As Nature Made Him (11 page)

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Who plays mother?”

“Me.”

“And who plays father?”

“My brother.”

“And who is the baby?”

“My doll.”

“How do you play with the dolls?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yep,” Brenda said.

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

“Fists and feet and hands.”

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

“I could beat him up.”

“Who wins?”

“I do.”

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

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

“You mean it’s flat?” Brenda said.

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

“I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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