As Nature Made Him (17 page)

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

U
PON 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.