As Nature Made Him (13 page)

“Yes,” Brenda said.

“You are pretty wise, aren’t you?”

“No,” Brenda said.

“I think so.”

“No,” Brenda said. “I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?” Money persisted.

Brenda did not reply.

“How are you?” Money asked.

Brenda said nothing.

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

“No,” Brenda repeated, “I’m not.”

“You’re one of my favorite girls.”

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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