As Nature Made Him (21 page)

“There were a couple of his mature students around,” Smith says. “We were having a drink quite casually in front of the fireplace and talking about the preparations for the interview, which was to take place the next day.”

The reporters then eased toward revealing to Money the full scope of their documentary. “We think the case is very interesting,” Smith remembers saying, “and we do want to do a documentary on it, but—”

“We should warn you,” Williams recalls cutting in, “that we have heard other things about it.”

Smith informed Money that they had spoken to the child’s psychiatrists and that all was not what it appeared to be from Money’s published writings. “At that point I think it’s fair to say that he got extremely angry and annoyed,” Smith says. “I think he felt that he’d been sandbagged into a corner. Which wasn’t the case. In fact we quite deliberately told him that we had made contact with the psychiatrists
before
we did the filming.”

Money, however, appeared to be in no state to appreciate such fine distinctions of journalistic etiquette. “His anger might have been that he felt that the child was being investigated or put at risk,” Smith continues. “Or it might have been personal anger that someone should challenge his work. I don’t know. But our relationships changed dramatically, and we were shortly out the door.”

The telephone call to the Reimers’ house in Winnipeg came later that evening. Janet and Ron had already gone to bed. Janet answered. It was Dr. Money calling from Baltimore, and he was in a panic. The content of the call has been preserved in notes taken the next day by Mary McKenty, to whom Janet recounted Money’s conversation. Speaking of “persons unknown” but “suspected to be a Mr. Smith of the BBC” and another man—“a friend of Mr. Goldwyn”—Money told a wild tale of files possibly stolen from him and of reporters who had somehow learned of Brenda’s whereabouts.

“He was all freaked out,” Janet says. “He said, ‘Don’t speak to any reporters.’ ” At which point Janet had no choice but to tell him the truth—that both she and Ron had already spoken to a man and woman from the BBC.

The extent of Money’s displeasure was clear from a letter he wrote the next day to Sir Charles Curran, then director general of the BBC. After laying out his history with Williams and Smith, Money delivered a threat. “I would appreciate it,” he informed Curran, “if you perused the contents of the program most carefully in light of the BBC’s moral and legal obligation not to violate the privacy of a family which is at present particularly vulnerable to the possible effects of an invasion of privacy. I need hardly tell you that my concern is for the protection of this family. However, I must advise you that if their privacy is not appropriately protected I will counsel them to take legal steps to obtain compensation for any harm the BBC has caused them, and I trust that this will not be necessary.”

But the BBC stood behind Williams and Smith, and the reporters moved on to the final stage of their reporting: to find a scientist who could comment on the significance of their findings. One name in particular kept coming up—that of the scientist who had inspired Money’s wrath fourteen years earlier when he first questioned Money’s conclusions and with whom Money had later clashed at the gender identity symposium in Dubrovnik.

“When we got onto Dr. Diamond,” Smith says, “it was then quite interestingly obvious that we were getting into what is best described as scientific warfare—and that warfare can get quite bloody.” Indeed, given Money and Diamond’s long history as doctrinal adversaries, the BBC reporters were at first wary about using Diamond as an expert commentator on the case, fearing that any opinions he expressed might not reflect an objective scientific viewpoint. “You have to be careful to find out: Was this something personal, or was it not?” Williams says. “I was satisfied that Diamond was actually raising something which deeply troubled him ethically. Whether or not he liked Money is quite another matter.”

Diamond says that he had no special dislike for Money. Their altercation of six years earlier he had forgiven as a by no means rare eccentricity in a scientist and perhaps a result of the bibulous nature of the Dubrovnik cocktail party. Even after that encounter, Diamond had tried to communicate with Money. “I asked John several times in the late 1970s about the twin,” Diamond says. “He didn’t want to talk about it. He said that the kid was going through some troubles unrelated to the sex reassignment and that it would be inappropriate to bother her at this time. So I let it go.”

But Diamond had never deviated from his conviction that sex reassignment of a developmentally normal infant was impossible, and he had not hesitated to publish this opinion—even as recently as a few months before the BBC contacted him. In the 1979 volume
Frontiers of Sex Research
, Diamond had cited the case, saying that on the evidence Money had so far published, it seemed to be “good fuel” for the power of rearing over biology, but in what today looks like a statement of extraordinary prescience, Diamond warned, “with puberty, the penectomized twin has a good likelihood of rebelling at the assignment of rearing which is in conflict with biological heritage.”

Diamond agreed to be interviewed, and his segment was filmed on a rocky precipice overlooking the ocean. Asked by Williams what impact it would have on the field if the twin were shown to be having “severe and sustained” problems, Diamond said, “I think it depends on who you ask. There are those who believe in the [case] almost as a religious entity.” He went on to say that if all the combined medical, surgical, and social efforts could not succeed in making the child accept a female gender identity, “then maybe we really have to think that there is something important in the individual’s biological makeup; that we don’t come to this world neutral; that we come to this world with some degree of maleness and femaleness which will transcend whatever the society wants to put into it.”

The documentary, entitled
The First Question
(in reference to the universal query at birth, “Is it a boy or a girl?”), aired in Britain on 19 March 1980. An impressively clear overview of the complex issues involved, the program also sought a balance in its depiction of Money’s work. Included in the program was an interview with the mother of one of Money’s intersexual research subjects, an XY male born with a tiny penis and undescended gonads, who on Money’s recommendation had been surgically reassigned as a girl. At eight years of age, the child, Paula, was described as successfully living in her female assignment. Yet the program was unsparing in its depiction of the far more theoretically important case of the developmentally normal twin—whose case seemed to be on the brink of collapse.

Williams and Smith expected their program to stir controversy and comment. It did not. “The reaction was curiously muted,” says Smith. “I was a bit surprised that print journalists didn’t take it up.” Diamond was similarly mystified at the failure of the documentary to provoke comment or follow-up from American programs like
60 Minutes
.

Determined to disseminate the BBC’s findings to North American physicians, Diamond wrote up the results of the documentary in a short scientific paper and submitted it to the American science journal
Archives of Sexual Behavior
. Titled “Sexual Identity, Monozygotic Twins Reared in Discordant Sex Roles and a BBC Follow-Up,” the paper appeared in a 1982 issue of the journal. In it Diamond quoted Sigmundson’s and Moggey’s verbatim comments about Brenda’s problems as well as Sigmundson’s doubts that she would ever make the adjustment to being a woman. Speaking to the wider implications of the case and its apparently imminent failure, Diamond added, “As for the twin, it is scientifically regrettable that so much of a theoretical and philosophical superstructure has been built on the supposed results of a single, uncontrolled and unconfirmed case. It is further regrettable that we here in the United States had to depend for a clinical follow-up [on] a British investigative journalist team for a case originally and so prominently reported in the American literature.”

Upon the article’s publication, Diamond was frustrated to see it meet with a reaction similar to that of the documentary. While some feminist scholars quietly dropped the twins case from new editions of their women’s studies textbooks, the academic, scientific, and medical communities were oddly silent about the findings. “They ignored it,” Diamond says. “It’s not what they wanted to hear.”

In the days and weeks following her glimpse of the mysterious man with the camera in the alley near her school, Brenda grew increasingly outspoken in her rejection of girlhood during her sessions with McKenty. She complained of how Brian had more friends because he wasn’t constantly being teased, and she railed about the fact that her brother could fight people without looking like a weirdo. “All girls do is make
babies
,” she said.

At school, her “out” boyishness provoked escalating taunts and threats from her peers. One day shortly before Christmas, she was threatened by a classmate who brandished a knife. “I told my mother, ‘I’m not going to that school anymore. I’ll run away,’ ” David says. Janet supported Brenda’s decision, as did McKenty, who arranged for a private tutor paid for by the government.

Away from the taunts and threats of her R. B. Russell classmates, Brenda continued to assert her boyishness in word, dress, and deed while at home. Janet, hoping that Brenda’s behavior was simply a “stage,” continued to look for signs of femininity in her daughter. “Any little sign—and I was in seventh heaven,” she says. “I misinterpreted a lot of things she did.”

David remembers an incident from this period when Brenda found a pair of her mother’s black kid gloves in a closet. “They felt nice and soft inside,” David says. “I put them on. They reminded me of those cool Italian race car gloves that you see in the movies. I was thinking, These would give a good grip on the steering wheel. All of a sudden I realized my mother was behind me. I looked around and she was smiling at me, and she said, ‘Go ahead. If you want to wear them, go
ahead
.’ She thought I was trying to be feminine.”

As the winter progressed, Janet found it increasingly difficult to sustain such fantasies. One night she had a dream that years later she recognized as a sign of all she was struggling to repress about her daughter. In the dream Janet was visiting a woman whose boyfriend had just moved out. The woman, distraught, opened a trunk and reverently lifted out of it a huge stuffed penis. “She held it out to me like it was a brick of gold,” Janet recalls. “And she said, ‘That’s what I’ve got to remember him by.’ ”

That winter, Janet began to feel returning the mood of desolate hopelessness that had engulfed her during the family’s ill-fated sojourn in British Columbia. In late January her psychiatrist, Dr. Nona Doupe, recognized that Janet was descending into a serious depression and was once again a threat to herself. Dr. Doupe had Janet admitted to Victoria Hospital, where she remained for a month. Soon after her release, Janet spiraled back into despair—and life at the Reimer home fell into chaos. For Brenda, her mother’s continued vigilance for signs of girlishness became intolerable; for Janet, the sight of Brenda in her boy’s clothes and matted hair seemed an unspoken and unbearable rebuke for the decision she and Ron had made almost thirteen years earlier. In early March, McKenty noted Brenda’s complaints “that nothing she does pleases her mother who criticizes and yells at her all the time.” A few days later things reached a climax.

“She told me to clean up the fridge,” David says. “I used as much elbow grease as possible, but it wasn’t to her liking. I shouted, ‘I’m doing the best I can!’ She threw a box of cereal at my face. I threw it back at her. She was ready to hit me. I grabbed her hand and shoved her. My mother said, ‘I’m going to tell your father!’ ”

Ron, pleading exhaustion, withdrew from the fray, turned on the television, and poured himself a drink. Janet recognized a return to the fatal pattern that had trapped the family in British Columbia. She called Dr. McKenty, whose notes on the conversation register the turmoil into which the family had plunged: Ron was drinking unsettling amounts of whiskey; Janet and Brenda were constantly at each other’s throats; and now Brenda and Brian, too, were in open warfare, fighting all the time.

By now it was impossible for McKenty and the other members of the local treatment team to ignore the obvious: after almost four years of trying to implement Dr. Money’s plan, Brenda and her family were only worse off. Dr. Winter was the only physician who still held out any hope. Convinced that the appearance of Brenda’s uncompleted vagina was the chief stumbling block to her psychological acceptance of herself as a girl, he had long been the most vocal advocate for the surgery. But now, even he began to waver. “Early on, I had . . . pushed for early surgery,” he wrote in a letter to Dr. McKenty. “I am not as convinced now that this is a good idea and therefore at the present time have no specific plans or opinions as to the proper time for the operation.”

Ultimately Brenda forced the endocrinologist to come down off the fence. During an appointment at his office in mid-March, she refused to remove her hospital gown for a breast exam. The doctor asked again. She refused. The standoff lasted twenty minutes. “It comes to a point in your life where you say, ‘I’ve had enough,’ ” David says. “There’s a limit for everybody. This was my limit.”

Dr. Winter had reached
his
limit, too. “Do you want to be a girl or not?” he demanded.

It was the question Dr. Money had been asking her since the dawn of her consciousness, a question the local treatment team had badgered her with for years. It was a question she’d heard once too often.

She raised her head and bellowed into Winter’s face, “
No!
”

To Brenda’s surprise, Winter did not get angry. Instead he simply left his office for a moment, then returned. “OK,” he told her. “You can get dressed and go home.”

Only later would Brenda learn that Winter had, in stepping out into the hallway, spoken with Dr. McKenty. He told her that in his opinion it was time the teenager was told the truth about who she was and what had happened to her.