As Nature Made Him (35 page)

No writer working in the wake of Janet Malcolm’s book
The Journalist and the Murderer
can pretend to obliviousness of the many sticky ethical issues surrounding the exploitation of another person’s life for the purposes of making one’s own living. David Reimer’s ordeal, in particular, seemed to highlight these inherent dilemmas of reporting. Not only had he endured sufferings of a singularly private, and potentially embarrassing, nature, but he was also wholly unsophisticated in the ways of publishing. Flying into Winnipeg for the first time in June 1997, I couldn’t help but think of Malcolm’s “morally indefensible” journalist who swoops into town, coaxes his subjects to reveal their secrets, then departs with his treasure hoard of painful and private facts, which he publishes for his own financial gain and professional advancement.

Hoping to mitigate these unhealthy conditions of journalism, I made two resolutions. First, I promised myself that I would attempt to recount David’s experiences in a tone, and within a context, that did not sensationalize them. Second, I arranged to share with David, fifty-fifty, the profits from the book. While this financial arrangement seemed the only proper way to proceed, it introduced the other great ethical dilemma of journalism: the paying of a source. Critics of the practice (and I’ve always been one of them) point out that sources who agree to speak for money will shape their testimony to fit the perceived needs of the person paying the money. While this is a danger in cases where supermarket tabloids use cash to induce an “insider” to spill dirt on celebrities, I felt we had a quite different situation here. Long before any financial remuneration entered the picture, David had told his story, at length, to Diamond and Sigmundson, who documented it in videotaped interviews; and he had spoken to me, over the course of six months, for my
Rolling Stone
article, without payment of any kind. Given the degree to which his life had already been documented, it would have been easy for me to detect if David were now straying from his story for reasons related to money; furthermore (and perhaps most important), there existed an extensive contemporaneous written record assembled by the various physicians who had treated Brenda since the age of twenty-two months—a record against which all of David’s (and his family’s) memories could be checked; my extra interviews with a raft of teachers, old classmates, and others close to the family further guaranteed that the Reimers’ account of their ordeal was as accurate as possible and untainted by the monetary reward that had now entered the picture. But perhaps the greatest safeguard of all was that David was not, in fact,
agreeing to speak for money
. As he often said during the research for this book, he would have participated in this project even if there had been no financial incentive. He was telling his story in order to correct a published record of his life that had stood for over twenty-five years—a published record which expressly denied the extraordinary torments he had undergone and which, to David’s everlasting horror, had led to similar anguish for untold numbers of children. Given the nature of this enterprise, no amount of money (I’m convinced) could have prompted David to lie about his past. And indeed, no one could have sat up with David until the small hours of the morning, night after night, and listened to him drag up memories of his blighted childhood, as I did, and doubt the veracity of his testimony.

Given my confidence that money played no part in tainting this story, I refrained from disclosing the details of my financial arrangement with David when writing the main body of this book. I do so now only to counter an insinuation made by John Money who, shortly before this book’s publication, released a book of his own in which, at an effort at preemptive strike, he reprinted details of a gossip column that mentioned the size of the advance paid for this book and that moviemakers had become interested in David’s story. “While money talks,” he wrote, “it does not necessarily guarantee the truth.” I do not think it is possible to read the final chapter of this book, in which David’s long monologue is printed, and to feel that you are hearing money talking. Likewise, David’s humiliating accounts of his junior high school years, when, in a bid to alleviate the unrelenting pressure of doctors and parents to have vaginal surgery, he actually attempted to behave as a girl—donning lipstick and skirts, attending school dances, allowing himself to be pecked on the cheek by a boy. Not until we began our deep interviews for the book did David dredge up this most shaming (but important) passage in his life. He had never mentioned it to Diamond and Sigmundson; he had refrained from mentioning it to me during the many months I interviewed him for
Rolling Stone
. That David should choose to volunteer this information to me for a book that he knew would be revealing his actual name, face, and location was my most convincing guarantee that, in participating with
As Nature Made Him
, David would allow nothing to stand in the way of the truth of his experience.

Of course, as we embarked on those interviews in late 1997, there was no predicting how the world would take David’s story. It was one thing for him to have been written about in article-length stories and medical journals as “John/Joan,” quite another for him to step out as David Reimer, in a book. Would he join the ignominious John Wayne Bobbitt as fodder for late-night talk show jokes? Would supermarket tabloid photographers camp out on his lawn to get photos of “the boy who was raised as a girl”? Thankfully, he was spared these indignities. Upon its publication in February 2000, his story was greeted with universal compassion and respect by readers. Letters and emails flooded in from people expressing their admiration for his courage and survival. His neighbors, friends, and coworkers at the slaughterhouse (which closed shortly before the book’s publication) took the news of his past with equanimity. (Through a mutual friend, David was told that many of his coworkers had expressed sadness that David had never told them of his past.) Journalists and talk show hosts the world over requested interviews. David, standing behind his decision that his story should reach the widest possible audience, agreed to appear, undisguised, on a variety of these programs; among them, the
Oprah Winfrey Show
,
Dateline NBC
, and
Good Morning America
as well as a number of other TV and radio programs in the USA, Canada, Europe, and the Antipodes. In almost every instance, he was treated with remarkable sensitivity and tact by interviewers. David, in turn, refused to be just another entry in the unending parade of self-pitying victims who so often clutter our airwaves. Dry-eyed, forthright, blunt-spoken, he answered the questions put to him, never with an air of hoping to elicit pity (indeed, there is no emotion against which he responds with such impatience), and always with a finely calibrated sense of where the public’s need to know ends and his own privacy begins. Asked by Oprah Winfrey about the phalloplasty which restored to him the ability to have sex with his wife, David said that it resembles a normal organ, then looked out over the audience and said: “And that’s all I’m going to say about
that
”—which brought a round of cheers, laughter, and applause.

Once wholly anonymous, David is, today, often stopped on the street by strangers who recognize him and who wish to congratulate him for his strength. I happened to be with him in Manhattan after appearing live on
Good Morning America
when just such an encounter took place. A hurrying New Yorker emerged from the morning rush hour crowds on Fifth Avenue to seize David by the hand and tell him how he had inspired her. “You walk in the light, man!” she called out, as she moved back into the foot traffic. It was an extraordinary moment for both us. For over a year and a half, during our collaboration on the telling of David’s story, I had listened to David discuss how his past had made him feel like a “freak”; I had listened to him describe how the history of lies that had surrounded his childhood had made it impossible for him to trust people; I had listened to him describe, with sometimes acid cynicism, his sense of the essential cruelty of humanity, perhaps the saddest legacy of his history of being ridiculed and rejected by his peers from kindergarten on. During those moments when that New Yorker held David’s hand and poured out her heartfelt admiration for him, it was as if all those wounds were, for a moment, healed. And indeed, for several moments afterward, David was virtually speechless, simply smiling and saying, over and over, “How about that?”

Over the ensuing months, David would have many such encounters with strangers. “Some of them even ask for an autograph,” he says, laughing. “I like it. For my whole life I felt like people are going to ridicule you if they learn the truth.” Nor has the interest in David’s story abated in the months since this book was published. Interview requests continue to come in, with regularity, from countries where foreign editions are now beginning to appear. Whenever possible, David tries to honor the requests for interviews.

“It’s hard to talk about it all the time,” he recently told me about the seemingly unending publicity blitz. “The memories flood back that much faster. And they’re not good memories. But what choice do I have? No one else who’s been through what I’ve been through seems to want to talk about it. I don’t blame them. It’s embarrassing. But if you’re going to let people know the truth, you have no choice. It’s the only way to change things.”

Acknowledgments

B
ESIDES THE
R
EIMER
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.

A Tragic Update

O
N
M
AY 5, 2004
, I received a phone call from Ron Reimer, David’s father. Over the four years since the publication of
As Nature Made Him
I spoke with the Reimers periodically—usually with David or his wife, Jane, most often about business relating to the book. To hear from Ron was a surprise, and the tone of his voice suggested that he was not calling with happy news. “David took his own life yesterday,” Ron said. “He shot himself in his car.”

It was a horrible shock to hear that David had killed himself; but I cannot say it was a complete surprise. The specter of suicide had hung over David’s life from early childhood. He was just six years old when the psychiatric treatment team in Winnipeg identified symptoms in Brenda (as David was then known) often associated with suicide: depression, panic attacks, anxiety. In Brenda’s early teens her psychiatrists formally diagnosed her with depression; it was Brenda’s suicidal thinking at age fourteen that prompted Dr. Mary McKenty to insist to Brenda’s parents that she be informed of the circumstances of her birth so that she could begin trying to resolve her conflicts and confusion. Brenda, of course, did manage to make the transition from a female to a male identity. As David, he had the courage and strength to find a wife and become a father through adoption. But even after David had settled into the “normal” life he so craved his demons persisted. Haunted by memories of his blighted childhood, David had threatened to kill himself on several occasions; shortly before Dr. Milton Diamond discovered David’s identity and invited him to participate in the follow-up paper on his case David had tried to asphyxiate himself in his car in the family garage, but was discovered by Jane in time.