As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  David says he quickly learned to try to tell Money and his coworkers what they wanted to hear. And indeed, in Money’s notes Brenda can sporadically be seen making sober avowals to her love of “sewing, cleaning, dusting and doing dishes.” As Money’s notes also show, however, Brenda often slipped up in her pose of serene and dutiful femininity. In one instance during the June 1972 visit, she can be seen actually feeling out Money for the correct way to answer him, and readjusting her response—on the fly—to fit her questioner’s expectations.

  The exchange began when Money asked if Brenda fought back or ran away when boys started to fight her. Brenda at first blurted out, “Fight back,” but then immediately reversed herself. “No,” she said. “I just run away.” Money, clearly noting this transparent attempt to tell him what he wanted to hear, asked the question again. Now. Brenda could not be budged. She insisted that she did not fight boys—“Because I’m a girl.”

  “You’re a girl?” the psychologist asked.

  “And not a boy,” Brenda felt compelled to assure him. Then, apparently unsure whether she had given the correct answer, she asked, “Girls don’t fight, do they?”

  Minutes later, when Money asked the question from yet another angle (Did she use her hands to fight people?), Brenda promptly contradicted her earlier avowals with the exclamation that she hit hard—“with my fist.”

  By the following year, when Brenda was seven, Money’s notes show that she was less prone to such childish mistakes of inconsistency. When Money conducted his standard “schedule of inquiry” with her, she dutifully snapped out her answers with the swiftness of a call-and-response routine.

  “Do you like to play house sometimes?” Money asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who plays mother?”

  “Me.”

  “And who plays father?”

  “My brother.”

  “And who is the baby?”

  “My doll.”

  “How do you play with the dolls?”

  “Feed them and, uh, give them milk. That’s all.”

  At this same visit, however, Brenda’s subconscious conviction that she was a boy emerged. For it was after the above exchange that Money asked Brenda to describe a “good dream.” She began by describing a child on a farm with a horse. Before announcing the sex of the child, Brenda (as Money dictated in his notes) “paus[ed], and search[ed] for the next word” before revealing that the child was a boy.

  “It was nice,” Brenda continued, “and he wanted to eat, and he wanted to drink. He wanted to go to bed, and he wanted to sleep. That’s all.”

  The presence of Brian in joint interviews with his sister did little to soften the impression Brenda gave of a scrappy, headstrong, dominant little pugilist. Indeed, Money’s transcripts of his joint interviews with the twins only serve to reinforce an impression that family members, teachers, Child Guidance Clinic personnel, and others in Winnipeg described to me: that Brenda was the more traditionally masculine of the two children. When Money questioned the six-year-old twins about how to play with a doll, it was Brian who first spoke up, talking excitedly of how you hold, feed, and nurse them. Only when Brenda was pressed to respond did she try to parrot her brother’s answer.

  In this same interview, Money asked a question he would put to the twins repeatedly over the years: who was “the boss.” Brian at first claimed that he was, but Money was clearly dubious. (Two years earlier, he had already noted that Brian “does a lot of copying of her.”) He now repeated his question to Brian, asking if he truly was the boss. Brian’s bravado instantly collapsed.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  Brenda pounced. “Are you the boss?” she challenged him. “Do you want to be the boss? I don’t think so. OK, I’ll be the boss.”

  In this same joint interview, Money questioned the twins about their respective fighting habits. Brian said he fought—but only with girls, and in particular a little girl with orange hair who picked on him.

  “Do you fight with other boys?” Money asked.

  “No,” Brian said. “I fight with girls.” Brenda then explained that she defended Brian against his female antagonists, telling them, “You better not hit my brother.”

  Brenda was still more explicit about her role as Brian’s protector a year later. In an interview alone with Money, she once again described how she rescued Brian from bullies. At the same time she let slip that she sometimes bullied Brian herself.

  “Do you and Brian fight sometimes?” Money asked.

  “Yep,” Brenda said.

  “Do you fight with your hands, or fists, or feet—or how?”

  “Fists and feet and hands.”

  “Can you beat Brian up, or does he beat you?”

  “I could beat him up.”

  “Who wins?”

  “I do.”

  It was at this same visit that Money compared how the twins threw a ball. Brian had privately told the psychologist that Brenda threw “like a girl.” To test this exciting thesis, Money gave Brenda a ball of modeling clay and asked her to throw it. “[S]he pitched the ball in a fairly straightforward way from her left hand (both children are left handed),” Money dictated in his private notes. “It was a standard overhand throw.”

  David says that at seven he was still too young to be able to formulate in words his inner sense of being identical to his brother in every way but in the anatomy of his genitals. Brenda, though, can be seen clearly struggling to articulate this concept in an exchange with Money over the difference between boys’ and girls’ private parts. It was a topic that Money had quizzed the twins on since their earliest visits to the unit and one that clearly caused both children acute embarrassment. In the present instance, Brenda dodged and weaved for several minutes, too mortified and frightened to say the words penis and vagina. Instead she employed a number of stalling tactics that she had perfected over the years in her verbal dueling matches with Money. To his question about how to tell boys and girls apart, she first offered that a boy has short hair, a girl long. Money asked the question again. Brenda said that boys wear pants, girls dresses. This went on for several more minutes until Money, clearly growing impatient, said, “Well, I’ll help you. You have a look down here, between the legs. How is a boy and how is a girl down there? What’s the difference?”

  “You mean it’s flat?” Brenda said.

  “A boy has a penis—for peeing through,” Money said. “It is just like a little sausage, huh? What does a girl have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, she has it flat,” Money said. He continued: “A boy doesn’t have that. They are both different.” Money repeated: “They are both different. Now we know, don’t we?”

  At this point Money’s private notes continue: “Spontaneously she adds: ‘But we’re twins. We’re twins.’ ”

  Money, obviously taken aback by the vehemence of this rare outburst from the ordinarily tight-lipped girl, asked, “What does it mean when you say you’re twins?”

  Brenda helplessly cataloged several of the physical things that made her identical to her brother: their left-handedness, their voices, their eyes. Too ashamed to speak directly of her genitals, she left it up to Money to settle the mystery of how two such completely similar children could be “both different” in their anatomic sex. But Money failed, or declined, to catch Brenda’s meaning, and instead returned to his standard schedule of inquiry—the list of prepared questions about toys, friends, school, and fighting that he worked through at each visit.

  * * *

  As the twins got older, Money’s questioning grew more explicit. “Dr. Money would ask, ‘Do you ever dream of having sex with women?’ ” Brian says. “ ‘Do you ever get an erection?’ And the same with Brenda. ‘Do you think about this? About that?’ ”

  While attempting to probe the twins’ sexual psyches, Money also tried his hand at programming Brenda’s and Brian’s respective sense of themselves as girl and boy. One of his theories of how chi
ldren form their different gender schemas—Money’s term—was that they must understand at a very early age the differences between male and female sex organs. Pornography, he believed, was ideal for this purpose. “[E]xplicit sexual pictures,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures, “can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.” Such pictures, he said, “reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.”

  “He would show us pictures of kids—boys and girls—with no clothes on,” Brian says. David recalls that Dr. Money also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. “He’d say to us, ‘I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.’ ”

  Money had two sides to his personality, according to the twins: “One when Mom and Dad weren’t around,” Brian says, “and another when they were.” When their parents were present, Money was avuncular, mild-mannered. Alone with the children he could be irritable or worse, especially when they defied him. They were particularly resistant, the twins say, to Money’s requests that they remove their clothes and inspect each other’s genitals. David recalls an occasion when he attempted to defy the psychologist. “He told me to take my clothes off,” David says, “and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed, ‘Now!’ Louder than that. I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking.” In a separate conversation with me, Brian recalls that same incident. “ ‘Take your clothes off—now!’ ” Brian shouts.

  Though the children could not know this, the genital inspections that Dr. Money demanded they perform were central to his theory of how children develop a sense of themselves as boy or girl—and thus, in Money’s mind, crucial to the successful outcome of Brenda’s sex reassignment. For as Money stressed in his writings of the period, “The firmest possible foundations for gender schemas are the differences between male and female genitals and reproductive behavior, a foundation our culture strives mightily to withhold from children. All young primates explore their own and each others’ genitals, masturbate, and play at thrusting movements and copulation—and that includes human children everywhere, as well as subhuman primates. The only thing wrong about these activities is not to enjoy them.”

  But the children did not enjoy these enforced activities—particularly those involving “play at thrusting movements and copulation,” which Brian recalls that Dr. Money first introduced when the twins were six years old. Money, he says, would make Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks. Variations on the therapy included Brenda lying on her back with her legs spread and Brian lying on top of her. On at least one occasion, Brian says, Dr. Money took a Polaroid photograph of them while they were engaged in this part of the therapy.

  Of all the therapy the children received, this particular form of counseling left the deepest impression on both twins. Today David is still unwilling to speak about it. “There are some things I don’t want to remember,” he says. In 1989 he did describe the sessions to Jane Fontane, the woman who would become his wife. The two had just watched a TV documentary on CIA torture involving electroshock to people’s genitals. “He cried hysterically,” Jane told me. “He was crying about John Money. I’d never seen him like that. I tried to comfort him. David said Dr. Money made him go on all fours and made Brian go up behind his butt. They were being photographed. He mentioned that very act.”

  Brian speaks of the coital mimicry only with the greatest emotional turmoil. “It’s very hard to— I don’t understand why to this day we were forced to do that,” Brian says.

  Brian’s perplexity would have instantly been eradicated had he ever made a study of John Money’s theory of childhood sexual rehearsal play, articulated repeatedly in books, papers, speeches, and press interviews published over a quarter century, and its supposed critical importance in the establishment of healthy gender identity.

  Money’s fascination with the topic of coital mimicry in children had its origins in a trip he made in late 1969 to the northern coast of Australia with three professors from the University of New South Wales. There Money visited for two weeks in a village of coastal aborigines called the Yolngu—a tribe Money would later describe as wholly heterosexual and entirely free of any psychosexual gender confusions or dysfunction whatsoever. While visiting one of the tribal elementary schools, Money heard a secondhand report from an eight-year-old child “that two six-year-old relatives at the camp-fire the previous night had given a demonstration of nigi-nigi”—a term Money understood to mean, through his preteen interpreter, “sexual intercourse.” This incident, coupled with Money’s belief in the tribe’s lack of any gender confusion, was the foundation for his theory that childhood “sexual rehearsal play” was vital to the formation of a healthy adult gender identity—a theory he first articulated in a 1970 paper on the Yolngu published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology.

  “The straightforward attitude of the Yolngu towards nudity and sex play in young children allows these children to grow up with a straightforward attitude towards sex differences, towards the proper meaning and eventual significance of the sex organs, and towards their own reproductive destiny and sense of identity as male or female,” he wrote. Conversely, Money hypothesized, Western society’s restrictions on such sex play in young children was highly detrimental and was the root cause of such things as homosexuality, pedophilia, and lust murders.

  One of Money’s colleagues on the trip, Professor J. E. Cawte, who has studied the Yolngu for almost thirty years, says that he has never witnessed sexual rehearsal play among the tribal children and knows of no researcher who has. Professor Cawte is similarly mystified at the claim that adults of the Yolngu manifest no sexual difficulties. As a psychiatrist who has ministered to the needs of the tribe for decades, Cawte says he has treated many of the Yolngu adults for a wide variety of what he calls “sexual neuroses” and dysfunctions of every variety.

  Nevertheless, the Yolngu’s purported habit of childhood sexual rehearsal play and their alleged freedom from any psychosexual confusion became a constant reference in almost every public utterance of Money’s for the next three decades. He included a section on sexual rehearsal play in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl and published an article on the theory in The Sciences magazine in 1975. By the time he came to write Sexual Signatures in the mid-1970s (a time concurrent with his treatment of the Reimer twins), the issue of childhood sexual rehearsal play had assumed the dimensions of a crusade—and one that could move Money to shrill flights of rhetoric. “[W]hat happens in our culture?” he wrote. “Children’s sex explorations are treated like a contagious disease. . . . [D]on’t let them see the incontrovertible differences in their genitals, and don’t, at all costs, let them rehearse copulation—the one universal human activity that still imperatively demands that the two sexes behave differently and harmoniously!”

  In an interview with the pornographic magazine Genesis in April 1977, Money vented his frustration against the prohibition against childhood sexual rehearsal play and a psychologist’s right to observe it. “The number of studies of the effects of depriving human infants and juveniles of sexual rehearsal play is exactly and precisely zero,” he said, “because anyone who tried to conduct such a study would risk imprisonment for contributing to the delinquency of minors, or for being obscene. Just imagine the headlines and the fate of a research-grant application requesting funds to watch children playing fucking games!” He sounded the same theme in a 1984 speech, lamenting that it was a “crime” for a sexologist “to make a pictorial record of children’s normal, healthy sexual rehearsal play” and returned to this theme in Psychology Today when he showed a book with pictures of young children engaged in sexual intercourse to interviewer Constance Holden and said, “You have just become a criminal by looking at those pictures of children.”

  In a 1988 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Money unexpectedly veered from the show’s main topic (i
ntersexuality) and put in a plug for his pet theory. “I worked among the aboriginal people on the north coast of Australia in the early seventies,” Money told Oprah’s audience. “I was very interested in the fact that they don’t impose a sexual taboo on themselves, and they don’t punish children for doing normal sexual rehearsal play . . . and I was very surprised to find out that there were no bisexual or no gay people in there.” Oprah, who had clearly not been briefed on this particular aspect of Money’s research, tried to deflect the remark. “I’m almost afraid to ask what all that means, Dr. Money,” she interjected. Money, however, was not to be put off, and continued with an explicit description of the sexual rehearsal play he now claimed to have directly witnessed among the Yolngu. A year later, Money could still be heard trying to promote his theory on an episode of the Canadian TV show The Originals, where he scoffingly referred to the prudery of a society that prohibits such childhood exploration. “It has become very obvious to me,” he said, “that sexual rehearsal play is part of nature’s absolute intention, in order to allow children to grow up to be sexually normal.”

  But never having heard of Money’s theory of sexual rehearsal play, Brian and Brenda Reimer could only perform the ritualized poses obediently, in complete perplexity about their meaning and wholly unaware of the critical role their counselor understood the episodes to have in the successful outcome of his most famous experiment in infant sex change.