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

7

THE REIMERS ARRIVED back in Winnipeg in mid-November 1976 and began trying to rebuild their lives. Janet found work as a cashier at a five-and-dime, and Ron took a job with a food company driving a lunch truck—a job he would soon leave to start his own business. Living temporarily out of the Capri Motel in the city’s East End, the Reimers enrolled Brenda and Brian in Agassiz Drive Elementary, a small school located nearby on the edge of the comfortable middle-class neighborhood of College Heights. Up to this point Brenda’s sole psychological therapy had been the counseling sessions during her annual visits to Johns Hopkins. This changed when she entered Agassiz Drive, where her anxiety, social isolation, and fear immediately drew the attention of the school’s principal, Mr. Bergmann, who once again notified the city’s Child Guidance Clinic. Joan Nebbs, the reading clinician who had handled Brenda’s case a year and a half earlier, interviewed Brenda again in the fall of 1976.

“Brenda’s interests are strongly masculine,” Nebbs wrote in her new report on Brenda at age eleven. “She has marvelous plans for building tree houses, go-carts with CB radios, model gas airplanes…. [S]he appears to be more competitive and aggressive than her brother and is much more untidy both at home and at school.” A session with the clinic’s psychologist revealed that Brenda had “strong fears that something has been done to her genital organs” and that she had “some suicidal thoughts.”

Brenda’s case was referred to Dr. Keith Sigmundson, an amiable thirty-four-year-old who was then head of the clinic’s Psychiatry Department. Born and raised in the small fishing town of Gimli, an hour’s drive north of Winnipeg, Sigmundson had taken his medical and psychiatric degrees at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, then joined the Child Guidance Clinic, where his career ascent had been rapid. “Because I was just ahead of the baby boomers,” Sigmundson says with typical self-deprecation, “I got a position that I was too young for and probably didn’t deserve in the first place.”

Even the most seasoned psychiatrist might have found Brenda Reimer’s case a unique challenge. Sigmundson read Dr. Money’s published accounts of the unequivocal female gender identity that Brenda had reportedly established, but from his very first meeting with the girl, Sigmundson was struck by her appearance. “She was sitting there in a skirt with her legs apart, one hand planted firmly on one knee,” he recalls. “There was nothing feminine about her.”

Sigmundson decided to establish a record of the girl’s behavior in comparison with that of her twin brother and arranged for a clinical video to be made. Shot through a two-way mirror in a room at the Child Guidance Clinic, the videotape showed psychiatrist Dr. Doreen Moggey interviewing the twins. Or rather, trying to interview the twins. Brenda, whose yearly trips to the Psychohormonal Research Unit had made her acutely distrustful of any unfamiliar people or situations, immediately grew wary of the undertaking.

“It was a big room,” David recalls, “nothing in it—just three chairs, one for me and one for my brother and one for this lady who was there talking. She had a notepad and she was writing. She was trying to get me to go over and sit down. But I was suspicious. I was checking all the nooks and crannies, checking the place out. I went up to the glass, and I saw the camera.” Yelling at her brother that they were being filmed, Brenda immediately stalked out of the room and refused to come back.

Despite the abortive nature of the video, it did provide an accurate record of Brenda’s mood, movements, and mannerisms, so that when Sigmundson convened a group of the city’s senior psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and pediatricians to consult on the case, he showed them the video. “Everyone who saw Brenda that day identified that she looked like a boy,” says Moggey, who attended the meeting. But in the conversation and debate that ensued among the assembled physicians, a consensus soon emerged that they had little choice but to continue the treatment Money had begun. It had simply gone too far to turn back. Nor was it lost upon Sigmundson that Brenda’s case was famous in the medical literature. “I felt I had a responsibility,” Sigmundson says. “This was the case. The idea was that we were going to try to make this work.”

To promote Brenda’s female identification, Sigmundson decided that she should be treated by a woman psychiatrist. He enlisted Dr. Moggey. A keen-eyed woman with a brisk, take-charge manner, Moggey was, like Sigmundson, troubled by the case from the outset. In an early meeting with Brenda, on 30 December 1976, Moggey noted the fitful girlishness that Brenda (especially when under observation) could incorporate into her mannerisms and utterances—“a mixture of masculine and feminine gestures and characteristics,” as Moggey put it in her notes. The psychiatrist soon grew skeptical about the degree to which Brenda’s sporadic feminine adaptations indicated her sense of herself as a girl. In her notes, Moggey wrote, “One gets impression that [Brenda] sometimes says what she thinks you want to hear—‘I am a girl.’”

As the sessions progressed, Moggey’s doubts quickly deepened. She documented the way Brenda repeatedly voiced the conviction that she was “just a boy with long hair in girl’s clothes,” and that people looked at her and said she “looks like a boy, talks like a boy.” At the same time Moggey noted that Brenda was vehemently opposed even to talking about undergoing femininizing surgery on her genitals and flat-out refused to return to Johns Hopkins where, Brenda complained, people looked at her and “a man show[ed] her pictures of nude bodies.”

Moggey had read John Money’s accounts of the case and was mystified. “When you read the papers and when you saw the kid, they didn’t go together,” she says. “That wasn’t the child he was describing.” Nor, Moggey says, did Ron and Janet seem to be the parents Money was describing. In Sexual Signatures, Money had portrayed Brenda’s parents as blissfully content with the difficult decision they had been forced to make in authorizing the sex change of their baby. Yet in her own interviews with Ron and Janet, Moggey heard of the couple’s recent near split, about Ron’s drinking, and about Janet’s depression and suicide attempt. Far from a husband and wife happily raising their daughter, Ron and Janet seemed to be a couple barely holding themselves together as they anxiously tried to comply with Dr. Money’s directives on how to raise Brenda.

Just how slavishly Ron and Janet were following Dr. Money’s program was borne home to Moggey upon her first visit with Brenda at the Agassiz Drive school. It was a frigid December day, and all the girls were dressed in pants; Brenda was the only girl in a skirt. When Moggey asked Janet why she did not put Brenda in pants, Janet helplessly replied, “Because Dr. Money said to put her in dresses.” Moggey had to remind Janet that Winnipeg experienced some of the harshest winters on the continent (unlike Baltimore) and that Brenda should be in pants like the other girls. Only then did Janet agree to dress Brenda more appropriately. Brenda began to wear jeans like the other girls in her class.

On 3 January 1977, a month and a half after she took on the case, Moggey wrote to John Money. She informed him of Brenda’s behavioral difficulties and requested some background information “to help Brenda and her family make a more appropriate adjustment to her problems.” She asked what surgery had already been done on Brenda (Money’s published accounts had always left this vague), what operations were planned, and what efforts Money had made to help both Brenda and her parents “adjust to the sex change.”

Money replied on 17 January and in a breezy tone professed himself very pleased that Dr. Moggey had become involved in Brenda’s case. He explained that the second stage of Brenda’s vaginal surgery had not yet been performed due to the child’s “fanatical fear of hospitals”—a fear, Money wrote, “that I have encountered on only one other occasion in 25 years of work at Johns Hopkins.” He added that mention of hormone treatments or surgery induced in Brenda a “panic so intense that it’s impossible to broach any conversation on such matters without the child fleeing from the room, screaming.” Nevertheless, Money continued, there was now “an urgency” that Brenda’s fears be overcome, because the need for hormone therapy and surgery was rapidly increasing with her approaching adolescence. “It will be one of the best things you can do for her if you can help her break down this extraordinary veto,” he wrote. Dismissing Moggey’s suggestion that Ron and Janet had not adjusted to Brenda’s sex change, Money added, “With regard to the help that you can give the parents, I think it is not so much with regard to helping them adjust to the sex reassignment, as it is to helping them adjust to one another”—specifically, Money added, by helping Janet control her depressive mood swings.

Moggey (having already found a psychiatrist for Janet, whose moods would soon stabilize with antidepressants) was nonplused by Money’s reply. “I thought, There are more problems here than are controlled by the mother,” she says. Yet inclined to defer to the famous psychologist’s apparently greater knowledge and experience of the case, Moggey forged on in her sessions with Brenda, reassuring the child that she was indeed a girl and impressing upon her the necessity that she return to Johns Hopkins to undergo surgery on her genitals.

“But the resistance!” Moggey says. Sullen, angry, unresponsive, Brenda often simply refused to speak, scowling and directing her gaze to the floor. Mere mention of the word penis or vagina would induce in the child an explosive panic. Brenda remained immovable on the subject of vaginal surgery or returning to the Psychohormonal Research Unit. “Won’t look at pictures of female bodies with Dr. Money,” Moggey noted on 20 January. “Won’t accept going to see Dr. Money.”

Struck by the obvious depth of the child’s aversion and concerned that Money had not yet grasped the severity of the problems that Brenda and her family had been laboring under, Moggey wrote to him again on 2 February. This time she wrote at greater length and was explicit about Brenda’s problems: she explained that the child was two years behind her peers academically and had not progressed well in school “from day one”; that Brian was “embarrassed” by Brenda’s “tomboy like behavior”; that Brenda was having trouble making friends and talked openly about being different from other girls; that she was “not interested in developing female shape,” felt anything to do with her body was “dirty,” was still refusing surgery, and had expressed embarrassment about her trips to Baltimore where “a man [was] showing her pictures of nude bodies”; and that furthermore “she is saying no to returning to see you and threatens to run away if this is necessary.” Moggey ended the letter by saying that despite Brenda’s resistance, she was continuing to work toward making the girl return to Baltimore, “as I do feel Brenda needs to start her hormone therapy and start developing female characteristics.”

Money’s reply, dated 9 February, was brief. Failing to allude even glancingly to the many issues raised by Moggey, he simply reiterated his great pleasure that the psychiatrist had become involved, his happiness in working “in closest collaboration” with her, and his “great relief” that Moggey was helping to prepare Brenda for her return to Johns Hopkins.

Money’s relief was to be short-lived. After two more months of trying—in vain—to convince Brenda to return to Johns Hopkins, Moggey decided that no amount of therapy could remove the girl’s fierce resistance. That spring Moggey spoke to Ron and Janet about the alternative of Brenda’s undergoing the vaginal surgery not in Baltimore, but in Winnipeg—a plan that would not only save considerable time, energy, and money for the Reimers, but also remove for Brenda the deep anxiety associated with her visits to Johns Hopkins.

Still Ron and Janet expressed trepidation about deviating in any way from Money’s program. They would agree to it only if Dr. Money himself approved the plan. On 18 April, Moggey wrote to him again and apprised him of the proposal to have Brenda’s surgery performed in Winnipeg—“unless,” she added, “there is some particular reason for returning to Johns Hopkins.”

As it happened, Money considered there to be many reasons for the child to return to Johns Hopkins. He outlined these reasons in a two-page, single-spaced letter that seemed to carry, under its surface smoothness, a strong undertone of desperation at the prospect of losing control of, and contact with, his most famous research subject.

“It goes without saying the Reimers have freedom of choice with respect to location of professional services,” Money began. “I shall go along with their decision, whatever it is. Nonetheless, I believe their wisest decision will be not to lose their Johns Hopkins contact, but to work out a joint program of cooperation between us and Brenda’s local specialists.” Citing the “unique” benefits of the “close collaboration between medical psychology, endocrinology and surgery” at Johns Hopkins, which, Money claimed, “eliminates the possibility of conflicting opinions among experts not accustomed to working together,” he also extolled the vagina-building skills of Howard Jones, the surgeon who had castrated Brenda a decade earlier and who was scheduled to construct her artificial genitals. Yet apparently aware that even his own formidable powers of persuasion were not quite up to the task of explaining why it was more practicable for the child to travel two thousand miles for a complicated operation requiring lengthy follow-up care (rather than have the surgery in a hospital just minutes from home), Money concluded his letter with a plea that regardless of where the surgery was done, he not lose contact with Brenda. “I would like to continue seeing her,” he wrote, “on approximately an annual basis in the future as in the past.”

Only when the Reimers saw that Dr. Money would not stand in the way of Brenda’s having the surgery in Winnipeg did they agree to the change in plan. But on the issue of Brenda’s returning to Baltimore for her annual follow-ups, Ron and Janet found themselves once again persuaded by Money’s eloquence. They decided that if Brenda’s fears could be overcome by the local psychiatrists, they would continue to bring her to the Psychohormonal Research Unit for her yearly counseling sessions with Dr. Money. “We felt like we had nowhere else to turn,” says Janet. “No one knew us, or Brenda, as well as Dr. Money did.”

8

In the spring of Brenda’s sixth-grade year at Agassiz Drive, her case was transferred to a new psychiatrist when Dr. Moggey, for family reasons, had to leave Winnipeg and go to live in Brandon, a small town some fifty miles north of the city. Moggey referred Brenda to Dr. Janice Ingimundson, a thirty-two-year-old alumna of the University of Manitoba Medical School. Ingimundson was a coolly rational Freudian whose considerable wit and warmth were carefully concealed under a scrupulously correct analytic detachment. Not a member of the city’s Child Guidance Clinic, Ingimundson had her own private practice, which she operated out of an office in downtown Winnipeg. Her first session with Brenda was on 6 May 1977. She recalls being taken aback at her first glimpse of the patient.

“All the documentation claimed that this child had accepted her gender identity as a female,” Ingimundson says. “Yet my one visual memory of this youngster is of kind of a”—she curls her hands into fists and bends her elbows in a boxer’s pose—“tough girl. A rather boyish-looking girl. Rugged.”

Little that Brenda said in her sessions contradicted Ingimundson’s first impression. Though at times Brenda said what she thought the psychiatrist wanted to hear (“I want to be pretty; I’m a girl, not a boy”), in the same breath she would inevitably reveal contradictory feelings about herself. She defended her preference for boy’s clothing, telling Ingimundson, “I like dressing like this. It doesn’t feel right to be in a dress, like I shouldn’t be in one.” Asked about her feelings for boys, Brenda said she “wants to beat up on [them]” and then added a comment that offered almost an embarrassment of riches for a devotee of Freudian symbolism. If a boy “laid a finger on her,” Brenda told the psychiatrist, “she would take her father’s ax and cut it off.” When Ingimundson tried to touch on the topic of vaginal surgery, Brenda grew especially truculent. “I have decided not to have that,” she informed the psychiatrist, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”

Troubled by such statements, Ingimundson nevertheless took Dr. Money’s word that Brenda had formed a female gender identity. The psychiatrist felt she had little choice. “I thought, The decision has been made,” Ingimundson says. “If you open up this can of worms now and say, ‘Maybe this was the wrong decision’—well, who is going to do that?” Accordingly, Ingimundson (like Moggey before her) resolved to work hard to assure Brenda that she was a girl and urge her to submit as soon as possible to the vaginal surgery. Yet from their first session on, Ingimundson was uncomfortable with every aspect of the case—and in particular her sense that on some subconscious level the child knew that she was a boy, yet knew she must not speak of it.

“You’d talk to her,” Ingimundson explains, “and conventionally masculine interests would come forward. Which is not surprising; you see that in girls. But her embarrassment—not embarrassment, but her difficulty—in talking about those kinds of interests was acute. She didn’t want to expose them. She used to say she had a ‘secret.’ She talked about wanting to be a ‘detective.’ She wanted to solve the mystery. That’s the therapeutic puzzle: she wants to know, but she doesn’t want to know. People in therapy want to know, but they don’t want to know. They want to know only if it’s good news.”

And according to Ingimundson, it was clear that Brenda had come to believe that the truth was anything but good news. Ingimundson continues: “Brenda was basically saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, why do these people want to cut into me?’ And in retrospect, she was right. ‘I’m a boy, I’m a male, so in that sense, there’s nothing wrong with me; but anatomically, if I’m a girl, then there is something wrong with me.’ So this is the bind that she’s in. ‘If I admit that I’m a boy, then I have to admit that there’s something wrong with me anatomically. And if I admit that there’s something wrong with me anatomically, what happened?’”

Thus convinced that Brenda’s resistance stemmed from her inkling that she was not being told the whole truth about herself, Ingimundson, after their second session, talked to Brenda’s parents. She urged Ron and Janet to begin preparing Brenda against the day when she would be informed about the circumstances of her birth, the accident she had suffered, and her subsequent sex change. “She has to be told,” Ingimundson said, “and she has to be helped in accepting it.” Only then, the psychiatrist believed, would Brenda recognize that there was no choice but to go forward with the vaginal surgery. In her notes, Ingimundson registered Ron’s and Janet’s terror at the prospect of telling Brenda the truth.

“I kind of wish that you could tell her,” Janet said. But Ingimundson assured her that it was more appropriate for Brenda to hear the truth from her parents. They should go slowly at first, laying the groundwork. Meanwhile Ingimundson would prepare Brenda emotionally for the final revelation.

A few days later, Ron had a private talk with Brenda. Sitting on the edge of her bed, he managed to choke out the statement that when Brenda was a baby, a doctor had “made a mistake down there” and that the surgery she was going to have was so that “other doctors” could fix up the “first doctor’s mistake.” Ron found it impossible to make any mention of Brenda’s true birth status, her sex change, or in any way to explain what this “mistake” had been. Nor did Brenda evince any interest in these matters; in fact, her reaction seemed to suggest that she wanted to hear nothing more about them. As Ron later reported to Ingimundson, Brenda’s sole response to his mysterious utterances about the “doctor who made a mistake” was to ask, “Did you beat him up?”

Today David explains that Ron’s halting talk of an “accident” did nothing to tip Brenda off to the fact that she was a male who had been surgically changed into a girl. “You’re not going to think of that in a million years,” David says. “So I didn’t know what he was talking about—and I didn’t want to know.”

Meanwhile Brenda was having her usual difficulties at school. “She has only been in the school for 4 days, and principal related peer problems,” scribbled the school’s social worker in Brenda’s file. “Teasing—‘looks like a boy, etc.’”

As the school year progressed, however, Brenda was gradually accepted into a small clique of misfit tomboys led by a girl named Heather Legarry, a short-haired brunet with an open smile. “I had been the subject of shunning several times throughout those early school years,” says Heather today. “I knew what it was like, and I never would do that to another person—ever.” Brenda, she says, seemed a natural candidate for inclusion in the group of tomboys who played soccer and dodge ball, climbed the jungle gym, and rode bikes. Though distrustful, at first, of Heather’s overtures, Brenda finally dropped her guard and began to hang around with Heather and her friends. “Heather was the first friend I ever had,” David says. “I didn’t know what a friend was.”

Heather, for her part, valued Brenda as a girl devoid of the duplicity and backstabbing that had poisoned so many of her relations with girls in the past and that even threatened the harmony of her current clique of tomboys. “Brenda didn’t speak much,” Heather says, “but when she did she was never vindictive or false. She was very honest. If she told me something was black or white, it was.”

At the same time, Heather was not blind to what she calls Brenda’s “oddity.” Partly this was a feature of what Heather describes as Brenda’s acute anxiety. “Brenda was always nervous about doing things that were the least bit unusual—like cutting through the university grounds on our bikes, which I did all the time. She was very nervous, very unsure of herself.” Heather says that this nervousness even affected Brenda’s speech. “Just making a sentence sometimes seemed hard for her.”

And there was something still more odd about Brenda. “As far as I knew, Brenda was a girl—physically,” Heather explains. “But from everything that she did and said, she indicated that she didn’t want to be a girl. The other girls in our group were competitive against the boys; we wanted to prove we could do whatever they could do. We wanted to show them. We might get in arguments with the guys, but we wouldn’t have gone as far as to fight with them physically. I wouldn’t want a bruise on my face, for example. But Brenda fought with the boys. Brenda would take the bruises.” Heather pauses and thinks about this for a moment. “I myself was a tomboy,” she resumes, “but I never wanted to be a boy. Brenda did.”

Heather’s impression was only strengthened when, one day on the school playground, she noticed a small bald patch near the crown of Brenda’s head. The hairless area was the result of an accident when Brenda was a baby—she’d pulled the cord of the electric frying pan while her father was cooking and been hit by hot grease. But that’s not the story Brenda told to Heather. “She said she had deliberately taken a hot frying pan to her head to burn off the hair,” Heather recalls, “because she ‘wanted to be bald like a man.’”

It was through her friendship with Heather that Brenda became increasingly aware of a new and perilous undercurrent in the life of the classroom. She first noticed it when overhearing bits of conversation among the other girls—talk of “crushes” and “going steady” and “kissing.” Then she saw boys and girls passing notes when the teacher’s back was turned. Once she saw one. It was a love note, and it was signed “xoxoxox.”

Brenda recognized in these developments a fertile field for fresh embarrassments and humiliations. She had resolved to give wide berth to the burgeoning dating scene—a resolution that she did not think would be difficult to keep, since none of the boys showed any romantic interest in her. Still, it soon became clear to her that she could not avoid the awakening sexuality of her peers entirely. That fall Heather took Brenda along to a birthday party for one of their classmates. The party began innocuously enough. With their host’s parents acting as chaperones, the children dutifully played games of pin the tail on the donkey and Twister while a children’s album played on the stereo. But when the parents left the room and went downstairs, everything changed.

“One of the kids took the record off—zzzzt!—and put on a makeout tune,” David recalls. “Another guy put the lights out. Suddenly everyone’s slow dancing and making out. I’m looking at Heather, and Heather was looking at me. We were the only two left over.” The pair beat a quick retreat downstairs. “But you could hear through the vents,” David says. “I could sense what was going on.”

I asked David how he had felt as Brenda, watching his classmates pair off romantically. He thought for a moment. “I guess envious,” he said finally. “These people looked like they knew where they belonged. There was no place for me to feel comfortable with anybody or anything.”

Brenda’s escalating alienation was clear in her sessions with Dr. Ingimundson, who continued doggedly to try to get Brenda to open up and discuss her genitals and to agree, finally, to surgery. But Brenda could not be budged.

“Not responsive to my efforts to engage,” the psychiatrist wrote, when she and Brenda were three months into their sessions. “Silent … staring off into space—head turned away…. Telling me she feels trapped in office—wants to get out—or feels trapped inside self.”

9

IN THE SUMMER OF 1977, Brenda suddenly had to fend off an attack on a new front. On her last several trips to Baltimore, Dr. Money had spoken to her about the medication she would soon need in order to become a “normal girl.” He was talking about estrogens, the female hormones that would simulate the effects of female puberty on Brenda’s broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped boy’s physique. Like the vaginal surgery, the prospect of growing breasts struck Brenda as a nightmare. So she was suspicious when one day soon after the end of her sixth-grade year at Agassiz Drive, her father produced a package of pills and told her to start taking them.

“What’s this medicine for?” she asked.

Ron, struggling for the best way to put it, finally came up with, “It’s to make you wear a bra.”

“I said, ‘I don’t wanna wear a bra!’” David recalls. “I threw a fit.”

The depths of Brenda’s resistance to the hormones was clear in her dealings with the doctor whose specific job it was to prescribe and regulate her estrogen therapy—a pediatric endocrinologist named Jeremy Winter. A thirty-four-year-old professor at the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg, Winter had trained in Philadelphia under the respected endocrinologist Alfred Bongiovanni, who himself had trained at Johns Hopkins under Lawson Wilkins.

Given this academic pedigree, it was perhaps not surprising that Winter was the Winnipeg doctor least inclined to question the methods or conclusions of Money’s twins case. Before meeting Brenda, he anticipated no problems with the treatment.

“I got the chart and looked at all the background information that was available,” says Winter. “I read Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, and I believed it. I said, ‘That makes sense, and everything fits, and I’m going to see this kid, and this is what we’re going to do’”—namely, put the child on a course of estrogens and commence vaginal surgery immediately. But things did not work out that way.

“It was easily the most frustrating case we had in the clinic,” Winter says. “We prided ourselves on excellent rapport with patients, being able to sit down with kids and talk and listen in a warm atmosphere. And here was this absolutely silent, angry child who didn’t want to be there. I’d ask, ‘Will you allow a blood test?’ ‘No.’ ‘Will you allow me to examine you?’ ‘No.’ So I would have these monologues about the importance of taking the estrogen and having the vaginal surgery and how successful and wonderful this was going to be.”

According to Winter, Brenda was especially adamant about never returning to Johns Hopkins. “I’d never seen a patient in my life who behaved that way about going to another doctor—who showed that depth of emotion,” Winter recalls. Meanwhile, Winter had no choice but to try to get her to take the estrogen pills—an increasingly urgent need, since her twelfth birthday was approaching in late August.

Brenda continued trying to resist, but after continued entreaties from Winter, her parents, and Dr. Ingimundson (not to mention the threat that Dr. Money had once introduced into Brenda’s head, that she would grow disproportionate limbs if she failed to take the drugs), she finally—on the eve of her twelfth birthday—began to take the pills. Or rather, she pretended to. When her parents were not looking, she would throw the small tablets into the toilet. “I remember the pink dye running out of them,” David says. “I had to flush fast before my parents saw.” Ron and Janet soon caught on, however, and took to standing over Brenda while she swallowed the daily medication—0.02 milligrams of ethinyl estradiol, later increased to 0.75 milligrams.

Soon enough, a pair of breasts sprouted on Brenda’s chest along with a padding of fat around her waist and hips. The changes caused her deep mortification. In a bid to disguise the increasing feminization of her figure, she began prodigious bouts of eating. With several ice cream cones every day, her waistline swelled to forty inches. The added fat helped to camouflage her breasts and hips, but no amount of binge eating could hide certain other physiological changes that began to accelerate within her that fall. “Spontaneously expressed anxiety about her voice,” Ingimundson wrote in her September session notes. “Starting to crack.”

The dramatic deepening of Brenda’s voice was a phenomenon endocrinologist Winter was at a loss to explain. Given her absence of testicles (the prirliary male hormone-secreting endocrine gland) and her estrogen therapy, her voice, by all known medical criteria, should not have undergone a virilizing change at puberty. Today Winter suggests that Brenda’s vocal cords and larynx were perhaps thickening because of increased androgen secretion from her adrenal glands. Whatever the cause, one thing was not in doubt. Brenda’s voice now began to change in a manner identical to her brother Brian’s. She asked her mother why.

Thinking fast, Janet mentioned the deep-voiced actress Mario Thomas from the TV situation comedy That Girl. “She has a raspy voice,” Janet told her daughter. “It’s normal for some girls to have voices like that.”

Armed with this explanation, Brenda started seventh grade that fall at her new school: Glenwood Junior High, a large public school some five minutes’ walk from her house. She was instantly exiled to the farthest periphery of Glenwood’s social life, where she took her place among a haphazard collection of the school’s misfits. One girl was an intersex. Another wore a complicated metal leg brace and built-up shoe to accommodate a right leg some three inches shorter than the left. Another, Esther Haselhauer, suffered from Poland’s syndrome, a congenital birth anomaly that had stunted her growth, partially withered one hand, and completely retarded the growth of her right breast. Esther remembers that she sensed an immediate kinship with Brenda.

“She was hard to connect with,” Esther says. “But there was something that I just responded to. It was … I don’t know, a sadness. She reminded me of me.” At the same time, Esther was aware that there was a big difference between the two of them, and indeed, between Brenda and any other girl she’d ever met. “Brenda wasn’t a girl girl,” Esther says. Furthermore, being with Brenda evoked a feeling in her that was curiously like that of being with a member of the opposite sex. “It was a feeling of security,” Esther says. “When I was with Brenda, I felt so safe. Kids would beat me up because I was so small. But when I was with Brenda, if anyone tried picking on me, she let them have it.”

David says that he was grateful for Esther’s friendship, but that their differences made it impossible for them to get close. “She was always talking about guys,”, David says. Asked if Brenda ever expressed interest in romance with boys, Esther laughs. “Oh no!” she says. “That would be unthinkable; as unthinkable as me, at four feet tall, going out for the basketball team.”

Six months after Brenda began seventh grade, Dr. Ingimundson received a letter from John Money requesting a progress report. Money’s letter arrived at a particularly inopportune moment—just two days after a disastrous family session Ingimundson had held with the Reimers. Her notes on the 20 February 1978 session make it clear that Brenda’s resistance to the surgery had abated not at all in the fourteen months since she had begun psychiatric treatment in Winnipeg. Refusing to utter a word, Brenda had pulled up the hood of her winter coat and folded her arms across her chest. Pressed to say something about the surgery, she finally burst into tears, while the adults looked on helplessly. “Parents & I at a loss for words,” Ingimundson wrote in her session notes. The session ended soon after that.

With this fraught scene still fresh in her mind, Ingimundson wrote back to Money. She explained that despite their success in getting Brenda to take hormones, the local team had made no further progress in the case. “[N]o plans for surgery have been formalized,” she wrote, “nor, for that matter, have they been discussed in a tentative fashion.” She added that Brenda remained “resistant to medical attention” and was “still refusing examination of her genitals.”

How Money greeted this letter is difficult to tell. His reply was written by his secretary—and it was brief. “Dr. Money has asked me to write you thanking you for your letter of March 8, 1978 giving a progress report on Brenda Reimer. We are very pleased to have it,” the note read in its entirety.

A more expansive articulation of Money’s opinion on the case soon appeared in a chapter of the book Biological Determinants of Sexual Behavior, an anthology of writings on gender identity published later that year in Britain. Once again the outlook was sunny. A full-page photograph of Brenda and Brian (taken at their last visit to the Psychohormonal Research Unit) showed them standing side by side against a white background. Brenda wears a short patterned dress with cap sleeves, her long, well-brushed hair falling to her shoulders; Brian is dressed in a boy’s short-sleeved shirt and dark jeans, his close-cut hair exposing his ears. A pair of large black dots cover their faces, obscuring all but their identical jaws, chins, and eyebrows. Nothing in the accompanying text suggested that, beneath the black dots, either child was anything but smiling and happy. “Now prepubertal in age,” Money wrote, “the girl has … a feminine gender identity and role, distinctly different from that of her brother.”

An attentive reader might have noticed in this update certain evidence to suggest a less sanguine prognosis for the sex-changed twin. Elsewhere in the chapter, Money wrote of further research he had done into the role played by excessive testosterone exposure in genetic females in the womb. Money now revealed that there was reason to think that such exposure affected not only masculinization of play preference, toy preference, and career goals (as he and Ehrhardt had reported eleven years earlier), but other behavior as well. “The preliminary evidence indicates the possibility,” Money wrote, “that there is a greater incidence of bisexuality and homosexuality [among such girls] than would be expected by chance.”

That Money’s famous sex-reassigned twin had spent her entire prenatal life awash in a full complement of testosterone produced by the fetal testicles (a complement of testosterone some ten times the amount experienced by normal female fetuses) might have led some readers to conclude that the twin, at puberty, would in all likelihood manifest an erotic attraction to females; but on the all-important question of Brenda’s sexual orientation, Money (perhaps forgetting what he had told Ron and Janet about her lesbianism) professed himself unable to venture even an educated guess as to what her partner preference might one day be. He wrote in his concluding remarks on Brenda’s gender identity, “The final and conclusive evidence awaits the appearance of romantic interest and erotic imagery.”

In the eleven years that had elapsed since Bruce Reimer’s conversion to Brenda, none of her local doctors had ever met with John Money in person to discuss her case. But in the spring of 1978, Jeremy Winter was invited to deliver a lecture at the Johns Hopkins Medical School’s Reproductive Biology Seminar. While in Baltimore, Winter arranged to speak with Money. Their meeting took place at the Psychohormonal Research Unit on 4 April. Winter detailed for Money the extreme difficulty the local treatment team was having in implementing his plans for Brenda: she continued to refuse to submit to a genital exam; refused even to discuss the issue of vaginal surgery; refused to return to Baltimore; and often refused to take her hormone pills. According to Winter, Dr. Money was wholly unconcerned by the issues he raised.

“He was supremely confident,” Winter says. “Everything was perfect; there were no problems—and any concerns that I was raising were my naïveté and youth coming to the fore; and I would learn, in time, that everything was fine.”

Money’s own notes on the encounter confirm Winter’s impression. Money refers confidently to the time when Brenda will be able to “negotiate the decision [for surgery] herself”; alludes to his belief that Brenda’s “intense phobia of white coats and doctors” reflects only a deep-seated sense memory of her circumcision accident at eight months of age; and opines, “I rather strongly suspect that Brenda already knows that she once had a penis and probably that she had been considered [sic] a boy.” Still, this suspicion did not diminish Money’s belief that Brenda would soon agree to vaginal surgery—possibly even at Johns Hopkins. As his notes show, Money also told Winter about Brenda’s “intense rejection of any conversation regarding matters sexual, and of looking at books pertaining to any aspect of sex education.” According to Winter, Money showed him some of the sex education materials. “He showed me photographs that he would use, dirty pictures, to see whether Brenda was homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual,” Winter says.

Though unsettled by Money’s seeming unconcern about the problems he had raised and troubled by the materials Money had shown him, Winter nevertheless resolved to feel encouraged by the visit. It was a relief that the world-renowned expert on gender identity did not consider Brenda’s resistance to be an insurmountable obstacle to the eventual success of the sex reassignment. It was similarly a relief that Money, the world’s leading authority on sex change, had endorsed the local team’s approach to Brenda’s case. “I was a very junior person going to the expert,” Winter says, “and I was happy to get some reassurance.”

But the dramatic depth of Brenda’s resistance to Johns Hopkins and to the surgery was soon to be brought home to all concerned—especially John Money. On 2 May 1978, one month after Winter’s trip to Baltimore, the Reimers returned with Brenda and Brian for a counseling session with Dr. Money. Brenda had fought hard against the visit, agreeing to go only when Ron and Janet promised an expensive side trip to New York City as a bribe. Yet even with Manhattan as a pill sweetener, the visit would prove so traumatic for Brenda that it marked the last time she would ever consent to go to Baltimore.

That something remarkable had occurred during Brenda’s visit was obvious from a letter Money wrote to Winter several weeks after the encounter. Stating that “Brenda talked more extensively on this occasion than on her last visit,” Money went on to say, “She was especially at ease with two youthful students doing an elective with me. She was quite explicit, however, about avoiding references to sex and sex-related topics, and to prospective surgery…. [S]he could not tolerate further continuance of such talk, and went into the next room to join her brother. I followed, and in bringing the session to a close, put my hand on her shoulder in what most youngsters would accept as a reassurance. She fled in panic. One of the students followed and helped her recover her composure. They walked, saying little, for about a mile.” In concluding this oddly elliptical-sounding account of the events, Money referred to the student as “a woman.” What he did not mention was that the woman had begun life as a man. She was a male-to-female transexual whom Money had enlisted to speak to Brenda about the positive aspects of surgical construction of a vagina.

The Reimers’ trip to the unit had begun typically enough, which is to say, with Brenda displaying intense anxiety, anger, and depression—emotions that were reflected in the Sentence Completion Test she was made to fill out. “Compared to most families mine’s …” “a loser,” Brenda wrote. “I think most girls …” “aren’t very nice.” “I believe most women …” “aren’t very nice either.” “My feelings about married life are …” “rotten.” “If I had sex relations …” “I wouldn’t like it. Same if a boy would kiss me.” “To me the future looks …” “bad.”

But it was when Dr. Money introduced her to the transexual that Brenda’s typically despairing mood turned to pure, deep-running panic.

“Dr. Money said, ‘I’ve got someone for you to talk to who’s been through what you’re going to be going through,’” David recalls. Brenda was ushered into the presence of a person whom she immediately identified as a man wearing makeup, dressed in women’s clothing, with a woman’s hairstyle. When the person spoke, it was in a breathy, artificially high-pitched voice. “He’s telling me about the surgery,” David says, “how fantastic it was for him, and how his life turned out beautifully.”

Brenda sat immobile, silent, apparently listening. But the words reached her through a clamoring, rising terror in her mind. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to end up like that?’” David says.

When the transexual finished speaking, she led Brenda back into Dr. Money’s office, where he sat waiting for her at his desk. Brenda sat in the armchair beside Money’s desk. The transexual sat on the adjacent sofa. Money’s transcripts of the meeting record what happened next.

“You do not have to have the operation for your sex organs if you don’t want it,” Money said. “And you can also change your mind and have it anytime you want to, whether you’re in your twenties, or your thirties, or whatever. But from now on you’re old enough to sign your own operative permit, and nobody can make you have an operation. As a matter of fact, nobody can make you take pills if you don’t want. And you know that very well, because all you have to do is tell lies about them, hmmm?”

Dr. Money talked on in this vein for almost ten minutes, shifting back and forth from trying to sound friendly and supportive to sounding threatening and angry. He said that no one should make her feel as if she were having things forced upon her—even as he relentlessly tried to convince her to have the surgery. He spoke about her “gender identity,” saying that she could not be a person unless she had one, and then he was talking about the operation again, about “sex organs for a female.”

Brenda tried to interrupt, but Dr. Money said he wanted to tell her “a very nice story” about a patient who had been born with “a birth defect of the sex organs.” Money began to talk about “clitorises” and “penises.” Brenda again tried to interrupt him. “Let me finish,” Money snapped. Recovering himself, he talked on about how this patient had always refused, like Brenda, to discuss his sexuality when he was growing up. Money said that he had learned from this patient not to force children to talk about things that disturbed them. Yet at the same time, Money continued to press her to speak. “I want you to know that I’m going to be the one person in the world that you can tell anything to, because I’m not going to yell at you,” Money said. “And I’m not going to tell you you’re crazy. I’m just going to listen and be helpful and find the answer to it. And you can tell me anything.”

When Money finally fell silent, Brenda had only one question.

“Are you finished?” she said.

“We’re finished.”

Brenda got up and hurried toward Money’s office door. Money and the transexual moved toward her. The transexual was saying something about taking Brenda up to the fifth floor where they could be alone. Dr. Money reached out for her. She felt the psychologist’s fingers grasp her shoulder. Convinced that they were going to drag her off to the operating room, Brenda wrenched free of Money’s grasp. Today David cannot recall how he got out of Money’s office. “I remember running,” David says, “that’s all.”

“I heard the door slam open,” says Brian, who was sitting in the waiting room, “and—whoosh!—there goes Brenda. Bolted. I hear John Money yelling. I see a bunch of people with lab coats running after her.”

Janet and Ron, who were being interviewed in a nearby office, heard the commotion and came out into the corridor. “Dr. Money took off,” Janet says. “We stayed with his assistants, waiting, while he went chasing.”

Brenda ran blindly until she reached a set of stairs, which she dashed up, emerging onto a rooftop. The transexual had followed. Brenda crouched by a low brick wall that ran around the perimeter of the roof, trying to hide. David cannot recall what happened next. A report filed by the transexual (whose name has been whited out in the Psychohormonal Research Unit record) reveals that Brenda, with her pursuer close behind, fled down four flights of stairs and ran out of the hospital’s back exit into a parking lot. The transexual searched the hospital grounds—then spotted Brenda running into the main entrance. She gave chase but once again lost sight of Brenda.

At the front desk, the transexual phoned Money at his office, gave a progress report on the search, then staked out the exit. Brenda appeared two minutes later heading for the door. The transexual intercepted her and offered to walk with her to calm her down. Brenda agreed only if they did not talk or come close to each other. “We walked,” the transexual’s notes continue, “Brenda about 4 feet behind me.” It was in this strange configuration that Brenda and her would-be counselor proceeded silently some eight blocks from the hospital, then back again.

On their return to the hospital, they were met at the main entrance by Viola Lewis—one of the few unit workers Brenda even remotely trusted. Lewis escorted the child to the nearby Sheraton Hotel, where Ron and Janet had been convinced to go and wait for her return.

Reunited finally with her parents and brother in their hotel room, Brenda told Janet that if ever again forced to see Dr. Money, she would kill herself.

10

UPON THEIR RETURN to Winnipeg from Baltimore, the Reimers found themselves enmeshed in a new crisis involving their daughter—although this time the drama did not directly include Brenda herself but rather the members of her local treatment team. Several weeks earlier, Dr. Ingimundson had terminated treatment with Brenda to take a leave of absence from her practice and have a baby. Ingimundson had referred Brenda to another psychiatrist, Dr. Sheila Cantor. An aggressive and outspoken woman, Cantor had taken a view of Brenda’s case quite out of synch with that held by the rest of the local treatment team. After taking a look at Brenda’s medical records and Child Guidance Clinic reports and having one joint session with Brenda and her parents, Cantor abruptly announced to the Reimers that Brenda’s sex reassignment was a dismal failure and that the child must be allowed to switch sex immediately to boyhood.

Sigmundson says that such bluntness was typical of Cantor (who has since died of cancer). “She was a good psychiatrist, but so strongly opinionated about anything she touched that she would alienate people,” says Sigmundson. Cantor certainly alienated the Reimers, who still labored under Dr. Money’s instructions to suppress all doubts about the treatment.

It was the ordinarily taciturn Ron who spoke up. “My husband got very angry,” Janet recalls. “He said, ‘First of all, we have to be sure that she wants to be a boy; don’t just assume this.’ He hadn’t yet accepted that Brenda was not to be.” Nor had Janet. Nor had Dr. Winter, who sided with the Reimers in their dispute with the psychiatrist. While Winter admits that, with hindsight, Cantor was correct in her assessment of Brenda’s condition, he thinks the psychiatrist erred in her approach to the problem. “Even if you’ve got the right answer in medicine,” he says, “part of this whole business is that you’ve got to wait for people to catch up and come along with you. And if you don’t do that, the best plans don’t work.”

With Winter’s support, Ron and Janet appealed to Sigmundson, demanding that he remove Cantor from the case. Sigmundson did so, which left him in a serious bind. Having now run through three of the city’s senior female psychiatrists, and still determined to assign Brenda’s case to a woman in order to increase her feminine identification, Sigmundson was running out of qualified women.

Even as the doctors struggled to find a way forward with the case, Brenda had settled on her own strategy for coping with her predicament. When Brenda started eighth grade at Glenwood Junior High that fall, Esther Haselhauer noted the stunning change that had come over her friend. Ordinarily Brenda was never seen in anything but jeans and a T-shirt, wearing no makeup. But something had clearly happened over the summer.

“I remember she came into the classroom,” Esther says, “and she was wearing this matching checkered beige pantsuit with stripes, her hair was brushed, and she was wearing lipstick, rouge, and mascara, and she was carrying a purse. It was obvious that she was trying very hard to fit in as a girl.”

Indeed she was. Following her last traumatic trip to the Psychohormonal Research Unit, Brenda had become convinced that the only way to avoid the surgery was to play along to the best of her ability; she would try to act the part of a girl; she would try to convince everyone that she was happy. That way, she reasoned, they might not force her to have the operation. And who knew? Perhaps they were all right: perhaps if she made a true effort at living as a girl, she would begin to feel like one. As David puts it, “I decided to play ball. I tried my guts out. I was miserable. I was unhappy. I was uncomfortable. I felt awkward as hell. But the pressure was on me. And I tried my hardest.”

For Ron and Janet and the members of the local treatment team, Brenda’s behavior that fall was initially a cause for considerable joy. “Parents have found her to be much more enthusiastic about school this year,” social worker Downey noted in Brenda’s Child Guidance Clinic file in early September, “and she has apparently been out shopping with some other girls.” This expedition to a local department store had actually been at the suggestion of their teacher, Mrs. Bailey, who had taken some of the more sympathetic girls aside and asked them to help Brenda a little with her dress and grooming, which left something to be desired. Ordinarily her mother would have helped Brenda with her makeup and clothes, but Janet had recently taken a job as a parking lot attendant and was gone early in the mornings, leaving Brenda to fend for herself. Otherwise it is unlikely that Brenda would have been allowed to go to school in the ill-applied makeup and unfortunate beige pantsuit, which she had bought for herself while on a shopping expedition with Ron.

“The pantsuit wasn’t exactly in style,” Esther says, “and the rouge was in circles on her cheeks. She came off looking more like a clown.”

David concurs. “I remember these girls took one look at how I was dressed, and they said, ‘We gotta take you shopping!’”

On a trip to the Hudson’s Bay department store, the girls combed the racks for Brenda and picked out a feminine-styled blue turtleneck sweater and a pair of designer jeans. After school, when her mother was back from work, Brenda asked Janet for some lessons on how to alter her angular, gunslinger’s stride, which since kindergarten had been a source of such hilarity among her peers. Janet showed Brenda how to balance a book on her head to practice straightening her spine and smoothing her stride. “It was unnatural,” David recalls. “I’d get all tensed up after a while. But you were expected to walk like that, so I tried to do it.”

Glenwood Junior High held dances on Friday nights in the school gym. All the kids went; Brenda did, too. “I’d get dressed up in my unisex disco clothes—jeans and high-heeled boots—and tell my parents, ‘I’m going out to forget about my worries and my troubles.’” But Brenda discovered that her worries and troubles did not dissipate at the school dances, where the gym walls reverberated to the taped strains of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

“I’d mostly dance with girls, in groups of four or five,” David says. But Brenda also danced with the occasional boy. “I was expected to dance with the boys, so I’d dance with a boy,” David says. “I’d ask some guy, ‘You wanna dance?’ They kinda look at you”—he wrinkles his nose—“and say ‘No, no, it’s OK.’” On a few occasions, however, boys did agree to accompany Brenda to the dance floor. “Sometimes it was a fast dance,” David says. “Sometimes a slow dance.” Circling the dance floor in the arms of a boy, it was painfully apparent to Brenda that she was not having the right sensations. Instead of any romantic flickering, she felt only embarrassment and excruciating awkwardness. One Friday night, David recalls, a boy in ninth grade who was one of the school’s main heartthrobs defended Brenda when she was being teased by a group of girls. Jokingly, the boy kissed her. “It was a peck on the cheek,” David says. “I went home and thought about it. I thought, ‘It doesn’t seem right. I don’t like this. This is how it’s supposed to happen, but it doesn’t feel right.’”

Such feelings of doubt, which Brenda had long expressed in her therapy sessions, had always been dismissed by her therapists. “These psychiatrists and psychologists kept saying that these were ‘normal confused feelings,’” David says. “You have a sense that it’s beyond that, but people are telling you what you’re thinking. And only you know what you’re thinking. It makes you feel even more crazy.”

Still, Brenda persevered. That fall a group of girls invited her to a pajama party. “Someone sneaked in a mickey of booze,” David says. “I didn’t drink any. I faked it. I put it to my mouth, but I put my tongue on the hole so I didn’t get any. Everyone was talking about boys—‘Who do you have a crush on?’ and all this. So I said, ‘Oh yeah, OK, I got a crush on this person or that person.’ I mean, what do gay people do when they’re in hiding? They pretend they’re straight. You toe the line, like everybody else. Act like everybody else, and you’ll be treated like everybody else.”

It was clear to Brenda that she did not feel like everybody else in the room. Especially when the other girls began to get ready for bed.

“A girl got undressed in front of me,” he says. “I was so embarrassed I looked the other way. She said, ‘That’s OK, you don’t have to be embarrassed, you’re one of us.’ She showed me her bra and asked, ‘What do you think of this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. It looks beautiful; I like the lace.’ And I’m sitting there turning red. I felt like Mrs. Doubtfire in that movie.” Asked about any other involuntary physiological reactions that he might have experienced in the company of so many half-dressed girls, David smiles—and answers with an analogy. “If you lose your arm,” he says, “and you’re dying of thirst, that stump is still going to move toward that glass of water to try to get it. It’s instinct. It’s in you.”

However, Brenda was now living a life in which every instinct had to be denied, repressed, hidden: at dances, at parties, in the classroom, and on the street. “I was like a robot,” he says, describing the playacting that his day-to-day, moment-to-moment survival now entailed. “You’re so careful to look normal, but you don’t want to go overboard. You’re saying to yourself, This looks like an appropriate time to smile. So you smile. This looks like an appropriate time to cross your legs. So you cross your legs. You’re always thinking one step ahead, like in a chess game.”

It was a chess game Brenda was losing. Despite those few girls who had obeyed their teacher’s orders to be nice to Brenda, the majority of her peers continued to jeer and laugh at her. “It was sad, because it was like the harder she tried, the more she failed,” says Esther Haselhauer. “The ridicule became worse.”

Of Brenda’s eighth-grade tormentors, Wendy Holderston, the popular and pretty daughter of a local singing star, remembers Brenda as an “odd duck,” a “tomboy” who had “a deep voice and really deep-set eyes”—characteristics that resulted in Brenda’s being dubbed “Cavewoman,” a name that soon caught on among their classmates. At first Brenda tried to absorb her peers’ ridicule in “ladylike” fashion, but one day she’d had enough. In the school hallway she rounded on Wendy, David recalls, grabbed her by the front of her shirt, smashed her against the lockers, and threw her onto the ground. Boys who teased her got similar treatment. “That’s what always impressed me about Brenda,” Esther says. “She’d actually fight with the boys who teased her. She’d haul off and punch them. I always wished I could do that.”

David is more rueful when he recalls his habit as Brenda of beating up the boys who teased her. “It only made people think I was a bigger weirdo and ostracize me more.”

By late November, the earlier note of optimism about Brenda’s social and academic life had vanished from her Child Guidance Clinic file. “She has no friends in class,” Downey wrote on November 27. More frighteningly, Brenda was also showing disturbing signs of deterioration in her intellectual functioning—a precipitous descent into a helpless, childlike regression. “She cannot spell the days of the week or the months of the year,” Downey noted in Brenda’s file. “As 5th grade spelling was too difficult for her, she had been placed back in a 4th grade program. She has not learned certain set routines in the classroom…. She has been waiting for other students to unlock her combination lock as she cannot remember her number.”

David recalls the humiliation associated with his helplessness. “When you’re going through what I was going through, schoolwork is kind of low on your list,” he says. “The last thing on your mind is a test. You’re thinking about survival.” The Child Guidance Clinic’s Joan Nebbs uses the same term when she describes Brenda’s predicament: “It was survival,” she says. “To get through the day. To get through the hour.”

As eighth grade progressed, Brenda’s continued ability to get through the hour became increasingly imperiled. The more her sense of the disjunction between her physical and mental selves increased and her feelings of entrapment and confusion escalated, the more her thoughts turned to the ultimate escape: suicide. “I kept visualizing a rope thrown over a beam,” says David.

It was at this critical stage of Brenda’s adolescence that Keith Sigmundson finally succeeded in placing her in the care of a new psychiatrist, a particularly gifted and empathetic one named Dr. Mary McKenty.

Upon entering Dr. McKenty’s office at the Child Guidance Clinic for her first session on 2 January 1979, Brenda was surprised by the sight of the smiling, elderly, gray-haired woman who welcomed her. She was dressed in a tweed skirt and matching jacket and stood no more than five feet one inch tall. “She looked like she’d be baking cookies for her grandchildren,” David says. “She didn’t look like a typical psychiatrist.”

And indeed, Mary McKenty was not a typical representative of the profession. McKenty had always eschewed the strict Freudian rules governing psychiatrist-patient relations—rules that frowned on excessive personal contact, or even warmth, between doctor and patient. She had always preferred to use a nurturing approach that was, in part, a reaction to the circumstances of her own childhood. Born in 1916, McKenty had been reared in an affluent home (her Scottish immigrant father worked for Richardson’s, the province’s most profitable grain company) but one lacking in introspection and overt displays of warmth. “Her Scottish upbringing was not attuned to psychiatry,” says Evelyn Loadman, who first met McKenty in 1934 when the two were among the first women pre-med students in Manitoba history. “But Mary happened to be the kind of person who was very sensitive to others and couldn’t really figure life out until she started to think about what we are made of.”

It was in the early 1940s, in her first job at the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg, that McKenty’s unique gifts as a child psychiatrist emerged. McKenty made no apparent attempts to delve into the protected realms of her patient’s unconscious. Instead she would come down to the child’s level, playing games, encouraging her patient to draw, paint, and write. Thus lulled into a state of distracted absorption, children could reveal themselves by word and deed. Loadman recalls that McKenty’s nonpressuring approach lent an almost magical quality to her ability to rid her patients of neurotic behaviors—bed-wetting, hair-pulling—that had resisted the efforts of other therapists. “She was the only one who ever cured anybody as a psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital,” Loadman says with a touch of wonder in her voice.

McKenty was hired by the Winnipeg Child Guidance Clinic at its inception in the late 1960s and quickly established a reputation for success with even the most difficult children. Indeed, when Keith Sigmundson first inherited Brenda Reimer’s fraught and complex case in late 1976, he initially tried to assign it to McKenty, but she was recovering from a double mastectomy and thinking about retirement, and she turned down the case. Sigmundson returned to her only in the fall of 1978, when he was unable to find any other female psychiatrist willing to take Brenda on. Recognizing that Sigmundson was desperate, McKenty finally gave in and took the case.

Ron and Janet formed an immediate liking for the calm, grandmotherly psychiatrist. Brenda was, by necessity, more circumspect.

On the one hand, Brenda was drawn to McKenty. She liked how the psychiatrist spoke in a kindly, conversational voice and refrained from scribbling on a pad. Brenda also liked that the bulk of her sessions with McKenty were taken up playing board games—Clue, Cootie, Basquetball, Sorry!—or drawing, painting, or playing tongue twisters. At times, Dr. McKenty would drop in an occasional question about how Brenda was feeling and sometimes would jot something on a pad, but somehow it was different when Dr. McKenty did it. “She’d be writing something down,” David recalls, “and I’d say, ‘Oh, you’re writing something down again—spying on me, huh?’ And she’d say, ‘Oh no, dear, this is just so I can make sure that we covered all the bases, so that I can help you.’”

Yet on the other hand, Brenda could not afford to trust McKenty completely, since she had to remain alert to the nightmare possibility that the psychiatrist’s friendliness might simply be a more diabolical tactic to trick her into the surgery. As McKenty’s therapy notes reveal, Brenda used an array of strategies to see if Dr. McKenty’s friendliness was genuine. She drew a cruel caricature of the psychiatrist and showed it to her; she seized one of the clinic’s toy machine guns and took the doctor “hostage”; she wrote out a “Death Warrant for Mary McKenty.” The psychiatrist offered no resistance. She carefully preserved Brenda’s nasty caricature of her, even obligingly signing her name underneath it; taken hostage, she allowed herself to be marched at gunpoint around the office; and on Brenda’s “Death Warrant,” she dutifully filled in the areas where Brenda had left room for the condemned woman’s vital statistics.

“I was testing her,” David says. “She passed the test.” Brenda dropped her provoking tactics and began actually looking forward to her psychiatric sessions with McKenty. “We didn’t see each other as patient and doctor,” David says. “It was a friendship.”

Brenda was now in particular need of a friend, since an old nemesis was about to reappear in her life. That January, Brenda confided to McKenty that she had snooped in her mother’s mail and seen a letter from Dr. Money announcing that he was coming to Winnipeg. Invited to give a talk at the local medical school, he had made plans to visit Brenda and her family—a visit, McKenty wrote, that Brenda was dreading.

Over the next two months, McKenty recorded Brenda’s escalating anxiety as Money’s impending visit drew nearer. On 31 January, Brenda recounted to McKenty a nightmare that she’d had about Money, her twin brother, and herself. “Dr. Money was a magician with a cape,” Brenda told McKenty, “and he said he could make us disappear—pouf!—like that. I woke up and thought we had disappeared.” To allay Brenda’s fears, McKenty said that she did not have to see the psychologist when he visited. Together they created the “Don’t Want to See Dr. Money Club.” McKenty signed her name on the membership list. Brenda added her own signature and the words “Join my Club!” But a month later, with Money’s visit less than two weeks away, Brenda had another dream. “I had on a fancy blue dress and my good shoes, too,” she told McKenty. “The skirt was split because it’s too narrow. Everything was cleaned up—the floor was washed. Something big seemed to be going to happen. There was a closet nearby. We have a closet like that in our house. I was scared because it seemed I could maybe get put in that closet.”

The week of 22 March 1979 proved to be one of those gray Winnipeg periods when the weather has stalled in the indefinable season between late winter and early spring. The snowbanks, having lingered too long, were blackened with car exhaust, and the sky was the color of cement. Ron, driving his Dodge Dart to pick up Dr. Money at the city’s Health Sciences Center (where the psychologist had just given his speech), looked with chagrin at the dirty snowbanks. He’d been hoping for better weather so that Money might take home a more favorable impression of their city.

Back at the Reimers’ house, Janet was having similar feelings of anxiety about the impression Money would carry away of his visit to Winnipeg and, specifically, the Reimers’ home. They had moved into the house two years earlier and put two thousand dollars into fixing the place up. Ordinarily Janet felt quite proud of what she’d been able to achieve on her budget. Now she was seeing the place through the eyes of Dr. Money, whom she considered the most aesthetically refined person she had ever met. “The house had an old gold rug down when we moved in,” Janet says. “It had been cleaned, but it just looked dirty. The walls hadn’t been painted in a long time, and we had a cheap couch, an old beige sofa with an orange thread running through it.”

By the time she heard the car pull up in the driveway, Janet had worked herself into a state of considerable apprehension. When Dr. Money stepped through the front door into the Reimers’ modest living room, however, he seemed to take particular pains to project a manner of friendly and accepting approval of everything that met his eye. If memories lingered in Money’s mind of the last time he had seen the Reimers—during the disastrous Baltimore trip the previous spring—he showed no signs of it. Certainly Ron and Janet made every effort to put the episode out of their own minds.

“He was like a friend—or an uncle—who had been away a long time and had come for a visit,” Janet says. Dr. Money admired Ron’s homemade wall cabinet and complimented Janet on her pen-and-ink drawings, which hung on the walls. Meanwhile the twins had disappeared into the basement and refused to come up and meet Dr. Money.

The adults sat at the dining room table, and Ron offered Dr. Money a beer. Sipping one of Ron’s Canadian lagers, Money relaxed and spoke about his childhood in rural New Zealand, where he said he had once seen a fireball and where the earthquakes were so frequent that his mother had strung thread across her kitchen shelves to prevent bottles from falling during the tremors. Money talked about the dark beer that was popular in his native country and asked Ron if they had dark beer in Winnipeg.

Today, neither Ron nor Janet can remember precisely how it was that Dr. Money, who had planned merely to drop over for an hour or two, ended up spending the night. Janet recalls that Money glanced at the clock and announced that he had missed his flight; Ron thinks that perhaps a snowstorm canceled Money’s flight back to Baltimore. In any case, once it was apparent that Dr. Money was stranded, Ron and Janet, out of politeness, invited him to stay with them—although they had only an air mattress in the front room for him to sleep on. To their surprise, the eminent psychologist accepted their offer. Ron phoned out for a bucket of chicken to accommodate their unexpected house guest. The children continued to hide in the basement. That is, until their parents forced them to come up.

During the stiff encounter in the living room, Money asked how the twins were doing in school. Brian did the talking. He said something noncommittal about their academic accomplishments, then asked Dr. Money how he liked their city and how long he was staying. “Then,” Brian says, “we wanted to go.” Before the two could escape to the basement, Money pulled out his wallet. Saying that he would have spent the money on a hotel room anyway, he bestowed on the children fifteen dollars each. The twins then hurried back downstairs. They did not emerge until the next morning, when Dr. Money had left for the airport. It was the last time the Reimers would see him in person.

It was not the last the city of Winnipeg would hear about John Money, however. After his departure, the Winnipeg Free-Press carried accounts, on two successive days, of Money’s standing-room-only appearance at the university’s Human Sexuality Conference. STUDENTS, MDS DEBATING WORTH OF SEX EXERCISE, ran the banner headline on the first day. MORAL VALUES OF LECTURERS QUESTIONED. Money had upset some students, the paper reported, by showing graphic slides of a range of unusual sexual behaviors. The slide show was in fact part of a standard lecture Money had devised to “desensitize” medical students to various sexual perversions, and had already generated fierce controversy in the local Baltimore newspapers when Money introduced the films to the Johns Hopkins Medical School curriculum in 1971. The show featured explicit photographs of people engaged in bestiality, urine-drinking, feces-eating, and various amputation fetishes. During the second day of his Winnipeg lecture (the paper reported), Money had also screened a stag film of five women and three men having group sex, then followed the screening with a speech in which he informed the assembled professors and first-year medical students that marriage was simply an economic compact in which the “heart follows the wallet”; that incest should not be prosecuted as a criminal offense; and that in cases where stepfathers sleep with their stepdaughters, the mother is often “happy” because she “is glad to have [her husband] off her back.”

Dr. Robert Martin, a clinical psychologist and member of the University of Manitoba’s Psychiatry Department, attended Money’s talks. “He was a personification of the style of the time,” Martin says. “He liked to shock, play the devil’s advocate, and was very cocky and very self-assured. His attitude was very much one of bringing ‘enlightenment’ to the ‘boonies.’ He radiated that particular lack of anxiety that, personally, sets alarm bells off, and he gave the impression that he’d plunge into anything. He was not the sort of person that you would forget.”

Steve Whysall, who also attended the lectures, agrees. A seasoned journalist who had worked in London’s Fleet Street, Whysall was the Free-Press medical reporter who wrote the paper’s accounts of Money’s controversy-stirring visit. “I’d been around and thought I’d seen and heard quite a few things,” he says. “But I was surprised that this [sexual material] came up in that form.” Whysall was especially surprised by the deliberate casualness with which Money spoke about such outlandish sexual fetishes as feces-eating. He interviewed Money briefly after the lecture. “I asked him, ‘Are you telling these doctors-to-be that they shouldn’t be alarmed if they meet someone who comes to them with that kind of request or condition?’” Money, Whysall says, dismissed such queries. “He was pretending that he was shocked that I was so narrow-minded, so Puritanical.”

Since the Reimers were not in the habit of reading the Free-Press (they preferred the tabloid Tribune, which did not cover the event), they failed to learn about the controversy their overnight guest had ignited. Brian alone happened to notice that Dr. Money’s visit generated some media interest; while watching TV, he caught a snippet of Dr. Money on CKND Channel 9, but the glimpse was fleeting, and Brian failed to hear the gist of the report.

In the days directly following Dr. Money’s visit to Winnipeg, Brenda began to make increasing strides in her therapy with Dr. McKenty—as if finally freed from the last vestiges of suspicion that Dr. McKenty was working in collusion with the psychologist from Baltimore. Arriving at her 4 April session from an Easter celebration with her family, and thus outfitted in full feminine attire—black cowl-necked top, garnet pendant, and mascara—Brenda pointedly rejected McKenty’s compliments on her appearance, denying that she was even wearing makeup. At her next session, Brenda announced, “I hate dresses. I only wear them to funerals and weddings.” On 4 May, McKenty wrote, “Showed me her purse and contents, which were a hairbrush, mascara, lip gloss and rouge given to her by her mother, but she remarked pleasantly, ‘I hate that stuff.’”

It was the session of 8 June that marked Brenda’s most dramatic psychotherapeutic breakthrough to date. That this was to be an unusual encounter is clear from the opening sentence of McKenty’s notes. “Did not want to play any games,” McKenty wrote. “Soon began to ask some questions about her medical condition.” This marked the first time in Brenda’s ten-year standoff with the medical profession that she ever voluntarily raised the issue of her genitals and the fact that they did not resemble those of other girls. Brenda told McKenty how her father had explained that a doctor “did something that was a mistake.” McKenty asked Brenda what she thought had happened.

“I used to think,” Brenda said, “that my mother had beaten me between the legs.”

Keith Sigmundson was immediately informed, by McKenty, of Brenda’s comment. The two psychiatrists discussed it, and they agreed that Brenda’s statement about her mother seemed to fit with almost eerie neatness a central tenet of psychoanalysis: Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex—the developmental stage that supposedly marks every human being’s psychosexual differentiation into boy or girl.

Named for the unlucky hero of Greek tragedy who unwittingly slept with his mother and murdered his father, the Oedipus complex was founded on Freud’s conviction that all children, both male and female, develop in earliest infancy an erotic attachment to their mother—an attachment that eventually pits them against the father in competition for the mother’s erotic favors. In boys, Freud postulated, the Oedipus complex gives rise to “castration anxiety”: the terror that their father will neutralize the son’s sexual threat by castrating him. In girls, Freud stated, the Oedipus complex breeds “penis envy”—a conviction that the castration has already been performed, that she once had a penis and has had it removed by one of her parents.

In normal female development, Freud argued, the girl’s urgent desire to reclaim her missing penis compels her to reroute her infantile erotic desires for her mother and direct them toward her father so that she might, in sexual intercourse with him, take back the penis stolen from her, and it is by this means that she forms a “normal” heterosexual orientation. In Freud’s view, psychotherapy was primarily concerned with curing the mental illnesses and neuroses that result in patients who, for a plethora of reasons, fail properly to resolve their Oedipal dramas in childhood. According to psychoanalytic theory, a crucial step in the resolution is to face the initial castration anxiety and voice it—as Brenda had apparently done when she described her childhood fear that her mother had damaged her sex organs.

On this basis, Sigmundson explains, he and McKenty hoped that Brenda’s comment might be the articulation of a universal Oedipal fear shared by all females. “So we thought,” Sigmundson says, “we were getting somewhere.”

At the same time, Sigmundson admits that he was also forced to consider another interpretation of Brenda’s comment—one that not only took into account the awkward fact of Brenda’s intensely masculine behavior, but also acknowledged that Brenda was born a boy with a normal penis and testicles, which had (at least partly on her mother’s authorization) been lost. Bearing these factors in mind, Brenda’s comment could be seen to signal not an Oedipal breakthrough, but something less abstract—namely, the gruesome but emotionally logical explanation that a young child had used to explain the scarred state of her genitals and the bouts of depression suffered by her guilt-ridden mother. Viewed thus, Brenda’s comment to McKenty could be interpreted not as her imminent acceptance of herself as a girl, but its opposite: her recognition that her earlier fears of maternal castration were incorrect and that now she wanted to know what had really happened to her; a sign, perhaps, that she was approaching the point at which she was ready to embrace the boy she had always instinctively known herself to be.

Whichever interpretation proved correct, Sigmundson and McKenty were now convinced that Brenda’s therapy was reaching a critical stage.

The events of that June also brought Janet to a critical stage. Told of Brenda’s statement, Janet was aghast. Already feeling nearly insupportable grief and guilt over her daughter, she found this latest piece of news almost unbearable. “I was just stunned,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that Brenda thought I could do such a horrible thing. I wondered, What must she think of me that I would do a thing like that to my own child?”

Today Janet cannot recall if this incident was instrumental in undermining her confidence in the entire experiment. One thing is certain, however. That June she and Ron were fast approaching the time when they would ordinarily start planning their annual visit to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Money had contacted them recently and pressed them to make an appointment for July. Yet when July arrived, Janet and Ron did not follow through on the plan to go to Baltimore. When Brenda anxiously inquired of Janet whether there were any plans to return to Johns Hopkins that summer, Janet responded with a question of her own.

“Would it do any good?” she asked.

“No,” Brenda said.

“Then we’re not going.” Janet did not bother to contact Dr. Money to cancel the appointment. The Reimers simply did not show up. Nor would they ever again.

11

IN THE FALL, when Brenda’s psychotherapy resumed with Dr. McKenty (who, like many psychiatrists, always took a summer vacation), she told the psychiatrist that she had passed a boring summer at home watching TV and doing a paper route. Now, however, she was uncharacteristically excited about starting classes at a new school. The previous spring Dr. McKenty and the other members of the local treatment team had discussed with Ron and Janet the option of removing Brenda from the academic path and putting her into a vocational school where she could learn a trade. Ron and Janet, having come to recognize that Brenda would never be a scholar, approved this plan, and Brenda herself was enthusiastic about it. She told McKenty that she would like to become an auto mechanic—a job whose only drawback was that “no guy would hire a girl to fix his car.”

In September 1979, Brenda, now fourteen, began ninth grade at R. B. Russell Vocational School, which was located across town in the scrappy industrial area of Winnipeg’s West End. The brochures for the school had featured shots of a pleasant city campus; the reality proved somewhat different. A school that ministered to children with behavioral and family problems (some of the teenage girl students were reportedly already moonlighting as prostitutes), the campus, David says, was a forbidding concrete complex covered with graffiti.

The school had a rigorous hazing initiation week for freshmen. It was as part of this hazing process that Brenda was selected by her upper-year schoolmates as “Freshie Queen.” On the day when she was to have the twenty-five-dollar prize bestowed on her, Brenda, as instructed, wore her best dress, a full-length gown with puffed sleeves and a ruffled lace neck. She then learned that she could not collect her cash prize until she danced with the “Freshie King.” Her royal counterpart proved to be a small, stooped boy with a brush cut and a pained expression. The two got up and danced in front of the school. “It damn near killed me,” David says.

The incident marked another turning point for Brenda. That September, after starting at R. B. Russell School, she took her sexual destiny into her own hands and simply stopped living as a female. Gone were the cowl-necked sweaters, garnet pendants, and purses she had adopted the previous year at Glenwood. She now wore a boy’s denim jacket, torn at both elbows, dirty corduroy pants frayed at the cuffs, a pair of what McKenty described as “men’s leather gloves,” and heavy construction boots on her feet. She stopped washing her hair, which grew matted. Her voice had settled into the rumbling register in which David speaks today. Physically, her condition was such that “strangers turn to look at her,” as McKenty wrote in her notes on Brenda. To the close observer, however, it was Brenda’s mental state that would have drawn particular scrutiny and pity. For as photographs from this period reveal, Brenda, for all her attempts to smile, had the eyes of a cornered animal.

“That was the worst time of her life,” says Sigmundson. “R. B. Russell really brought things to a head in a way that may have taken much longer had she been in a more cultured society where the kids might have been more prepared to play the game. At the other schools they called her ‘Cavewoman.’ At R. B. Russell they looked at her and said, ‘You’re a fucking gorilla.’”

Despite the brutal intensification in her peers’ taunts, Brenda refused to change. “I won’t walk funny like girls do,” she told McKenty—and she jumped up and did a caricature of a girl ,walking: “mincing along,” McKenty noted, “with bent arm and 5th finger prominently displayed.” Brenda enrolled in Appliance Repair—the first and only girl ever to take the course in the twelve years it was offered at R. B. Russell. The teacher, Hillel Taylor, was at first concerned about how a girl would fare with the boys in his class, but his fears were soon allayed. “Brenda could relate to the boys on a very equal basis,” says Taylor, who has never been informed of Brenda’s medical history. “I could picture someone like her making it in the military or something. I remember being questioned by my principal and other people involved—guidance counselors and so on—‘How is she fitting in?’ How is she handling the boys?’” Taylor let them know that Brenda was adapting as if she were “just one of the guys.”

Ron and Janet were not happy with Brenda’s behavior, but that was fine with Brenda. “I was at that age where you rebel,” David says. “I got so sick to death of doing what everyone wanted me to do. I got to that point in my life, I knew I was an oddball, I was willing to live my life as an oddball. If I wanted to wear my hair in a mess, that’s how I wore it. I wore my clothes the way I wanted to.”

And Brenda had more private ways of rebelling. Since earliest childhood she had been instructed both by her parents and by Dr. Money to urinate in the sitting position—despite her strong, overriding urge to face the toilet bowl standing up. Ever since she had been spotted by a kindergarten classmate peeing this way, Brenda had tried to refrain from standing up. No more. “If no one was around, I’d stand up,” David says. “It was easier for me to do that. I figured, what difference did it make?” It made a difference to her peers at R. B. Russell. Caught one day urinating like a boy, Brenda was barred from the girls’ bathroom. She tried sneaking into the boys’ but was kicked out and threatened with a beating if she returned. With nowhere else to go, Brenda was reduced to sneaking out to a back alley near the school to urinate.

It was on one such trip that Brenda became conscious of a car idling in the gap between the houses that lined the alleyway. She noticed that the car had rental plates. The man at the wheel seemed to be looking at her. She zipped up her pants and moved away, but the car followed. Then she saw that the man behind the wheel was pointing a camera at her.

“I ran back to the school,” David says. “I didn’t know what he was up to. I wondered if maybe he was a reporter. You know that you’re different. You go to the United States to see all these important people, so it’s feasible a reporter would want to see you, but you don’t know why—or why he’s so anxious to get a photo of you.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s interest in John Money’s famous twins case dated to some eight months prior to the day Brenda spotted the man trying to photograph her. Edward Goldwyn, an award-winning documentary filmmaker with the BBC series Horizon, had begun researching a film about gender identity in late 1978. A tenacious reporter with a background in science, Goldwyn had burrowed into all aspects of the subject, traveling around the globe to interview experts in the Dominican Republic, East Germany, Los Angeles, New York, and London. He inevitably heard much in his travels about Money’s landmark case, which still stood as the single most compelling piece of evidence to prove the primacy of rearing over biology in the formation of gender identity. Yet when he discussed the experiment with experts, Goldwyn was surprised to hear rumblings that the case was not quite as it appeared in Money’s writings.

“I was getting vibes from people in Baltimore being quite embarrassed by Money and the prominence of this case in the literature,” Goldwyn says. “I could tell that these people were getting increasingly worried.” They urged him not to put too much stock in the experiment until he had talked to the doctors in charge of the twin’s care. Tipped off by a source whom he declines to name, Goldwyn learned that the child was being treated by Jeremy Winter.

Goldwyn contacted Winter in late 1978 and told him about the documentary he was making on gender identity.

“I was incredibly suspicious of some guy wanting to produce a show for TV entertainment,” Winter says. “I was very frosty at the beginning.” But Goldwyn quickly established his bona fides with Winter and showed him the extent of his reading and research. “He totally brought me around,” says Winter Having thus allayed Winter’s fears, Goldwyn questioned him about the twins case. Winter cannot recall the precise words he used, but he says that he did disabuse the reporter of the notion that the case was a success. “At the very least, I’m sure I would have said, ‘Look, I wouldn’t take that case too seriously, because the reality of the child’s psychological adjustment is really quite different.’”

Goldwyn wanted to know how different and was struck by Winter’s reply: “He told me that the twin would have been suicidal if it hadn’t been for Mary McKenty,” Goldwyn says.

In January 1979, Goldwyn even visited the Reimers at home—a visit none of the family members can recall twenty years later, and with reason. Eager to see the family but concerned not to disrupt them by revealing that their identity had been learned by a journalist, Goldwyn settled on a ruse to gain access to their house. He declines to say precisely what his cover story was, but he says, “I came in as if I were asking if they could move their car because it was in my way. I was being, I suppose, a bit immoral, but I thought it was important for me to go and look and see for myself.” Ron and Janet, he says, were “worried, lonely looking people.” Brenda was surly, distinctly sexually ambiguous, and “somebody who I thought was really quite angry.” In short, the family little conformed to Money’s sunny portrait in Sexual Signatures. “Having found that the case wasn’t a good data point—that Money’s study actually didn’t prove anything,” Goldwyn says, “I felt the only thing to do was to leave it all out of my film. The only reason to put it in was to rubbish it.”

This decision did not preclude Goldwyn’s discussing what he had learned with a BBC colleague known for producing programs of a more controversial bent. Freelance TV journalist Peter Williams had recently been placed under contract by the BBC as executive producer on a new series called Open Secret, which was to deal specifically with medical scandals. Williams was fascinated by what Goldwyn told him about Money’s famous case and asked freelance documentary filmmaker Martin Smith to direct a projected half-hour program on the case.

In late September 1979, Williams; his wife, Jo Taylor; Smith; and a small BBC-TV crew arrived in ’Winnipeg. Within days of their arrival, Dr. McKenty notified Sigmundson of Brenda’s description of the strange incident in the alley near the school, where a man had tried to photograph her. Sigmundson immediately recognized that reporters had gotten wind of Brenda’s location. As head of the clinic’s psychiatry unit, Sigmundson had the most experience with the press, so it was agreed that he would handle the reporters.

“By that time,” Sigmundson says, “there were clear doubts in my mind that this [sex reassignment] ever should have happened. At that point, I think I really wanted the world to know.” Sigmundson agreed to speak to the reporters only under conditions that guaranteed the Reimers’ anonymity. He demanded that the reporters agree in writing not to broadcast the photographs they had taken of Brenda; make no further effort to capture her on film; obscure the Reimers’ location by omitting the names of all local treatment personnel; and finally, that the program not be sold in Canada or the United States. With these conditions agreed to by Williams and Smith, Sigmundson allowed himself to be interviewed at his home on 30 September.

Although appearing as an unnamed psychiatrist, Sigmund-son nevertheless looked distinctly nervous as he faced the BBC cameras. Glancing frequently at a set of notes in his lap, he described the “significant psychological problems” from which Brenda had been suffering when she first came to his attention at the Child Guidance Clinic. He related the litany of Brenda’s masculine appearance, her difficulties at school, and her failure to sustain friendships with peers. It was when Williams asked about the prognosis for the sex reassignment that Sigmundson paused. Several seconds passed before he spoke.

“When I took that long, long pause,” Sigmundson says today, “I was wondering if I was really going to tell the truth or just fudge it. After all, it was still Hopkins. Money was the guru.” When he finally answered, Sigmundson picked his words carefully, like a man tiptoeing through a minefield.

“I don’t think all the evidence is in,” he began. “And it may not be until she is a young adult that we’re going to know everything about this particular case. At the present time, however, she does display certain features which would make me be very suspicious that she will ever make an adjustment as a woman.”

Brenda’s former psychiatrist, Doreen Moggey, also agreed to be interviewed. “I felt it needed to be done,” Moggey says. “Somebody needed to say that this was not the rosy success story that was presented in the literature.” On camera Moggey described the extreme difficulties she had faced with Brenda’s case and recounted how she had notified Dr. Money of these difficulties by letter.

Ron and Janet Reimer learned of the BBC’s presence in Winnipeg from Mary McKenty, who had declined to speak to the filmmakers.

“She called to say that there were reporters who wanted to see us,” Janet recalls. McKenty told her that they should not feel they had to be interviewed, but Ron saw no reason to refuse—as long as they were not filmed or recorded. At that point Ron and Janet still remained convinced that Dr. Money’s treatment would work, and they thought their testimony would be a help to other parents who might find themselves in a similar predicament. “We were too close to the situation,” Janet says. “I had brainwashed myself. I couldn’t afford to believe anything else.”

In the Reimers’ living room, Williams and his wife, Jo Taylor, asked how Brenda’s treatment was working out. “I said I was still hopeful,” Janet recalls. The reporters began to ask about Sigmundson’s and Moggey’s observations regarding Brenda’s school performance and social life. The mood of the encounter changed. Janet started to cry, and Ron sank into a characteristic mute melancholy. The reporters asked to meet Brenda. Janet called her daughter in from outside and introduced the British visitors as editors of a poetry magazine that wished to publish one of Janet’s poems.

Brenda, dressed in tattered jeans and a torn jacket, her unwashed hair falling in tangles around her face, stalked into the living room and said an awkward hello in her deep voice, then quickly disappeared. Her appearance seemed to make a strong impression on the reporters.

“When Brenda left the room,” Janet says, “the woman got up and said, ‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this!’ She seemed quite angry.”

The BBC crew were headed for Baltimore. They had notified Money some weeks earlier that they were doing a documentary on the twins case. “Money initially showed considerable willingness and interest in being involved,” says Smith, but that was before he learned of the reporters’ investigative efforts in Winnipeg.

Williams and Smith arrived at Money’s house in the early evening of 3 October 1979. At the time of his divorce more than twenty-five years earlier, Money had moved from the suburbs to an address just minutes by foot from Johns Hopkins, in a gritty, inner-city Baltimore neighborhood, where he continues to live to this day. “It was not the sort of place where you would expect a well-heeled academic or scientist to be living,” says Smith. Money occupied the upper floors of a run-down corner store. Williams and Smith, admitted through a front door that boasted three locks, were no less surprised at the interior of Money’s residence, which was decorated with the masks, totems, and sexual artifacts that also bedecked his office. Money himself was a convivial host—at least initially.

“There were a couple of his mature students around,” Smith says. “We were having a drink quite casually in front of the fireplace and talking about the preparations for the interview, which was to take place the next day.”

The reporters then eased toward revealing to Money the full scope of their documentary. “We think the case is very interesting,” Smith remembers saying, “and we do want to do a documentary on it, but—”

“We should warn you,” Williams recalls cutting in, “that we have heard other things about it.”

Smith informed Money that they had spoken to the child’s psychiatrists and that all was not what it appeared to be from Money’s published writings. “At that point I think it’s fair to say that he got extremely angry and annoyed,” Smith says. “I think he felt that he’d been sandbagged into a corner. Which wasn’t the case. In fact we quite deliberately told him that we had made contact with the psychiatrists before we did the filming.”

Money, however, appeared to be in no state to appreciate such fine distinctions of journalistic etiquette. “His anger might have been that he felt that the child was being investigated or put at risk,” Smith continues. “Or it might have been personal anger that someone should challenge his work. I don’t know. But our relationships changed dramatically, and we were shortly out the door.”

The telephone call to the Reimers’ house in Winnipeg came later that evening. Janet and Ron had already gone to bed. Janet answered. It was Dr. Money calling from Baltimore, and he was in a panic. The content of the call has been preserved in notes taken the next day by Mary McKenty, to whom Janet recounted Money’s conversation. Speaking of “persons unknown” but “suspected to be a Mr. Smith of the BBC” and another man—“a friend of Mr. Goldwyn”—Money told a wild tale of files possibly stolen from him and of reporters who had somehow learned of Brenda’s whereabouts.

“He was all freaked out,” Janet says. “He said, ‘Don’t speak to any reporters.’” At which point Janet had no choice but to tell him the truth—that both she and Ron had already spoken to a man and woman from the BBC.

The extent of Money’s displeasure was clear from a letter he wrote the next day to Sir Charles Curran, then director general of the BBC. After laying out his history with Williams and Smith, Money delivered a threat. “I would appreciate it,” he informed Curran, “if you perused the contents of the program most carefully in light of the BBC’s moral and legal obligation not to violate the privacy of a family which is at present particularly vulnerable to the possible effects of an invasion of privacy. I need hardly tell you that my concern is for the protection of this family. However, I must advise you that if their privacy is not appropriately protected I will counsel them to take legal steps to obtain compensation for any harm the BBC has caused them, and I trust that this will not be necessary.”

But the BBC stood behind Williams and Smith, and the reporters moved on to the final stage of their reporting: to find a scientist who could comment on the significance of their findings. One name in particular kept coming up—that of the scientist who had inspired Money’s wrath fourteen years earlier when he first questioned Money’s conclusions and with whom Money had later clashed at the gender identity symposium in Dubrovnik.

“When we got onto Dr. Diamond,” Smith says, “it was then quite interestingly obvious that we were getting into what is best described as scientific warfare—and that warfare can get quite bloody.” Indeed, given Money and Diamond’s long history as doctrinal adversaries, the BBC reporters were at first wary about using Diamond as an expert commentator on the case, fearing that any opinions he expressed might not reflect an objective scientific viewpoint. “You have to be careful to find out: Was this something personal, or was it not?” Williams says. “I was satisfied that Diamond was actually raising something which deeply troubled him ethically. Whether or not he liked Money is quite another matter.”

Diamond says that he had no special dislike for Money. Their altercation of six years earlier he had forgiven as a by no means rare eccentricity in a scientist and perhaps a result of the bibulous nature of the Dubrovnik cocktail party. Even after that encounter, Diamond had tried to communicate with Money. “I asked John several times in the late 1970s about the twin,” Diamond says. “He didn’t want to talk about it. He said that the kid was going through some troubles unrelated to the sex reassignment and that it would be inappropriate to bother her at this time. So I let it go.”

But Diamond had never deviated from his conviction that sex reassignment of a developmentally normal infant was impossible, and he had not hesitated to publish this opinion—even as recently as a few months before the BBC contacted him. In the 1979 volume Frontiers of Sex Research, Diamond had cited the case, saying that on the evidence Money had so far published, it seemed to be “good fuel” for the power of rearing over biology, but in what today looks like a statement of extraordinary prescience, Diamond warned, “with puberty, the penectomized twin has a good likelihood of rebelling at the assignment of rearing which is in conflict with biological heritage.”

Diamond agreed to be interviewed, and his segment was filmed on a rocky precipice overlooking the ocean. Asked by Williams what impact it would have on the field if the twin were shown to be having “severe and sustained” problems, Diamond said, “I think it depends on who you ask. There are those who believe in the [case] almost as a religious entity.” He went on to say that if all the combined medical, surgical, and social efforts could not succeed in making the child accept a female gender identity, “then maybe we really have to think that there is something important in the individual’s biological makeup; that we don’t come to this world neutral; that we come to this world with some degree of maleness and femaleness which will transcend whatever the society wants to put into it.”

The documentary, entitled The First Question (in reference to the universal query at birth, “Is it a boy or a girl?”), aired in Britain on 19 March 1980. An impressively clear overview of the complex issues involved, the program also sought a balance in its depiction of Money’s work. Included in the program was an interview with the mother of one of Money’s intersexual research subjects, an XY male born with a tiny penis and undescended gonads, who on Money’s recommendation had been surgically reassigned as a girl. At eight years of age, the child, Paula, was described as successfully living in her female assignment. Yet the program was unsparing in its depiction of the far more theoretically important case of the developmentally normal twin—whose case seemed to be on the brink of collapse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What,” she asked, “was my name?”

12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We all knew they weren’t telling us the entire truth,” says Lyle Denike, one of Brian and David’s friends from that era. “But we didn’t want to push things too far. We knew we were dealing with something very personal.”

Heather Legarry, Brenda’s friend from sixth grade, also had doubts. In July 1983 she was working for the summer at her brother’s Go-Cart track after completing her freshman year of college. “I was selling tickets,” Heather says. “Suddenly there was a familiar face at the counter. It was Brian Reimer—or so I thought. I said hi, but instead of smiling, he flushed and stammered, then stepped away and pointed at this other guy. Up steps the real Brian. I asked, ‘Who was that? He looks just like you.’ Brian said, ‘That’s my cousin David.’ I wondered if it was Brenda, but I just brushed it off, telling myself, If he says it’s his cousin, it’s his cousin.”

“I couldn’t say anything to her,” David says of this encounter with the one person from his childhood whom he had considered a true friend. “It would take too long to explain everything. It was easier just to avoid people.”

Later that summer, when David turned eighteen, he reached another milestone, for it was then that he came into possession of the money that had been held in trust for him since he was two and a half years old—money awarded to him when St. Boniface Hospital settled out of court with Ron and Janet for a sum of sixty-six thousand dollars in 1967. This was far less than the millions that some had predicted they would receive in compensation for their son’s penile ablation. But then urgently in need of funds, and warned by their lawyer that a judge might overturn a large jury award, the young couple had accepted the hospital’s offer. In 1960s dollars, it had seemed a considerable sum to Ron, who at the time had an annual income of only six thousand dollars. Placed in trust for David, the settlement money was to be used by Ron and Janet only for treatment associated with David’s injury and had financed the family’s annual trips to Johns Hopkins. By 1983 the money had grown to over a hundred and seventy thousand dollars—a sum that instantly made David one of the best-heeled young men in his peer group. In the hopes of “lassoing some ladies” (as he would later tell Diamond), he bought a souped-up van. Equipped with a wet bar, TV, and wall-to-wall carpeting, it was quickly dubbed “The Shaggin’ Wagon.”

David did not do any shagging in the van, however. Indeed it was in his relations to girls that he felt the worst complications of his transition—complications that were only exacerbated by the fact that by age eighteen he was not merely a passably attractive young man, but an arrestingly handsome one. His sudden popularity with what was now the opposite sex introduced a terrible dilemma, because he knew his penis neither resembled nor performed like the real thing (it was incapable of becoming erect). “How do you even start dating?” David says, recalling this period of his life. “You can’t. You’re in such an embarrassing situation.”

Eventually he did date a girl two years his junior, a pretty but flighty sixteen-year-old. For David there was an ever-present anxiety. “I would think, What the hell is going to happen when she wants to go further than a kiss? How am I going to handle that?” He developed a strategy for stopping their sexual encounters before they became too intimate: he would drink a lot and then say, I’m tired, I’m going to pass out now. But one evening he miscalculated and truly did drop unconscious after drinking too much. When he woke in the morning, his girlfriend was beside him in the bed, and he could tell from her expression that she had looked between his legs. He had no choice now but to tell her. He explained that he had suffered an “accident.” Within days, he says, everyone knew. Just as in his childhood, he was suddenly the object of muttered comments, giggling, and ridicule. For David, this proved unbearable. The next day, he swallowed a bottle of his mother’s antidepressants and lay down on his parents’ sofa to die.

Ron and Janet discovered him unconscious. “Me and Janet looked at each other,” Ron recalls, “and we were wondering if we should wake him up.”

Janet remembers saying to Ron, “I wonder if we should just leave him, because that kid has done nothing but suffer all his life. He really wants to die.” Within seconds, however, she had made up her mind, and they lifted him and rushed him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. On his release one week later, he tried it again, ingesting another bottle of his mother’s antidepressants, then running a bath with the intention of drowning himself. “I was thinking, When you’re dead you don’t feel anything, no pain in your heart, no pain in your body, no humiliation—nothing, but I couldn’t make it to the bathtub. Every step was like I had a hundred-pound weight on each foot.” With the overdose beginning to suck him under, he lay down on the sofa and dropped unconscious. This time Brian saved him.

David withdrew from the world. He spent sojourns of up to six months at a time alone in a cabin in the woods near Lake Winnipeg. By now he refused to see even Dr. McKenty, but she had convinced him to bring a tape recorder with him to the cabin and to speak his thoughts into it. One night in January 1985, he did so.

“This is David Reimer,” he began, his voice slurred with alcohol. “I’m nineteen. Soon I’ll be turning twenty. I’m halfway through grade twelve. What I plan to do in my life is”—after a pause, he continued in a new tone—“OK, by the time I’m twenty-five, I should be all fixed up. I don’t plan to marry until I’m in my thirties, because I’m just not the—not the type to get married.” He rambled for a few minutes before returning to the subject that was preying obsessively on his mind. “I want to marry a chick that’s sort of shy,” he said. “Not too shy. And I would prefer her to have kids of her own. Because I want to have kids. And I can’t have kids.” This statement seemed to trigger a new set of associations. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I got some money, about a hundred grand, because of an accident I had a long time ago. When I was small.” He paused again, as if trying to decide whether he had the energy, or inclination, to speak about this part of his life. He did not. “Well, that’s just about it,” he said. “I hope everybody out there has a great life.” He turned off the recorder and never made another tape.

It was not until almost a year after David had retreated to his cabin, that two friends of his, Harold Normand and Ron Mandel, talked him into leaving the woods and indeed getting far from frigid mid-winter Manitoba. Given subsequent events, there was an irony in the destination the three young men chose: Hawaii. On 11 January 1986 they flew to Honolulu, where they stayed for a week in the Outrigger Hotel not ten minutes drive from Milton Diamond’s house. The trip had a salubrious effect on David, but it was an incident in the airplane on the way to Hawaii that suggested he was finally coming out of his depression and beginning to come to terms with the secrets of his past.

In the plane over the Pacific Ocean, he turned to Harold. “He said to me, ‘I always wanted to tell you about that sister of Brian’s,’” Harold recalls. “I said, ‘You don’t have to. I already know.’”

Harold had heard the truth three years earlier when he first met David. Immediately suspicious about the tale of the twin sister who had died in a plane crash, Harold mentioned the mystery to his parents. They instantly recalled the short newspaper item from 1967 about a twin boy who had lost his penis while being circumcised at St. Boniface Hospital. They had later learned through the grapevine that the family was named Reimer and had even heard whispers that the boy had been raised as a girl. “My parents put two and two together,” Harold recalls. A uniquely private person himself, Harold had never gossiped about David’s secret among their friends and had never revealed to David that he knew the truth.

In the months after their trip to Hawaii, David confided much to his friend that he had never told anyone except Mary McKenty. “He said to me that he never felt like a girl, so that when he found out he was a boy, his mind was made up to switch back,” says Harold. “Either that, or he was going to be a lesbian. Because that was his biggest problem when he was growing up. He had feelings about girls.”

After his return from Hawaii, David heard from his doctor about a new type of artificial penis, one that would, the doctor said, be a vast improvement over his current one. His new penis would resemble the real thing, and through the use of advanced microsurgery could be supplied with sensation. Shortly before his twenty-second birthday, David underwent a second phalloplasty. In a twelve-stage operation, which took three surgeons thirteen hours to perform, David underwent a procedure known as microvascular right radial artery forearm flap reconstruction of the penis—an operation in which the flesh, nerves, and an artery from his right wrist to elbow were cut away and formed into a tube to build the new urethra and main body of his penis, and a segment of cartilage was grafted from one of his left ribs to give structural support to the organ. Despite the long recovery time, David was delighted with the results, which were immeasurably better than his former phalloplasty. “I was driving down the street afterward,” David says, “and I just started crying.”

Despite the marked improvement in both appearance and sensation of his new penis, it would be two more years before David used it for sex. The delay had less to do with his feelings of confidence about his penis, he says, than with the legacy of what had been done to him in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital when he was twenty-two months old—his castration. “I kept thinking, What am I going to say to the woman I meet who I want to marry?” David remembers. “What am I going to say to her when she says she wants children and I can’t give her children?” Even if he did meet a woman who said she did not want to have children, she might change her mind later in life and then resent him. “I thought it would be unfair for me to do that to somebody I love,” David says.

Still, David could not put thoughts of marriage and children out of his mind. His brother had married at the age of nineteen, and by the summer of 1988, Brian was twice a father—and possessed everything David wanted for himself. “I got so terribly lonely,” David says. “I did something I’d never done before. I wound up praying to God. I said, ‘You know, I’ve had such a terrible life. I’m not going to complain to You, because You must have some idea of why You’re putting me through this. But I could be a good husband if I was given the chance; I think I could be a good father, if I was given a chance.’”

Two months later, Brian and his wife introduced David to a young woman of their acquaintance. Twenty-five years old, Jane Fontane was a pretty woman with blue eyes and shoulder-length strawberry blond hair. At five feet one and one hundred and eighty pounds, she was sensitive about her weight, but she carried her generous size easily, and to those who knew her, it seemed merely a natural adjunct to her nurturing personality. When I first met Jane in the summer of 1997, her combination of unflappability, affectionate friendliness, and infectious laughter reminded me of no one so much as the central character in Joyce Cary’s comic novel Herself Surprised—the unsinkable Sara Monday, the picaresque mother of five children, a woman whom Cary describes as a kind of force of nature, a woman whose earthy goodness and fundamental optimism see her through every scrape life can throw at her—including her own youthful poor judgments.

Like Sara, Jane possessed a guilelessness and innocence that helped to explain how, by the time she met David, she was herself the single mother of three children—by three different fathers. Unworldly to a fault, Jane was a lifelong nonsmoker and nondrinker, a homebody who did not go to bars and didn’t approve of “cursing.” Her chief flaw was a certain neediness, a result perhaps of her difficult childhood in Winnipeg, where she was raised by her mother and stepfather.

Jane was sixteen when she joined the civilian cadets—an army program offered at her school as an extracurricular activity. There she met Robert, a cadet a few years older than her. “He was the first guy I ever fell in love with,” she says. Robert suggested that they leave Winnipeg and move across the country to his hometown of Bancroft, Ontario. To her parents’ chagrin, Jane agreed to the plan. The couple stayed with Robert’s parents for the summer, then moved on to Quebec, where Jane soon learned that she was pregnant. Robert talked about marriage, but then he started taking off. “He’d go out for cigarettes and he wouldn’t come back for six hours,” Jane recalls. One day she saw him on the street holding hands with another girl. Shortly after that, she left and returned home to Winnipeg on the train.

Her parents were furious to learn that she was pregnant, but she was jobless and broke and had no choice but to stay with them. Her daughter was born in 1982. Jane was twenty years old. She was an excellent mother, surrounding her daughter with the love that she felt she had never received from her own parents. Jane eventually moved out to a small apartment in the city’s West End, where a friend of a friend introduced her to Dean, a handsome, dark-haired young man who worked as a security guard. They started dating, but he was too young to settle down, even when Jane discovered that she was pregnant again. Their daughter was born in 1984. Dean helped out financially when he could, but his visits gradually grew less frequent and finally stopped altogether. With two infants at home, Jane could not work, but eventually she got a job through a government program and started making money. Life was looking up. Then she met a young man who lived across the way. His name was Raymond. “Our apartment block was right across from each other,” Jane says. “He said, ‘If you ever want to use my washer and dryer …’” Jane took him up on this offer, and more besides.

“I’m not proud of it,” Jane says. “But I was really looking for love in all the wrong places. I wanted a relationship. I wanted someone to love me.” When Raymond learned that Jane was carrying her third child, he told her about his “common-law wife” who happened to be returning soon from British Columbia. “That’s how I lost Raymond,” Jane says. Her son was born in the early spring of 1988. Jane was at the lowest point in her life.

Three weeks after her son’s birth, Jane got a call from her mother. Anne had some news. Lately she had been keeping house for a young woman recuperating from surgery. Anne had mentioned to this woman Jane’s difficult situation, saying that she would probably never find someone to marry her now that she was saddled with three children. The woman had mentioned that she knew a young man who might like to meet Jane: he was her brother-in-law, the identical twin of her husband, Brian.

Jane had little hope for this long-shot matchmaking effort, but she gave the woman a call. Brian’s wife told Jane all about David’s accident and how he had received a substantial sum of money as a settlement. “She said he’s got this van and a convertible. I said, ‘Does it really matter how much money he has or what he has between his legs? If he’s not good to me or the kids, he can go his own way.”

The two women arranged a day when Jane would go to Brian’s house and meet David. The two hit it off right away. David, who was probably the more nervous of the two, says, “She had such a true heart.”

The foursome made plans for a double date and that weekend went to a restaurant. At the end of the night, David held Jane’s hand, and they made a date to meet each other alone. Soon they were dating regularly, and as they fell increasingly for each other, David began to worry about when, and how, to tell Jane about his injury. He finally got up the nerve one day while they were driving in his van up to his cabin in the woods. He had not got more than a few words out when Jane stopped him. She told him she already knew, and she didn’t care about it. “She said that she had known all that time and she didn’t want to tell me because she figured it would bother me,” David recalls. “That’s when I knew it was the real thing; I knew that she cared for me.”

Asked her feelings about knowing her husband was raised to age fifteen as a girl, Jane treats it as a fact less to be marveled at than one to inspire outrage. “When I saw those pictures of him as Brenda, I just shook my head and thought, Poor child. He didn’t look like a girl to me. He looked like Dave. I thought, Going to school must have been the hardest thing.”

In the fall of 1989, they moved into an apartment together. David’s phalloplasty allowed him to have sex with Jane. “You know how it is when you get into a relationship,” Jane laughs. “You do it a lot in the first year.”

David sold his “Shaggin’ Wagon”—emblem of the reckless, oats-sewing youth that he had never actually had. With the money, he bought a diamond ring.

“I remember,” Jane says, “he came into the bedroom and he said, in a very serious voice, ‘I want to talk to you.’ We were sitting on the bed. He took out this box and opened it up. There was a ring inside. My eyes were like saucers. He said, ‘Will you marry me?’”

On 22 September 1990, two years and four months after they first met, David Peter Reimer and Jane Anne Fontane were married at a ceremony in Regents Park United Church in the city of Winnipeg. Jane’s two daughters were bridesmaids. David wore a white tuxedo; Jane wore a white dress. Standing before the congregation of some one hundred and thirty guests, made up of friends and family, on an unseasonably warm fall morning, David and Jane spoke the vows that they had written for one another.

“Jane,” David said, “I take you to be my wife; to laugh with you in joy, to grieve with you in sorrow, to grow with you in love, to be faithful to you alone, as long as we both shall live.”

And Jane said to him, “David, I choose you to be my life’s partner. I promise to respect you, to encourage you, to forgive you and instill hope in you. I give you my love for this day, and for all the days to come.”