As Nature Made Him

by Colapinto, John

  Not surprisingly perhaps, Brenda, at age seven, began strongly to resist going to Baltimore. Money suggested to Ron and Janet that they sweeten the pill of the annual visits by blending the trips to Johns Hopkins with a family vacation. “Soon,” Janet says, “we were promising Disneyland and side trips to New York just to get her to go.”

  * * *

  It was also at this time that Dr. Money began increasingly to focus on the issue of vaginal surgery in his sessions with Brenda. When she underwent her castration at the age of twenty-two months, Brenda was only at the first stage of the feminizing process. Dr. Jones had elected to wait until Brenda’s body was closer to fully grown before performing the two remaining surgeries: the first to lower her urethra into the female position, the second to excavate a full vaginal canal. For Dr. Money, there was an increasingly urgent need for Brenda to prepare for these operations. Because genital appearance was critical to his theory of how one “learns” a sexual identity, he believed that Brenda’s psychological sex change could not be complete until her physical sex change was finished.

  There was only one problem. Brenda was determined not to have the surgery—ever. As Money’s private clinical notes reveal, he first raised the issue of vaginal surgery with Brenda on her visit of 24 April 1973. He segued into the subject with deceptive casualness.

  “That reminds me of something else I wanted to tell you about,” Money said after interrogating her at length on the usual range of topics: fighting, how to tell boys and girls apart. “You know already the way you are made down there, between your legs, you are not exactly the same as other girls, eh?”

  “Yes,” Brenda said. She was understating the case considerably. Her vagina, with its small stumplike protrusion under the skin and its apparent scarring, caused her such confusion and anxiety that she could not even bring herself to look, or touch, between her own legs.

  “Well, I have a message for you about that,” Money said. “Here in this hospital we can fix it up for you and make it look like it’s supposed to look.”

  “Huh?” Brenda said.

  Money went on to explain that the doctors could operate on her so that she could urinate properly. (It was Money’s theory that Brenda’s continuing unorthodoxies in the bathroom resulted solely from the condition of her uncompleted vaginal surgery.) “How old will you be when you’re ready for that [operation]?” Money asked.

  Brenda resorted to the reply she so often gave to Money’s queries. “I don’t know.”

  Money suggested that Brenda would be ready at her next visit, when she was eight—one year away. Brenda said nothing. Money talked on at length about the “doctor in the white coat” who would “fix it up down there.” Finally Brenda found her voice.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she said.

  This was a position from which Brenda would refuse to shift.

  Today David explains that his refusal to undergo vaginal surgery was not only a result of his deep fear of hospitals, doctors, and needles. It had to do with certain realizations he came to around this time—realizations that convinced him he was not a girl and never would be, no matter what his parents, his doctor, his teachers, or anyone else said. For as David explains, when seven-year-old Brenda daydreamed of an ideal future, she saw herself as a twenty-one-year-old male with a mustache, a sports car, and surrounded by admiring friends. “He was somebody I wanted to be,” David says today, reflecting on those childhood fantasies. Based on those fantasies, Brenda was convinced that to submit to vaginal surgery would lock her into a gender that was not her own.

  Dr. Money, with the fate of his famous case hanging in the balance, spared no effort to break down the child’s resistance. The transcript of their encounter on 24 April 1973 continues with Money taking a new tack. Hoping to teach Brenda about the vaginal opening and canal, which she did not yet possess, Money asked, “How much do you know about where babies come from?”

  Brenda said, “From their mother’s tummy.”

  “Now,” Money said, circling closer to the issue at hand, “do you know how the baby gets out?”

  Brenda, clearly tumbling to Money’s tactic, stalled, mumbling incoherent syllables.

  “When it’s ready to get born,” Money repeated, “how does it get out?”

  Again Brenda stalled.

  “I’ll ask my question one more time,” Money said. “When the baby is ready to get born, how does it get out from inside the mother? Where does it get out?”

  Brenda, aware that she had driven Money to the limits of his patience, feigned not to have understood. “Oh!” she now exclaimed. “The mother gets her out.”

  Money was not to be put off so easily. “How does the mother get it out?” he repeated.

  “Um, I don’t know,” Brenda finally said. “I didn’t learn that at school.”

  “Would you like me to show you some pictures?” Money said.

  Brenda made no recorded response.

  “This is a book called Two Births,” Money continued, opening a large coffee-table book for Brenda to look at.

  Published one year earlier, Two Births is a vintage artifact of the early 1970s. Photographed by Ed Buryn, it is a record of two hippie women having home births. The large black-and-white photographs are expertly and beautifully made but are at the same time unsparingly graphic in their depiction of the moments before, during, and after birth. Intense close-ups show both women naked, grimacing, their bare breasts swollen, their vaginas distended as the babies’ heads begin to push through the stretched orifices.

  “See, there is the lady with the baby inside,” Money said as he leafed through the pages for Brenda. “Getting ready, almost ready to come out. . . . See, here’s the baby just getting ready to come out and here it’s really coming out. See, there’s his head beginning to poke through. . . . There, it got all the way out.”

  “Now,” Money continued, “I wanted to show you that picture of a baby being born because I wanted to tell you that, down there, the way you are, you can’t find the baby hole yet.” And suddenly Money was once again talking about the “doctor in the hospital here” who could give her a “baby hole.”

  Neither the pictures of the grimacing women with the spread legs and stretched vaginas nor Money’s explanations of the pictures convinced Brenda to submit to the vaginal surgery. Nor did what followed—a description from Dr. Money of sexual intercourse.

  “A lot of kids don’t know that story,” Money said when he had finished describing how the penis goes into the vagina, “because they don’t have a doctor to tell them. The lucky kids who know about it are best if they don’t talk about it too much.”

  “Yes,” Brenda said.

  “You are pretty wise, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Brenda said.

  “I think so.”

  “No,” Brenda said. “I’m not.”

  “Aren’t you?” Money persisted.

  Brenda did not reply.

  “How are you?” Money asked.

  Brenda said nothing.

  “I think you’re a wise girl,” Money said.

  “No,” Brenda repeated, “I’m not.”

  “You’re one of my favorite girls.”

  According to David, Money’s supposed affection for Brenda turned to increasing frustration, impatience, and anger as she continued to resist his blandishments. Brenda meanwhile reacted badly to the increasing pressure to submit to the operation. In the spring of 1974, facing another summer visit to Dr. Money’s Psychohormonal Research Unit and yet another battle of wits and wills with him, Brenda found that the pressure was simply too much.

  “I had a nervous breakdown,” David says. “Because I knew, also, that right after I saw this guy on the summer holidays it would be school. It was a double whammy. I remember the summer I turned nine just huddling in a corner and shaking and crying.”

  Seeing their daughter’s distress, Ron and Janet postponed that summer’s visit. Finally, however, it was Ron, convinced that only Dr. Money could
help their daughter, who insisted that Brenda return to Johns Hopkins in the fall. And so on 19 November 1974 the family again visited the Psychohormonal Research Unit. The two-day visit was a trial for all concerned—but especially for Brenda. In a one-on-one taped interview, Money tried in vain to get her to speak. She would only mumble monosyllables. When Money tried to raise the topic of vaginal surgery, Brenda scurried from the room, found her father in the hallway, and refused to leave his side.

  Today David recognizes that if he had told his parents what went on between Brenda and the psychologist behind closed doors—the pressure tactics, cajoling, pornography, and unorthodox inspections and posings—Janet and Ron would never have made her return to Johns Hopkins. But the thought never occurred to her—for a simple and chilling reason.

  “I thought my parents knew,” David says. “I figured, they’re responsible for me. They brought me here. They must know what’s going on.”

  6

  RON AND JANET DID NOT KNOW what went on in the twins’ sessions with Dr. Money. “The twins would be whisked off somewhere, I didn’t know where,” Janet says. “Dr. Money spent some of the time in a little office talking mostly with me, some to Ron.” They had no reason to think that the psychologist was any different with Brenda and Brian than he was with them, and with Ron and Janet he was unfailingly polite and kind. Only once did they have any reason to suspect that there might be another side to Dr. Money. “One time we came into his office when he wasn’t expecting us,” Ron says, “and he was giving all holy shit to his secretary. Just chewing her out for something small—she forgot to mail a letter or something. When he saw us, he let it drop.”

  This unsettling glimpse was never repeated, so Ron and Janet wrote it off as a rare moment when the psychologist lost control. Otherwise they continued to think of Money as their closest confidant and friend. And he considered them important allies in his ongoing struggles with Brenda. In fact, the end of their fraught November 1974 visit, Dr. Money took Ron and Janet aside and gave them what he called a “homework assignment,” telling them to find opportunities to talk with Brenda explicitly about her genitalia and vaginal surgery and impressing upon them how important it was that she agree, at the very next visit, to a vaginal inspection.

  In a private note to himself after this meeting, Money was still more emphatic: “Next year it will be imperative for a physical examination to be done,” he wrote. “There is an optimal length of time for dealing with a difficult issue by avoiding it, and that optimum will be passed next year, if it is not already passed this year.” Something of Money’s growing frustration with Brenda’s stalwart resistance also crept into this note. “When Brenda is tense and hyperkinetic, she does not give an exactly endearing impression nor a particularly feminine one.”

  Back in Winnipeg, Ron and Janet got to work on their homework assignment. Told to impress upon Brenda the differences between male and female sex organs, Ron and Janet had been instructed by Money to allow her to see them naked. In Sexual Signatures, Money emphasized the importance of such parental genital displays for correct heterosexual child development, and even went so far as to recommend that parents engage in sexual intercourse in front of their children. “With a little calm guidance,” he wrote, “the experience can be integrated into the child’s sex education and serve to reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.”

  Janet and Ron drew the line at having sex in front of the twins, but Janet did try to follow the other parts of the homework assignment. She appeared naked, as often as possible, in front of Brenda. This only embarrassed the child, who seemed startled to see her mother walking around the house unclothed. “All of a sudden,” David recalls, “right after we go on one of John Money’s trips, she’s walking around stark naked.” Desperate for the treatment to work, and afraid to contravene Money’s orders in the least, Janet persevered. “He encouraged us to go to a nude beach,” she says. “We knew of a river where there was nobody for miles around. Ron and I went in the buff, but the twins wouldn’t.” Janet also tried, in conversation, to “break the ice” with Brenda about the vaginal surgery, but with similar dismal results. “The minute I went anywhere near that topic,” Janet says, “she’d leave the room.”

  The atmosphere in the Reimer home grew steadily more tense as Brenda realized that her parents were now working in collusion with Dr. Money to force her into the surgery. She began to rebel against her parents openly. Even the supposedly happy occasion of Christmas became an ordeal. Brenda raged against having to get into the party dress her parents insisted she wear when they went to see Ron’s family in Kleefeld. Brenda had always hated going to see her extended family because this always meant that her parents would put special pressure on her to dress and act like a little lady. Making matters worse, her grandparents, aunts, and uncles would constantly scrutinize her. “They’d be studying me like a bug, to see how much I’d changed throughout the year,” David says. “And as soon as I’d catch them staring at me, they’d look the other way. I told my dad, ‘I don’t know why, but I always feel like an oddball around my own family.’ He said, very quietly, ‘I know.’ ”

  Ron’s family, like the rest of the relatives, knew about Brenda’s sex change, so Ron understood why they studied his daughter so closely. He also recognized in his heart of hearts what they were seeing. “I sort of knew it wasn’t working after Brenda was seven or something,” Ron says. “But what were we going to do?”

  Neither Ron nor Janet could entertain the notion that they had made the wrong decision. The only option was to put distance between themselves and anyone who seemed bent on making them face such a realization. From now on, Ron decided, they would see as little of his parents as possible.

  But it proved difficult to segregate themselves from all reminders of Brenda’s problems. Just that fall the Child Guidance Clinic had once again contacted them to say that her behavioral problems in school had worsened and that she was “hyper and defiant” and looked “unhappy.” Furthermore, the clinic reported, Brian was also showing signs of increasingly serious emotional problems related to Brenda’s predicament.

  “At that point my main emotion toward my sister was jealousy,” Brian explains. “She got all the attention. I was just the normal one. Mom and Dad were so worried about Brenda that they neglected me. I felt I was unimportant. I started to act up a bit, try to get some attention.” He succeeded that March, when he was caught trying to shoplift from a local store and the proprietor threatened to press charges. For Janet and Ron, this proved to be the last straw.

  At the time of Brenda’s sex reassignment almost eight years earlier, their local pediatrician had advised them to move away from the area so that they could make a fresh start in a place where there was no lingering memory of their former son. They had refused his advice at the time. Now they saw the wisdom of it. It was imperative that they get away from the ghosts and doubters who haunted Winnipeg; it was imperative that they put as much distance as possible between themselves and Ron’s parents, the Child Guidance Clinic—everyone.

  That spring of 1975, Ron and Janet sold their house, their furniture, their appliances, and their ’66 Pontiac. They bought a half-ton Chevy truck with a camper on the back. They packed up what few belongings they still owned and headed west for British Columbia. Ron had a friend out there who’d told him there was plenty of work. Yet so little had Ron planned this move—so completely had he failed to look ahead—that he would later castigate himself for having sold all their possessions and thus put himself in the position of having to buy everything when they got to BC.

  “I remember thinking when we got there, Oh God, what did I do?” Ron says. “How could I have just picked up and moved? What an idiot thing to do!” Only much later, Janet says, did she and Ron fully face why they had so precipitately uprooted their lives and headed off to BC. “We were trying to escape.”

  That Dr. Money already understood this motive was clear from a note he made to himself at this time. “Th
e plan to move to British Columbia may include a bit too much geographical magic,” he wrote, “especially with regard to solving problems with the grandparental families. However, it could also turn out to be a perfectly satisfactory move.”

  * * *

  Their destination was British Columbia’s mountainous, wooded, sparsely populated interior. They settled in a tiny place called Ashton Creek. The nearest town was Enderby with a population of just 2,500. Ron bought a house trailer, which they parked in an encampment. The twins were enrolled in grade four at tiny Ashton Creek School.

  “It was more of a country school,” David says. “But it didn’t matter what kind of school it was. If you’re not comfortable, you’re not going to be comfortable no matter what school you go to. You can go to a thousand schools, and it’s always the same. Because the standard rule of thumb is: There’s the girls over here, and there’s the boys over there. Separated. Which direction [do I go]? There’s no belonging. So you’re an outcast. It doesn’t change. School to school to school. It doesn’t change.”

  In April the family returned to Baltimore for another visit with Dr. Money. By now, Brenda, almost ten years old, had developed a new attitude toward Dr. Money. Frowning, sullen, and almost completely mute, she refused to answer his questions in anything but, grunting monosyllables. She also imagined that she had succeeded in keeping secret certain shameful impulses she had started to have, but she was wrong. According to Ron, it was during this visit that Dr. Money informed him of an issue that had arisen during his private sessions with Brenda.

  “Money told us that he had asked Brenda what partner she would rather have, a boy or a girl,” Ron recalls. “Brenda had said, ‘A girl.’ ” Ron says that Dr. Money wanted to know how they felt about raising a lesbian. At a loss for how to respond, but relieved that Dr. Money did not seem to think it significant, Ron said what he honestly believed about homosexuality: “It’s not the most important thing in life.”