Sexual Politics, Biological Consequences

by Andrew Grossman

A routine operation—a circumcision—gone horribly wrong sparked one of the greatest debates in the gender wars. It took a publicity-crazed sexologist to give the feminist-led sex-as-a-social-construct movement ammunition to overpower, for a time, traditional notions of biologically-determined sex. And it took over twenty years for the real story of Bruce/Brenda/David to emerge and strike back against the movement that replaced nature with nurture and science with gender politics.

John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl explores the unusual case of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer who, even years after his sexual reassignment, was still trotted out in psychological and feminist literature as proof of the primacy of nurture—purely social influences—over nature. Colapinto recounts in great detail a shocking story, one which served as precedent for thousands of sexual reassignments.

The story known as “John/Joan” in medical literature is unsettling. It is distasteful. It is true. And it should serve as a warning against politically motivated social scientists who bring their theories into the realm of the hard sciences: even unintentionally, the results can be tragic.

Twin boys, Bruce and Brian Reimer were born in 1966 to working-class parents. Their mother Janet noticed that both twins, previously healthy, experienced pain with urination at seven months—diagnosed by a pediatrician as phimosis, a condition easily remedied by circumcision.

Their dual operations were scheduled at Winnipeg’s Saint Boniface hospital. Only one, Bruce’s, was performed.

The surgeon used a Bovie cautery (which cauterizes electronically as it cuts to prevent bleeding) in place of a scalpel. Two low-current passes failed to sever Bruce’s foreskin. The surgeon increased the power. Dr. Cham, the anesthesiologist, heard a sound “like a steak being seared.” Shortly thereafter, a second surgeon performed emergency surgery to place a catheter through which Bruce could urinate.

The infant’s penis, burnt solid, soon fell off.

His brother’s phimosis later resolved itself without surgical intervention.

Doctors recommended to the Reimers phallic reconstruction for Bruce, but the surgery was crude and, in several respects, ineffective. Bruce would undergo the surgery before starting school and again as his body grew.

But reconstruction was soon abandoned when coincidence presented the Reimers another choice. On a television talk show, they saw Dr. John Money, a sexologist and practitioner of sexual reassignments.

Inventor of the term “gender identity,” Dr. Money was renowned for his research of sexual psychology. Money was especially interested in hermaphroditism, the condition of having ambiguous genitalia, and the conclusions that could be generalized from the gender assignment of hermaphrodites.

Money’s research indicated that sex assignment could be made without regard to underlying biological sexuality. He described “matched pairs,” hermophrodites of similar genetic make-up who had been successfully assigned to opposite sexes. Money brought these results into the nature versus nurture debate as proof that upbringing (nurture) can overpower what had previously been assumed biological imperative. It was unclear, though, whether that conclusion extended beyond the initially unassigned, and, obviously, experimentation on normally differentiated infants was out of the question.

Money jumped when he realized the potential ramifications of Bruce’s case: not only had Bruce been born a healthy, differentiated baby, but he came matched with the perfect control experiment: his brother Brian. At Money’s invitation, the Reimers flew to Baltimore, site of his Psychohormonal Research Unit, for a consultation. Money issued an ultimatum: a successful reassignment was possible, but the time in which it could be done, the “gender identity gate,” was running out. Although the Reimers were undecided returning to Winnipeg, within days they agreed to Money’s plans. Bruce became Brenda Lee, and, in July of 1967, his conversion was finalized in the gynecological operating room of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

In the years that followed, Brenda, identified as “John/Joan,” became a celebrity in the sexological, psychological, and gender studies worlds. In 1972, Money published an account of the case in his Man & Woman, Boy & Girl. Other articles and books followed, as well as frequent lecturing. To Money, Brenda was a success; tomboyish at times, but clearly feminine. She played with dolls in his office, took an interest in cleanliness, and was wholly different from her brother, Brian. Alice Sargent’s 1977 Beyond Sex Roles, the 1979 volume of Textbook of Sexual Medicine, and many other texts and articles cited the case. Ian Robertson wrote in his 1977 textbook Sociology that John/Joan “indicated that children can be easily raised as a member of the opposite sex.”

The Reimers, however, were beginning to learn otherwise. According to Brian, “There was nothing feminine about Brenda.” She eschewed dolls at home, favoring toy guns, fort-building, snowball fights, and army games. Although Janet wasn’t overly concerned – she’d “seen all kinds of women in my life,”—she still pushed Brenda towards more traditionally feminine pursuits, like cooking, cleaning, and the Girl Scouts. Occasionally, Brenda would oblige her mother, but more often she would revert to her more masculine self.

Masculine behavior, no matter how pronounced, doesn’t prove Money’s grand experiment a failure. Brenda herself would do that in her adolescence.

She had had, from first enrolling, difficulties in school—social problems that quickly spilled into her academic work, keeping her back several grades. Brenda described the situation: “There’s the girls over here, and there’s the boys over there. Separated. Which direction [do I go]? There’s no belonging.” Beyond simple ostracism, Brenda was taunted by her peers, girls and boys, for her underlying difference which, although unrevealed, was eerily apparent.

Brenda’s condition should have been no less apparent to Dr. Money, whom she saw yearly, than it was to her classmates. Money, an advocate of childhood sex education and experimentation, would talk to Brenda about sexual matters and attempt to engage her in sexual role-playing with Brian. In these games, Brenda revealed herself as the dominant twin. Further, she consistently demonstrated male tendencies on the tests given to her at these sessions. In one, the Draw a Person Test, she drew a boy. Brenda identified the figure as herself. Money goaded her repeatedly towards the answers he was seeking, and even misunderstood her speech when it fit his theoretical schema. When Money asked her, as part of a string of questions, if she would rather be a boy or girl monkey, Brenda replied “gorilla.” Money’s notes indicate an answer of “girl.”

At age 11, Brenda began a regimen of female hormones and began to grow breasts. Embarrassed, she consciously gained weight to cover them up. Money, working through the Reimers, local psychologists, and doctors, placed increasing pressure on his patient to submit to the final stage of reassignment—surgery which would complete a functional vagina. Brenda, however, refused consent; she would flee from the room when her mother broached the subject. Even a final meeting with Money at Johns Hopkins in 1978 left the issue at a stalemate.

Instead of advancing with her classmates to high school, Brenda enrolled at vocational school, where, in a sort of rebellion, she adopted a more masculine style instead of the dresses and frilly things she’d been made to wear earlier. This provoked further taunting and even threats. Soon Brenda was being privately tutored at home.

The turning point for Brenda came in 1980. Her doctors in Winnipeg realized the futility of proceeding with Money’s plans. Brenda was unhappy, and her family, strained nearly to the point of breaking, sunk into depression and dysfunction. The last hold-out, an endocrinologist, relented after he asked Brenda, during a confrontational examination, if she wanted to be a girl. She answered, screaming, “No.” Several days later, Brenda’s father told her how she had come to be as she was.

Within months, Brenda became David. And now, after several dark years and suicide attempts, after a painful mastectomy, after two kinds of penis reconstruction surgery, David is a happily married man, able to perform sexually, though unable to father children.

The failure of John Money’s celebrated project was first reported in a 1980 BBC special, “The First Question.” The details, however, were sketchy, and the program went unmentioned in professional literature.

Money’s 1991 book, Biographies of Gender and Hermaphroditism, made no mention of his most famous case except to castigate those who had been involved in the BBC documentary, among them a rival sexologist, Milton Diamond, whose theories of gender development often ran counter to Money’s.

Diamond tracked down Brenda, now David, through the Winnipeg psychiatric community. David’s tale became the basis for Diamond’s 1997 paper cautioning doctors against performing assignment surgery on infants—on average, half such surgeries would end like Brenda’s—unsuccessfully and with unimaginable psychological costs.

And the rationale behind Brenda’s and others’ unimaginable traumas? The failed theory of nurture—that human action can override the most basic of nature’s designs.

The idea of gender as a purely social construct is not a new one. Indeed, so long as homosexuality has been recognized as such—several centuries—there have been such theories into its existence. Only in recent times, however, after the rise of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and, most notably, feminism, has gender too been taken from simple being and placed under man’s alleged control.

The reasons for this are complex and oftentimes politically motivated. Feminists, seeking to avoid the “separate but equal” ghetto to which natural sex differences might constrain them, have argued vigorously for “nurturist” theories—that society (read: men) is responsible exclusively for their social roles, from their physical capabilities to, oddly enough, motherhood.

The idea, then, that sex itself is a construct—that no underlying difference separates males from females—gives women, specifically feminists, license to be men—to demand equal and identical responsibility and expectations, and to eliminate all gender distinctions.

Political ramifications aside, these theories, with scant evidence behind them to begin with, have been further discredited in the past decade, as genetics, endocrinology, and increasingly detailed analysis have given us insight into our most hidden biology. There are, as most intuitively assume, differences between the sexes beyond just genitalia. These differences can extend to body structure, brain composition, and, by extension, to personality.

None of this is to say that nurture plays no role in who we are; indeed, it plays a great role in shaping our beliefs, values, and, altogether, total worldview. But it is nature that determines our sex and, to an unknown extent, our gender. Pure nurture theories are proposed in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence and troubling anecdotal evidence. They are political theories advanced with a certain agenda, an agenda counter to our innate beings.