a condition of being half-man, half-woman, the syndrome derives its name from a combination of the names of the Greek gods of love, Hermes and Aphrodite, and occurs as often as one in two thousand births (by some estimates). The symptoms vary from the extreme manifestation of a genetic female born with a penis-sized clitoris and fused labia resembling a scrotum, to a male whose genital resemblance to a girl at birth is so total that his true biological sex is not suspected until puberty when “she” fails to menstruate—to anything in between.

Money was fascinated by hermaphroditism and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject. Until then the syndrome had been studied almost solely from a biological perspective. Money approached it from a psychological angle, investigating the mental and emotional repercussions of growing up as anatomically neither boy nor girl. His thesis, entitled “Hermaphroditism: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Human Paradox,” was completed in 1952 and led to his invitation to join Johns Hopkins, where the world’s first and largest clinic for studying and treating intersexual conditions had been established. The clinic’s director, pioneering pediatric endocrinologist Lawson Wilkins, teamed Money with two married psychiatrists, Drs. Joan and John Hampson, to study the mental and emotional makeup of the intersexual patients treated in the clinic. The three researchers made up the newly created Psychohormonal Research Unit.

Over the next six years, Money and the Hampsons studied some 131 intersexuals ranging in age from toddlers to adults. Money (who was lead investigator and author of the team’s published reports) claimed to observe a striking fact about intersexes who had been diagnosed with identical genital ambiguities and chromosomal makeups but raised in the opposite sex from one another: more than 95 percent of them reportedly fared equally well psychologically whether they had been raised as boys or girls. Money called these groupings of patients “matched pairs” and said they were proof that the primary factor determining an intersexual child’s gender identity was not biology, but rather the way the child was raised. He concluded that these children were born wholly undifferentiated in terms of their psychological sex and that they formed a conception of themselves as masculine or feminine solely through rearing.

This theory was the foundation on which Money based his recommendation to Johns Hopkins surgeons and endocrinologists that they could surgically and hormonally steer intersexual newborns into whichever sex, boy or girl, they wished. Such surgeries would range from cutting down enlarged clitorises on mildly intersexual girls to full sex reversal on intersexual boys born with undeveloped penises. These conversions to girlhood were foreordained by the state of surgical technology: it was easier for surgeons to construct a synthetic vagina than to create an artificial penis. Money’s only provisos were that such “sex assignments” and reassignments be done within the first two and a half years of life (after which time, Money theorized, a child’s psychosexual orientation ceased to be as malleable) and that once the sex had been decided upon, doctors and parents never waver in their decision lest they risk introducing fatal ambiguities into the child’s mind.

By providing a seemingly solid psychological foundation for such treatments, Money had offered physicians a relatively simple surgical solution to one of the most vexing and emotionally fraught conundrums in medicine: how to deal with the birth of an intersexual child. “One can hardly begin to imagine what it’s like for a parent when the first question—‘Is it a boy or a girl?’—results in a response from the physician that they’re just not sure,” says Dr. Fred Berlin. “John Money was one of those folks who, years ago, before this was even talked about, was out there doing his best trying to help families, trying to sort through what’s obviously a difficult circumstance.”

Money, however, was not interested chiefly in intersexes. As he stated as early as his Harvard thesis, he recognized the scientific worth of intersexes primarily as what he called “experiments of nature”—as a cohort of research subjects who could shed light on the question of sexual development in normal humans—who could, in fact, resolve one of the longest-running debates in science; namely, whether it is primarily nature or nurture that shapes our sexual sense of self. It was in his first published papers at Johns Hopkins that Money generalized the theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth from hermaphrodites to include all children, even those born without genital irregularity.

“From the sum total of hermaphroditic evidence,” he wrote in 1955, “the conclusion that emerges is that sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis. In place of a theory of instinctive masculinity or femininity which is innate, the evidence of hermaphroditism lends support to a conception that, psychologically, sexuality is undifferentiated at birth and that it becomes differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of the various experiences of growing up.” In short, Money was advancing a view that human beings form a sense of themselves as boy or girl according to whether they are dressed in blue or pink, given a masculine or feminine name, clothed in pants or dresses, given guns or Barbies to play with. Many years later, Money would describe how he arrived at some of his more radical theories about human sexual behavior. “I frequently find myself toying with concepts and working out potential hypotheses,” he mused. “It is like playing a game of science fiction.”

While Money’s theory of human newborns as total psychosexual blank slates may strike a contemporary reader as science fiction, such was not the case in the mid-1950s, when it was met with almost universal acceptance by clinicians and scientists—an acceptance not difficult to understand in the context of the time. Explanations for sex differences had been moving toward a nurturist view for decades. Prior to that, the pendulum had been pointing in the naturist direction—thanks to the discovery at the end of the nineteenth century of the so-called male and female hormones, testosterone and estrogen. The discovery of these chemical-based internal secretions had led biologists to proclaim the riddle of sex differences solved: testosterone was the masculinizing agent; estrogen, the feminizing. They confidently predicted that male homosexuals would be discovered to possess an excess of the “female” hormone in their bloodstream and a deficiency of the “male” hormone. Minute analysis of the urine and blood of adult homosexual men, however, revealed no such hormonal imbalances. Under the microscope, a straight and a gay man’s internal secretions are identical. Other experiments meant to show the hormonal basis of sexual identity also failed, and as the failures mounted, enthusiasm for a biological explanation of sexual differences gradually waned. Simultaneously, the first half of the twentieth century and the advent of Freud and modern psychology saw a rapid increase in social learning models for human behavior. Against this background, the Johns Hopkins team’s conclusions that sexual identity and orientation were solely shaped by parents and society fit perfectly into an intellectual zeitgeist in thrall to behaviorist theories. Nor did it detract from the papers’ reception that they carried the imprimatur of Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the premier medical research institutions in the world.

The Johns Hopkins team’s 1955 intersex papers were proclaimed instant classics and won that year’s Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association. The Hampsons soon left Johns Hopkins for Washington State University and by 1961 had drifted out of gender identity research. As a result, Money alone became heir to the award-winning papers’ reputation. And as sole director of the Psychohormonal Research Unit (after Lawson Wilkins’s death in 1962), he was also the lone beneficiary of the unit’s success. In 1963 Money was awarded a grant of $205,920 from the National Institutes of Health—a considerable sum in early-1960s dollars, but merely the first of several NIH grants that would sustain Money and his unit for the next thirty-five years. In 1965 he served as Mead Johnson visiting professor of pediatrics at the University of Buffalo Children’s Hospital, and was awarded the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Medal “for contributions to the study of the psychological development of children.” A year later he would begin to garner fame outside the academic realm when he finally succeeded in persuading Johns Hopkins to establish the clinic for the treatment and study of adult transexuals.

Money had been galvanized by transexualism since 1952, when the revelations about Christine Jorgensen first hit the press. In Jorgensen’s case, Money saw tantalizing proof of his theory that environment, not biology, determines psychological sex, for here was a person born with apparently normal male biological makeup and genitals whose inner sense of self had differentiated as female—in direct contradiction to his chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, reproductive, and anatomic sex. What greater evidence could there be that gender identity is determined not by biology but by environment? Determined to study such individuals in the greatest number possible, Money set out to get Johns Hopkins into transexual research and treatment, which was still a repellent idea for the majority in the American medical establishment.

In his campaign to establish Johns Hopkins as the first hospital in America to embrace transexual surgeries, Money knew that he would first have to bring on board a respected medical man. (Money himself was a psychologist and did not possess a medical degree of any kind.) He turned first to Dr. Howard Jones, the Johns Hopkins gynecologist who had perfected the surgical techniques for sex assignment on Money’s infant intersexual subjects. “I can recall,” Jones says, “that for a number of months, maybe even years, John kept raising the question of whether we shouldn’t get into the transexual situation.” While Jones was interested in experimental medicine (he would eventually leave Johns Hopkins for the University of Virginia where he would found the nation’s first in vitro fertilization clinic), he was resistant to the idea of performing elective castrations and genital reconstruction on adults.

But Money was persistent. He turned for help to Dr. Harry Benjamin. The acknowledged grandfather of transexual study in America, Benjamin had for the previous ten years been quietly referring transexual patients to doctors in Casablanca and Morocco for sex change surgery. Money enlisted three of Benjamin’s postoperative transexuals to come to Johns Hopkins and meet with Jones and pediatric endocrinologist Milton Edgerton. Eventually Jones and Edgerton were convinced. “John finally marshaled enough evidence,” as Jones puts it, “to indicate that this was something that maybe should be done.” Fittingly enough, Money was given the job of naming the new clinic for adult transexual surgeries. He dubbed it the Gender Identity Clinic.

The first complete transexual surgery at Johns Hopkins was performed by Dr. Jones on 1 June 1965, when a New Yorker named Phillip Wilson became Phyllis Avon Wilson. But it still remained for Johns Hopkins to sell the idea to the American public. While some members of the sex change committee argued for keeping the existence of the clinic quiet, Money pushed for a preemptive strike and argued in favor of creating a press release that would circumvent leaked rumors about what the team had done. Money’s argument prevailed, and he helped concoct a press release with the hospital’s public relations department. The statement was issued on 21 November 1966. Money later revealed that a strategic decision had been made to issue the press release to the New York Times alone. The prestige of the Times, the Johns Hopkins team hoped, would set the tone for all other media coverage. “The plans,” Money later wrote, “worked out exactly as hoped.”

The Times treated the revelations with none of the scandalized outrage that had greeted the Jorgensen case in 1951. The front-page story used verbatim quotations from Gender Identity Clinic chairman John Hoopes, culled directly from the Johns Hopkins press release, and presented the procedure as a humane and effective solution to an intractable psychosexual problem. Similarly approving stories followed in all three news weeklies, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. In April 1967 Esquire magazine published an exhaustive feature on the Johns Hopkins clinic, in which Money was admiringly quoted. Indeed, of all the coverage in late 1966 and early 1967 of Johns Hopkins’ pioneering foray into transexual surgery, by far the hardest edged was CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days, in which Alvin Davis sharply challenged Money on the ethics and efficacy of switching people’s sex. Except for the single stinging rejoinder (“Would you like to argue on God’s side?”), Money had refused to rise to the bait, and thus, for his fellow Gender Identity Clinic committee members, set the standard for how to handle direct attacks. Money’s calm, judicious performance was a masterpiece of public relations, and all the more impressive to those who knew the ferocity with which, in ordinary life, he responded to even the mildest opposition to his opinions.

As Money himself would admit in an essay written in 1990, “In the practice of my psychohormonal research, I do not suffer fools gladly.” This was an understatement. The psychologist’s violent reactions to intellectual challenge were legendary. “John was unusually brilliant,” says Dr. Donald Laub, a pioneer in adult transexual surgical techniques who has known Money for thirty years. “He may be the smartest person I’ve ever met. He was so smart that it was a problem—because he knew everybody else was dumb.” By all accounts, Money had no compunction about letting others know his low opinion of their intellectual firepower. “Even when John asked for feedback, what he was looking for was agreement,” says Dr. Howard Devore, a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. under Money in the Psychohormonal Research Unit in the mid-1980s. Should that agreement fail to be forthcoming, Money was never afraid to let his displeasure be known. As early as the mid-1950s, Money had a reputation for tantrums among his coworkers, underlings, and students that preceded him throughout the academic world.

“Every center that I trained at after [Johns Hopkins],” says Devore, “when people saw on my résumé that I had worked with John Money, they would ask me to comment, off the record, what it was like working with him and was he ‘as bad as people say?’ I was just amazed at how consistent his worldwide reputation actually was. And frankly, John didn’t do that much to hide it. I once saw him stand up at an academic meeting and shout a presenter down because he didn’t agree with what she was saying.”

By February 1967—when Ron and Janet Reimer first saw John Money on television—his reputation was for all intents and purposes unassailable. Dr. Benjamin Rosenberg, himself a leading psychologist who specialized in sexual identity, says that Money was “the leader—the front-runner on everything having to do with mixed sex and hermaphrodites and the implications for homosexuality and on and on and on.”

Money’s reach and influence throughout the academic and scientific world would help to define the scientific landscape for decades to come—indeed, to the present day: many of his students and protégés, trained in his theories of psychosexual differentiation, have gone on to occupy the top positions at some of the most respected universities, research institutions, and scientific journals in the country. His former students include Dr. Anke Ehrhardt, now a senior professor at Columbia University; Dr. Richard Green, director of the Gender Identity Clinic in London, England; Dr. June Reinisch, who for years was head of the famed Kinsey Institute; and Dr. Mark Schwartz, director of the influential Masters and Johnson Clinic.

On the clinical side, Money’s influence was perhaps even more remarkable. His theories on the psychosexual flexibility at birth of humans form the cornerstone of an entire medical specialty—pediatric endocrinology. Professor Suzanne Kessler, in her 1998 book, Lessons from the Intersexed, suggests that Money’s views and their implications for the treatment of ambiguously sexed babies form among physicians “a consensus that is rarely encountered in science.”

There was, however, at least one researcher in the mid-1960s who was willing to question John Money. He was a young graduate student fresh from the University of Kansas.

The son of struggling Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents, Milton Diamond, whom friends called Mickey, was raised in the Bronx, where he had sidestepped membership in the local street gangs for the life of a scholar. As an undergraduate majoring in biophysics at the City College of New York, Diamond had become fascinated by the role hormones played in human behavior. Seeking a place to do graduate work, he chose Kansas, where anatomist William C. Young (famous for his hallmark studies of the 1930s on the role of hormones in the estrus cycle) ran a laboratory. In a stroke of serendipity, Diamond’s arrival in Kansas in the fall of 1958 coincided with the time when a trio of researchers on Young’s staff—Charles Phoenix, Robert Goy, and Arnold Gerall—stood on the brink of a discovery about the sex-differentiating role of hormones that would change the science and study of sexual development forever.

Disillusionment with earlier hormone studies had led many sex researchers, including Young’s team, to shift their focus from the role played by hormones in the mature organism to the role played by hormones in the womb. Working from guinea pig studies done two decades earlier by Soviet sex researcher Vera Dantchakoff, the Kansas team sought to learn the role played by the hormones that bathe a developing fetus’s brain and nervous system. Earlier researchers had shown that, in humans, in the early stages of gestation, the male and female fetus’s internal and external sex organs are identical to one another. Between six and eight weeks, however, changes start to take place. If the fetus’s cells bear the male (XY) chromosome, the fetal gonads differentiate as testicles, which begin to pump out testosterone. This prenatal androgen is the agent that masculinizes the developing fetus’s external genitals—turning the undifferentiated genital tubercle into a penis, causing the open genital sinus to fuse along the midline and form the scrotum, into which the testicles descend—and at the same time masculinizes the internal reproductive system by spurring the growth of the seminal ducts (another testicular secretion suppresses growth of the rudimentary female internal structures). If, on the other hand, the fetus bears the female (XX) chromosome, the gonads develop as ovaries, no testosterone is produced, in the absence of which the external genitals and internal anatomy differentiate as female, the genital tubercle develops as a clitoris, the genital sinus remains open and becomes the entrance to the vagina, and the internal structures develop as fallopian tubes and uterus.

The question for the Kansas team was whether these prenatal hormonal effects on the anatomy were mirrored in the brain. To find out, they set about creating a cohort of hermaphrodite guinea pigs by injecting large doses of testosterone into the wombs of pregnant mothers. When exposed to testosterone at a critical stage in fetal development, the female guinea pigs were born, as expected, with clitorises enlarged to the size of penises. The researchers then set out to learn if the masculinization of a treated female’s anatomy was matched by a corresponding masculinization of her sexual behavior.

In observing the treated females as they grew from childhood to maturity, the team noticed something extraordinary. Not only did the treated females demonstrate an increased physical activity distinct from that of their untreated sisters, they also did not, in the presence of normal males, present their hindquarters for sexual penetration in the normal female in-heat posture known as lordosis. Instead, the testosterone-treated females (even those that showed no clitoral enlargement) attempted to mount their untreated sisters.

I spoke with team member Robert Goy, shortly before his death in 1999, about the breakthrough moment of his research career. His voice was charged with an excitement that suggested he had just made the discovery the night before. “We couldn’t schedule tests fast enough,” he told me. “We were testing every night—night after night after night—and getting data, and analyzing it, and reanalyzing it.”

Milton Diamond was in the thick of the research, performing adjunct experiments on the pregnant mothers to learn what, if any, influence the testosterone had on their functioning. Having come to Kansas hoping to learn something new and interesting about the action of hormones on behavior, Diamond found himself present at one of the most significant biological breakthroughs in sex research of the twentieth century.

There was concern among members of the team about how their professor, William Young, would react to the results. They knew him to be an adherent of the theories of psychosexual neutrality advanced just four years earlier by John Money’s team at Johns Hopkins. “Young was a great follower of John Money and the Hampsons,” Goy told me. “He had been thinking all this time that the organizing principle for sexual behavior was experience. So his world was shaken by these results. But he was wonderfully adaptable, and the truth was more important to him than anything else. It’s very unusual in a scientist. Most scientists fall in love with their own ideas and theories, and you can’t shake them out of it. Will Young wasn’t like that.”

In fact it was Young who settled the debate that flared among the research team members when it came time to write up the results. Unsure precisely how to label the behavior of the treated female guinea pigs—the team toyed with calling it “masculine mimicry” or “pseudodifferentiation”—they were overruled by Young, who told them they had discovered not the role played by prenatal testosterone in creating a simulation of masculine behavior, but masculine behavior itself. Accordingly, Young advised the team to state unequivocally that they had discovered, in the fetal guinea pig, the organizing principle for adult masculine sexual behavior.

“Young was an anatomist,” Goy explained, “and if you understand the way anatomists use the term organization, it makes that choice of word inevitable. Anatomists believe that the organs of the body are organized by a set of tissues that are differentiated in a special way and combined so that they carry out a definite function or malfunction of that organ. And that’s the way he used the word organization. He meant that all of the tissues underlying sexual behavior—whether peripheral structures, brain tissues, blood, or muscles—are organized into a whole; and that that organization is imposed by exposure to hormones before birth; and that that organization is either masculine or feminine. And he believed that we had discovered the principle that organizes the tissues in a masculine form.”

Still, when the team came to write up their results, which would appear in a 1959 issue of the journal Endocrinology, Young urged caution in how directly they should extrapolate their experimental animal work to sexual differentiation in humans—largely out of Young’s respect for Money’s work with the Hampsons. The team agreed to soften their statements on the applicability of their research to humans. “We said there may be some way that the guinea pig picture will ‘complement’ or ‘supplement’ the human picture by accounting for ‘discrepancies,’” Goy said.

Not everyone in the lab was satisfied with that decision. The youngest member, Mickey Diamond, felt that Young and the others were being too cautious in failing to link their animal findings directly to the human situation. “I believe in evolution,” Diamond says, chuckling. “I didn’t see any reason that human beings would be different from other mammals in that regard.” He felt so strongly that when he was applying for a research grant in his final year at Kansas and was required to submit an original paper, he decided to write an essay taking on Money and the Hampsons’ theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth.

In that paper, entitled “A Critical Evaluation of the Ontogeny of Human Sexual Behavior,” Diamond rejected outright the Johns Hopkins team’s theory. Citing the guinea pig findings, Diamond described as “specious” a theory that said man is “completely divested of his evolutionary heritage,” and stated that prebirth factors “set limits” on how far culture, learning, and environment can direct gender identity in humans. Marshaling evidence from biology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and endocrinology to argue that gender identity is hardwired into the brain virtually from conception, the paper was an audacious challenge to Money’s authority (especially coming from an unknown graduate student at the University of Kansas).

Addressing the theory about the psychosexual flexibility of intersexes, Diamond pointed out that such individuals had experienced “a genetic or hormonal imbalance” in the womb, and he argued that even if human hermaphrodites could be steered into one sex or the other as newborns (as Money claimed), this was not necessarily evidence of their gender neutrality at birth. It might simply suggest that the organization of their nervous systems and brains had undergone in utero a similar ambiguous organization as their genitals. In short, they had an inborn neurological capability to go both ways—a capability, Diamond hastened to point out, that genetically normal children certainly would not share. As for transexuals, who showed no observable anatomic ambiguity of sex, Diamond postulated that they, too, might possess an as yet undiscovered biological condition that hardwired their brains to a program opposite to the evidence of their bodies—a possibility that Diamond was able to back up with evidence from no less an authority than Dr. Harry Benjamin himself, who had recently reported that in forty-seven out of eighty-seven of his patients, he “could find no evidence that childhood conditioning” was involved in their conviction that they were living in the wrong sex.

Had he known of it at the time, Diamond might also have drawn upon an obscure paper in the foreign literature for his critique—a paper that had questioned the Johns Hopkins team’s protocols for intersex treatment some six years earlier. In a 1959 edition of The Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, three Toronto physicians, Dr. Daniel Cappon, Dr. Calvin Ezrin, and Dr. Patrick Lynes, had pointed out serious flaws in the Hopkins team’s statistical and research methods. “[T]hese workers,” the Canadians wrote, “failed to relate the physical and psychological wholes of the person and only compared component parts without submitting these comparisons to mathematical validation.” In conducting their own research on a cohort of seventeen intersexual patients, the Canadian doctors took precautions that the Johns Hopkins team had not. To prevent subjective tainting of their results, the Canadians split their research team in two: one to study the patients from an endocrinologic perspective, the other to study the patients from a psychological perspective. For comparative purposes, the Canadian team also carried out research on a control group of nonhermaphrodites, as well as on a series of homosexuals and transvestites.

The team’s results showed that it was dangerous indeed to suppose that no link existed between an intersexual child’s biological makeup and its gender identity; that in fact the status of the chromosomes, gonads, or hormones might predispose a hermaphrodite child to identify more with one sex than the other in adulthood. Stating that the Johns Hopkins team had based its recommendations to surgeons on “shaky theory,” the Canadians had expressed particular unease about the recommendation that males born with tiny or nonexistent penises should, without exception, be castrated and converted into girls. Such sex-changed children, the Canadians had warned, “were liable to be brought up tragically incongruously with the main somatic sex.”

The Canadian team’s findings would have made a strong addition to Diamond’s exhaustive theoretical critique, but he did not learn of the paper’s existence until after his own was published (at which point he began to cite it in his own papers). “The Canadian paper got lost somewhere,” Diamond says. “It just died. I think it was maybe Hopkins compared to Podunk.” But in 1965, Diamond’s paper was published in a high-profile, well-respected American journal, the Quarterly Review of Biology, where it could not be missed—least of all by John Money, considering that the Quarterly Review was at that time published out of Johns Hopkins.

I was sitting with Diamond in his cluttered, windowless office on the campus of the University of Hawaii Medical School as he reminisced about these origins of his thirty-year-long scientific debate with John Money. It was June of 1997, just two months after Diamond and Sigmundson’s “John/Joan” paper had delivered a blow to his old rival. A mild-mannered sixty-four-year-old with frizzy graying hair and beard, Diamond was clearly exhausted from fielding the unending stream of phone calls, faxes, and letters from both reporters and fellow scientists requesting more information about, or an interview with, John/Joan. Dressed in a pale blue overlaundered T-shirt riddled with holes, a pair of jeans, and battered running shoes, Diamond told me that professors at the University of Hawaii are “paid in sunshine.” His putty-colored pallor suggested that he had not been drawing his full wages. Diamond had, in fact, spent the majority of his thirty years in Honolulu doing experiments or hunched over his computer in the tiny office he calls his “cave,” pumping out more than one hundred journal articles and eight books on sexuality. On the wall beside him was tacked a snapshot of his four daughters; on the messy desk in front of him were heaped papers, books, open journals, and boxed sets of both Robert Johnson and Bach tapes.

Diamond insists that he bore John Money no personal animus at the time of writing his 1965 article and that his intent was not to embarrass him. He says that his paper had merely been an effort to advance the field of knowledge in the time-honored scientific tradition of assertion and challenge. Diamond points out that after the article’s publication, he actually made an overture to Money, suggesting that they collaborate on an article. Though he recognized that they stood on opposite sides of the nature-nurture debate, Diamond believed this was precisely why their collaboration would be of particular value. He shakes his head and smiles at the naïveté that compelled him, a mere graduate student, to suggest a collaboration with one of the leading scientists in the field—a scientist whom, furthermore, he had just publicly challenged in a leading journal. “I really believed that it was an intellectually good thing to do,” Diamond says. Money evidently felt otherwise. “His attitude was, Why should I do anything with you?” Diamond says. “Who knows you?” Diamond admits that he was not completely surprised by the reaction. “I had challenged his theory, which he took as an argument against him. Which it wasn’t.”

Yet even a scientist less thin-skinned than John Money might have been stung by the calm, relentless logic of Diamond’s critique—which, near the end, raised the most rudimentary Science 101 objection to the unquestioning acceptance of Money’s theory of psychosexual neutrality in normal children. “To support [such a] theory,” Diamond wrote, “we have been presented with no instance of a normal individual appearing as an unequivocal male and being reared successfully as a female.” And Diamond had added: “If such an individual is available he has not been referred to by proponents of a ‘neutrality-at-birth’ theory. It may be assumed that such an individual will be hard to find.”

Hard—but not, as events transpired, impossible. For it was just one year and eight months after Diamond threw down this gauntlet in the Quarterly Review of Biology that Dr. John Money received a letter from a young mother in Winnipeg, Canada, describing the terrible circumcision accident that had befallen one of her identical twin baby boys.

3

RON AND JANET REIMER made their first trip to Johns Hopkins in early 1967, shortly after seeing Dr. Money on TV. The young couple—aged twenty and twenty-one respectively—were awestruck by the vast domed medical center dominating the top of a rise on Baltimore’s Monument Street. Dr. Money’s Psychohormonal Research Unit was located in the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, a gloomy Victorian building tucked away off a back courtyard. The unit’s offices, located on the fourth floor, were reached by way of a rickety turn-of-the-century elevator. Money’s own inner sanctum (where most of his meetings with the Reimers would take place over the next eleven years) reflected the psychologist’s eccentric tastes in interior decoration. Furnished with a couch, Oriental rugs, and a profusion of potted plants, the room also featured brightly colored afghans thrown over the backs of armchairs, a collection of carved aboriginal sculptures of erect phalluses, vaginas, and breasts on a mantel, and a collection of primitive blowguns, darts, and masks hanging on the walls. The Reimers had certainly never seen anything like this before, but Dr. Money, with his smoothly confident, professional manner—not to mention the diplomas on his wall—made the Reimers feel that they were, finally, in the best possible hands. “I looked up to him like a god,” says Janet. “I accepted whatever he said.” And what Dr. Money had to say was exactly what the Reimers ached to hear.

In his many published versions of this first interview, Money has recounted how he spelled out to the young couple the advantages of sex reassignment for their baby—“using nontechnical words, diagrams, and photographs of children who had been reassigned.” He explained to Ron and Janet that their baby could be given a perfectly functional vagina—“adequate for sexual intercourse and for sexual pleasure, including orgasm.” He also explained to them that although their child would not, if changed into a girl, be able to bear children, she would develop psychologically as a woman and would find her erotic attraction to men. As a married woman she would be perfectly capable of adopting children of her own.

What is not clear from Money’s written accounts of this meeting is whether Janet and Ron, whose education at the time did not go beyond ninth and seventh grades, respectively, understood that such a procedure was in fact purely experimental—that while Money and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins had performed sex reassignments on hermaphrodite children, no such infant sex change had ever been attempted on a child born, like their Bruce, with normal genitals and nervous system. Today Ron and Janet say that this was a distinction they did not fully grasp until many years later. The crucial point they gleaned from Dr. Money was his conviction that the procedure had every chance for success. “I see no reason,” Janet recalls him saying, “that it shouldn’t work.”

Money’s eagerness to begin seemed evident in his recounting of the interview almost ten years later. “If the parents stood by their decision to reassign the child as a girl,” he wrote in Sexual Signatures, “surgeons could remove the testicles and construct feminine external genitals immediately. When she was eleven or twelve years old, she could be given the female hormones.”

If Dr. Money seemed to be in a hurry, he was. He explained to Ron and Janet that they would have to make up their minds quickly. For according to one of the finer points of his theory, the gender identity gate—Money’s term for that point after which a child has locked into an identity as male or female—comes at two and a half to three years of age. Bruce was now nineteen months. “The child was still young enough so that whichever assignment was made, erotic interest would almost certainly direct itself toward the opposite sex later on,” Money wrote, “but the time for reaching a final decision was already short.”

Ron and Janet, however, were not prepared to have Bruce immediately admitted to the hospital. They needed time to decide on something as momentous as having their child undergo a surgical sex change. They told Dr. Money that they would have to go home and think about it. Janet says that he made no secret of his impatience with the delay. Upon their return to Winnipeg, the couple received letters from him urging them to reach a final decision. “He wrote in a letter that we were ‘procrastinating,’” Janet recalls, “but we wanted to move slow because we had never heard of anything like this.”

Back home, Ron and Janet canvassed opinions. Their pediatrician recommended against such drastic treatment and stuck by his earlier advice that Ron and Janet wait until the child was of preschool age before beginning the long process of phalloplasty. Janet’s mother, Betty, was inclined to trust the expert from Baltimore but had no real opinion of her own. Ron decided not even to bring it up to his parents since he felt sure they would be against it.

Finally Ron and Janet realized that only they could decide the fate of their child. They alone were the ones living with the reminder, at each diaper change, of his terrible injury. Janet saw the benefits of changing their son into a daughter. “I didn’t know much back then,” she says, “and I thought women were the gentler sex. Mistakenly. I have since learned that women are the hard-core knockabout tough guys. Men are the gentler sex, by far, from my experience. But I thought, with his injury, it would be easier for Bruce to be raised as a girl—to be raised gently. He wouldn’t have to prove anything like a man had to.”

Ron, too, could see the benefits of changing Bruce’s sex. “You know how little boys are,” Ron says. “Who can pee the furthest? Whip out the wiener and whiz against the fence. Bruce wouldn’t be able to do that, and the other kids would wonder why.” And then, of course, there was the entire question of Bruce’s sex life. Ron could not even imagine the humiliations and frustrations that would entail. As a girl and woman, though, Bruce wouldn’t face all that, Ron reasoned. If what Dr. Money told them was true, she could live a normal life, she could get married, she could be happy.

Within days of their return from Baltimore, Ron and Janet stopped cutting the baby’s hair, allowing the soft, light brown locks to curl down past the ears. Janet used her sewing machine to turn his pajamas into girlish granny gowns. Their son had become, for Ron and Janet, their daughter. Dr. Money had counseled them, when deciding what to call their new daughter, to select a name beginning with the same letter as her former name and to avoid calling her after any female family members with whom her identity could become confused. Janet, following Dr. Money’s instructions, called her new baby daughter Brenda Lee.

There was, of course, still one more step to take. That summer, Ron and Janet left Brenda’s twin brother, Brian, with an aunt and uncle, then flew back to Baltimore with their daughter. Now twenty-two months old, she was still within the window that Money had established as safe for infant sex change. On Monday, 3 July 1967, Brenda underwent surgical castration in a gynecologic operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The surgeon was Money’s Gender Identity Clinic cofounder, Dr. Howard Jones. Today Jones says he can recall few specifics about the case. He says that all decisions regarding reassignment of sex were the responsibility of Money and pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Blizzard.

“My chief interest was the physical situation and the surgical potential,” Jones says. “Was the patient healthy and able to withstand the operation?—all that kind of stuff. The case was pretty well worked up before I ever got involved.” For Jones, the surgery on Brenda Reimer was like the routine castrations he had been performing on hermaphrodite babies over the previous twelve years—and apparently Johns Hopkins Hospital viewed the operation the same way. Officials of the hospital have declined all comment on the case, but a Johns Hopkins public relations person, JoAnne Rodgers, told me in the winter of 1998, “In all surgeries that were considered, in the sixties, to be experimental, there were protocols in place to have those approved by appropriate committees and boards.” Dr. Jones cannot recall that the hospital convened any special committee or board in the case of Bruce Reimer’s historic conversion to girlhood.

The main procedure was a bilateral orchidectomy—removal of both testicles. As Jones’s operating room notes reveal, the baby, under general anesthesia, was placed on his back on the operating table, each foot secured in a stirrup so that the groin was exposed for the doctors. Three clamps were placed on the scrotum, and two incision lines were drawn on either side of the midline. With a pair of scissors, Dr. Jones cut away the demarcated scrotal flesh in a strip 1.5 centimeters long to lay bare the testicles and seminal vesicles within. With a scalpel, Jones cut away both the right and left testicles, then used a length of catgut thread to tie off the cord and vessels that in adulthood would have carried sperm to the severed urethra.

In closing the scrotum, Dr. Jones then fashioned a rudimentary exterior vagina using the remaining scrotal skin, which he pulled up from its lower edge to meet the top edge of the incision and sewed in a manner that left the scrotum not as a single empty sack, but as two symmetrical flaps. “A rolled piece of gauze covered with telfa was then placed in the midline to effect a midline furrow leaving constructed labia majora on either side,” Jones’s operating room note concludes.

Ron and Janet say that by the time they decided to have their baby undergo clinical castration, they had eradicated any doubts they might have had about the efficacy of the treatment. This was a crucial turnabout since according to Dr. Money it was a “vital consideration” that the parents of a sex-reassigned child harbor no doubts that could weaken the child’s identification as a girl and woman.

Whether Dr. Money himself was able to eradicate his own doubts about the child’s future development is debatable. In a letter he wrote on 28 August 1967, more than a month after Brenda’s sex change surgery, his tone admitted of considerable caution regarding the child’s prognosis. This was perhaps to be expected, since the letter was addressed to the Winnipeg lawyer whom Ron and Janet had hired to sue St. Boniface Hospital and the doctor who had botched the circumcision.

“The reassignment of a baby’s sex is usually undertaken only in cases of a birth defect of the genitalia,” Money wrote. “Then one usually expects that the child’s psychosexual differentiation will be congruous with the sex of rearing. In any given case, however, it is not possible to make an absolute prediction.”

And indeed, by the summer of 1967, when Bruce Reimer underwent his castration, Dr. Money had special reason to be particularly reluctant to make an “absolute prediction” about the patient’s future psychosexual development. Two years earlier he had undertaken to discover if the findings of the Kansas team about the masculinizing effects on behavior of prenatal testosterone in guinea pigs could be observed in humans. Under Money’s direction, one of his graduate students, Anke Ehrhardt, had studied a group of ten girls, ranging in age from three to fourteen, who had been subjected to excesses of testosterone in the womb when their pregnant mothers had taken a synthetic steroid called progestin to prevent threatened miscarriage. Like the guinea pigs in the Kansas team’s study, nine of the ten girls had been born with masculinized genitals—an oversized clitoris and in some cases partially fused labia. As interviews with the children and their parents revealed, all nine of those girls demonstrated what Money and Ehrhardt called (in an article published six months before Bruce Reimer’s castration) “tomboyishness.” This, the authors explained, included marked preferences for “masculine-derived” clothes and “outdoor pursuits,” a “strong interest in boys’ toys” (these included guns and toy soldiers), a “high incidence of interest and participation in muscular exercise and recreation,” and a “minimal concern for feminine frills, doll play, baby care, and household chores.”

Central to Dr. Money’s program for the sex assignment of hermaphrodites was his edict that the children, when very young, know nothing of their ambiguous sexual status at birth. Money put the same stricture into effect with baby Brenda Reimer. “He told us not to talk about it,” Ron says. “Not to tell Brenda the whole truth and that she shouldn’t know she wasn’t a girl.”

It was shortly after the Reimers’ return from Baltimore, and not long before the twins’ second birthday, when Janet first put Brenda in a dress. It was a special dress that Janet had sewn herself, using the white satin from her own wedding gown. “It was pretty and lacy,” Janet recalls. “She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, Oh my God, she knows she’s a boy and she doesn’t want girls’ clothing. She doesn’t want to be a girl. But then I thought, Well, maybe I can teach her to want to be a girl. Maybe I can train her so that she wants to be a girl.”

Ron and Janet tried their best to do just that. They furnished her with dolls to play with; they tried to teach her to be neat and tidy; and they tried, whenever possible, to reinforce her identity as a girl. So when, for instance, the twins had just turned four, and Brian was watching Ron shave and asked if he could shave, too, Ron gave him an empty razor and some shaving cream to play with. When Brenda also clamored for a razor, Ron refused. “I told her girls don’t shave,” Ron says. “I told her girls don’t have to.” Janet offered to put makeup on Brenda, but Brenda didn’t want to wear makeup.

“I remember saying, ‘Oh, can I shave, too?’” David says of this incident, which forms his earliest childhood memory of life as Brenda. “My dad said, ‘No, no. You go with your mother.’ I started crying, ‘Why can’t I shave?’”

Brian says that the episode was typical of the way their parents tried to steer him and his sister Brenda into opposite sexes—and how such efforts were inevitably doomed to failure. “I recognized Brenda as my sister,” Brian says. “But she never, ever acted the part.”

Today, with the twins having rejoined each other on the same side of the gender divide, the stark physical differences between them eerily testify to all that David has been through. When David first introduced me to Brian in the summer of 1997, I instinctively assumed that the man who took my hand in a firm grip was an older brother, so different did this balding, dark-bearded, bearlike man look from his youthfully thin, smooth-faced brother. It was only when I looked a little closer at Brian’s face and recognized the startling familiarity of the eyes, nose, and distinctively shaped mouth that I realized I was meeting David’s identical twin, and that he was in fact the younger of the two (albeit by a scant twelve minutes).

As children, their physical differences were, if less pronounced, equally deceptive. Photographs of them as preschoolers show a pair of exceptionally attractive children: a puppy-eyed little boy with a crew cut, and a slim, brown-eyed girl with wavy chestnut hair framing a face of delicate prettiness. However, by all accounts of family, teachers, guidance clinic workers, and relatives, this illusion of two children of opposite sexes disappeared the second Brenda moved, spoke, walked, or gestured.

“When I say there was nothing feminine about Brenda,” Brian laughs, “I mean there was nothing feminine. She walked like a guy. Sat with her legs apart. She talked about guy things, didn’t give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup. We both wanted to play with guys, build forts and have snowball fights and play army. She’d get a skipping rope for a gift, and the only thing we’d use that for was to tie people up, whip people with it. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys, dump trucks. This toy sewing machine she got just sat.” That is, David recalls, until the day when Brenda, who loved to take things apart to see how they worked, sneaked a screwdriver from her dad’s tool kit and dismantled the toy.

Enrolled in Girl Scouts, Brenda was miserable. “I remember making daisy chains and thinking, If this is the most exciting thing in Girl Scouts, forget it,” David says. “I kept thinking of the fun stuff my brother was doing in Cubs.” Given dolls at Christmas and birthdays, Brenda simply refused to play with them. “What can you do with a doll?” David says today, his voice charged with remembered frustration. “You look at it. You dress it. You undress it. Comb its hair. It’s boring! With a car, you can drive it somewhere, go places. I wanted cars.” Brenda also wanted toy guns. Once, around age eight, she went to the store to buy an umbrella. Waiting in line to pay, she saw a nearby display of toy machine guns. After a moment’s hesitation, she put down the umbrella and bought one of the guns. At age ten, Brenda would prove to be a crack shot with the pellet rifle Ron and Janet bought for Brian—a rifle in which, ironically enough, Brian himself evinced little interest.

Brenda had always tried to co-opt Brian’s toys and clothes—a habit that would invariably initiate fights. “There were knock-down-drag-out wrestling matches all the time,” Janet says. “Brian was a weakling compared to Brenda. She was wiry. More often than not, Brenda won. Poor Brian felt so bad getting beat up by a girl.”

Ron and Janet were troubled by Brenda’s masculine behavior, but having been admonished by Dr. Money not to entertain any doubts about their daughter, they felt that to do so would only increase the problem. Instead they tried to focus on those moments when Brenda’s behavior could be construed as stereotypically feminine. “She could be sort of feminine sometimes, when she wanted to please me,” Janet says. “She’d be less rough, keep herself clean and tidy, and help a little bit in the kitchen.”

In her letters to Dr. Money describing Brenda’s progress, Janet made sure to emphasize those moments so that the psychologist would know that Janet and Ron were doing everything they could to implement his plans. She also informed Money of their daughter’s masculine leanings, but the psychologist assured her that this was mere “tomboyism.” This was an explanation that Janet found comforting, and she would cling to it for many years to come. “I have seen all kinds of women in my life,” she says, “and some of them, you’d swear they were men. So I thought, Well, maybe it won’t be a problem, because there are lots of women who aren’t very effeminate. Maybe it could work. I wanted it to work.”

Ron’s and Janet’s parents were struck by Brenda’s behavior. “When a girl would come to play with her,” says Ron’s mother, Helen, “she would not play like a girl, and then she would say to her mother that she wanted the girl to go home.”

“I noticed it when she had that fight with the boy across the street,” says Janet’s mother, Betty. “This boy tried to beat her up. And Brenda beat back.”

Janet’s uncle Johnny and aunt Evelyn were also unable to ignore certain realities about their niece. They might have surmised that Brenda was simply imitating Brian, but they knew better. They knew Brian particularly well because they were the ones who had baby-sat him for the three weeks while Ron, Janet, and Brenda were in Baltimore for Brenda’s operation. Without his sister around, Brian had been a quiet, gentle, sensitive boy—quite unlike the little terror who was tearing up Ron and Janet’s home with Brenda. Johnny and Evelyn formed the private opinion that, if anything, Brenda was the leader of the pair, and it was Brian who followed her lead into boyish mayhem and mischief. “She was the instigator,” Johnny says. Neither Johnny nor Evelyn ever voiced this to Ron and Janet, of course. “We were trying to go along with this,” Evelyn explains. “We were not going to start looking for trouble.”

Brenda, meanwhile, was having her own doubts. “You don’t wake up when you’re four and a half years old, look at the clock, and say, ‘Yup, I feel like a boy,’” David explains. “You’re too young.” At the same time, he says he knew something was amiss, even before he fully understood the concept of boy and girl. “I thought I was very similar to my brother. It’s not so much me being a guy, it’s more that we were brothers. It didn’t matter that I was in a dress.”

Brian didn’t question his sister’s boyish ways until they went off to school. “I was in grade one or two,” he says, “and I saw all these other girls doing their thing, combing their hair, holding their dolls. Brenda was not like that. Not at all.” At that time Brenda voiced the ambition to be a garbage man. “She’d say, ‘Easy job, good pay,’” Brian explains. “I thought it was kinda bizarre—my sister a garbage man?” Brian would finally grow so perplexed with his sister’s unconventional behavior that he went to his mother about it. “Well, that’s Brenda being a tomboy,” Janet told him, which he accepted.

It was not an explanation that Brenda’s schoolmates were prepared to accept, however. Upon entering kindergarten at Woodlawn, a small school near their house, Brenda became the object of instant ridicule from both boys and girls. “As you’d walk by, they’d start giggling,” David recalls. “Not one, but almost the whole class. It would be like that every day. The whole school would make fun of you about one thing or another.”

“It started the first day of kindergarten,” Janet says. “Even the teacher didn’t accept her. The teacher knew there was something different.”

She did indeed. Contacted twenty-six years later, the twins’ kindergarten teacher, Audrey McGregor, said she had never seen a girl like Brenda before or since. At first glance the child looked like the thousands of other girls who have passed through McGregor’s classroom, but there was a rough-and-tumble rowdiness, an assertive, pressing dominance, and a complete lack of any demonstrable feminine interests that were unique to Brenda in McGregor’s experience. And there was something else. McGregor mentions an incident that occurred shortly after the school year began. “A female classmate of Brenda’s came up to me,” McGregor recalls, “and she asked, ‘How come Brenda stands up when she goes to the bathroom?”

Ever since setting out to toilet train the twins, Janet had been grappling with Brenda, trying to convince her daughter not to stand and face the toilet bowl when she peed. No amount of coaxing seemed to work. Janet had mentioned the problem to Dr. Money, who had assured her that it was common for girls to insist on standing up to urinate and that the problem would correct itself in time. It had not. For Janet, Brenda’s stubborn insistence on standing created a housekeeping nightmare, since Brenda’s urine stream, which shot out almost perpendicular to her body from her severed urethra, splashed all over the back of the toilet seat. As for any suggestion that Brenda’s stubborn insistence on standing up to urinate indicated that the treatment was not working—this was not, Janet says, something she could afford to believe.

Kindergarten teacher McGregor, unschooled in Money’s theories of child development, formed a quite different opinion about Brenda. “She was more a boy,” McGregor says, “in the nature of things.” Furthermore, McGregor was convinced that Brenda herself, on some unconscious level, knew this. “I don’t think she felt she was a little girl,” the teacher says.

McGregor’s surmise was correct. Plunged into the sexually polarized world of school, Brenda now knew there was something seriously different about her. “You know generally what a girl is like,” David says, “and you know generally what a guy is like. And everyone is telling you that you’re a girl. But you say to yourself, I don’t feel like a girl. I liked to do guy stuff. It didn’t match. So you figure, Well, there’s something wrong here. If I’m supposed to be like this girl over here, but I’m acting like this guy, I guess I gotta be an it.”

Brenda’s personal difficulties were obvious in her functioning in the classroom. On her year-end Kindergarten Inventory of Skills, she was rated unsatisfactory in category after category: Social Living, Work Habits, Listening Skills, Speaking Skills, Reading Skills. The school threatened to hold Brenda back to repeat kindergarten. Janet complained to Dr. Money during a follow-up visit to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Money responded by giving the child an IQ test. Over two days, his research assistant, Nanci Bobrow, administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (the standard IQ test). Brenda scored in the low 90s, which placed her in the middle 50 percent of the population, indicating an average intelligence. Three weeks later Dr. Money sent the results to Brenda’s school. In an accompanying letter he painted a portrait of Brenda as a girl whose problems were temporary and well on the way to clearing up once she got over what he called her “playful negativism,” which was the result of “the bad emotional situation created by her early hospitalizations.”

“In such a case as the present one,” he concluded, “I very strongly favor promotion, because the degree of under achievement observed is a function of an emotional interference-factor which will definitely not improve by retaining the child at the kindergarten level.”

The school authorities in Winnipeg, upon receipt of Dr. Money’s letter, reversed their recommendation, and in September 1971, Brenda was advanced to first grade at a new school called Minnetonka.

Brenda’s problems only got worse. On 29 October, less than two months after Brenda started first grade, her teacher, Sharyn Froome, filed a report with the district’s Child Guidance Clinic. “I have had an extremely hard time interesting Brenda in any games or activities,” wrote Froome, who saw Brenda’s negative behavior as anything but “playful.” Describing her simply as “very negativistic,” and noting the child’s total isolation from her peers, Froome wrote that Brenda “has been doing just the opposite of anything the other children do.”

Child Guidance Clinic worker Joan Nebbs was among those who observed Brenda’s functioning at this time. “Her mother would send her to school very clean and cutely dressed, in little fancy tops and things like that,” Nebbs recalls. “She was quite fine-featured, with curly hair, and was a very pretty child with big brown eyes. It was her manner more than anything else that got in the way. She was always grubby. She’d always just been fighting with the kids and playing in the dirt. Brenda was really a rough little kid. She didn’t want to sit down with a book. She’d rather play knock-’em-down-shoot-’em-up cop games.” Nebbs says that Brenda sometimes tried to play with girls, but with little success. “She’d be trying to organize the girls to do things her way—trying to be the boss. She’d want them to play cowboys and Indians, chasing everyone around, general mayhem—and they didn’t want any part of that.”

Ron and Janet, who had hoped to keep Brenda’s medical history confidential, had no choice but to recognize that that would be impossible. After repeated queries from both the school and the Child Guidance Clinic for information about Brenda that might throw light on her academic and social difficulties, Ron and Janet signed a confidentiality waiver authorizing their local pediatrician, Dr. Mariano Tan, to contact the Child Guidance Clinic.

“I hope you will keep this letter strictly confidential,” Dr. Tan wrote to the clinic’s director. “Both of these children have been under my care since Oct., 1966. They are identical twins—both male—however, because of an unfortunate accident during circumcision on Bruce (now Brenda), the penis was amputated.” Tan went on to explain about Brenda’s sex change at Johns Hopkins.

The revelations in Tan’s letter seemed to explain, for both the clinic and the school, much about Brenda Reimer. “I just agreed it was a girl until I heard different,” says Brian’s first grade teacher, June Hunnie. “Once we knew the background, we thought to ourselves, Well, no wonder. What can you do to have a child sit down and quietly concentrate on classwork if there’s all this horrible stuff going on in the background? It’s impossible.”

Indeed it was—at least for Brenda. At the end of that school year Minnetonka informed Ron and Janet that while Brian would be promoted to the next grade in the fall of 1972, Brenda (despite Dr. Money’s sanguine predictions) would have to remain behind.

4

ON 28 DECEMBER 1972, four months after Brenda Reimer began her second attempt at first grade, John Money unveiled his “twins case.”

The occasion was the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. There Money delivered to a capacity crowd of over one thousand scientists, feminists, students, and reporters the first speech in a two-day series of talks devoted to “Sex Role Learning in Childhood and Adolescence.” The symposium, held in the Ambassador Ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel, featured an impressive roster of leading researchers in the field of sexual development. Only Money’s appearance at the meeting would make headlines, however—thanks to the remarkable case he cited that morning, a still fuller account of which (he informed his audience) could be found in his book Man & Woman, Boy & Girl (coauthored with Anke Ehrhardt)—a book that happened to have been published, in an early example of cross-promotional marketing, the very day of Money’s appearance at the symposium.

Man & Woman, Boy & Girl had been in the making for the previous four years. Culling data from the hundreds of hermaphrodites who had passed through his Psychohormonal Research Unit since the early 1950s, and drawing (as Money announced in the book’s preface) on scientific specialties as diverse as “genetics, embryology, neuroendocrinology, endocrinology, neurosurgery, social, medical and clinical psychology, and social anthropology,” the book was a daunting, ambitious-looking effort of scholarship—all the more so for its often impenetrable Latinate terminology and convoluted syntactic structures. Its thematic thrust, however, was surprisingly straightforward and was reducible to one organizing idea stated again and again in its three hundred pages. It was the same idea Money had first advanced in his mid-1950s papers on intersexes: namely, that the primary factors driving human psychosexual differentiation are learning and environment, not biology.

Appearing five years after Money and Ehrhardt’s data showing that female humans exposed to excesses of testosterone in utero displayed “tomboyism” in later life, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl had little choice but to acknowledge what Money called “a determining influence” of prenatal hormones on adult sexual behavior. Money explained that these influences were not decisive, however. Describing them as merely adding “a certain special flavor” to the girls’ behavior, Money stated that in the formation of gender identity, prebirth biological influences are secondary to the power of postbirth environmental factors, which override them. To prove this nurturist bias, Money repeatedly evoked his principle of “matched pairs” of hermaphrodites—intersexual patients who shared a similar syndrome yet had been raised successfully, he claimed, as opposite sexes.

But the careful reader might have been struck by what looked like an uncharacteristic admission that hermaphrodites could not tell the whole story of human sexual development. For midway through the book, Money confessed to the frustrating constraints that prevented sex researchers from conducting the kinds of experiments that would provide truly conclusive answers to the riddle of psychosexual differentiation in humans. “The ultimate test of the thesis that gender identity differentiation is not preordained in toto by either the sex chromosomes, the prenatal hormonal pattern, or the postnatal hormonal levels would be undertaken, if one had the same ethical freedom of working in experiments with normal babies as with animals,” he wrote. “Since planned experiments are ethically unthinkable, one can only take advantage of unplanned opportunities, such as when a normal boy baby loses his penis in a circumcision accident.”

Then Money revealed that just such an “unplanned opportunity” to experiment on a developmentally normal infant had come his way—and that he had seized it. Describing how the injured baby’s parents had allowed their son to be surgically reassigned as a girl, Money also pointed out what he called an “extreme unusualness” to the case: the child in question was one of a pair of identical male twins. The momentous import of this would not have been lost on either Money’s readers or his AAAS audience. Money was saying that he had used for his experiment a pair of children whose biology was as close to identical as any two human beings could be: a pair of children whose lives had begun with the same primordial zygote cell, whose DNA bore the same genetic blueprint, and whose brains and nervous systems had developed in the womb within the same bath of prenatal hormones. In short, the ultimate matched pair.

That Money recognized the very special place Brenda Reimer’s case occupied in his work—and indeed within the entire history of sex research—was clear from the emphasis he gave it in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl. First mentioned in the book’s introduction, it was then cited at various key points throughout the text: in Chapter 8 on “Gender Identity Differentiation,” in Chapter 9 on “Developmental Differentiation,” in Chapter 10 on “Pubertal Hormones.” It was in Chapter 7, on “Gender Dimorphism in Assignment and Rearing,” that Money explored the case at greatest length, his account having been assembled from firsthand observation of Brenda during the family’s annual visits to his Psychohormonal Research Unit and from letters and phone calls with Janet during the year.

Money made mention in passing of Brenda’s “tomboyish traits” but dismissed these as insignificant next to the myriad ways she conformed to the stereotypes of female behavior—examples of which were selected from Janet’s hopeful cataloging over the years of Brenda’s fitful attempts to act more like a girl. Money did make reference to Brenda’s extraordinary bathroom habits, but as he had done with Janet, he assured his readers that “many girls” attempt standing to urinate like boys, and he hinted that by age five Brenda no longer stood to pee—and that any sporadic reversion to her old habits was merely her effort at “copying her brother.” No mention was made of the academic, social, and emotional difficulties that had obliged Money to intervene on Janet’s behalf with the Winnipeg school authorities a year and a half before the book’s publication.

By any measure, the account portrayed the experiment as an unqualified success. In comparison with her twin brother, Brenda provided what Money variously described as an “extraordinary” and a “remarkable” contrast. Brian’s interest in “cars and gas pumps and tools” was compared with Brenda’s avid interest in “dolls, a doll house and a doll carriage”; Brenda’s cleanliness was characterized as wholly different from Brian’s total disregard for such matters; Brenda’s interest in kitchen work was placed alongside Brian’s disdain for it. Money did describe Brenda as always the “dominant twin,” though he gave the impression that this was changing over time. By age three, he reported, her dominance over Brian had become “that of a mother hen.” All in all, the twins embodied an almost miraculous division of taste, temperament, and behavior along gender lines and seemed the “ultimate test” that boys and girls are made, not born.

The significance of the case was not lost on the then-burgeoning women’s movement, which had been arguing against a biological basis for sex differences for decades. Money’s own papers from the 1950s on the psychosexual neutrality of newborns had already been used as one of the main foundations of modern feminism. Kate Millet, in her bestselling 1970 feminist bible, Sexual Politics, had quoted the 1950s papers as scientific proof that the differences between men and women reflect not biological imperatives, but societal expectations and prejudices. The twins case offered still more dramatic, and apparently irrefutable, evidence to support that view.

“This dramatic case,” Time magazine duly reported on January 8, 1973, the week after Money debuted the case at the AAAS meeting in Washington, “provides strong support for a major contention of women’s liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered. It also casts doubt on the theory that major sexual differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.”

The New York Times Book Review hailed Man & Woman, Boy & Girl as “the most important volume in the social sciences to appear since the Kinsey reports.” It summed up the book’s argument on the power of nurture to override nature thus: “[I]f you tell a boy he is a girl, and raise him as one, he will want to do feminine things.”

The twins case was quickly enshrined in myriad textbooks ranging from the social sciences to pediatric urology and endocrinology. “The clear message here is that even if biologically based sex differences in behavioral predispositions exist, social factors such as the sex which the child is assigned and in which the child is reared can substantially override and obscure them,” wrote Alice G. Sargent about the case in her 1977 women’s studies text, Beyond Sex Roles. Sociologists were equally enthralled by the case and cited it as the premier example of society’s power to mold the most fundamental building block of human identity. Typical was the textbook Sociology, first published in 1977, in which Ian Robertson wrote that Money’s work “indicates that children can easily be raised as a member of the opposite sex” and that what few inborn sex differences might exist in humans “are not clear-cut and can be overridden by cultural learning.” The 1979 volume Textbook of Sexual Medicine, by Robert Kolodny and renowned sex researchers Masters and Johnson, cited the case as compelling evidence of the power of nurture over nature: “The childhood development of this (genetically male) girl has been remarkably feminine and is very different from the behavior exhibited by her identical twin brother. The normality of her development can be viewed as a substantial indication of the plasticity of human gender identity and the relative importance of social learning and conditioning in this process.”

Money meanwhile did his part to ensure that the case got maximum exposure in both the academic and lay press. Through the 1970s he made the case the centerpiece of his public addresses, rarely giving a speech in which he did not mention it. He soon introduced refinements into his crowd-pleasing presentation. At a March 1973 address at the prestigious Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Money included a slide show in which he displayed a close-up photograph of Bruce’s groin following the loss of his penis and a shot of the twins standing near a doorway. Brian is dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, Brenda in a sleeveless dress, white ankle socks, and white shoes. Money also showed a shot of Brenda alone, taken by Money himself. The child is seated awkwardly on the patterned upholstery of his office sofa. She wears a floral dress and running shoes, her bare left knee lifted self-protectively against the lens, her left hand deliberately obscuring her face. “In the last illustration,” Money told his audience, “you have a pretty persuasive example of feminine body talk.”

At his Nebraska lecture, Money also dropped a telling comment in summing up the case, when he told his listeners that Brenda’s successful sex change refuted charges that “Money studies only odd and atypical cases, not normal ones.” To those in the know, this was a not very veiled allusion to Money’s principal theoretical rival, Milton Diamond.

In fact, Diamond did not object to Money’s use of “odd and atypical cases” to study gender identity formation. He merely questioned the theoretical conclusions that Money drew from them. Since publishing his challenge to Money in 1965, Diamond had taken a teaching post at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, where he set to work studying intersexes himself. In his own interviews with intersexual patients, whom he met at the Louisville Children’s Hospital, Diamond found that an imposed sex assignment in early infancy was by no means the magical panacea Money’s writings suggested.

Instead, Diamond met several patients who contradicted the claim that rearing in a particular sex will always make a child accept that designation. There was the female baby exposed to excessive testosterone in utero, who was reared from birth as a girl but at age six stated to her mother that she was “a boy.” There was the genetic male born with a tiny penis and raised as a girl, who at age seventeen voluntarily came to Louisville Children’s Hospital requesting a change of sex to male—and was willing to endure more than twenty-five surgeries to construct an artificial penis, so vehemently was “she” determined to live in the sex of her genes and chromosomes. Even in those instances when an intersexual child did seem to accept a sex in contradiction to his or her biology, Diamond was not convinced that they had undergone a transformation in their core sexual identity. Such cases “should be considered a credit to human role flexibility and adaptability rather than an indelible feature of upbringing,” he warned in the book Perspectives in Reproduction and Sexual Behavior, published in 1968.

In the years following publication of that book, Diamond was heartened to see that his views were beginning to be noticed by a scattering of scientists, researchers, and clinicians. In England, a pair of physicians, Dewhurst and Gordon, who had been treating intersexual patients for a decade, published their book, The Intersexual Disorders, in which they specifically questioned Money’s assertion that rearing in a particular sex invariably led to a child’s identifying with that sex. They not only cited a nationwide survey of British physicians whose clinical experience with intersexes contradicted Money’s claim, but also referred to Diamond’s work with intersexes in Louisville. A year later, in 1970, a fellow American joined Diamond for the first time in challenging Money’s theory of human psychosexual differentiation.

Dr. Bernard Zuger was a Manhattan-based child psychiatrist whose work treating young male homosexuals and their families had caused him to question the prevailing view that sexual orientation results from rearing and environment. By exploring the family dynamics of his gay patients, Zuger discovered that in many cases the stereotypical pattern of an overbearing mother and a detached, hostile father did pertain; but by actually observing children in their family settings, Zuger came to believe that such a dynamic was not a cause of the child’s homosexuality, but an effect. Long-term interviews with some fifty-five children (some of whom Zuger would follow for thirty years) showed that in virtually every case the boys demonstrated very early feminine play preferences, interests, and behavior. The father’s efforts to bond over masculine interests were rebuffed by the child, and the father—rejected—would emotionally withdraw; the mother would move in to fill the vacuum, thus creating the observed pattern of a distant father and overbearing mother. Zuger suspected a biological basis for homosexuality that contradicted the universally accepted nurturist view—a view, as Zuger later wrote, that was founded to a remarkable degree on Money and the Hampsons’ prize-winning 1950s papers on hermaphrodites. It was in an effort to learn how the Johns Hopkins team had arrived at those findings that Zuger submitted their work to close review.

Like the Canadian team more than a decade earlier, Zuger found serious problems with the Johns Hopkins team’s methodology, interpretation of the clinical data, and statistical analysis. Noting that the papers were “lacking in such data as the ages when individual cases were observed, their subsequent course, and the part substitution therapy played in maintaining their gender role,” Zuger also referred to new biological evidence, which had arisen in the intervening fifteen years, that cast further doubt on the Hopkins team’s conclusions. Unlike the Canadian team, however, Zuger actually reanalyzed the Johns Hopkins data using what he considered proper statistical methods and in light of the new biological findings. In doing so, he meticulously dismantled case after case cited by Money and the Hampsons and showed how children who, according to the team, had been raised in contradiction to their prevailing biological sex had in fact accepted a gender assignment in keeping with one or another of the factors that constitute a person’s biological makeup as male or female: the chromosomes, the gonads, or the hormones. Summing up, Zuger wrote that of the sixty-five instances given as evidence for the dominance of rearing over biology, only four cases could be said to have escaped challenge—and even those were questionable. “The four cases,” Zuger wrote, “might be explained on the basis of the ‘flexibility’ which Diamond attributes to human sexuality, or perhaps even by specific biologic factors which more detailed studies might have brought to light.”

Slated for publication in a 1970 issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, a prepublication copy of Zuger’s paper was shown by the journal’s editors to Money, who fired off a blistering response.

“It is difficult for the seeing to give art instruction to the blind,” Money began, before proceeding to accuse Zuger of “intentionally biased sampling” and lambasting his work as “argumentative,” and “very conjectural.” Declining to address any of the specific scientific, methodological, and statistical unorthodoxies Zuger had highlighted, Money instead issued a threat to the journal editors: “I am sure you have ascertained, by now, the strength of my feeling about Dr. Zuger’s manuscript. I do not want to take the easy way out and recommend simply that you do not publish it, because I know it would be equally easy, these days, to journal-shop and get the manuscript into print in another journal. What I really want is to ask Dr. Zuger to subject his manuscript to a very radical, total revision.” A revision, in Money’s exhaustive spelling out, that would bring Zuger’s conclusions into agreement with Money’s.

It was a measure of Money’s academic power that the editors took his advice. They asked Zuger to revise his paper along the lines suggested by Money. Zuger declined, pointing out that Money had made no criticism “carrying any substance whatever” and adding, “Dr. Money’s notion of a total revision, way beyond the scope of the paper, amounts to, of course, stalling it forever.” Instead, through an arrangement agreed upon by both researchers, Zuger’s paper and Money’s letter of rebuttal were published in their entirety in the September-October 1970 edition of the journal.

Whatever larger debate might have been stimulated by the cumulative weight of the critiques by the Canadians in 1959, Diamond in 1965 and 1968, the British team in 1969, and Zuger in 1970 was effectively quashed by the fanfare that attended the publication, in late 1972, of Money’s magnum opus, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, and in particular its remarkable chapter on the twins case.

Dr. Mel Grumbach, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a world authority on the subject, says that Money’s twins case was decisive in the universal acceptance not only of the theory that human beings are psychosexually malleable at birth, but also of sex reassignment surgery as treatment of infants with ambiguous or injured genitalia. Once confined principally to Johns Hopkins, the procedure soon spread and today is performed in virtually every major country with the possible exception of China. While no annual tally of infant sex reassignments has ever been made, one physician conservatively estimates that three to five cases of babies with incongruous genitalia requiring sex change crop up annually in every major American city—giving the United States alone a total of at least one hundred such operations a year. Globally that figure could be as high as a thousand a year.

“Doctors were very influenced by the twin experience,” Grumbach explains. “John stood up at a conference and said, ‘I’ve got these two twins, and one of them is now a girl, and the other is a boy.’ They were saying they took this normal boy and changed him over to a girl. That’s powerful. That’s really powerful. I mean, what is your response to that? This case was used to reinforce the fact that you can really do anything. You can take a normal XY male and convert it into a female in the neonatal period, and it won’t make any difference.” Grumbach adds, “John Money is a major figure, and what he says gets handed down and accepted as gospel by some.”

But not all. Mickey Diamond had continued his research into how the sexual nervous system is organized before birth, and his studies had only strengthened his conviction that neither intersexual nor normal children were born psychosexually neutral—a conviction that would make him view with alarm the burgeoning practice of infant sex reassignment. And he was more convinced than ever that converting a normal infant from one sex to the other would be impossible. “But I didn’t have any evidence to disprove the twins case at the time,” Diamond says. “I didn’t have anything except a theoretical argument to challenge it.” He vowed to follow the case closely—a decision, he says, that was made from purely scientific motives. If, however, Diamond also by now felt a degree of personal involvement in his theoretical dispute with Money, that was perhaps understandable. For in the chapter directly following his account of the twins case in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, Money had lashed out at Diamond and the others who had challenged his classic papers. Restating his own position, Money had acidly observed: “It would not have been necessary to belabor this point, except that some writers still don’t understand it,” and he went on to say that the work of Diamond and the others was “instrumental in wrecking the lives of unknown numbers of hermaphroditic youngsters.”

At the time of Man & Woman, Boy & Girl’s publication, Money and Diamond had limited their debate solely to published papers and books. That was shortly to change.

In September 1973, some nine months after the book’s publication, John Money chaired the Third Annual International Symposium on Gender Identity, held at the Hotel Libertas in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. The symposium brought together a number of the leading authorities in the field of sexual development. These included Money’s coauthor Dr. Anke Ehrhardt, who had taken a position as clinical associate professor in psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo; Dr. Donald Laub, the Stanford Medical School professor and plastic surgeon who specialized in sex change surgery; and Dr. Ira Pauly, a psychiatrist who today is still a leader in the field of transexualism. Milton Diamond, not invited as either presenter or panelist, had nevertheless come to Yugoslavia to attend the conference. After the first day of speeches, during which Money had given the keynote address, the scientists gathered at an evening cocktail reception. The convivial gathering took place in a large room with vast windows that framed a view of the sunset over the Aegean Sea.

“I was sitting with some people over at one end of the room,” Diamond recalls, “and Money was sitting over in another part of the room with Anke Ehrhardt. And all of a sudden he gets up and shouts at the top of his voice, ‘Mickey Diamond, I hate your fucking guts!’”

An altercation ensued.

“They were arguing over the twins case,” says Vern Bullough, then a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a friend of both men. “Mickey pointed out to John that all the data was not there, that it was too early to draw definitive conclusions about the kid. John suddenly slugged Mickey. Hit him. Mickey did not fight back. He just repeated, ‘The data is not there.’ John yelled at him, ‘We have to stick together as sex researchers and not challenge one another!’” (Diamond says that he cannot recall any physical contact during this encounter.)

The combatants were separated, but the incident, Bullough says, threw a considerable pall over the party. Still, it did not inhibit Money’s ongoing promotion of the twins case in lectures, published papers, and the press. The following June, Baltimore’s News American newspaper ran a long profile on Money, in which the twins case was highlighted as his most impressive accomplishment in sex and gender research. “There isn’t any question which one is the boy and which one the girl,” Money told the newspaper. “It’s just plain obvious.”

“Such findings,” the story continued, “could have an effect on future attitudes about sex roles that could prove comparable to that of Darwin’s theory of Evolution.”

5

IN 1967, AT THE TIME of Brenda’s castration, Dr. Money had stipulated to the Reimers that he see the child once a year for follow-up consultations. The trips, which were sometimes separated by as many as eighteen months, were meant to “guard against the psychological hazards” associated with growing up as a sex-reassigned child, as Money said in a letter to the Reimers’ lawyer. According to the Reimers, however, and to contemporaneous clinical notes, the family’s trips to the Psychohormonal Research Unit only exacerbated the confusion and fear that Brenda was already suffering. As Money’s private case files show, Brenda reacted with terror on her first follow-up trip to Johns Hopkins at age four. “[T]here was something almost maniacal about her refusals [to be tested],” Money wrote in his notes, “and the way she hit, kicked and otherwise attacked people.”

“You get the idea something happened to you,” David says, explaining the dread that engulfed him during those mysterious annual visits to the Psychohormonal Research Unit, “but you don’t know what—and you don’t want to know.” Brian, who was also required to submit to sessions with Dr. Money on each visit, found the trips equally bewildering and unsettling. “For the life of me I couldn’t understand why, out of all the kids in my class, I’m the only one going with my sister to Baltimore to talk to this Dr. Money? It made us feel like we were aliens.” The twins soon developed a conviction that everyone, from their parents to Dr. Money and his colleagues, was keeping something from them. “There was something not adding up,” Brian says. “We knew that at a very early age. But we didn’t make the connection. We didn’t know.”

All they did know was that Dr. Money and his associates seemed to take an inordinate amount of interest in everything about them. Some of the questions they were asked were relatively innocuous—“What’s your favorite food?” “Who do you like more, Mom or Dad?” Others were less so. Dr. Money repeatedly asked the children about the differences between boys’ and girls’ genitalia and about what they knew about how babies were made. For Brenda, there were also private sessions with Dr. Money in which she was asked minutely detailed, numbingly repetitious questions about the toys she liked to play with, whether she fought with boys, whether she liked to play with girls. David says that Dr. Money and his coworkers dismissed Brenda’s concerns about her boyish behavior and feelings. “They’d tell me, ‘You shouldn’t be ashamed of being a girl,’” David says. “They’d say, ‘Girls can do the same things as boys.’ One woman—an associate of Dr. Money’s—told me, ‘That’s a typical tomboy thing; I did the same thing. You’re just a tomboy.’ But I was saying to myself, No, it’s not quite like that. I don’t think that’s quite it.”

Money’s Psychohormonal Research Unit files corroborate David’s claim that Money and his colleagues seemed unwilling or unable to see and hear Brenda’s efforts to tell them of her sexual confusion. At her earliest visits to the unit, Brenda could not consciously articulate her feelings of not being a girl, but as Money’s notes show, those feelings were clear in her interviews and in the psychological tests Money and his students administered to her.

On a 19 June 1972 visit to the Psychohormonal Research Unit, when Brenda was six, she was given the Draw a Person Test, a standard test in which children demonstrate the primacy of their own gender identity by representing their own sex when instructed to draw a person. But Brenda did not draw a girl. Instead she produced the standard childish representation of a boy, which her tester, Money’s student R. Clopper, called a “stick figure.” Asked who it was, Brenda said, “Me.” Asked to draw a figure of the sex opposite to herself, Brenda refused. Only after what the notes describe as “considerable coaxing” did she draw another stick figure, which she called “Brenda with a ponytail.” Then she changed her response to “Brian,” then changed again and said it was Brenda herself. Asked what the “opposite sex” figure to herself was wearing, Brenda said, “A dress.”

David says he quickly learned to try to tell Money and his coworkers what they wanted to hear. And indeed, in Money’s notes Brenda can sporadically be seen making sober avowals to her love of “sewing, cleaning, dusting and doing dishes.” As Money’s notes also show, however, Brenda often slipped up in her pose of serene and dutiful femininity. In one instance during the June 1972 visit, she can be seen actually feeling out Money for the correct way to answer him, and readjusting her response—on the fly—to fit her questioner’s expectations.

The exchange began when Money asked if Brenda fought back or ran away when boys started to fight her. Brenda at first blurted out, “Fight back,” but then immediately reversed herself. “No,” she said. “I just run away.” Money, clearly noting this transparent attempt to tell him what he wanted to hear, asked the question again. Now. Brenda could not be budged. She insisted that she did not fight boys—“Because I’m a girl.”

“You’re a girl?” the psychologist asked.

“And not a boy,” Brenda felt compelled to assure him. Then, apparently unsure whether she had given the correct answer, she asked, “Girls don’t fight, do they?”

Minutes later, when Money asked the question from yet another angle (Did she use her hands to fight people?), Brenda promptly contradicted her earlier avowals with the exclamation that she hit hard—“with my fist.”

By the following year, when Brenda was seven, Money’s notes show that she was less prone to such childish mistakes of inconsistency. When Money conducted his standard “schedule of inquiry” with her, she dutifully snapped out her answers with the swiftness of a call-and-response routine.

“Do you like to play house sometimes?” Money asked.

“Yes.”

“Who plays mother?”

“Me.”

“And who plays father?”

“My brother.”

“And who is the baby?”

“My doll.”

“How do you play with the dolls?”

“Feed them and, uh, give them milk. That’s all.”

At this same visit, however, Brenda’s subconscious conviction that she was a boy emerged. For it was after the above exchange that Money asked Brenda to describe a “good dream.” She began by describing a child on a farm with a horse. Before announcing the sex of the child, Brenda (as Money dictated in his notes) “paus[ed], and search[ed] for the next word” before revealing that the child was a boy.

“It was nice,” Brenda continued, “and he wanted to eat, and he wanted to drink. He wanted to go to bed, and he wanted to sleep. That’s all.”

The presence of Brian in joint interviews with his sister did little to soften the impression Brenda gave of a scrappy, headstrong, dominant little pugilist. Indeed, Money’s transcripts of his joint interviews with the twins only serve to reinforce an impression that family members, teachers, Child Guidance Clinic personnel, and others in Winnipeg described to me: that Brenda was the more traditionally masculine of the two children. When Money questioned the six-year-old twins about how to play with a doll, it was Brian who first spoke up, talking excitedly of how you hold, feed, and nurse them. Only when Brenda was pressed to respond did she try to parrot her brother’s answer.

In this same interview, Money asked a question he would put to the twins repeatedly over the years: who was “the boss.” Brian at first claimed that he was, but Money was clearly dubious. (Two years earlier, he had already noted that Brian “does a lot of copying of her.”) He now repeated his question to Brian, asking if he truly was the boss. Brian’s bravado instantly collapsed.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

Brenda pounced. “Are you the boss?” she challenged him. “Do you want to be the boss? I don’t think so. OK, I’ll be the boss.”

In this same joint interview, Money questioned the twins about their respective fighting habits. Brian said he fought—but only with girls, and in particular a little girl with orange hair who picked on him.

“Do you fight with other boys?” Money asked.

“No,” Brian said. “I fight with girls.” Brenda then explained that she defended Brian against his female antagonists, telling them, “You better not hit my brother.”

Brenda was still more explicit about her role as Brian’s protector a year later. In an interview alone with Money, she once again described how she rescued Brian from bullies. At the same time she let slip that she sometimes bullied Brian herself.

“Do you and Brian fight sometimes?” Money asked.

“Yep,” Brenda said.

“Do you fight with your hands, or fists, or feet—or how?”

“Fists and feet and hands.”

“Can you beat Brian up, or does he beat you?”

“I could beat him up.”

“Who wins?”

“I do.”

It was at this same visit that Money compared how the twins threw a ball. Brian had privately told the psychologist that Brenda threw “like a girl.” To test this exciting thesis, Money gave Brenda a ball of modeling clay and asked her to throw it. “[S]he pitched the ball in a fairly straightforward way from her left hand (both children are left handed),” Money dictated in his private notes. “It was a standard overhand throw.”

David says that at seven he was still too young to be able to formulate in words his inner sense of being identical to his brother in every way but in the anatomy of his genitals. Brenda, though, can be seen clearly struggling to articulate this concept in an exchange with Money over the difference between boys’ and girls’ private parts. It was a topic that Money had quizzed the twins on since their earliest visits to the unit and one that clearly caused both children acute embarrassment. In the present instance, Brenda dodged and weaved for several minutes, too mortified and frightened to say the words penis and vagina. Instead she employed a number of stalling tactics that she had perfected over the years in her verbal dueling matches with Money. To his question about how to tell boys and girls apart, she first offered that a boy has short hair, a girl long. Money asked the question again. Brenda said that boys wear pants, girls dresses. This went on for several more minutes until Money, clearly growing impatient, said, “Well, I’ll help you. You have a look down here, between the legs. How is a boy and how is a girl down there? What’s the difference?”

“You mean it’s flat?” Brenda said.

“A boy has a penis—for peeing through,” Money said. “It is just like a little sausage, huh? What does a girl have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she has it flat,” Money said. He continued: “A boy doesn’t have that. They are both different.” Money repeated: “They are both different. Now we know, don’t we?”

At this point Money’s private notes continue: “Spontaneously she adds: ‘But we’re twins. We’re twins.’”

Money, obviously taken aback by the vehemence of this rare outburst from the ordinarily tight-lipped girl, asked, “What does it mean when you say you’re twins?”

Brenda helplessly cataloged several of the physical things that made her identical to her brother: their left-handedness, their voices, their eyes. Too ashamed to speak directly of her genitals, she left it up to Money to settle the mystery of how two such completely similar children could be “both different” in their anatomic sex. But Money failed, or declined, to catch Brenda’s meaning, and instead returned to his standard schedule of inquiry—the list of prepared questions about toys, friends, school, and fighting that he worked through at each visit.

As the twins got older, Money’s questioning grew more explicit. “Dr. Money would ask, ‘Do you ever dream of having sex with women?’” Brian says. “ ‘Do you ever get an erection?’ And the same with Brenda. ‘Do you think about this? About that?’”

While attempting to probe the twins’ sexual psyches, Money also tried his hand at programming Brenda’s and Brian’s respective sense of themselves as girl and boy. One of his theories of how children form their different gender schemas—Money’s term—was that they must understand at a very early age the differences between male and female sex organs. Pornography, he believed, was ideal for this purpose. “[E]xplicit sexual pictures,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures, “can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.” Such pictures, he said, “reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.”

“He would show us pictures of kids—boys and girls—with no clothes on,” Brian says. David recalls that Dr. Money also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. “He’d say to us, ‘I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.’”

Money had two sides to his personality, according to the twins: “One when Mom and Dad weren’t around,” Brian says, “and another when they were.” When their parents were present, Money was avuncular, mild-mannered. Alone with the children he could be irritable or worse, especially when they defied him. They were particularly resistant, the twins say, to Money’s requests that they remove their clothes and inspect each other’s genitals. David recalls an occasion when he attempted to defy the psychologist. “He told me to take my clothes off,” David says, “and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed, ‘Now!’ Louder than that. I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking.” In a separate conversation with me, Brian recalls that same incident. “ ‘Take your clothes off—now!’” Brian shouts.

Though the children could not know this, the genital inspections that Dr. Money demanded they perform were central to his theory of how children develop a sense of themselves as boy or girl—and thus, in Money’s mind, crucial to the successful outcome of Brenda’s sex reassignment. For as Money stressed in his writings of the period, “The firmest possible foundations for gender schemas are the differences between male and female genitals and reproductive behavior, a foundation our culture strives mightily to withhold from children. All young primates explore their own and each others’ genitals, masturbate, and play at thrusting movements and copulation—and that includes human children everywhere, as well as subhuman primates. The only thing wrong about these activities is not to enjoy them.”

But the children did not enjoy these enforced activities—particularly those involving “play at thrusting movements and copulation,” which Brian recalls that Dr. Money first introduced when the twins were six years old. Money, he says, would make Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks. Variations on the therapy included Brenda lying on her back with her legs spread and Brian lying on top of her. On at least one occasion, Brian says, Dr. Money took a Polaroid photograph of them while they were engaged in this part of the therapy.

Of all the therapy the children received, this particular form of counseling left the deepest impression on both twins. Today David is still unwilling to speak about it. “There are some things I don’t want to remember,” he says. In 1989 he did describe the sessions to Jane Fontane, the woman who would become his wife. The two had just watched a TV documentary on CIA torture involving electroshock to people’s genitals. “He cried hysterically,” Jane told me. “He was crying about John Money. I’d never seen him like that. I tried to comfort him. David said Dr. Money made him go on all fours and made Brian go up behind his butt. They were being photographed. He mentioned that very act.”

Brian speaks of the coital mimicry only with the greatest emotional turmoil. “It’s very hard to— I don’t understand why to this day we were forced to do that,” Brian says.

Brian’s perplexity would have instantly been eradicated had he ever made a study of John Money’s theory of childhood sexual rehearsal play, articulated repeatedly in books, papers, speeches, and press interviews published over a quarter century, and its supposed critical importance in the establishment of healthy gender identity.

Money’s fascination with the topic of coital mimicry in children had its origins in a trip he made in late 1969 to the northern coast of Australia with three professors from the University of New South Wales. There Money visited for two weeks in a village of coastal aborigines called the Yolngu—a tribe Money would later describe as wholly heterosexual and entirely free of any psychosexual gender confusions or dysfunction whatsoever. While visiting one of the tribal elementary schools, Money heard a secondhand report from an eight-year-old child “that two six-year-old relatives at the camp-fire the previous night had given a demonstration of nigi-nigi”—a term Money understood to mean, through his preteen interpreter, “sexual intercourse.” This incident, coupled with Money’s belief in the tribe’s lack of any gender confusion, was the foundation for his theory that childhood “sexual rehearsal play” was vital to the formation of a healthy adult gender identity—a theory he first articulated in a 1970 paper on the Yolngu published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology.

“The straightforward attitude of the Yolngu towards nudity and sex play in young children allows these children to grow up with a straightforward attitude towards sex differences, towards the proper meaning and eventual significance of the sex organs, and towards their own reproductive destiny and sense of identity as male or female,” he wrote. Conversely, Money hypothesized, Western society’s restrictions on such sex play in young children was highly detrimental and was the root cause of such things as homosexuality, pedophilia, and lust murders.

One of Money’s colleagues on the trip, Professor J. E. Cawte, who has studied the Yolngu for almost thirty years, says that he has never witnessed sexual rehearsal play among the tribal children and knows of no researcher who has. Professor Cawte is similarly mystified at the claim that adults of the Yolngu manifest no sexual difficulties. As a psychiatrist who has ministered to the needs of the tribe for decades, Cawte says he has treated many of the Yolngu adults for a wide variety of what he calls “sexual neuroses” and dysfunctions of every variety.

Nevertheless, the Yolngu’s purported habit of childhood sexual rehearsal play and their alleged freedom from any psychosexual confusion became a constant reference in almost every public utterance of Money’s for the next three decades. He included a section on sexual rehearsal play in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl and published an article on the theory in The Sciences magazine in 1975. By the time he came to write Sexual Signatures in the mid-1970s (a time concurrent with his treatment of the Reimer twins), the issue of childhood sexual rehearsal play had assumed the dimensions of a crusade—and one that could move Money to shrill flights of rhetoric. “[W]hat happens in our culture?” he wrote. “Children’s sex explorations are treated like a contagious disease…. [D]on’t let them see the incontrovertible differences in their genitals, and don’t, at all costs, let them rehearse copulation—the one universal human activity that still imperatively demands that the two sexes behave differently and harmoniously!”

In an interview with the pornographic magazine Genesis in April 1977, Money vented his frustration against the prohibition against childhood sexual rehearsal play and a psychologist’s right to observe it. “The number of studies of the effects of depriving human infants and juveniles of sexual rehearsal play is exactly and precisely zero,” he said, “because anyone who tried to conduct such a study would risk imprisonment for contributing to the delinquency of minors, or for being obscene. Just imagine the headlines and the fate of a research-grant application requesting funds to watch children playing fucking games!” He sounded the same theme in a 1984 speech, lamenting that it was a “crime” for a sexologist “to make a pictorial record of children’s normal, healthy sexual rehearsal play” and returned to this theme in Psychology Today when he showed a book with pictures of young children engaged in sexual intercourse to interviewer Constance Holden and said, “You have just become a criminal by looking at those pictures of children.”

In a 1988 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Money unexpectedly veered from the show’s main topic (intersexuality) and put in a plug for his pet theory. “I worked among the aboriginal people on the north coast of Australia in the early seventies,” Money told Oprah’s audience. “I was very interested in the fact that they don’t impose a sexual taboo on themselves, and they don’t punish children for doing normal sexual rehearsal play … and I was very surprised to find out that there were no bisexual or no gay people in there.” Oprah, who had clearly not been briefed on this particular aspect of Money’s research, tried to deflect the remark. “I’m almost afraid to ask what all that means, Dr. Money,” she interjected. Money, however, was not to be put off, and continued with an explicit description of the sexual rehearsal play he now claimed to have directly witnessed among the Yolngu. A year later, Money could still be heard trying to promote his theory on an episode of the Canadian TV show The Originals, where he scoffingly referred to the prudery of a society that prohibits such childhood exploration. “It has become very obvious to me,” he said, “that sexual rehearsal play is part of nature’s absolute intention, in order to allow children to grow up to be sexually normal.”

But never having heard of Money’s theory of sexual rehearsal play, Brian and Brenda Reimer could only perform the ritualized poses obediently, in complete perplexity about their meaning and wholly unaware of the critical role their counselor understood the episodes to have in the successful outcome of his most famous experiment in infant sex change.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Brenda, at age seven, began strongly to resist going to Baltimore. Money suggested to Ron and Janet that they sweeten the pill of the annual visits by blending the trips to Johns Hopkins with a family vacation. “Soon,” Janet says, “we were promising Disneyland and side trips to New York just to get her to go.”

It was also at this time that Dr. Money began increasingly to focus on the issue of vaginal surgery in his sessions with Brenda. When she underwent her castration at the age of twenty-two months, Brenda was only at the first stage of the feminizing process. Dr. Jones had elected to wait until Brenda’s body was closer to fully grown before performing the two remaining surgeries: the first to lower her urethra into the female position, the second to excavate a full vaginal canal. For Dr. Money, there was an increasingly urgent need for Brenda to prepare for these operations. Because genital appearance was critical to his theory of how one “learns” a sexual identity, he believed that Brenda’s psychological sex change could not be complete until her physical sex change was finished.

There was only one problem. Brenda was determined not to have the surgery—ever. As Money’s private clinical notes reveal, he first raised the issue of vaginal surgery with Brenda on her visit of 24 April 1973. He segued into the subject with deceptive casualness.

“That reminds me of something else I wanted to tell you about,” Money said after interrogating her at length on the usual range of topics: fighting, how to tell boys and girls apart. “You know already the way you are made down there, between your legs, you are not exactly the same as other girls, eh?”

“Yes,” Brenda said. She was understating the case considerably. Her vagina, with its small stumplike protrusion under the skin and its apparent scarring, caused her such confusion and anxiety that she could not even bring herself to look, or touch, between her own legs.

“Well, I have a message for you about that,” Money said. “Here in this hospital we can fix it up for you and make it look like it’s supposed to look.”

“Huh?” Brenda said.

Money went on to explain that the doctors could operate on her so that she could urinate properly. (It was Money’s theory that Brenda’s continuing unorthodoxies in the bathroom resulted solely from the condition of her uncompleted vaginal surgery.) “How old will you be when you’re ready for that [operation]?” Money asked.

Brenda resorted to the reply she so often gave to Money’s queries. “I don’t know.”

Money suggested that Brenda would be ready at her next visit, when she was eight—one year away. Brenda said nothing. Money talked on at length about the “doctor in the white coat” who would “fix it up down there.” Finally Brenda found her voice.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she said.

This was a position from which Brenda would refuse to shift.

Today David explains that his refusal to undergo vaginal surgery was not only a result of his deep fear of hospitals, doctors, and needles. It had to do with certain realizations he came to around this time—realizations that convinced him he was not a girl and never would be, no matter what his parents, his doctor, his teachers, or anyone else said. For as David explains, when seven-year-old Brenda daydreamed of an ideal future, she saw herself as a twenty-one-year-old male with a mustache, a sports car, and surrounded by admiring friends. “He was somebody I wanted to be,” David says today, reflecting on those childhood fantasies. Based on those fantasies, Brenda was convinced that to submit to vaginal surgery would lock her into a gender that was not her own.

Dr. Money, with the fate of his famous case hanging in the balance, spared no effort to break down the child’s resistance. The transcript of their encounter on 24 April 1973 continues with Money taking a new tack. Hoping to teach Brenda about the vaginal opening and canal, which she did not yet possess, Money asked, “How much do you know about where babies come from?”

Brenda said, “From their mother’s tummy.”

“Now,” Money said, circling closer to the issue at hand, “do you know how the baby gets out?”

Brenda, clearly tumbling to Money’s tactic, stalled, mumbling incoherent syllables.

“When it’s ready to get born,” Money repeated, “how does it get out?”

Again Brenda stalled.

“I’ll ask my question one more time,” Money said. “When the baby is ready to get born, how does it get out from inside the mother? Where does it get out?”

Brenda, aware that she had driven Money to the limits of his patience, feigned not to have understood. “Oh!” she now exclaimed. “The mother gets her out.”

Money was not to be put off so easily. “How does the mother get it out?” he repeated.

“Um, I don’t know,” Brenda finally said. “I didn’t learn that at school.”

“Would you like me to show you some pictures?” Money said.

Brenda made no recorded response.

“This is a book called Two Births,” Money continued, opening a large coffee-table book for Brenda to look at.

Published one year earlier, Two Births is a vintage artifact of the early 1970s. Photographed by Ed Buryn, it is a record of two hippie women having home births. The large black-and-white photographs are expertly and beautifully made but are at the same time unsparingly graphic in their depiction of the moments before, during, and after birth. Intense close-ups show both women naked, grimacing, their bare breasts swollen, their vaginas distended as the babies’ heads begin to push through the stretched orifices.

“See, there is the lady with the baby inside,” Money said as he leafed through the pages for Brenda. “Getting ready, almost ready to come out…. See, here’s the baby just getting ready to come out and here it’s really coming out. See, there’s his head beginning to poke through…. There, it got all the way out.”

“Now,” Money continued, “I wanted to show you that picture of a baby being born because I wanted to tell you that, down there, the way you are, you can’t find the baby hole yet.” And suddenly Money was once again talking about the “doctor in the hospital here” who could give her a “baby hole.”

Neither the pictures of the grimacing women with the spread legs and stretched vaginas nor Money’s explanations of the pictures convinced Brenda to submit to the vaginal surgery. Nor did what followed—a description from Dr. Money of sexual intercourse.

“A lot of kids don’t know that story,” Money said when he had finished describing how the penis goes into the vagina, “because they don’t have a doctor to tell them. The lucky kids who know about it are best if they don’t talk about it too much.”

“Yes,” Brenda said.

“You are pretty wise, aren’t you?”

“No,” Brenda said.

“I think so.”

“No,” Brenda said. “I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?” Money persisted.

Brenda did not reply.

“How are you?” Money asked.

Brenda said nothing.

“I think you’re a wise girl,” Money said.

“No,” Brenda repeated, “I’m not.”

“You’re one of my favorite girls.”

According to David, Money’s supposed affection for Brenda turned to increasing frustration, impatience, and anger as she continued to resist his blandishments. Brenda meanwhile reacted badly to the increasing pressure to submit to the operation. In the spring of 1974, facing another summer visit to Dr. Money’s Psychohormonal Research Unit and yet another battle of wits and wills with him, Brenda found that the pressure was simply too much.

“I had a nervous breakdown,” David says. “Because I knew, also, that right after I saw this guy on the summer holidays it would be school. It was a double whammy. I remember the summer I turned nine just huddling in a corner and shaking and crying.”

Seeing their daughter’s distress, Ron and Janet postponed that summer’s visit. Finally, however, it was Ron, convinced that only Dr. Money could help their daughter, who insisted that Brenda return to Johns Hopkins in the fall. And so on 19 November 1974 the family again visited the Psychohormonal Research Unit. The two-day visit was a trial for all concerned—but especially for Brenda. In a one-on-one taped interview, Money tried in vain to get her to speak. She would only mumble monosyllables. When Money tried to raise the topic of vaginal surgery, Brenda scurried from the room, found her father in the hallway, and refused to leave his side.

Today David recognizes that if he had told his parents what went on between Brenda and the psychologist behind closed doors—the pressure tactics, cajoling, pornography, and unorthodox inspections and posings—Janet and Ron would never have made her return to Johns Hopkins. But the thought never occurred to her—for a simple and chilling reason.

“I thought my parents knew,” David says. “I figured, they’re responsible for me. They brought me here. They must know what’s going on.”

6

RON AND JANET DID NOT KNOW what went on in the twins’ sessions with Dr. Money. “The twins would be whisked off somewhere, I didn’t know where,” Janet says. “Dr. Money spent some of the time in a little office talking mostly with me, some to Ron.” They had no reason to think that the psychologist was any different with Brenda and Brian than he was with them, and with Ron and Janet he was unfailingly polite and kind. Only once did they have any reason to suspect that there might be another side to Dr. Money. “One time we came into his office when he wasn’t expecting us,” Ron says, “and he was giving all holy shit to his secretary. Just chewing her out for something small—she forgot to mail a letter or something. When he saw us, he let it drop.”

This unsettling glimpse was never repeated, so Ron and Janet wrote it off as a rare moment when the psychologist lost control. Otherwise they continued to think of Money as their closest confidant and friend. And he considered them important allies in his ongoing struggles with Brenda. In fact, the end of their fraught November 1974 visit, Dr. Money took Ron and Janet aside and gave them what he called a “homework assignment,” telling them to find opportunities to talk with Brenda explicitly about her genitalia and vaginal surgery and impressing upon them how important it was that she agree, at the very next visit, to a vaginal inspection.

In a private note to himself after this meeting, Money was still more emphatic: “Next year it will be imperative for a physical examination to be done,” he wrote. “There is an optimal length of time for dealing with a difficult issue by avoiding it, and that optimum will be passed next year, if it is not already passed this year.” Something of Money’s growing frustration with Brenda’s stalwart resistance also crept into this note. “When Brenda is tense and hyperkinetic, she does not give an exactly endearing impression nor a particularly feminine one.”

Back in Winnipeg, Ron and Janet got to work on their homework assignment. Told to impress upon Brenda the differences between male and female sex organs, Ron and Janet had been instructed by Money to allow her to see them naked. In Sexual Signatures, Money emphasized the importance of such parental genital displays for correct heterosexual child development, and even went so far as to recommend that parents engage in sexual intercourse in front of their children. “With a little calm guidance,” he wrote, “the experience can be integrated into the child’s sex education and serve to reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.”

Janet and Ron drew the line at having sex in front of the twins, but Janet did try to follow the other parts of the homework assignment. She appeared naked, as often as possible, in front of Brenda. This only embarrassed the child, who seemed startled to see her mother walking around the house unclothed. “All of a sudden,” David recalls, “right after we go on one of John Money’s trips, she’s walking around stark naked.” Desperate for the treatment to work, and afraid to contravene Money’s orders in the least, Janet persevered. “He encouraged us to go to a nude beach,” she says. “We knew of a river where there was nobody for miles around. Ron and I went in the buff, but the twins wouldn’t.” Janet also tried, in conversation, to “break the ice” with Brenda about the vaginal surgery, but with similar dismal results. “The minute I went anywhere near that topic,” Janet says, “she’d leave the room.”

The atmosphere in the Reimer home grew steadily more tense as Brenda realized that her parents were now working in collusion with Dr. Money to force her into the surgery. She began to rebel against her parents openly. Even the supposedly happy occasion of Christmas became an ordeal. Brenda raged against having to get into the party dress her parents insisted she wear when they went to see Ron’s family in Kleefeld. Brenda had always hated going to see her extended family because this always meant that her parents would put special pressure on her to dress and act like a little lady. Making matters worse, her grandparents, aunts, and uncles would constantly scrutinize her. “They’d be studying me like a bug, to see how much I’d changed throughout the year,” David says. “And as soon as I’d catch them staring at me, they’d look the other way. I told my dad, ‘I don’t know why, but I always feel like an oddball around my own family.’ He said, very quietly, ‘I know.’”

Ron’s family, like the rest of the relatives, knew about Brenda’s sex change, so Ron understood why they studied his daughter so closely. He also recognized in his heart of hearts what they were seeing. “I sort of knew it wasn’t working after Brenda was seven or something,” Ron says. “But what were we going to do?”

Neither Ron nor Janet could entertain the notion that they had made the wrong decision. The only option was to put distance between themselves and anyone who seemed bent on making them face such a realization. From now on, Ron decided, they would see as little of his parents as possible.

But it proved difficult to segregate themselves from all reminders of Brenda’s problems. Just that fall the Child Guidance Clinic had once again contacted them to say that her behavioral problems in school had worsened and that she was “hyper and defiant” and looked “unhappy.” Furthermore, the clinic reported, Brian was also showing signs of increasingly serious emotional problems related to Brenda’s predicament.

“At that point my main emotion toward my sister was jealousy,” Brian explains. “She got all the attention. I was just the normal one. Mom and Dad were so worried about Brenda that they neglected me. I felt I was unimportant. I started to act up a bit, try to get some attention.” He succeeded that March, when he was caught trying to shoplift from a local store and the proprietor threatened to press charges. For Janet and Ron, this proved to be the last straw.

At the time of Brenda’s sex reassignment almost eight years earlier, their local pediatrician had advised them to move away from the area so that they could make a fresh start in a place where there was no lingering memory of their former son. They had refused his advice at the time. Now they saw the wisdom of it. It was imperative that they get away from the ghosts and doubters who haunted Winnipeg; it was imperative that they put as much distance as possible between themselves and Ron’s parents, the Child Guidance Clinic—everyone.

That spring of 1975, Ron and Janet sold their house, their furniture, their appliances, and their ’66 Pontiac. They bought a half-ton Chevy truck with a camper on the back. They packed up what few belongings they still owned and headed west for British Columbia. Ron had a friend out there who’d told him there was plenty of work. Yet so little had Ron planned this move—so completely had he failed to look ahead—that he would later castigate himself for having sold all their possessions and thus put himself in the position of having to buy everything when they got to BC.

“I remember thinking when we got there, Oh God, what did I do?” Ron says. “How could I have just picked up and moved? What an idiot thing to do!” Only much later, Janet says, did she and Ron fully face why they had so precipitately uprooted their lives and headed off to BC. “We were trying to escape.”

That Dr. Money already understood this motive was clear from a note he made to himself at this time. “The plan to move to British Columbia may include a bit too much geographical magic,” he wrote, “especially with regard to solving problems with the grandparental families. However, it could also turn out to be a perfectly satisfactory move.”

Their destination was British Columbia’s mountainous, wooded, sparsely populated interior. They settled in a tiny place called Ashton Creek. The nearest town was Enderby with a population of just 2,500. Ron bought a house trailer, which they parked in an encampment. The twins were enrolled in grade four at tiny Ashton Creek School.

“It was more of a country school,” David says. “But it didn’t matter what kind of school it was. If you’re not comfortable, you’re not going to be comfortable no matter what school you go to. You can go to a thousand schools, and it’s always the same. Because the standard rule of thumb is: There’s the girls over here, and there’s the boys over there. Separated. Which direction [do I go]? There’s no belonging. So you’re an outcast. It doesn’t change. School to school to school. It doesn’t change.”

In April the family returned to Baltimore for another visit with Dr. Money. By now, Brenda, almost ten years old, had developed a new attitude toward Dr. Money. Frowning, sullen, and almost completely mute, she refused to answer his questions in anything but, grunting monosyllables. She also imagined that she had succeeded in keeping secret certain shameful impulses she had started to have, but she was wrong. According to Ron, it was during this visit that Dr. Money informed him of an issue that had arisen during his private sessions with Brenda.

“Money told us that he had asked Brenda what partner she would rather have, a boy or a girl,” Ron recalls. “Brenda had said, ‘A girl.’” Ron says that Dr. Money wanted to know how they felt about raising a lesbian. At a loss for how to respond, but relieved that Dr. Money did not seem to think it significant, Ron said what he honestly believed about homosexuality: “It’s not the most important thing in life.”

Money evidently agreed, for this clinical finding was not included in his next report on the twins, which appeared later that year in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Entitled “Ablatio Penis” (the Latin term for the medical condition of complete amputation of the organ), the paper recapped earlier data about the sex reassignment’s success and added one new piece of evidence of the girl’s happy femininity. Money recounted an exchange he had had with Brenda about the family’s recent trip to the Washington Zoo: “I resorted to the standard question of which animal she’d want to be if she could change into one,” Money reported. “She elected to be a monkey…. ‘Would you want to be a boy monkey or a girl monkey?’ I asked. ‘A girl one,’ she replied, and gave as the reason for this choice, ‘I’m already a girl!’”

A question remains about this seemingly unequivocal statement of female gender identity (even if not dismissed as one of Brenda’s typical efforts at telling the psychologist what he wanted to hear). In that interview session of 24 April 1973, Money had threaded his reel-to-reel tape recorder incorrectly. Thus Brenda’s statements on the tape were virtually inaudible, and Money had to make a special effort to hear anything at all of the interview. “I’m pressing the earpiece closer into my ear,” he dictated in his notes while listening to the playback of this exchange, “and hearing a little more now…. I ask her why she wants to be a monkey, but I cannot hear the reply on tape. I remember that it was something that I did not immediately understand until she demonstrated with her hands that she meant climbing and swinging. I then asked her if she would want to be a boy monkey or a girl monkey. Her reply is audible on tape, ‘a girl one.’ I inquire as to why…. Again, the reply is audible on the tape, ‘I’m already a girl.’ The pronunciation of girl is as if it were spelled g-r-i-r-l.”

Upon seeing these interview transcripts for the first time, in 1998, David insists that he did not say “girl” but in fact used one of the standard evasion tactics he had by then developed. Instead of answering Money’s question about the sex of the monkey, Brenda had instead answered what kind of monkey she would like to be. “I said ‘gorilla,’” David says. Considering the particular clipped Canadian prairie accent in which all the Reimers speak, it is easy to see how the word gorilla, heard through a faulty recording, would come out “grirl.” That it should then be interpreted by Money as “girl” is perhaps illustrative not of Brenda’s gender identity but rather of the role the subjective hopes of scientific researchers can play in the gathering and interpretation of their data.

Epistemological vagaries notwithstanding, Money’s “Ablatio Penis” paper ended on a note of high optimism. “No one [outside the family] knows [that she was born a boy],” Money wrote. “Nor would they ever conjecture. Her behavior is so normally that of an active little girl, and so clearly different by contrast from the boyish ways of her twin brother, that it offers nothing to stimulate anyone’s conjectures.”

Later that year, Money published yet another account of Brenda’s successful metamorphosis. This time the intended audience was not only Money’s scientific and medical colleagues, but the general public. The new account appeared in Sexual Signatures. Coauthored with journalist Patricia Tucker, the book was couched in the language of commercial pop-psych bestsellers, and it represented Money’s bid for a wider audience. It also provided his most detailed and readable account of Brenda’s sex change to date. Stripped of the often impenetrable medical jargon that characterized his earlier accounts of the sex reassignment, Sexual Signatures offered an unrelievedly upbeat, almost triumphant version of Brenda’s story.

“Although the girl had been the dominant twin in infancy,” Money wrote, “by the time the children were four years old there was no mistaking which twin was the girl and which the boy. At five, the little girl already preferred dresses to pants, enjoyed wearing her hair ribbons, bracelets and frilly blouses, and loved being her daddy’s little sweetheart. Throughout childhood, her stubbornness and the abundant physical energy she shares with her twin brother and expends freely have made her a tomboyish girl, but nonetheless a girl.” Describing Brenda’s sex reassignment as “[d]ramatic proof that the gender identity option is open at birth for normal infants,” Money went on to claim that the child’s subsequent history was proof of how well the family had adjusted to the original decision in favor of castration.

Even as Sexual Signatures appeared in bookstores, the Reimer family’s adjustment to their decision was growing more imperiled by the day in British Columbia.

Ron, who had found work in a sawmill after a grueling period of unemployment, was no better than he had ever been at talking about his daughter and the major medical decisions that were ahead of her. “I’m a workaholic,” Ron admits. “If I’m worried about something, I just work harder.” Rather than face what was happening with Brenda—her nervous breakdown before the previous year’s trip to Johns Hopkins, her intense boyishness, her refusal to discuss the surgery, her continued dismal performance in school, her “lesbianism”—Ron would simply stagger home from an overtime shift at the sawmill, silently shovel in his dinner, then stare into the TV while he drained a six-pack. Often failing to join Janet in bed, he would simply slope off into unconsciousness in front of the TV.

Janet was faring little better. After six months in British Columbia she was feeling dangerously alienated. “I had no family to talk to,” she says. “I had some friends, but they didn’t know the real me—or the real Brenda.” The only person who did know the real Brenda was Ron, and he refused to talk about her. David recalls vividly the chaos that engulfed their small trailer: “Mom crying and screaming,” he says, “Dad drinking.”

That summer Janet’s condition deteriorated. She sank into a serious depression and found herself obsessively thinking about all that had happened to them. “Sometimes it didn’t feel real,” she says. “What I especially found difficult was all those years I had a strong sense of Christianity, of a living God—a God who laid out a path for you. I remember thinking, What kind of a purpose could this possibly have in life? All this pain after pain after pain? What possible purpose could there be in this horrible life?” She began to suffer wild mood swings, from volatile anger to weeping despondency. At times, she felt that her very sanity was in jeopardy. Janet says that she experienced periods of “psychosis”—episodes when she could not tell reality from fantasy.

“She was unpredictable,” Brian says. “It was like walking on eggs. You didn’t know what you were going to come home to.” Janet consulted some doctors in the area. “I couldn’t get help,” she says. “One lady doctor said to me, ‘Oh, all you need is another baby to keep you busy.’ I said, ‘The last thing I need is another child!’”

Ron and Janet were almost completely estranged. That summer Janet drifted into an affair with one of the local men to spite Ron. He found out and was devastated. Janet, guilt-ridden, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Ron found her in time to drive her to the hospital in Enderby. Upon Janet’s release, the couple talked about divorce but decided to soldier on somehow together. In the early fall, more bad luck arrived: their house trailer caught fire and burned to the ground, destroying all the family pictures and most of their possessions.

In November 1976, one year and five months after their flight from Winnipeg, the family packed up the few belongings that had escaped the fire and began the long drive back to Winnipeg. Janet and Ron were obliged to admit that their attempt to escape had only exacerbated the problems they were trying to flee. Janet’s depression and suicide attempt, the near breakup of the marriage, and the acceleration in Ron’s alcohol intake had all taken a visible toll on the twins. Brian was now beginning to have troubling outbursts of frustrated violence and anger against other kids. Brenda turned her feelings inward and became increasingly anxiety-ridden and depressed. She was also demonstrating overt hostility and distrust toward both parents, especially her mother—although, as David points out, he tried to hide these feelings because he was now trying with everything he had to hold together his parents’ disintegrating marriage. “I thought it was all my fault,” David explains. “So I would try to make them happy. I would try to be more ladylike.”

. Those efforts proved more difficult than ever for Brenda—especially now that she had passed her eleventh birthday, and certain physiological changes began to occur: her shoulders had started to widen and grow more muscular; her neck and biceps, too, began to thicken; and sometimes now her voice would crack into a strange squeaking sound.

All in all, the Reimers’ sojourn in British Columbia formed a bitterly ironic contrast to the way their lives were portrayed in the New York Times Book Review of May 1975, when reviewer Linda Wolfe, working from the evidence presented by John Money in Sexual Signatures, wrote of “the identical twin boy whose penis was cauterized at birth and who, now that his parents have opted for surgical reconstruction to make him appear female, has been sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.”