As Nature Made Him (14 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO:
To Know My Birth

7

T
HE
R
EIMERS 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.”