The Transgendering of America
In the summer of 1967, a farm-machinery repairman and his wife drove their infant son from Winnipeg to Baltimore, to the most famous sex researcher in the world, because a circumcision had gone catastrophically wrong. The boy’s name was Bruce Reimer. He had an identical twin brother, Brian. The doctor waiting for them at Johns Hopkins was John Money, and when he saw the twins he understood what fortune had delivered to his clinic: a perfect experiment. Two boys, one genome. Raise one as a girl, keep the other as the control, and see whether our nature is given or assigned.
Money told the parents that gender was plastic in the first years of life, that a child raised consistently as a girl would become one, and that the surgery should proceed. Bruce was castrated at twenty-two months and renamed Brenda. The family was instructed never to tell.
Money published the “twins case” in 1972 as an unqualified triumph: the genetically male child was developing a female identity, therefore nurture ruled and nature was negotiable. Time magazine carried the news, feminist theorists cited it, and textbooks canonized it for twenty years. The case seemed to demonstrate that the deepest fact about a human being, boy or girl, was not discovered but installed.
There was one problem.
Brenda tore off the dresses. She refused the dolls, fought the boys who mocked her, insisted on urinating standing up, and told her therapists year after year that something was wrong in a way she had no words for. By her teens she was suicidal. Money’s published papers described a happy, well-adjusted girl during the exact years the child was threatening to kill himself. When Brenda was fourteen, her father finally broke and told her the truth in a parking lot. Her reaction, recounted for the rest of her life, was relief. Everything clicked. For the first time, the child understood why the identity assigned by the world’s leading expert had never fit: it had been false from the first day, and the body had known all along.
The patient took a new name and lived as a man. In 1997, the researchers Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson tracked him down and detonated the case in the medical literature; the journalist John Colapinto then told the full story to the public.