Pediatrician Dr. Harry Medovoy was also called in to consult on the case. Though Medovoy had spent his entire career practicing in Manitoba, he had an international reputation. He was a member of the editorial board of the American journal Pediatrics and founder of a children’s hospital at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Center, which bears his name today. Though he was a relentless booster of Canadian medicine, it was Medovoy’s opinion that the child should be seen at one of the major American medical centers. He recommended the Mayo Clinic, a mere half-day’s train ride away in Rochester, Minnesota. Thus, upon Bruce’s release from the hospital on 7 June—six weeks after he was first admitted to St. Boniface—Ron and Janet took him on the train to Rochester.
At the Mayo Clinic the baby was examined by a team of doctors. They recommended that Bruce have an artificial phallus constructed at some time shortly before he began school. Like the Winnipeg doctors, the Mayo Clinic physicians explained that phalloplasties were by no means foolproof: they required multiple surgeries through childhood, and the cosmetic and functional results were not promising.
Ron and Janet could hardly believe that this was all the Mayo Clinic doctors could offer them. They wondered why they had bothered to go to the expense and trouble of coming all the way to this famous medical center merely to hear what they had heard back in Canada.
Feeling that they had now exhausted all their options, Ron and Janet returned to Winnipeg and tried to reconcile themselves to raising a son who, no matter how successful the phalloplasty, “must live apart.”
* * *
The Winnipeg Free-Press and its rival, the Tribune, soon got wind of the story. The newspapers each ran an article about a child whose penis was burned off at St. Boniface Hospital. The press did not print the Reimers’ name, however, so Ron and Janet were able to keep secret from their neighbors the dreadful accident that had befallen their child. When Janet accepted invitations from other young mothers in the neighborhood to come over for coffee, she sat silently while the others happily traded information about their babies. Only when she got home did she burst into tears and wail, “I hate you, God!” Her taciturn husband, typically, permitted himself no such outpouring of emotion. Ron had once tried to confide in a couple of friends at work about the accident, but the guys joked about it. “I stopped talking to those people,” Ron says. “I stopped talking to everybody, pretty much.” It only added to the young couple’s misery that Brian’s phimosis had long since cleared up by itself, his healthy penis a constant reminder that the disastrous circumcision on Bruce had been utterly unnecessary in the first place.
The twins’ first birthday, on 22 August 1966, passed in gloom for Ron and Janet. By January they felt like prisoners in their house. They could not even go out together to see a movie (if they had felt so inclined), since they were afraid to hire a baby-sitter who might gossip about the tragedy. By February, Ron began to wake in the middle of the night from dreams that he was strangling Dr. Huot.
Then on a Sunday evening in mid-February—some ten months after Bruce’s accident—Ron and Janet saw something that jolted them from their despondency. Their small black-and-white TV happened to be tuned to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular current affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days, where a man identified as Dr. John Money was a guest. A suavely charismatic individual in his late forties, bespectacled and with the long, elegantly cut features of a matinee idol, Dr. Money was talking about the wonders of gender transformation taking place at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Today, with the subject of transexual surgeries a staple of daytime talk shows, it is difficult to imagine just how alien the concept seemed on that February evening in 1967. Fifteen years earlier, in 1952, a spate of publicity had attended the announcement by American ex-GI George Jorgensen that he had undergone surgical transformation to become Christine. That operation, performed in Denmark, had been roundly criticized by American hospitals, which refused to perform the surgeries. The subject had faded from public view—until now, when Johns Hopkins announced that it had not only performed two male-to-female sex changes, but had established the world’s first clinic devoted solely to the practice of converting adults from one sex to the other. The driving force behind the renowned hospital’s adoption and promotion of the controversial procedure was the man who now appeared on the Reimers’ TV screen: Dr. John Money.
The name rang a distant bell for Ron and Janet. Shortly after Bruce’s accident, one of the Winnipeg plastic surgeons had said that he had mentioned Bruce’s case to a leading sex researcher at a medical meeting in the United States; the man had suggested that Ron and Janet raise Bruce as a girl. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic had also said something to Ron and Janet about a man in Baltimore who could help them raise Bruce as a girl. While the Mayo Clinic doctors had not themselves recommended the procedure, they had said that the Reimers might like to get a second opinion. At the time, Ron and Janet had not even considered the idea of a sex change. Or so they had thought. As they watched Dr. Money on television, they realized that the idea had never completely left them; it had lodged in the backs of their minds, as Ron puts it, “like a seed that had been planted.” Now, as they watched and listened to Dr. Money speak, it was as if that seed had grown and burst into full flower.
It was his confidence that was most striking. Even under the pressure of the staring television cameras and live studio audience, Dr. Money’s words, tinged with a highly cultured, British-sounding accent, issued forth with uncanny fluency. He did not stumble over a single syllable, even when the show’s interviewer—a bulldoglike young man named Alvin Davis—asked pointedly why psychiatrists were “so opposed” to the practice that Dr. Money was promoting.
“Well,” Money said, “I suppose it’s a self-evident fact that there are many people who feel that this is not the psychiatric way to treat these patients, since the usual definition of psychiatry is in terms of psychotherapy and the talking treatment. However, there are a small group of people who, like myself, believe that it’s thoroughly justified in an attempt to constantly increase our ability to help human beings and to see exactly what the outcome is when, let’s say, twenty or thirty people can be followed for five to ten years after having received this kind of treatment.”
“But isn’t it a fact,” Davis said, “that a homosexual will come to you and say, ‘I want to be castrated.’ And then you will make the judgment—or you and a board, a panel at Johns Hopkins will make the judgment—about whether to castrate that person?”
“Yes,” Dr. Money said, mildly. “If you want to state it that way, it’s true.”
“Not only to castrate that person,” Davis continued, his voice taking on the rising tone of a prosecutor, “but to inject hormones into the person and virtually change the person—not into a female, but into a male with female parts. Aren’t you arrogating to yourselves certain decisions that not only psychiatrists don’t want to have, but perhaps God doesn’t want to have?”
“Well,” Dr. Money said, the flicker of a smile underlining the martini-dry sarcasm in his tone, “would you like to argue on God’s side?”
“No,” Davis said. “I would like to know whether you believe God doesn’t belong in this.”
“Well,” Money replied, returning to his tone of unflappable calm, a tone ever so slightly shaded by patient condescension, “I’m not sure that’s really a particularly relevant question—although I’m aware that many would. May I,” he continued, “give you the answer of the group of ministers in Baltimore who were interrogated by the press at the time of the announcement in the papers there? The thirteen of them agreed that in terms of the magnitude of the problem—especially in terms of its magnitude in the lives of the people concerned—that this was ethically justifiable as an attempt to help them. There was one person who withheld an answer until a later date, and that was a representative of the Roman church.”
“Why isn’t the work being done here in Canada?” Davis demanded to know. And
he repeated his earlier query: “And why are so many psychiatrists here so opposed to it?”
“Oh,” Money said, almost languidly, “I would think for the same reason that there tends to be a traditionalism in most places. I don’t need to tell you that in many branches of medicine, science—or even housekeeping or farming—there is a tendency to hang on to the past, to cling to the past.”
“And you’re the pioneer?” Davis asked.
“Well,” Dr. Money said, “perhaps in a small way.”
At this point the camera cut from Dr. Money and his questioner to a blond woman who walked out onto the set. Dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and a matching close-fitting jacket, she took a seat in the chair across from the two men. A close-up shot revealed that her round, pretty face was expertly made up, in the style of the mid-1960s, with heavy eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, her mouth thickly painted with lipstick.
“This is Mrs. Diane Baransky,” the show’s announcer said. “Until four years ago, her name was Richard.”
Ron and Janet gaped at the TV screen. It was their first glimpse, ever, of a transexual. It was one thing to hear Dr. Money talk about sex change in the abstract; it was another to see it with your own eyes. Ron and Janet could hardly believe it. If they hadn’t been told that Mrs. Baransky was born a man, they would never have guessed it. Even knowing it, it was hard to believe. She looked like an attractive, even sexy woman. The way she moved, walked, sat—even her voice, despite an ever so slight huskiness, had the timbre of a woman’s as she said hello to her host and fellow guest.
After a few preliminary questions from Davis, Dr. Money spoke up, deftly seizing the reins of the interview.
“Diane,” he said, “I think people would be extremely interested if you could give us a short sketch of the difference that it makes to have had this procedure—to compare the old life with the new.”
“Well, there is a tremendous difference,” Mrs. Baransky said. “It’s a way of finding yourself. You actually fit into society, you’re more accepted in a more normal society.” She explained that the discrepancy between her anatomic self as a male and her inward sense of herself as a female had been a trial to her growing up. “As a teenager—or being young—when you’re different from anybody else, it’s very hard.” Becoming a woman, Mrs. Baransky explained, had solved all her problems of being teased and “singled out.” Until her sex change, she had felt completely alone. Now she was accepted as a woman and had recently married her husband, a fellow hairdresser. “I was different,” she said. “I was never complete. I was neither a man nor a woman.”
“And now you feel complete as a woman?” Davis asked.
Her response was unequivocal: “Oh, yes, definitely. Yes. Completely—body and mind.”
The audience was then invited to ask questions. It was near the end of the segment that a young man asked the question that had been forming in Janet’s mind. He asked about “the other group of sex patients” whom Dr. Money treated—newborn babies with what Dr. Money had earlier called “unfinished genitals,” babies whose private parts were neither male nor female at birth. In replying to this question, Dr. Money explained that he and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins could, through surgery and hormone treatments, make such children into whichever sex seemed best, and that the child could be raised happily in that sex. “The psychological sex in these circumstances,” as Dr. Money put it, “does not always agree with the genetic sex nor with whether the sex glands are male or female.”
Despite the big words and the rapidity with which Dr. Money spoke them, Janet and Ron caught their meaning. Dr. Money was saying that the sex a baby was born with didn’t matter; you could convert a baby from one sex to the other.
Janet turned to Ron. “I think I should write to this Dr. Money,” she said.
Ron agreed. When the segment ended a few minutes later, Janet wrote a letter to Dr. Money describing what had happened to Bruce. Dr. Money’s reply was prompt. He expressed great optimism about what could be done for the Reimers’ baby at Johns Hopkins and urged them to bring the child to Baltimore without delay.
After so many months of grim predictions, bleak prognoses, and hopelessness, Dr. Money’s words, Janet says, felt like a balm. “Someone,” she says, “was finally listening.”
2
DR. MONEY WAS indeed listening. In a sense, Janet’s cry for help was one that he might have been waiting for his entire professional life.
At the time the Reimer family’s plight became known to him, John Money was already one of the most respected, if controversial, sex researchers in the world. Born in 1921 in New Zealand, he had come to America at the age of twenty-five, received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, then joined Johns Hopkins, where his rise as a researcher and clinician specializing in sexuality was meteoric. Fifteen years after joining Johns Hopkins, he was already widely credited as the man who coined the term gender identity to describe a person’s inner sense of himself or herself as male or female. He was also known as the world’s undisputed authority on the psychological ramifications of ambiguous genitalia and was making headlines around the world for his establishment of the pioneering Johns Hopkins clinic for transexual surgeries.
As his unflappable appearance on This Hour Has Seven Days would suggest, Money was also a formidable promoter of his ideas. “He’s a terribly good speaker, very organized, and very persuasive in his recital of the facts regarding a case,” says Dr. John Hampson, a child psychiatrist who, with his wife, Joan, coauthored a number of Money’s groundbreaking papers on sexual development in the mid-1950s. “I think a lot of people were envious. He’s kind of a charismatic person, and some people dislike him.”
Money’s often overweening confidence actually came to him at some cost. His childhood and youth in rural New Zealand had been beset by anxieties, personal tragedies, and early failure. The son of an Australian father and an English mother who belonged to the Brethren church, he was a thin, delicate child raised in an atmosphere of strict religious observance—or what he would later derisively call “tightly sealed, evangelical religious dogma.” His sense of intellectual superiority developed early. On his first day of school at age five, he was set upon by bullies and took refuge with a female cousin in the girls’ play-shed, where boys would not be caught dead. “Having not measured up as a fighter,” Money would later write, “I was set on the pathway of outwitting other kids by being an intellectual achiever. That was easier for me than for most of them.”
Money’s childhood difficulties were compounded by his vexed relationship with his father. Six decades later he would write with barely controlled venom of this father, portraying him as a brutal man who heartlessly shot and killed the birds that infested his fruit garden, and administered to his four-year-old son an “abusive interrogation and whipping” over a broken window. This incident, Money wrote, helped establish his lifelong rejection of “the brutality of manhood.”
Money was eight years old when his father died of a chronic kidney ailment. “My father died without my being able to forget or forgive his unfair cruelty,” Money wrote. Not told of his father’s death until three days after seeing him carried off to the hospital, Money’s shock was compounded by the experience of being informed by an uncle that now he would have to be the man of the household. “That’s rather heavy duty for an eight-year-old,” Money wrote. “It had a great impact on me.” As an adult, Money would forever avoid the role of “man of the household.” After one brief marriage ended in divorce in the early 1950s, he never remarried, and has never had children.
After his father’s death, Money was raised in an exclusively feminine atmosphere by his mother and spinster aunts, whose anti-male diatribes also had a lasting effect on him. “I suffered from the guilt of being male,” he wrote. “I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality”—that is, the penis and testicles. In light of Money’s future fame in both adult and infant sex change, his next comment has an unsettling tenor: “I wondered if the world might
really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded at birth.”
A solitary adolescent with a passion for astronomy and archaeology, Money also harbored youthful ambitions as a musician, a goal doomed to disappointment once Money realized that he would never be more than a skilled amateur. As an undergraduate at Victoria University, in the New Zealand capital city of Wellington, Money discovered a new passion into which he rechanneled his thwarted creativity: the science of psychology. Like so many students drawn to the study of the mind and emotions, Money’s interest in the discipline was in large part as a means for solving certain troubling questions about himself. His first serious work in psychology, his master’s thesis, concerned “creativity in musicians,” in which, Money writes, “I began to investigate my relative lack of success in comparison with that of other music students.”
His decision soon after that to narrow his studies to the psychology of sex had a similarly personal basis. Having departed sharply from his parents’ faith, Money grew increasingly to react against what he saw as the repressive religious strictures of his upbringing. The academic study of sexuality, which removed even the most outlandish sexual practices from moral considerations into the “pure” realm of scientific inquiry, was for Money an emancipation. From his twenties on, he would be a fierce proselytizer for sexual curiosity and exploration. By the mid-1970s, with the sexual revolution in full rampage, Money would step out publicly as a champion of open marriage, nudism, and other more rarefied manifestations of the culture’s sexual unbuttoning. “There is plenty of evidence that bisexual group sex can be as personally satisfying as a paired partnership, provided each partner is ‘tuned in’ on the same wavelength,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures. Elsewhere, he has described his own private life as casual and eclectic—“a give-and-take of sexual visitations and friendly companionships with compatible partners, some women, some men.”
As Nature Made Him Page 3
