by Sam Kean
Now, the point here isn’t that there are certain intrinsically “male” ways of speaking or strutting around. It’s that, for whatever reason, a majority of males in North American culture do walk and talk a certain way, and Brenda instinctively copied those habits as her own. Why? Because—despite lacking a penis, and despite years of being socialized as a girl—she still identified with men. She still felt herself to be male on some primal level.
Unfortunately, Brenda’s classmates were oblivious to this struggle. All they knew was that a purported girl was aping male habits, and like children often do, they pounced on this difference and started mocking her as a “gorilla” and a “cavewoman.” They especially loathed her aggressiveness. She was always plowing into other girls at recess and knocking them flat; they hated playing with her. In fact, Brenda proved much more stereotypically aggressive than her twin brother, stealing his toys and even pummeling him for fun. (One time, while they were bathing together, little Brian got an erection and stood up to show it off. “Look what I got!” he yelled. Brenda responded by slapping him in the jacobs.) More seriously, when she was older, Brenda got expelled from school for slamming a girl who was taunting her into a wall and then flinging her onto the ground.
All the while, Brenda and her parents were flying out to Baltimore every year to show Money how well the transition was going.6 To be fair, the Reimers did hide some of Brenda’s troubles from Money—they wanted to seem like good parents. But Money dismissed or ignored plenty of warning signs about his star patient, especially in private interviews with her. Money would start the interviews by asking Brenda a series of questions. When she tried to respond, he’d prompt her to answer a certain way or even talk over her. Brenda quickly learned to feed him the baloney he wanted to hear: Yes, of course, she loved sewing and playing with dolls and getting her hair done. No, she never got into fights at school. “You can’t argue with a bunch of doctors in white coats,” she later explained. “You’re just a little kid and their minds are already made up.”
Other sessions with Money proved outright terrifying for Brenda. However suave on television, Money had a foul mouth in private and was often vulgar with patients. He casually asked if they liked golden showers, and talked about sex in the crudest terms. (“Have you ever fucked someone? Wouldn’t you like to fuck someone?”) To help Brenda socialize as female, he showed her pictures of naked children, as well as gory photographs of childbirth, assuring her that she too would have a “baby hole” after her next surgery.
The most outrageous sessions—bordering on criminal—involved Brenda and Brian together. Money would order them to strip naked in his office (if they didn’t obey, he’d snap at them), and then have them inspect each other’s genitals while he watched. (Ron and Janet had no idea this was taking place; they trusted Money.) Worse still, Money forced the twins to engage in “sex rehearsal play,” one of his favorite activities. The children kept their clothes on for this, but Money would force Brenda to kneel, doggy-style, and make Brian bump his crotch against her butt over and over. Other times he had Brenda lie spread-eagle on her back and forced her brother to mount her. At least once, Money snapped a picture of them doing this.
Brenda quickly pegged the oh-so-enlightened Money as a pervert. She also resented his obsession with her genitals. “I wasn’t very old at the time,” she later said, “but it dawned on me that these people gotta be pretty shallow if [genitals are] the only thing they think I’ve got going for me.”
All the while, Money was boasting to his colleagues about Brenda’s progress. In scientific papers he declared that no one would ever suspect she’d been born a boy; he even speculated about what a sexy little dish she’d grow up to be someday. Throughout it all, he managed to keep the family anonymous, but he also fed Brenda’s story to the media, who parroted his arguments about the insignificance of biology. In 1973, for example, Time reported that the so-called twins case “casts doubt on the theory that major sex differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.”
If Money was a bigshot before, he rode the Reimer twins to international stardom. Based on his work, sex- and gender-reassignment surgery became the standard treatment worldwide for infants with ambiguous genitalia and genital trauma, with up to a thousand operations yearly. In every speech, every interview, every television spot—and there were plenty of each—he crowed about how Brenda was thriving as a girl.
Meanwhile, the actual Brenda was contemplating suicide. Sometime during grade school, she had an awakening similar to the one that many transgender people report. At first, she just felt different from other children in a vague way. Then she felt different from her purported sex, from girls. Then she started feeling actively more like boys. Ignorant of her birth sex, she didn’t know what to make of all this. By adolescence, she was tormented by thoughts of killing herself: “I kept visualizing a rope thrown over a beam.”
The rest of the family wasn’t faring much better. Brenda’s struggles monopolized the family’s attention, and the long-neglected Brian began lashing out—shoplifting and dabbling in drugs. Brian’s friends also made it clear that, unless he too wanted to be a pariah, he’d better ditch his freak of a sister socially. To Brian’s later shame, he did. Meanwhile, Ron slid into alcoholism. Night after night he’d slump home from work at the sawmill and anesthetize himself with a six-pack in front of the television; later, he graduated to whiskey. He’d then snort awake in the morning, and drag himself out the door to do it all over again. “I sort of knew it wasn’t working after Brenda was seven or something,” he once said. “But what were we going to do?” Janet eventually had an affair to get revenge on Ron (he’d stop coming to bed at night). When Ron found out, Janet was so ashamed that she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills. After that, she had several nervous breakdowns and suffered from spells of psychosis where she couldn’t separate fantasy from reality.
Still, Janet never lost faith in John Money’s reality. Like many mothers, she blamed herself for her children’s failings, and she redoubled her efforts after every setback. For instance, because Money had once recommended dresses for Brenda, Janet forced Brenda to wear a dress to school every day, even during Winnipeg’s arctic winters. (A teacher finally intervened.) Money also suggested that Ron and Janet have sex in front of the twins. Janet wouldn’t go that far, but did start parading around naked in front of Brenda, to habituate her to the female body.
Per Money’s instructions, Brenda was also visiting psychiatrists in Winnipeg to help her adjust. They were privy to the botched circumcision, and they realized that the efforts to feminize her were failing. Still, what could they do? John Money was a famous TV sexologist; they were schmoes from Manitoba. Psychologically speaking, they also fell prey to the sunken-cost fallacy: We’ve already put in this much effort. Better to keep going. In all, they felt helpless to change course or challenge Money—exactly the sort of blind obedience to authority that allows unethical behavior to thrive.
Still, Money’s power did have limits. Strangely, Brenda’s chromosomes hadn’t kept up with his latest theories on the insignificance of biology, and around the time that most boys hit puberty, her body started going through male-typical changes7: her shoulders widened, her arms and neck thickened, and her voice started cracking.
In the summer of 1977, the year Brenda turned twelve, Money tried to tame Brenda’s body by prescribing estrogen pills. When a suspicious Brenda asked what the pills were for, her father muttered, “To make you wear a bra.” Brenda, however, didn’t want to wear a bra, and began tossing the pills in the toilet. Unfortunately, they left a telltale pink streak as they dissolved, and from then on, her parents hovered over her and made sure she swallowed them. To her horror, Brenda soon developed breasts, which she masked by binge-eating ice cream to gain weight.
Before long, Brenda loathed the sight of Money, and a final break between them took place in Money’s office in 1978. He’d been pushing Brenda to under
go more cosmetic surgery on her genitals. To Money’s anger, Brenda finally stood up for herself and refused. So, changing tactics, Money surprised Brenda one day by bringing a post-op male-to-female transsexual to their session. Her job was to consult with Brenda and explain how much better her life would be after surgery.
A nervous conversation ensued. When it ended, Money reached out to give Brenda an avuncular squeeze on the shoulder. But Brenda no longer trusted him. She saw his paw reaching out for her and feared he was going to drag her into the operating room then and there. She bolted from the office and began darting through corridors of the hospital, finally climbing to the roof to hide. When Brenda’s parents picked her up later that afternoon, she straight up told them that if she ever had to see Money again she’d kill herself. A colleague of Money’s later said, “I’d never seen a patient in my life who behaved that way about going to another doctor—who showed that depth of emotion.”
What saved Brenda’s life was meeting Mary McKenty in 1979. Like every other psychiatrist in Winnipeg, McKenty saw right through Money’s claims of a successful gender conversion. Unlike other psychiatrists, McKenty didn’t push Brenda to conform to Money’s agenda. She just listened, and tried to win Brenda’s trust.
It took a while. At first Brenda lashed out at McKenty, drawing nasty caricatures of her and writing up a “death warrant.” But McKenty persevered, cheerfully, and day by day Brenda thawed. For the first time, she opened up to someone about her anxieties. She also recounted her dreams, both the happy ones, in which she was a farmer doing fieldwork, and the nightmares, in which John Money appeared in a sinister cape. In response, McKenty and Brenda jokingly founded the Don’t Want to See Dr. Money Club, and installed themselves as officers.
Such compassion was essential then because Brenda’s struggles in school had reached a crisis point. Brenda had always had poor grades and discipline problems, and for her ninth-grade year, in the fall of 1979, her parents enrolled her in a vo-tech program, to become a car mechanic. There, she let her feminine habits slide, wearing denim jackets and construction boots and becoming the first female in school history to take Appliance Repair. But the new school sat in a sketchy part of town, and a fellow student soon pulled a knife on her. Several of her female classmates also moonlighted as prostitutes, and when they caught Brenda standing up to pee one day, they threatened to kill her if she ever set foot in the girls’ bathroom again. She took to peeing in a nearby alley instead.
Amid this chaos, a local doctor (after consulting with McKenty) finally prevailed upon Ron and Janet to come clean with Brenda and reveal the full story of her life. Ron had actually tried to do so once before, around the time when Money started pressuring Brenda to get more surgery. But he’d gotten choked up, and only managed to say that a doctor had made a mistake “down there” long ago, and now a surgeon wanted to fix it. Brenda, baffled, didn’t follow what he meant. She merely asked about the doctor, “Did you beat him up?”
This time, Ron took Brenda out for ice-cream cones first—a kindness that put Brenda instantly on guard. Was there a divorce imminent, or god forbid, another surgery? Ron didn’t say. In fact, he didn’t say anything. They got the ice cream and drove all the way home and pulled into the driveway in silence. He’d wimped out yet again.
Then, suddenly, Ron did it. He made himself start talking, and everything tumbled out at once—the bungled circumcision and how she used to be a boy, Money’s gender theories and the plan to raise her as a girl. Ron talked and talked until he was blubbering, and broke down in tears right there in the driveway.
Brenda listened in silence, her forgotten ice cream dripping down her hand. She was stunned, of course, but mostly relieved. “All of a sudden everything clicked,” she said. “For the first time things made sense.”
From that moment forward, Brenda was determined to live as a man. She had just one question for her father: “What was my [birth] name?” He choked out “Bruce,” but Brenda rejected that as too nerdy. She chose David instead, after the biblical king: “It reminded me of a guy with the odds stacked against him, the guy who was facing up to a giant eight feet tall. It reminded me of courage.”
David would need that courage. His public debut as a male took place at a wedding six months later. He still had extra fat and breasts, and his extended family stared when he arrived in a suit. But he insisted on dancing with the bride, and got through the night intact. He felt more confident afterward, and started taking testosterone. He quickly shot up an inch, and in that classic male rite of passage, he began growing a shitty mustache.
In a topsy-turvy way, David’s lack of friends suddenly became an asset now: there was no one to break the news to about his transition, or the embarrassing fact that he lacked a penis. His brother Brian even made amends for abandoning him earlier, incorporating David into his friend group. The twins made up a not-very-plausible story about how David was a cousin that had come to live with them. As for Brenda, um, she’d died in a plane wreck on her way to visit an old boyfriend in British Columbia. No one really bought it, but the story deflected the questions well enough.
Still, however better he felt, David’s problems didn’t magically disappear after a dozen years of what he called “brainwashing.” In particular, he was enflamed with fantasies of revenge against the doctor who’d botched the circumcision. Unfortunately, anger and testosterone pills don’t mix well, and David took $200 he’d saved from a paper route, bought an unregistered Russian Luger on the streets of Winnipeg, and smuggled it into the hospital where the doctor worked. When he arrived at his office and whipped the gun out, the doctor claimed not to recognize him. “Take a good look,” David hissed. The doctor started weeping. David screamed, “Do you know the hell you put me through!”
But the doctor’s sniveling deflated David; he turned to leave. The doctor called out, “Wait!”, but David was already gone. He wandered down to a nearby river and smashed the Luger with a rock. He’d almost lost his life once to this doctor’s mistake, and he decided that there would be no more casualties. Life, unfortunately, had other plans.
In October 1980, when David was fifteen, he underwent a mastectomy to remove his breasts, then a phalloplasty the next July to provide male genitalia. The surgeons sculpted his new penis from thigh muscle and reconstituted a scrotal sac from his onetime vulvar flesh. The testicles were purely decorative, two plastic eggs. But his new urethra kept getting blocked and infected, requiring eighteen trips to the hospital that first year alone. He also found the sensation of a penis dangling between his legs a little spooky.
Once the infections settled down, however, and he’d grown into his body, David embraced his masculinity. When he turned eighteen, he took part of a $170,000 settlement from the hospital that had botched the circumcision and bought a van with a television and a wet bar inside to “lasso some ladies.” He called it the Shaggin’ Wagon. With his wiry good looks, testosterone-hardened muscles, and mess of curly hair, he never lacked for dates.
What he did lack was the confidence to do anything on dates, beyond kiss. He coped with his fear of sex by drinking too much and passing out before anything physical happened. But one morning he awoke to find his date beside him, and from the look on her face, he could tell she’d peeked beneath his clothes. The girl soon told everyone in town about his Frankenpenis, and old-timers recalled that story in the newspapers long ago, about the poor boy who’d lost his manhood. The humiliation proved too much for David. The very next day he swallowed a bottle of his mother’s antidepressants and slumped down on the family sofa to die.
His parents found him passed out next to the empty bottle. Heartbreakingly, Janet wondered aloud whether to leave him there; for once in his life David looked peaceful. But of course she couldn’t just let her son die, and a minute later she and Ron rushed him to the hospital. He spent a week there—then immediately tried to kill himself again after discharge, by swallowing more pills and drowning himself in the bathtub. He blacked out before crawlin
g in, and this time his brother hauled him to the hospital.
The suicide attempts ceased after that, but the brooding didn’t. Brian soon married and started having children—something David had always longed to do. This left David furious with the world, and he started spending months alone at a cabin in the wilderness outside Winnipeg.
David (née Bruce, née Brenda) Reimer poses in his living room with his wife, Jane, and son, Anthony.
Still, things slowly got better over the next few years. Although hesitant, he told a few close friends about his accident and his former life as a girl. Then his brother’s wife set him up with a woman named Jane, who had her own troubled history—three children with three different men—and was ready to settle down. She and David hit it off immediately, and he liked the fact that she already had children, since he could adopt them. Nevertheless, he refrained from telling her about his past, assuming she’d reject him. Finally, when he couldn’t hide it any longer, he started to confess—only to have her hush him. She already knew; she’d known before their first date. David’s heart melted: “That’s when I knew it was the real thing. I knew that she cared for me.” He sold the Shaggin’ Wagon and bought a diamond ring, and married Jane in September 1990.
By that point, David had a new penis as well. Phalloplasty had advanced rapidly in the previous decade, and in a thirteen-hour operation, surgeons crafted a decent-looking unit from the nerves and flesh of his forearm and the cartilage from one of his ribs. It was functional enough to have sex with, and while it lacked much sensation during coitus, he could still ejaculate and orgasm. He soon settled into married life and got a job as a janitor at a slaughterhouse—tough, bloody work that thrilled him. Everything seemed to be going so well.
