As Nature Made Him (12 page)

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 (intersexuality) 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.

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.”