false 41379 0060929596 9780060929596 987 192 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169603250m/41379.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41379.As_Nature_Made_Him_The_Boy_Who_Was_Raised_as_a_Girl 23301 John Colapinto 1220 238 5 0 false Mon Sep 28 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 29 09:53:26 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 29 09:53:46 -0700 2009
But, as I learned through John Colapinto’s powerful As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised a Girl, that rosy-if-mischievous picture couldn’t have been further from the truth. David, born Bruce Reimer, was indeed raised a girl, Brenda, when doctors gave his parents no other feasible options after a botched circumcision at eight months old. Though this case was often touted by his doctor, John Money, as immutable proof that gender was completely a social construction, the truth is that Brenda had an incredibly unhappy childhood, marked by social difficulties and competition with her twin brother, Brian, and marred further by disturbing therapeutic sessions (which included forced viewings of pornography and graphic sexual conversations) administered by Money.

Colapinto’s account is vividly and soundly written. It’s an incredibly fast-read and has the juicy journalistic quality of a good episode of Dateline, not to mention a similarly horrific car-crash-on-the-highway feel. Colapinto’s strong descriptions of David and his family are incredibly sympathetic; when, after finishing the book, I learned that both David and his brother Brian died at their own hands in 2004 and 2002 respectively, I fully felt the loss of their lives that had, I suppose, begun nearly four decades earlier.

Before the publication of As Nature Made Him, the then-anonymous case of the Reimers was often cited by feminists as proof that it was nurture, not nature—upbringing, and not sex—that determines gender. The sad truth is that, had doctors been more open-minded about what constitutes a “boy” or a “man”, David Reimer would have never been subjected to castration, would never have had to endure therapy sessions with Money where he was forced to pose naked with his brother in order to model “proper gender roles”, would never have had to struggle in school and at home with the conviction that he wasn’t really a girl. The motives of the doctors were reductionist, as David himself says: “It just seems that they implied that you’re nothing if your penis is gone. The second you lose that, you’re nothing, and they’ve got to do surgery and hormones to turn you into something. Like you’re a zero. It’s like your whole personality, everything about you is all directed—all pinpointed—toward what’s between his legs. And to me, that’s ignorant. I don’t have the kind of education that these scientists and doctors and psychologists have, but to me it’s very ignorant.” (262)

I do think that there’s a feminist lesson to be found in Reimer’s story: namely, that prescriptivist attitudes toward gender and sex are problematic, and that forcing gender models (and certainly genital surgery) on young children who cannot express their feelings about their own gender or sex is a dangerous game.]]>