As Nature Made Him (19 page)

Back at the Reimers’ house, Janet was having similar feelings of anxiety about the impression Money would carry away of his visit to Winnipeg and, specifically, the Reimers’ home. They had moved into the house two years earlier and put two thousand dollars into fixing the place up. Ordinarily Janet felt quite proud of what she’d been able to achieve on her budget. Now she was seeing the place through the eyes of Dr. Money, whom she considered the most aesthetically refined person she had ever met. “The house had an old gold rug down when we moved in,” Janet says. “It had been cleaned, but it just looked dirty. The walls hadn’t been painted in a long time, and we had a cheap couch, an old beige sofa with an orange thread running through it.”

By the time she heard the car pull up in the driveway, Janet had worked herself into a state of considerable apprehension. When Dr. Money stepped through the front door into the Reimers’ modest living room, however, he seemed to take particular pains to project a manner of friendly and accepting approval of everything that met his eye. If memories lingered in Money’s mind of the last time he had seen the Reimers—during the disastrous Baltimore trip the previous spring—he showed no signs of it. Certainly Ron and Janet made every effort to put the episode out of their own minds.

“He was like a friend—or an uncle—who had been away a long time and had come for a visit,” Janet says. Dr. Money admired Ron’s homemade wall cabinet and complimented Janet on her pen-and-ink drawings, which hung on the walls. Meanwhile the twins had disappeared into the basement and refused to come up and meet Dr. Money.

The adults sat at the dining room table, and Ron offered Dr. Money a beer. Sipping one of Ron’s Canadian lagers, Money relaxed and spoke about his childhood in rural New Zealand, where he said he had once seen a fireball and where the earthquakes were so frequent that his mother had strung thread across her kitchen shelves to prevent bottles from falling during the tremors. Money talked about the dark beer that was popular in his native country and asked Ron if they had dark beer in Winnipeg.

Today, neither Ron nor Janet can remember precisely how it was that Dr. Money, who had planned merely to drop over for an hour or two, ended up spending the night. Janet recalls that Money glanced at the clock and announced that he had missed his flight; Ron thinks that perhaps a snowstorm canceled Money’s flight back to Baltimore. In any case, once it was apparent that Dr. Money was stranded, Ron and Janet, out of politeness, invited him to stay with them—although they had only an air mattress in the front room for him to sleep on. To their surprise, the eminent psychologist accepted their offer. Ron phoned out for a bucket of chicken to accommodate their unexpected house guest. The children continued to hide in the basement. That is, until their parents forced them to come up.

During the stiff encounter in the living room, Money asked how the twins were doing in school. Brian did the talking. He said something noncommittal about their academic accomplishments, then asked Dr. Money how he liked their city and how long he was staying. “Then,” Brian says, “we wanted to go.” Before the two could escape to the basement, Money pulled out his wallet. Saying that he would have spent the money on a hotel room anyway, he bestowed on the children fifteen dollars each. The twins then hurried back downstairs. They did not emerge until the next morning, when Dr. Money had left for the airport. It was the last time the Reimers would see him in person.

It was not the last the city of Winnipeg would hear about John Money, however. After his departure, the
Winnipeg Free-Press
carried accounts, on two successive days, of Money’s standing-room-only appearance at the university’s Human Sexuality Conference. S
TUDENTS,
MD
S
D
EBATING
W
ORTH OF
S
EX
E
XERCISE
, ran the banner headline on the first day. M
ORAL
V
ALUES OF
L
ECTURERS
Q
UESTIONED.
Money had upset some students, the paper reported, by showing graphic slides of a range of unusual sexual behaviors. The slide show was in fact part of a standard lecture Money had devised to “desensitize” medical students to various sexual perversions, and had already generated fierce controversy in the local Baltimore newspapers when Money introduced the films to the Johns Hopkins Medical School curriculum in 1971. The show featured explicit photographs of people engaged in bestiality, urine-drinking, feces-eating, and various amputation fetishes. During the second day of his Winnipeg lecture (the paper reported), Money had also screened a stag film of five women and three men having group sex, then followed the screening with a speech in which he informed the assembled professors and first-year medical students that marriage was simply an economic compact in which the “heart follows the wallet”; that incest should not be prosecuted as a criminal offense; and that in cases where stepfathers sleep with their stepdaughters, the mother is often “happy” because she “is glad to have [her husband] off her back.”

Dr. Robert Martin, a clinical psychologist and member of the University of Manitoba’s Psychiatry Department, attended Money’s talks. “He was a personification of the style of the time,” Martin says. “He liked to shock, play the devil’s advocate, and was very cocky and very self-assured. His attitude was very much one of bringing ‘enlightenment’ to the ‘boonies.’ He radiated that particular lack of anxiety that, personally, sets alarm bells off, and he gave the impression that he’d plunge into anything. He was not the sort of person that you would forget.”

Steve Whysall, who also attended the lectures, agrees. A seasoned journalist who had worked in London’s Fleet Street, Whysall was the
Free-Press
medical reporter who wrote the paper’s accounts of Money’s controversy-stirring visit. “I’d been around and thought I’d seen and heard quite a few things,” he says. “But I was surprised that this [sexual material] came up in that form.” Whysall was especially surprised by the deliberate casualness with which Money spoke about such outlandish sexual fetishes as feces-eating. He interviewed Money briefly after the lecture. “I asked him, ‘Are you telling these doctors-to-be that they shouldn’t be alarmed if they meet someone who comes to them with that kind of request or condition?’ ” Money, Whysall says, dismissed such queries. “He was pretending that
he
was shocked that I was so narrow-minded, so Puritanical.”

Since the Reimers were not in the habit of reading the
Free-Press
(they preferred the tabloid
Tribune
, which did not cover the event), they failed to learn about the controversy their overnight guest had ignited. Brian alone happened to notice that Dr. Money’s visit generated some media interest; while watching TV, he caught a snippet of Dr. Money on CKND Channel 9, but the glimpse was fleeting, and Brian failed to hear the gist of the report.

In the days directly following Dr. Money’s visit to Winnipeg, Brenda began to make increasing strides in her therapy with Dr. McKenty—as if finally freed from the last vestiges of suspicion that Dr. McKenty was working in collusion with the psychologist from Baltimore. Arriving at her 4 April session from an Easter celebration with her family, and thus outfitted in full feminine attire—black cowl-necked top, garnet pendant, and mascara—Brenda pointedly rejected McKenty’s compliments on her appearance, denying that she was even wearing makeup. At her next session, Brenda announced, “I hate dresses. I only wear them to funerals and weddings.” On 4 May, McKenty wrote, “Showed me her purse and contents, which were a hairbrush, mascara, lip gloss and rouge given to her by her mother, but she remarked pleasantly, ‘I hate that stuff.’ ”

It was the session of 8 June that marked Brenda’s most dramatic psychotherapeutic breakthrough to date. That this was to be an unusual encounter is clear from the opening sentence of McKenty’s notes. “Did not want to play any games,” McKenty wrote. “Soon began to ask some questions about her medical condition.” This marked the first time in Brenda’s ten-year standoff with the medical profession that she ever voluntarily raised the issue of her genitals and the fact that they did not resemble those of other girls. Brenda told McKenty how her father had explained that a doctor “did something that was a mistake.” McKenty asked Brenda what she thought had happened.

“I used to think,” Brenda said, “that my mother had beaten me between the legs.”

Keith Sigmundson was immediately informed, by McKenty, of Brenda’s comment. The two psychiatrists discussed it, and they agreed that Brenda’s statement about her mother seemed to fit with almost eerie neatness a central tenet of psychoanalysis: Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex—the developmental stage that supposedly marks every human being’s psychosexual differentiation into boy or girl.

Named for the unlucky hero of Greek tragedy who unwittingly slept with his mother and murdered his father, the Oedipus complex was founded on Freud’s conviction that all children, both male and female, develop in earliest infancy an erotic attachment to their mother—an attachment that eventually pits them against the father in competition for the mother’s erotic favors. In boys, Freud postulated, the Oedipus complex gives rise to “castration anxiety”: the terror that their father will neutralize the son’s sexual threat by castrating him. In girls, Freud stated, the Oedipus complex breeds “penis envy”—a conviction that the castration
has already been performed
, that she once had a penis and has had it removed by one of her parents.

In normal female development, Freud argued, the girl’s urgent desire to reclaim her missing penis compels her to reroute her infantile erotic desires for her mother and direct them toward her father so that she might, in sexual intercourse with him, take back the penis stolen from her, and it is by this means that she forms a “normal” heterosexual orientation. In Freud’s view, psychotherapy was primarily concerned with curing the mental illnesses and neuroses that result in patients who, for a plethora of reasons, fail properly to resolve their Oedipal dramas in childhood. According to psychoanalytic theory, a crucial step in the resolution is to face the initial castration anxiety and voice it—as Brenda had apparently done when she described her childhood fear that her mother had damaged her sex organs.

On this basis, Sigmundson explains, he and McKenty hoped that Brenda’s comment might be the articulation of a universal Oedipal fear shared by all females. “So we thought,” Sigmundson says, “we were getting somewhere.”

At the same time, Sigmundson admits that he was also forced to consider another interpretation of Brenda’s comment—one that not only took into account the awkward fact of Brenda’s intensely masculine behavior, but also acknowledged that Brenda
was
born a boy with a normal penis and testicles, which had (at least partly on her mother’s authorization) been lost. Bearing these factors in mind, Brenda’s comment could be seen to signal not an Oedipal breakthrough, but something less abstract—namely, the gruesome but emotionally logical explanation that a young child had used to explain the scarred state of her genitals and the bouts of depression suffered by her guilt-ridden mother. Viewed thus, Brenda’s comment to McKenty could be interpreted not as her imminent acceptance of herself as a girl, but its opposite: her recognition that her earlier fears of maternal castration were incorrect and that now she wanted to know what had
really
happened to her; a sign, perhaps, that she was approaching the point at which she was ready to embrace the boy she had always instinctively known herself to be.

Whichever interpretation proved correct, Sigmundson and McKenty were now convinced that Brenda’s therapy was reaching a critical stage.

The events of that June also brought Janet to a critical stage. Told of Brenda’s statement, Janet was aghast. Already feeling nearly insupportable grief and guilt over her daughter, she found this latest piece of news almost unbearable. “I was just stunned,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that Brenda thought I could do such a horrible thing. I wondered, What must she think of me that I would do a thing like that to my own child?”

Today Janet cannot recall if this incident was instrumental in undermining her confidence in the entire experiment. One thing is certain, however. That June she and Ron were fast approaching the time when they would ordinarily start planning their annual visit to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Money had contacted them recently and pressed them to make an appointment for July. Yet when July arrived, Janet and Ron did not follow through on the plan to go to Baltimore. When Brenda anxiously inquired of Janet whether there were any plans to return to Johns Hopkins that summer, Janet responded with a question of her own.

“Would it do any good?” she asked.

“No,” Brenda said.

“Then we’re not going.” Janet did not bother to contact Dr. Money to cancel the appointment. The Reimers simply did not show up. Nor would they ever again.

11

I
N THE FALL,
when Brenda’s psychotherapy resumed with Dr. McKenty (who, like many psychiatrists, always took a summer vacation), she told the psychiatrist that she had passed a boring summer at home watching TV and doing a paper route. Now, however, she was uncharacteristically excited about starting classes at a new school. The previous spring Dr. McKenty and the other members of the local treatment team had discussed with Ron and Janet the option of removing Brenda from the academic path and putting her into a vocational school where she could learn a trade. Ron and Janet, having come to recognize that Brenda would never be a scholar, approved this plan, and Brenda herself was enthusiastic about it. She told McKenty that she would like to become an auto mechanic—a job whose only drawback was that “no guy would hire a girl to fix his car.”

In September 1979, Brenda, now fourteen, began ninth grade at R. B. Russell Vocational School, which was located across town in the scrappy industrial area of Winnipeg’s West End. The brochures for the school had featured shots of a pleasant city campus; the reality proved somewhat different. A school that ministered to children with behavioral and family problems (some of the teenage girl students were reportedly already moonlighting as prostitutes), the campus, David says, was a forbidding concrete complex covered with graffiti.