As Nature Made Him (20 page)

The school had a rigorous hazing initiation week for freshmen. It was as part of this hazing process that Brenda was selected by her upper-year schoolmates as “Freshie Queen.” On the day when she was to have the twenty-five-dollar prize bestowed on her, Brenda, as instructed, wore her best dress, a full-length gown with puffed sleeves and a ruffled lace neck. She then learned that she could not collect her cash prize until she danced with the “Freshie King.” Her royal counterpart proved to be a small, stooped boy with a brush cut and a pained expression. The two got up and danced in front of the school. “It damn near killed me,” David says.

The incident marked another turning point for Brenda. That September, after starting at R. B. Russell School, she took her sexual destiny into her own hands and simply stopped living as a female. Gone were the cowl-necked sweaters, garnet pendants, and purses she had adopted the previous year at Glenwood. She now wore a boy’s denim jacket, torn at both elbows, dirty corduroy pants frayed at the cuffs, a pair of what McKenty described as “men’s leather gloves,” and heavy construction boots on her feet. She stopped washing her hair, which grew matted. Her voice had settled into the rumbling register in which David speaks today. Physically, her condition was such that “strangers turn to look at her,” as McKenty wrote in her notes on Brenda. To the close observer, however, it was Brenda’s mental state that would have drawn particular scrutiny and pity. For as photographs from this period reveal, Brenda, for all her attempts to smile, had the eyes of a cornered animal.

“That was the worst time of her life,” says Sigmundson. “R. B. Russell really brought things to a head in a way that may have taken much longer had she been in a more cultured society where the kids might have been more prepared to play the game. At the other schools they called her ‘Cavewoman.’ At R. B. Russell they looked at her and said, ‘You’re a fucking
gorilla
.’ ”

Despite the brutal intensification in her peers’ taunts, Brenda refused to change. “I won’t walk funny like girls do,” she told McKenty—and she jumped up and did a caricature of a girl ,walking: “mincing along,” McKenty noted, “with bent arm and 5th finger prominently displayed.” Brenda enrolled in Appliance Repair—the first and only girl ever to take the course in the twelve years it was offered at R. B. Russell. The teacher, Hillel Taylor, was at first concerned about how a girl would fare with the boys in his class, but his fears were soon allayed. “Brenda could relate to the boys on a very equal basis,” says Taylor, who has never been informed of Brenda’s medical history. “I could picture someone like her making it in the military or something. I remember being questioned by my principal and other people involved—guidance counselors and so on—‘How is she fitting in?’ How is she handling the boys?’ ” Taylor let them know that Brenda was adapting as if she were “just one of the guys.”

Ron and Janet were not happy with Brenda’s behavior, but that was fine with Brenda. “I was at that age where you rebel,” David says. “I got so sick to death of doing what everyone wanted me to do. I got to that point in my life, I knew I was an oddball, I was willing to live my life as an oddball. If I wanted to wear my hair in a mess, that’s how I wore it. I wore my clothes the way
I
wanted to.”

And Brenda had more private ways of rebelling. Since earliest childhood she had been instructed both by her parents and by Dr. Money to urinate in the sitting position—despite her strong, overriding urge to face the toilet bowl standing up. Ever since she had been spotted by a kindergarten classmate peeing this way, Brenda had tried to refrain from standing up. No more. “If no one was around, I’d stand up,” David says. “It was easier for me to do that. I figured, what difference did it make?” It made a difference to her peers at R. B. Russell. Caught one day urinating like a boy, Brenda was barred from the girls’ bathroom. She tried sneaking into the boys’ but was kicked out and threatened with a beating if she returned. With nowhere else to go, Brenda was reduced to sneaking out to a back alley near the school to urinate.

It was on one such trip that Brenda became conscious of a car idling in the gap between the houses that lined the alleyway. She noticed that the car had rental plates. The man at the wheel seemed to be looking at her. She zipped up her pants and moved away, but the car followed. Then she saw that the man behind the wheel was pointing a camera at her.

“I ran back to the school,” David says. “I didn’t know what he was up to. I
wondered
if maybe he was a reporter. You know that you’re different. You go to the United States to see all these important people, so it’s feasible a reporter would want to see you, but you don’t know why—or why he’s so anxious to get a photo of you.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s interest in John Money’s famous twins case dated to some eight months prior to the day Brenda spotted the man trying to photograph her. Edward Goldwyn, an award-winning documentary filmmaker with the BBC series
Horizon
, had begun researching a film about gender identity in late 1978. A tenacious reporter with a background in science, Goldwyn had burrowed into all aspects of the subject, traveling around the globe to interview experts in the Dominican Republic, East Germany, Los Angeles, New York, and London. He inevitably heard much in his travels about Money’s landmark case, which still stood as the single most compelling piece of evidence to prove the primacy of rearing over biology in the formation of gender identity. Yet when he discussed the experiment with experts, Goldwyn was surprised to hear rumblings that the case was not quite as it appeared in Money’s writings.

“I was getting vibes from people in Baltimore being quite embarrassed by Money and the prominence of this case in the literature,” Goldwyn says. “I could tell that these people were getting increasingly worried.” They urged him not to put too much stock in the experiment until he had talked to the doctors in charge of the twin’s care. Tipped off by a source whom he declines to name, Goldwyn learned that the child was being treated by Jeremy Winter.

Goldwyn contacted Winter in late 1978 and told him about the documentary he was making on gender identity.

“I was incredibly suspicious of some guy wanting to produce a show for TV entertainment,” Winter says. “I was very frosty at the beginning.” But Goldwyn quickly established his bona fides with Winter and showed him the extent of his reading and research. “He totally brought me around,” says Winter Having thus allayed Winter’s fears, Goldwyn questioned him about the twins case. Winter cannot recall the precise words he used, but he says that he did disabuse the reporter of the notion that the case was a success. “At the very least, I’m sure I would have said, ‘Look, I wouldn’t take that case too seriously, because the reality of the child’s psychological adjustment is really quite different.’ ”

Goldwyn wanted to know how different and was struck by Winter’s reply: “He told me that the twin would have been suicidal if it hadn’t been for Mary McKenty,” Goldwyn says.

In January 1979, Goldwyn even visited the Reimers at home—a visit none of the family members can recall twenty years later, and with reason. Eager to see the family but concerned not to disrupt them by revealing that their identity had been learned by a journalist, Goldwyn settled on a ruse to gain access to their house. He declines to say precisely what his cover story was, but he says, “I came in as if I were asking if they could move their car because it was in my way. I was being, I suppose, a bit immoral, but I thought it was important for me to go and look and see for myself.” Ron and Janet, he says, were “worried, lonely looking people.” Brenda was surly, distinctly sexually ambiguous, and “somebody who I thought was really quite angry.” In short, the family little conformed to Money’s sunny portrait in
Sexual Signatures
. “Having found that the case wasn’t a good data point—that Money’s study actually didn’t prove anything,” Goldwyn says, “I felt the only thing to do was to leave it all out of my film. The only reason to put it in was to rubbish it.”

This decision did not preclude Goldwyn’s discussing what he had learned with a BBC colleague known for producing programs of a more controversial bent. Freelance TV journalist Peter Williams had recently been placed under contract by the BBC as executive producer on a new series called
Open Secret
, which was to deal specifically with medical scandals. Williams was fascinated by what Goldwyn told him about Money’s famous case and asked freelance documentary filmmaker Martin Smith to direct a projected half-hour program on the case.

In late September 1979, Williams; his wife, Jo Taylor; Smith; and a small BBC-TV crew arrived in ’Winnipeg. Within days of their arrival, Dr. McKenty notified Sigmundson of Brenda’s description of the strange incident in the alley near the school, where a man had tried to photograph her. Sigmundson immediately recognized that reporters had gotten wind of Brenda’s location. As head of the clinic’s psychiatry unit, Sigmundson had the most experience with the press, so it was agreed that he would handle the reporters.

“By that time,” Sigmundson says, “there were
clear
doubts in my mind that this [sex reassignment]
ever
should have happened. At that point, I think I really wanted the world to know.” Sigmundson agreed to speak to the reporters only under conditions that guaranteed the Reimers’ anonymity. He demanded that the reporters agree in writing not to broadcast the photographs they had taken of Brenda; make no further effort to capture her on film; obscure the Reimers’ location by omitting the names of all local treatment personnel; and finally, that the program not be sold in Canada or the United States. With these conditions agreed to by Williams and Smith, Sigmundson allowed himself to be interviewed at his home on 30 September.

Although appearing as an unnamed psychiatrist, Sigmund-son nevertheless looked distinctly nervous as he faced the BBC cameras. Glancing frequently at a set of notes in his lap, he described the “significant psychological problems” from which Brenda had been suffering when she first came to his attention at the Child Guidance Clinic. He related the litany of Brenda’s masculine appearance, her difficulties at school, and her failure to sustain friendships with peers. It was when Williams asked about the prognosis for the sex reassignment that Sigmundson paused. Several seconds passed before he spoke.

“When I took that long, long pause,” Sigmundson says today, “I was wondering if I was really going to tell the truth or just fudge it. After all, it was still Hopkins. Money was the guru.” When he finally answered, Sigmundson picked his words carefully, like a man tiptoeing through a minefield.

“I don’t think all the evidence is in,” he began. “And it may not be until she is a young adult that we’re going to know everything about this particular case. At the present time, however, she does display certain features which would make me be very suspicious that she will ever make an adjustment as a woman.”

Brenda’s former psychiatrist, Doreen Moggey, also agreed to be interviewed. “I felt it needed to be done,” Moggey says. “
Somebody
needed to say that this was not the rosy success story that was presented in the literature.” On camera Moggey described the extreme difficulties she had faced with Brenda’s case and recounted how she had notified Dr. Money of these difficulties by letter.

Ron and Janet Reimer learned of the BBC’s presence in Winnipeg from Mary McKenty, who had declined to speak to the filmmakers.

“She called to say that there were reporters who wanted to see us,” Janet recalls. McKenty told her that they should not feel they had to be interviewed, but Ron saw no reason to refuse—as long as they were not filmed or recorded. At that point Ron and Janet still remained convinced that Dr. Money’s treatment would work, and they thought their testimony would be a help to other parents who might find themselves in a similar predicament. “We were too close to the situation,” Janet says. “I had brainwashed myself. I couldn’t
afford
to believe anything else.”

In the Reimers’ living room, Williams and his wife, Jo Taylor, asked how Brenda’s treatment was working out. “I said I was still hopeful,” Janet recalls. The reporters began to ask about Sigmundson’s and Moggey’s observations regarding Brenda’s school performance and social life. The mood of the encounter changed. Janet started to cry, and Ron sank into a characteristic mute melancholy. The reporters asked to meet Brenda. Janet called her daughter in from outside and introduced the British visitors as editors of a poetry magazine that wished to publish one of Janet’s poems.

Brenda, dressed in tattered jeans and a torn jacket, her unwashed hair falling in tangles around her face, stalked into the living room and said an awkward hello in her deep voice, then quickly disappeared. Her appearance seemed to make a strong impression on the reporters.

“When Brenda left the room,” Janet says, “the woman got up and said, ‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this!’ She seemed quite angry.”

The BBC crew were headed for Baltimore. They had notified Money some weeks earlier that they were doing a documentary on the twins case. “Money initially showed considerable willingness and interest in being involved,” says Smith, but that was before he learned of the reporters’ investigative efforts in Winnipeg.

Williams and Smith arrived at Money’s house in the early evening of 3 October 1979. At the time of his divorce more than twenty-five years earlier, Money had moved from the suburbs to an address just minutes by foot from Johns Hopkins, in a gritty, inner-city Baltimore neighborhood, where he continues to live to this day. “It was not the sort of place where you would expect a well-heeled academic or scientist to be living,” says Smith. Money occupied the upper floors of a run-down corner store. Williams and Smith, admitted through a front door that boasted three locks, were no less surprised at the interior of Money’s residence, which was decorated with the masks, totems, and sexual artifacts that also bedecked his office. Money himself was a convivial host—at least initially.