As Nature Made Him (8 page)

The main procedure was a bilateral orchidectomy—removal of both testicles. As Jones’s operating room notes reveal, the baby, under general anesthesia, was placed on his back on the operating table, each foot secured in a stirrup so that the groin was exposed for the doctors. Three clamps were placed on the scrotum, and two incision lines were drawn on either side of the midline. With a pair of scissors, Dr. Jones cut away the demarcated scrotal flesh in a strip 1.5 centimeters long to lay bare the testicles and seminal vesicles within. With a scalpel, Jones cut away both the right and left testicles, then used a length of catgut thread to tie off the cord and vessels that in adulthood would have carried sperm to the severed urethra.

In closing the scrotum, Dr. Jones then fashioned a rudimentary exterior vagina using the remaining scrotal skin, which he pulled up from its lower edge to meet the top edge of the incision and sewed in a manner that left the scrotum not as a single empty sack, but as two symmetrical flaps. “A rolled piece of gauze covered with telfa was then placed in the midline to effect a midline furrow leaving constructed labia majora on either side,” Jones’s operating room note concludes.

Ron and Janet say that by the time they decided to have their baby undergo clinical castration, they had eradicated any doubts they might have had about the efficacy of the treatment. This was a crucial turnabout since according to Dr. Money it was a “vital consideration” that the parents of a sex-reassigned child harbor no doubts that could weaken the child’s identification as a girl and woman.

Whether Dr. Money himself was able to eradicate his own doubts about the child’s future development is debatable. In a letter he wrote on 28 August 1967, more than a month after Brenda’s sex change surgery, his tone admitted of considerable caution regarding the child’s prognosis. This was perhaps to be expected, since the letter was addressed to the Winnipeg lawyer whom Ron and Janet had hired to sue St. Boniface Hospital and the doctor who had botched the circumcision.

“The reassignment of a baby’s sex is usually undertaken only in cases of a birth defect of the genitalia,” Money wrote. “Then one usually expects that the child’s psychosexual differentiation will be congruous with the sex of rearing. In any given case, however, it is not possible to make an absolute prediction.”

And indeed, by the summer of 1967, when Bruce Reimer underwent his castration, Dr. Money had special reason to be particularly reluctant to make an “absolute prediction” about the patient’s future psychosexual development. Two years earlier he had undertaken to discover if the findings of the Kansas team about the masculinizing effects on behavior of prenatal testosterone in guinea pigs could be observed in humans. Under Money’s direction, one of his graduate students, Anke Ehrhardt, had studied a group of ten girls, ranging in age from three to fourteen, who had been subjected to excesses of testosterone in the womb when their pregnant mothers had taken a synthetic steroid called progestin to prevent threatened miscarriage. Like the guinea pigs in the Kansas team’s study, nine of the ten girls had been born with masculinized genitals—an oversized clitoris and in some cases partially fused labia. As interviews with the children and their parents revealed, all nine of those girls demonstrated what Money and Ehrhardt called (in an article published six months before Bruce Reimer’s castration) “tomboyishness.” This, the authors explained, included marked preferences for “masculine-derived” clothes and “outdoor pursuits,” a “strong interest in boys’ toys” (these included guns and toy soldiers), a “high incidence of interest and participation in muscular exercise and recreation,” and a “minimal concern for feminine frills, doll play, baby care, and household chores.”

Central to Dr. Money’s program for the sex assignment of hermaphrodites was his edict that the children, when very young, know nothing of their ambiguous sexual status at birth. Money put the same stricture into effect with baby Brenda Reimer. “He told us not to talk about it,” Ron says. “Not to tell Brenda the whole truth and that she shouldn’t know she wasn’t a girl.”

It was shortly after the Reimers’ return from Baltimore, and not long before the twins’ second birthday, when Janet first put Brenda in a dress. It was a special dress that Janet had sewn herself, using the white satin from her own wedding gown. “It was pretty and lacy,” Janet recalls. “She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, Oh my God, she knows she’s a boy and she doesn’t want girls’ clothing. She doesn’t want to be a girl. But then I thought, Well, maybe I can
teach
her to want to be a girl. Maybe I can train her so that she wants to be a girl.”

Ron and Janet tried their best to do just that. They furnished her with dolls to play with; they tried to teach her to be neat and tidy; and they tried, whenever possible, to reinforce her identity as a girl. So when, for instance, the twins had just turned four, and Brian was watching Ron shave and asked if he could shave, too, Ron gave him an empty razor and some shaving cream to play with. When Brenda also clamored for a razor, Ron refused. “I told her girls don’t shave,” Ron says. “I told her girls don’t have to.” Janet offered to put makeup on Brenda, but Brenda didn’t want to wear makeup.

“I remember saying, ‘Oh, can I shave, too?’ ” David says of this incident, which forms his earliest childhood memory of life as Brenda. “My dad said, ‘No, no. You go with your mother.’ I started crying, ‘Why can’t
I
shave?’ ”

Brian says that the episode was typical of the way their parents tried to steer him and his sister Brenda into opposite sexes—and how such efforts were inevitably doomed to failure. “I recognized Brenda as my sister,” Brian says. “But she never, ever acted the part.”

Today, with the twins having rejoined each other on the same side of the gender divide, the stark physical differences between them eerily testify to all that David has been through. When David first introduced me to Brian in the summer of 1997, I instinctively assumed that the man who took my hand in a firm grip was an
older
brother, so different did this balding, dark-bearded, bearlike man look from his youthfully thin, smooth-faced brother. It was only when I looked a little closer at Brian’s face and recognized the startling familiarity of the eyes, nose, and distinctively shaped mouth that I realized I was meeting David’s identical twin, and that he was in fact the
younger
of the two (albeit by a scant twelve minutes).

As children, their physical differences were, if less pronounced, equally deceptive. Photographs of them as preschoolers show a pair of exceptionally attractive children: a puppy-eyed little boy with a crew cut, and a slim, brown-eyed girl with wavy chestnut hair framing a face of delicate prettiness. However, by all accounts of family, teachers, guidance clinic workers, and relatives, this illusion of two children of opposite sexes disappeared the second Brenda moved, spoke, walked, or gestured.

“When I say there was nothing feminine about Brenda,” Brian laughs, “I mean there was
nothing
feminine. She walked like a guy. Sat with her legs apart. She talked about guy things, didn’t give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup. We both wanted to play with guys, build forts and have snowball fights and play army. She’d get a skipping rope for a gift, and the only thing we’d use
that
for was to tie people up, whip people with it. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys, dump trucks. This toy sewing machine she got just sat.” That is, David recalls, until the day when Brenda, who loved to take things apart to see how they worked, sneaked a screwdriver from her dad’s tool kit and dismantled the toy.

Enrolled in Girl Scouts, Brenda was miserable. “I remember making daisy chains and thinking, If this is the most exciting thing in Girl Scouts, forget it,” David says. “I kept thinking of the fun stuff my brother was doing in Cubs.” Given dolls at Christmas and birthdays, Brenda simply refused to play with them. “What can you
do
with a doll?” David says today, his voice charged with remembered frustration. “You
look
at it. You
dress
it. You
undress
it. Comb its hair. It’s boring! With a car, you can drive it somewhere,
go
places. I wanted cars.” Brenda also wanted toy guns. Once, around age eight, she went to the store to buy an umbrella. Waiting in line to pay, she saw a nearby display of toy machine guns. After a moment’s hesitation, she put down the umbrella and bought one of the guns. At age ten, Brenda would prove to be a crack shot with the pellet rifle Ron and Janet bought for Brian—a rifle in which, ironically enough, Brian himself evinced little interest.

Brenda had always tried to co-opt Brian’s toys and clothes—a habit that would invariably initiate fights. “There were knock-down-drag-out wrestling matches all the time,” Janet says. “Brian was a weakling compared to Brenda. She was wiry. More often than not, Brenda won. Poor Brian felt so bad getting beat up by a girl.”

Ron and Janet were troubled by Brenda’s masculine behavior, but having been admonished by Dr. Money not to entertain any doubts about their daughter, they felt that to do so would only increase the problem. Instead they tried to focus on those moments when Brenda’s behavior
could
be construed as stereotypically feminine. “She could be sort of feminine sometimes, when she wanted to please me,” Janet says. “She’d be less rough, keep herself clean and tidy, and help a little bit in the kitchen.”

In her letters to Dr. Money describing Brenda’s progress, Janet made sure to emphasize those moments so that the psychologist would know that Janet and Ron were doing everything they could to implement his plans. She also informed Money of their daughter’s masculine leanings, but the psychologist assured her that this was mere “tomboyism.” This was an explanation that Janet found comforting, and she would cling to it for many years to come. “I have seen all kinds of women in my life,” she says, “and some of them, you’d swear they were men. So I thought, Well, maybe it won’t be a problem, because there are lots of women who aren’t very effeminate. Maybe it could work. I
wanted
it to work.”

Ron’s and Janet’s parents were struck by Brenda’s behavior. “When a girl would come to play with her,” says Ron’s mother, Helen, “she would not play like a girl, and then she would say to her mother that she wanted the girl to go home.”

“I noticed it when she had that fight with the boy across the street,” says Janet’s mother, Betty. “This boy tried to beat her up. And Brenda beat back.”

Janet’s uncle Johnny and aunt Evelyn were also unable to ignore certain realities about their niece. They might have surmised that Brenda was simply imitating Brian, but they knew better. They knew Brian particularly well because they were the ones who had baby-sat him for the three weeks while Ron, Janet, and Brenda were in Baltimore for Brenda’s operation. Without his sister around, Brian had been a quiet, gentle, sensitive boy—quite unlike the little terror who was tearing up Ron and Janet’s home with Brenda. Johnny and Evelyn formed the private opinion that, if anything,
Brenda
was the leader of the pair, and it was Brian who followed her lead into boyish mayhem and mischief. “She was the instigator,” Johnny says. Neither Johnny nor Evelyn ever voiced this to Ron and Janet, of course. “We were trying to go along with this,” Evelyn explains. “We were not going to start looking for trouble.”

Brenda, meanwhile, was having her own doubts. “You don’t wake up when you’re four and a half years old, look at the clock, and say, ‘Yup, I feel like a boy,’ ” David explains. “You’re too young.” At the same time, he says he knew something was amiss, even before he fully understood the concept of boy and girl. “I thought I was very similar to my brother. It’s not so much me being a guy, it’s more that we were
brothers
. It didn’t matter that I was in a dress.”

Brian didn’t question his sister’s boyish ways until they went off to school. “I was in grade one or two,” he says, “and I saw all these other girls doing their thing, combing their hair, holding their dolls. Brenda was not like that. Not at all.” At that time Brenda voiced the ambition to be a garbage man. “She’d say, ‘Easy job, good pay,’ ” Brian explains. “I thought it was kinda bizarre—my
sister
a garbage man?” Brian would finally grow so perplexed with his sister’s unconventional behavior that he went to his mother about it. “Well, that’s Brenda being a tomboy,” Janet told him, which he accepted.

It was not an explanation that Brenda’s schoolmates were prepared to accept, however. Upon entering kindergarten at Woodlawn, a small school near their house, Brenda became the object of instant ridicule from both boys and girls. “As you’d walk by, they’d start giggling,” David recalls. “Not one, but almost the whole class. It would be like that every day. The whole school would make fun of you about one thing or another.”

“It started the first day of kindergarten,” Janet says. “Even the teacher didn’t accept her. The teacher knew there was something different.”

She did indeed. Contacted twenty-six years later, the twins’ kindergarten teacher, Audrey McGregor, said she had never seen a girl like Brenda before or since. At first glance the child looked like the thousands of other girls who have passed through McGregor’s classroom, but there was a rough-and-tumble rowdiness, an assertive, pressing dominance, and a complete lack of any demonstrable feminine interests that were unique to Brenda in McGregor’s experience. And there was something else. McGregor mentions an incident that occurred shortly after the school year began. “A female classmate of Brenda’s came up to me,” McGregor recalls, “and she asked, ‘How come Brenda stands
up
when she goes to the bathroom?”

Ever since setting out to toilet train the twins, Janet had been grappling with Brenda, trying to convince her daughter not to stand and face the toilet bowl when she peed. No amount of coaxing seemed to work. Janet had mentioned the problem to Dr. Money, who had assured her that it was common for girls to insist on standing up to urinate and that the problem would correct itself in time. It had not. For Janet, Brenda’s stubborn insistence on standing created a housekeeping nightmare, since Brenda’s urine stream, which shot out almost perpendicular to her body from her severed urethra, splashed all over the back of the toilet seat. As for any suggestion that Brenda’s stubborn insistence on standing up to urinate indicated that the treatment was not working—this was not, Janet says, something she could afford to believe.