As Nature Made Him (22 page)

It was Ron’s custom to pick Brenda up in the car after her weekly sessions with Dr. McKenty. The afternoon of 14 March 1980 was no exception. The only difference was that when Brenda climbed into the car, Ron said that instead of driving straight home, they would get an ice cream cone.

Immediately Brenda was suspicious. “Usually when there was some kind of disaster in the family, good old dad takes you out in the family car for a cone or something,” David says. “So I was thinking, Is mother dying? Are you guys getting a divorce? Is everything OK with Brian?”

“No, no,” Ron said to Brenda’s nervous questioning. “Everything’s fine.”

It was not until Brenda had bought her ice cream and Ron had pulled the car into the family’s driveway that he found the words he needed.

“He just started explaining, step by step, everything that had happened to me,” David says. “He told me that I was born a boy, and about the accident when they were trying to circumcise me, and how they saw all kinds of specialists, and they took the best advice they had at the time, which was to try to change me over. My dad got very upset.” It was the first time Brenda ever saw her father cry. She remained dry-eyed, however, staring straight ahead through the windshield, the ice cream cone melting in her hand.

“She just sat there listening, real quiet,” Ron says, almost two decades after this extraordinary encounter between father and child. “I guess she was so fascinated with this
unbelievable
tale that I was telling her.”

Today David says that the revelations awoke many emotions within him—anger, disbelief, amazement. But one emotion overrode all the others. “I was
relieved
,” he says. “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn’t some sort of weirdo. I wasn’t
crazy
.”

Brenda did have a question for her father. It concerned that brief charmed span of eight months directly after her birth, the only period of her life when she ever had been, or ever would be, fully intact.

“What,” she asked, “was my name?”

12

B
RENDA’S DECISION
to revert to the sex of her biological makeup was immediate. “When I’m eighteen I’ll be what I want,” she told McKenty in her first therapy session after learning the truth. “I’ll go from girl to boy.” The question was how to do it without creating gossip. She considered disappearing to Vancouver for a while and then returning as a male who had come to stay with the Reimer family. But there was an obvious drawback to this plan: “I look like Brian,” she said to McKenty. “People will know.” Then Brenda raised a still more agonizing problem. Trained her whole life to behave like a girl and to hide her impulses and feelings, Brenda wondered how her parents would take it when she revealed her true self. “What will they say,” she asked McKenty, “if I go out with a girl?”

A month and a half later, the Reimers attended a large family gathering to celebrate Janet’s youngest brother’s engagement. Still living socially as a girl, Brenda had no choice but to go to the party in female attire: a dress, red shoes, panty hose, makeup, and a stylish, short, imitation white mink coat which Janet had bought specially for the occasion—and, perhaps, as a last inducement to Brenda to remain in the sex they had chosen for her. But the humiliation of parading herself publicly as a girl, now that she knew the truth, was too much for Brenda. Having vowed to change sex in three years, she now moved up the deadline. “In
two
years,” she told McKenty a day after the party, “I want to look like a boy. I’d like a mustache.”

At her next session, Brenda again moved up the deadline for becoming a boy. She wanted to do it
now
, and she told McKenty that she had been thinking about a boy’s name for herself. She did not want to revert to her birth name, Bruce, which she considered a name for “geeks and nerds.” She’d come up with two options. She liked Joe because it had no pretensions; it was a name for Everyman. She also thought of calling herself David, after the biblical king and giant-slayer. “It reminded me of the guy with the odds stacked against him,” David says, “the guy who was facing up to a giant eight feet tall. It reminded me of courage.”

Brenda left the final decision up to her parents, who chose the name David. Ron says it was easy to make the transition from calling their child Brenda and he cannot recall ever accidentally calling his son Brenda after that. Others, too, found Brenda’s transformation to David easier to accept than they had anticipated. David’s tutor, Dorothy Troop, says that she had initially been nervous when notified of the change, but when David arrived for his first tutoring session, Troop found that his maleness was far from an obstacle between them. Brenda had always been a sullen, depressed, angry child; as David, everything was different. “He was happier,” Troop says, “far more settled and
alive
to what was going on around him.” Troop gave David a chain with his new name on it. In return, David gave his tutor a gift: the imitation mink jacket he had worn to the family party. “He seemed to want to get rid of anything that reminded him of when he was Brenda,” Troop recalls.

That August, one week after his fifteenth birthday, David made his big public debut as a boy among his extended family. The occasion was the wedding ceremony and reception of his uncle Dale. Using tape to flatten the breasts that still protruded from his chest, David donned a starched white dress shirt, a dark tie, and a charcoal gray suit identical to his brother Brian’s. It was not easy, David says, to step out as a boy for the first time in front of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends. He knew that the whole family had been informed long ago about his sex reassignment as a baby, but this knowledge did not make it any easier for him, trained for so long to play the little lady in front of relatives. Still, determined to get up in front of the crowd, he danced with the bride and several of her bridesmaids. “Happy,” Dr. McKenty wrote in her session notes with David two days later, “wedding a success.”

David began to receive injections of testosterone. He soon boasted a growth of peach fuzz on his cheeks and chin, and he grew over an inch in height. On 22 October 1980 he underwent a double mastectomy, an intensely painful procedure that left him in agony for weeks afterward. He decided to wait until the following summer—until he finished tenth grade—before having any further surgery.

In the intervening months, he fell to brooding on the accident that had set his life on its bewildering course. “At that stage in his life,” Dr. Winter says, “all he wanted was a gun to kill the doctor who had done that to him.” As the dismal Winnipeg winter progressed, David’s fantasies of revenge began to take on the contours of reality. With two hundred dollars saved from his paper route money, David bought an unlicensed 1950 Russian Luger on the streets of downtown Winnipeg. One February day he went to the Winnipeg clinic where Dr. Jean-Marie Huot had an office.

“I had the gun in my pocket,” David says. “I opened the door to his office. He looked at me and says, ‘Yes, what can I do for you?’ I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ He said, ‘No. Should I remember you?’ I said, ‘Take a good look.’ Then he knew who I was. He nodded his head. I was intending to pull out the gun and blow his brains out, but he started crying. I felt sorry for him. He had his head down. I said, ‘Do you know the hell you put me through?’ He didn’t say anything, just sat there, crying. I walked out. I could hear him behind me saying, ‘Wait! Wait!’ But I left. I sat by the river, crying.”

David smashed the gun with a rock and threw it into the Red River. A few days later he admitted to McKenty that he had gone to Huot’s office and “blasted him about the accident.” He did not say he had been carrying a gun in his pocket.

I contacted Dr. Huot in the summer of 1997. He refused to speak about this encounter. “That was seventeen years ago,” he said, “a very long time ago.” Nor did he care to discuss the incident that had brought the murderously depressed fifteen-year-old boy to his office in the first place. Asked about the circumcision accident, Huot said in his heavy French-Canadian accent, “I’m not in a situation to start talking about that now, for sure, for sure, for
sure
.”

On 2 July 1981, a month before his sixteenth birthday, David underwent surgery to create a rudimentary penis. Constructed of muscles and skin from the inside of his thighs, the penis was attached to the small stump of remaining penile corpora under the skin. False testicles, made of light-colored plastic, were inserted into his reconstructed scrotum. The sensation of a penis hanging between his legs was odd and unfamiliar. And he soon learned the drawbacks to phalloplasties. Over that first year, he was hospitalized eighteen times for blockages and infections in his artificial urethra. He would continue to be hospitalized regularly over the next three years.

Meanwhile, David tried to come to terms with his new life, and to prepare for reentering the world. In some respects, he says, this proved less difficult than he had feared. For apart from her fleeting friendships with Heather Legarry and Esther Haselhauer, Brenda had suffered severe social rejection; this, along with her almost annual changes of school, had guaranteed that no one ever got close enough to her to remark on her sudden vanishing—and David’s sudden materialization. Still, after his reversion to his biological sex, David (fearing that he might run into someone who would recognize him as the former Brenda) took the precaution of lying low in his parents’ basement. He watched TV, listened to records, and mulled all that had happened to him, trying to absorb and process it. This period would ultimately extend to nearly two years, until gradually, around the time of his eighteenth birthday, he began to emerge from the house, hanging out at local fast-food joints, roller rinks, and bars with Brian and his friends. Brian’s buddies immediately accepted David as one of the guys, but there were inevitably kids who vaguely recalled that Brian had once had a sister named Brenda.

Together the twins dreamed up a story to explain Brenda’s disappearance. They claimed she had gone to live with her boyfriend in British Columbia and had died in a plane crash. David was Brian’s long-lost cousin. As for David’s frequent hospitalizations, the twins said that they were to treat injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.

“We all knew they weren’t telling us the entire truth,” says Lyle Denike, one of Brian and David’s friends from that era. “But we didn’t want to push things too far. We knew we were dealing with something very personal.”

Heather Legarry, Brenda’s friend from sixth grade, also had doubts. In July 1983 she was working for the summer at her brother’s Go-Cart track after completing her freshman year of college. “I was selling tickets,” Heather says. “Suddenly there was a familiar face at the counter. It was Brian Reimer—or so I thought. I said hi, but instead of smiling, he flushed and stammered, then stepped away and pointed at this other guy. Up steps the
real
Brian. I asked, ‘Who was that? He looks just like you.’ Brian said, ‘That’s my cousin David.’ I wondered if it was Brenda, but I just brushed it off, telling myself, If he says it’s his cousin, it’s his cousin.”

“I couldn’t say anything to her,” David says of this encounter with the one person from his childhood whom he had considered a true friend. “It would take too long to explain everything. It was easier just to avoid people.”

Later that summer, when David turned eighteen, he reached another milestone, for it was then that he came into possession of the money that had been held in trust for him since he was two and a half years old—money awarded to him when St. Boniface Hospital settled out of court with Ron and Janet for a sum of sixty-six thousand dollars in 1967. This was far less than the millions that some had predicted they would receive in compensation for their son’s penile ablation. But then urgently in need of funds, and warned by their lawyer that a judge might overturn a large jury award, the young couple had accepted the hospital’s offer. In 1960s dollars, it had seemed a considerable sum to Ron, who at the time had an annual income of only six thousand dollars. Placed in trust for David, the settlement money was to be used by Ron and Janet only for treatment associated with David’s injury and had financed the family’s annual trips to Johns Hopkins. By 1983 the money had grown to over a hundred and seventy thousand dollars—a sum that instantly made David one of the best-heeled young men in his peer group. In the hopes of “lassoing some ladies” (as he would later tell Diamond), he bought a souped-up van. Equipped with a wet bar, TV, and wall-to-wall carpeting, it was quickly dubbed “The Shaggin’ Wagon.”

David did not do any shagging in the van, however. Indeed it was in his relations to girls that he felt the worst complications of his transition—complications that were only exacerbated by the fact that by age eighteen he was not merely a passably attractive young man, but an arrestingly handsome one. His sudden popularity with what was now the opposite sex introduced a terrible dilemma, because he knew his penis neither resembled nor performed like the real thing (it was incapable of becoming erect). “How do you even
start
dating?” David says, recalling this period of his life. “You
can’t
. You’re in such an embarrassing situation.”

Eventually he did date a girl two years his junior, a pretty but flighty sixteen-year-old. For David there was an ever-present anxiety. “I would think, What the hell is going to happen when she wants to go further than a kiss? How am I going to handle
that
?” He developed a strategy for stopping their sexual encounters before they became too intimate: he would drink a lot and then say,
I’m tired, I’m going to pass out now
. But one evening he miscalculated and truly did drop unconscious after drinking too much. When he woke in the morning, his girlfriend was beside him in the bed, and he could tell from her expression that she had looked between his legs. He had no choice now but to tell her. He explained that he had suffered an “accident.” Within days, he says, everyone knew. Just as in his childhood, he was suddenly the object of muttered comments, giggling, and ridicule. For David, this proved unbearable. The next day, he swallowed a bottle of his mother’s antidepressants and lay down on his parents’ sofa to die.