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

Acknowledgments

BESIDES THE REIMER family and all others named in this book who granted me interviews, I’d also like to acknowledge the crucial help of Mel Myers, Josh Weinstein, John Danakas, and Keith Black in Winnipeg; Dave Amber at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.; Sara Pinto at the BBC in London; Miriam Zuger, whom I happened first to contact just days after the passing of her husband, Bernard, and who supplied me with reprints of his fascinating papers; Holly Devor, who has written two books on intersexuality; Edward Eichel who gave me the difficult-to-find Paidiki interview with John Money; Drs. Mariano and Marvin Tan who fielded endless e-mail queries about the twins’ early lives; and photographer Ed Buryn who kindly sent me a copy of his book Twin Births. Thanks, also, to the staffs of the New York Academy of Medicine Library, the library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and the New York Society Library, where much of this book was written.

This book would not exist if not for my friend and longtime editor at Rolling Stone, Bob Love. He helped me shape and fine-tune the structure of the original article (which formed the narrative blueprint for As Nature Made Him), and he was always a patient sounding board for the ideas herein. Many thanks, too, to Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner, who was passionate about this project from the outset, and whose reaction to the article’s 17,500-word first draft was to bark, “It’s great. Now gimme more!” Thanks also to the other people at Rolling Stone whose work on the article bears a lasting imprint on this book: Erika Fortgang, Tom Conroy, and Marian Berelowitz.

Closer to home, I’d like to thank certain members of my family for the grounding they gave me in medical and scientific terminology and ideas which made my journeying in these areas a good deal less disorienting than it would otherwise have been: my mother Carol, a registered nurse; my brother Ted, a neurosurgeon; and my late father, Vincent, who was for many years the chief of Urology at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and who, nightly, regaled me and my three siblings with tales from the medical world—including, in the early 1970s, the amazing news that when newborn boys lose their penis to circumcision they are turned into girls. Not himself a pediatric urologist, my father did not perform infant sex reassignments, but he (like the majority of medical men) accepted the psychological rationale behind them. I hope he would be proud of my efforts, with this book, to disseminate to the medical community (and world at large) contradictory evidence not available for the past three decades.

Many thanks to my agent, Lisa Bankoff, who made sure my proposal came before the eyes of the superb Robert Jones at HarperCollins. Not only did Robert give this book the most meticulous and artful edit, purging it of longueurs, repetition, and other maladies, he also somehow found the time to write explanations for each suggested change in the margin. I took them all. Thanks, too, to Fiona Hallowell at HarperCollins. Any errors of fact or interpretation, meanwhile, are my own.

I want to thank my wife, Donna Mehalko, who is the first person to read everything I write and upon whose instincts I rely utterly. Thanks, too, to my son John Vincent. Born eleven months into the process of my writing this book, he gave me, with his beloved presence, a special insight into the unimaginable horror faced by Ron and Janet Reimer all those years ago, and whose newborn crying, at times a distraction, was also a happy goad to keep at the computer and press on to the end.