As Nature Made Him (30 page)

When I asked Money about Diamond’s appeal to delay surgery on intersexual babies until they are old enough to speak for themselves, Money grew angry. Apparently forgetting the conclusions he had reached in his own Harvard thesis review of over two hundred and fifty untreated intersexes, he emphatically rejected the idea that a person could survive a childhood with ambiguous genitalia. “I’ve seen the people who were the victim of that,” he said. “I’ve heard these poor people describe how they had to sit in a locked room and not go out for fear that someone would see them.” Money insisted that surgical intervention at the earliest opportunity after birth was the only guarantee of the child’s future happiness. “You cannot be an
it
,” he declared, adding that Diamond’s recommendations would lead intersexes back to the days when they locked themselves away in shame and worked as “circus freaks.”

Money refused to discuss any aspect of his personal life. “You’re trying to entrap me,” he said, darkly. “Just like my patients try to entrap me.”

At this point Money seemed determined to get off the phone. Before he did so, I reminded him that his now classic text,
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
, was still in print and that it reports the twins case as a success. I asked if it would not be worthwhile for him to make changes in the text for a future edition. Money said flatly, “I’ll be dead by then.”

Despite its ring of finality, this proved not to be Money’s last word on the case. After the publication of my
Rolling Stone
story in December 1997, he again broke his press silence when he granted an interview to a sympathetic writer and friend, Michael King, in the New Zealand magazine
The Listener
. There Money dismissed both Diamond and Sigmundson’s John/Joan paper and my
Rolling Stone
article as part of a dark conspiracy against him.
The Listener
article furthermore hinted that David and his family were deliberately lying about Brenda’s life for financial gain, since David had decided to collaborate on this book, and moviemakers had expressed interest in the saga. King’s article described Money as “surprisingly resilient and sanguine” despite the controversy and ended with news of the undimmed status that Money still enjoys among U.S. funding agencies. “He has recently been recommended for a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a major new project, a classification and consolidation of contemporary knowledge of paraphilias or ‘perversions,’ ” King reported. I checked with the NIH in the summer of 1999 and learned that Money is still supported by the same NIH research grant that he was awarded in the mid-1950s. His most recent renewal was in the amount of $135,956.

Nor does Money lack for defenders within the academic community—and in particular among professors of psychology, many of whose tenured positions and clinical appointments have been built upon the promulgation and dissemination of Money’s theories of psychosexual development. One of his more engaging and intelligent defenders is Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto and a longtime adherent to Money’s nurturist bias in gender identity formation. (In his clinical work, Zucker has for years attempted to modify homosexuality and transexualism in boy and girl children.) Several months after the publication of Diamond and Sigmundson’s article, Zucker wrote a paper entitled “Experiment of Nurture,” which was framed as a direct response to the John/Joan revelations. Showing his environmentalist leanings, Zucker suggested that the twins case had failed not because David possessed a male biology, but because of certain “psychosocial factors”—in particular “parental ambivalence regarding the initial decision to reassign the infant as a girl.”

Efforts on the part of Money’s defenders to blame the failure of the case on Ron’s and Janet’s supposed lack of commitment were by no means exclusive to Zucker; many of Money’s acolytes have made the same charge to me in interviews. These charges might carry more weight if not for the fact that all the evidence shows that Ron and Janet were almost slavishly devoted to the experiment—not to mention that Money himself, in his reports on the case, repeatedly described Ron and Janet as particularly skilled and committed parents in the rearing of their daughter. To be sure, once news of the case’s failure emerged, rumors apparently originating with Money leaked into the scientific community that Ron and Janet were rural fundamentalists whose restricted religious and cultural values had made it impossible for them to accept their child’s sex change in the first place, and that therefore they unconsciously undermined it. In reality, Ron and Janet grew up and spent the majority of their lives in the modern metropolis of Winnipeg (except for the three teen years they spent on farms), and both had (like Money himself) thoroughly rejected the fundamentalist religion of their parents (so much so that they refused even to be married in a Mennonite church). All new claims to the contrary, neither Ron nor Janet labored under outmoded stereotypes of men’s and women’s roles which would have forbidden them from accepting a merely “tomboyish” daughter, nor was their surrounding community of 1970s Winnipeg—an eclectic, cosmopolitan mix of cultures, religions, backgrounds, races, and socioeconomic levels—predisposed to rejecting a girl who did not conform to rigid stereotypes of femininity.

Zucker’s paper, however, did not concern itself solely with unnamed “psychosocial factors” that supposedly negatively influenced the case. He also presented a long-term follow-up on a second case of a developmentally normal baby boy who had been raised as a girl. In a shocking parallel to David’s case, this child (also, coincidentally, a Canadian) had lost his penis to a bungled circumcision by electrocautery and had subsequently been castrated and reassigned as a girl at seven months of age in 1971. Now twenty-six years old, the patient was described by Zucker as still living in the female sex. “She denied any uncertainty about being a female from as far back as she could remember,” Zucker wrote, “and did not report any dysphoric feelings about being a woman.” At the same time, Zucker admitted that the case could not be deemed an unalloyed example of the efficacy of sex reassignment, for he was obliged to acknowledge that the patient, in childhood, had always enjoyed “stereotypically masculine toys and games”; that as an adult she works in a “ ‘blue collar’ job practiced almost exclusively by men”; and that she is currently living with a woman, in her third significant sexual relationship with a member of the female sex.

Nevertheless, Zucker concluded, “In this case . . . the experiment of nurture was successful regarding female gender identity differentiation,” and he cited the case as convincing proof that her rearing as a girl “overrode any putative influences of a normal prenatal masculine sexual biology.”

Struck by the seeming incongruity of these conclusions, I spoke with Zucker about the case at his office in Toronto in the summer of 1998. Our conversation only served to raise further doubts about the paper’s conclusions, for Zucker was unable to answer any of my specific questions about whether the patient might not have been telling the researchers what they wanted to hear when she stated that she had never harbored any doubts about her gender. By now I understood that this is a phenomenon endemic to all areas of sex research that rely on patient testimony, but particularly so in the fraught and sensitive world of sex reassignment, where as one ISNA member told me, “You feel so embarrassed and ashamed to be talking to someone that you’ll basically tell them
anything
so you can get the hell out of there.” Zucker agreed that such scenarios are not unfamiliar, but he couldn’t say whether such a dynamic was at work in the case in question. And for a simple reason. He had never met the patient and had based his reporting solely on information supplied to him by the people listed as coauthors of the paper. These included a gynecologist with no training in the assessment of gender identity, and a psychiatrist who had conducted only two interviews with the woman—the first when she was sixteen, the second when she was twenty-six.

There was, as well, further reason to feel uneasy about the paper’s conclusions, and this had to do with its murky provenance. It was only in the closing moments of my interview with Zucker, after I had turned off my tape recorder, that he let fall that the paper had another silent collaborator—an investigator who, when notified of the researchers’ efforts, had hastened to supply records he had gathered on the patient in her early childhood. The investigator was John Money, who had authorized and overseen the patient’s sex reassignment in infancy and who had, true to practice, conducted a number of annual follow-ups with the child until she (for reasons unspecified in Zucker’s paper) stopped returning to Johns Hopkins.

16

I
T HAS BEEN TWENTY YEARS
since Brenda Reimer made her transformation to David. That metamorphosis marked a turning point in the family’s fortunes. Ron, who had been struggling to get his business on its feet, began finally to build a faithful clientele of construction companies and factories. By the early 1980s he was earning forty thousand dollars a year, the best money he had made in his life. Janet continued to see her psychiatrist, and by the mid-1980s, with lithium treatment, her depressions had abated. “I found out what kind of person I really was,” she says. “And I went to my children and apologized to them. I said, ‘I know at times I was unreasonable and that you were wary of me sometimes because you didn’t know what was going to come up next, and you didn’t altogether trust me or feel you could take me into your confidence.’ I told them that I felt great remorse.”

The improvements in Ron’s finances and Janet’s emotional health brought a harmony the couple hadn’t known since the earliest days of their marriage. “I would lay down my life for Ron,” Janet told me in the summer of 1998. “Actually, I remember something Dr. Money once said to me. He said, ‘I don’t know why people always say
making love
; it’s
making sex
.’ Back then I didn’t have an answer for him. Now I do. What I have with Ron is love. We make
love
.”

Neither Ron nor Janet pretends that they can ever put the past behind them completely. Janet remains the more talkative on the subject of the guilt and grief that are the main emotions associated with their decision, thirty years ago, to turn their son into a daughter. Ron typically finds it more difficult to speak directly about these matters, but he communicates them nevertheless in his more spare and diffident speech.

“I wonder,” I asked him in our first interview, “if you’ve ever got to a point where you forgot this had happened?”

Ron shook his head. “No,” he said. “We never forget.” Then he said it again. “Never forget.” And once more: “Never forget.”

I remembered a notation I had seen in Dr. Ingimundson’s psychiatric notes from the spring of 1977 concerning a private meeting with Janet and Ron. Under the heading “Counter transference” (the psychoanalytic term for the emotions experienced by the therapist toward the patient), Ingimundson had written, “Have a need to protect them.” I now felt something of the same need.

“I know David doesn’t blame you at all,” I told Ron. “He attributes all the best things in his life to you and Janet.”

Ron smiled weakly and blinked away the moisture in his eyes. “I’m glad
he
feels that way,” Ron said. “I don’t know if
I
feel like that.”

Perhaps the greatest insight that Ron gave me into his emotions concerning the failed experiment came when our formal interview was over, and we repaired from the backyard to the house. Ron poured us a pair of Crown Royal rye whiskeys, then invited me to watch a tape of his favorite movie. It had been a long day, and I told him I would probably head back to my Travelodge and turn in early. Ron was strangely, and uncharacteristically, insistent. “This is a really great movie,” he said. “I got Brian to tape it for me off HBO. I’ve seen it maybe twenty times.” The movie, he said, was called
Crossroads
. I soon realized that it was pointless to resist; by now Janet (who also loved the movie) had joined Ron in his entreaties. So I followed them to the basement, where we settled down in front of the television set.

I vaguely registered the movie’s plot as it played on the Reimers’ TV screen. Ralph Macchio plays a cocky young blues guitarist who befriends an eighty-year-old blues player, one Blind Willie Brown. Together the pair travel from New York City to Blind Willie’s Mississippi home, where he has some “unfinished business” to take care of. As Ry Cooder’s keening blues guitar soundtrack wailed over the opening credits, Janet turned to me and said, “We love this music. I think you have to have been to hell and back to love the blues.” In its detail, and in the thorny, affectionate relationship between the older and the younger man, the movie was better than I expected; but I still found myself fighting off sleep as the saga reached its final act, which occurs at a stark, dusty crossroads in the depths of rural Mississippi—at which point I began to grow alert.

Drawing on the famous legend of blues guitarist Robert Johnson (who was said to have won his skills as a guitar player from a deal he signed with the devil at “the crossroads”), the movie now revealed that Blind Willie Brown had made a similar deal almost sixty years earlier, when he was seventeen years old. But Blind Willie had not become famous and celebrated. Instead he had ended up destitute in a Harlem old folks’ home. Now he had come for a reckoning. Standing in the shadow of a leafless tree at the crossroads, he watched as the dapper, smooth-talking, grinning man with whom he had struck his deal all those years ago materialized from nowhere. The two men face each other. Ron, who was sitting in an armchair to my right, set down his rye and 7-Up and sat forward a little, bringing his face closer to the screen.

Confronting the man who had hoodwinked him into his bum deal, Willie Brown demands that the Man in Black tear up the contract between them—“and give me some peace.”