As Nature Made Him (9 page)

Kindergarten teacher McGregor, unschooled in Money’s theories of child development, formed a quite different opinion about Brenda. “She was more a
boy
,” McGregor says, “in the nature of things.” Furthermore, McGregor was convinced that Brenda herself, on some unconscious level, knew this. “I don’t think she
felt
she was a little girl,” the teacher says.

McGregor’s surmise was correct. Plunged into the sexually polarized world of school, Brenda now knew there was something seriously different about her. “You know generally what a girl is like,” David says, “and you know generally what a guy is like. And everyone is telling you that you’re a girl. But you say to yourself, I don’t
feel
like a girl. I liked to do guy stuff. It didn’t match. So you figure, Well, there’s something
wrong
here. If I’m supposed to be like this girl over here, but I’m acting like this guy, I guess I gotta be an
it
.”

Brenda’s personal difficulties were obvious in her functioning in the classroom. On her year-end Kindergarten Inventory of Skills, she was rated unsatisfactory in category after category: Social Living, Work Habits, Listening Skills, Speaking Skills, Reading Skills. The school threatened to hold Brenda back to repeat kindergarten. Janet complained to Dr. Money during a follow-up visit to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Money responded by giving the child an IQ test. Over two days, his research assistant, Nanci Bobrow, administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (the standard IQ test). Brenda scored in the low 90s, which placed her in the middle 50 percent of the population, indicating an average intelligence. Three weeks later Dr. Money sent the results to Brenda’s school. In an accompanying letter he painted a portrait of Brenda as a girl whose problems were temporary and well on the way to clearing up once she got over what he called her “playful negativism,” which was the result of “the bad emotional situation created by her early hospitalizations.”

“In such a case as the present one,” he concluded, “I very strongly favor promotion, because the degree of under achievement observed is a function of an emotional interference-factor which will definitely not improve by retaining the child at the kindergarten level.”

The school authorities in Winnipeg, upon receipt of Dr. Money’s letter, reversed their recommendation, and in September 1971, Brenda was advanced to first grade at a new school called Minnetonka.

Brenda’s problems only got worse. On 29 October, less than two months after Brenda started first grade, her teacher, Sharyn Froome, filed a report with the district’s Child Guidance Clinic. “I have had an extremely hard time interesting Brenda in any games or activities,” wrote Froome, who saw Brenda’s negative behavior as anything but “playful.” Describing her simply as “very negativistic,” and noting the child’s total isolation from her peers, Froome wrote that Brenda “has been doing just the opposite of anything the other children do.”

Child Guidance Clinic worker Joan Nebbs was among those who observed Brenda’s functioning at this time. “Her mother would send her to school very clean and cutely dressed, in little fancy tops and things like that,” Nebbs recalls. “She was quite fine-featured, with curly hair, and was a very pretty child with big brown eyes. It was her manner more than anything else that got in the way. She was always grubby. She’d always just been fighting with the kids and playing in the dirt. Brenda was
really
a rough little kid. She didn’t want to sit down with a book. She’d rather play knock-’em-down-shoot-’em-up cop games.” Nebbs says that Brenda sometimes tried to play with girls, but with little success. “She’d be trying to organize the girls to do things her way—trying to be the boss. She’d want them to play cowboys and Indians, chasing everyone around, general mayhem—and they didn’t want any part of that.”

Ron and Janet, who had hoped to keep Brenda’s medical history confidential, had no choice but to recognize that that would be impossible. After repeated queries from both the school and the Child Guidance Clinic for information about Brenda that might throw light on her academic and social difficulties, Ron and Janet signed a confidentiality waiver authorizing their local pediatrician, Dr. Mariano Tan, to contact the Child Guidance Clinic.

“I hope you will keep this letter strictly confidential,” Dr. Tan wrote to the clinic’s director. “Both of these children have been under my care since Oct., 1966. They are identical twins—both
male
—however, because of an unfortunate accident during circumcision on Bruce (now Brenda), the penis was amputated.” Tan went on to explain about Brenda’s sex change at Johns Hopkins.

The revelations in Tan’s letter seemed to explain, for both the clinic and the school, much about Brenda Reimer. “I just agreed it was a girl until I heard different,” says Brian’s first grade teacher, June Hunnie. “Once we knew the
background
, we thought to ourselves, Well, no wonder. What can you do to have a child sit down and quietly concentrate on classwork if there’s all this horrible stuff going on in the background? It’s impossible.”

Indeed it was—at least for Brenda. At the end of that school year Minnetonka informed Ron and Janet that while Brian would be promoted to the next grade in the fall of 1972, Brenda (despite Dr. Money’s sanguine predictions) would have to remain behind.

4

O
N 28
D
ECEMBER 1972
, four months after Brenda Reimer began her second attempt at first grade, John Money unveiled his “twins case.”

The occasion was the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. There Money delivered to a capacity crowd of over one thousand scientists, feminists, students, and reporters the first speech in a two-day series of talks devoted to “Sex Role Learning in Childhood and Adolescence.” The symposium, held in the Ambassador Ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel, featured an impressive roster of leading researchers in the field of sexual development. Only Money’s appearance at the meeting would make headlines, however—thanks to the remarkable case he cited that morning, a still fuller account of which (he informed his audience) could be found in his book
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
(coauthored with Anke Ehrhardt)—a book that happened to have been published, in an early example of cross-promotional marketing, the very day of Money’s appearance at the symposium.

Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
had been in the making for the previous four years. Culling data from the hundreds of hermaphrodites who had passed through his Psychohormonal Research Unit since the early 1950s, and drawing (as Money announced in the book’s preface) on scientific specialties as diverse as “genetics, embryology, neuroendocrinology, endocrinology, neurosurgery, social, medical and clinical psychology, and social anthropology,” the book was a daunting, ambitious-looking effort of scholarship—all the more so for its often impenetrable Latinate terminology and convoluted syntactic structures. Its thematic thrust, however, was surprisingly straightforward and was reducible to one organizing idea stated again and again in its three hundred pages. It was the same idea Money had first advanced in his mid-1950s papers on intersexes: namely, that the primary factors driving human psychosexual differentiation are learning and environment, not biology.

Appearing five years after Money and Ehrhardt’s data showing that female humans exposed to excesses of testosterone in utero displayed “tomboyism” in later life,
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
had little choice but to acknowledge what Money called “a determining influence” of prenatal hormones on adult sexual behavior. Money explained that these influences were not decisive, however. Describing them as merely adding “a certain special flavor” to the girls’ behavior, Money stated that in the formation of gender identity, prebirth biological influences are secondary to the power of postbirth environmental factors, which override them. To prove this nurturist bias, Money repeatedly evoked his principle of “matched pairs” of hermaphrodites—intersexual patients who shared a similar syndrome yet had been raised successfully, he claimed, as opposite sexes.

But the careful reader might have been struck by what looked like an uncharacteristic admission that hermaphrodites could not tell the whole story of human sexual development. For midway through the book, Money confessed to the frustrating constraints that prevented sex researchers from conducting the kinds of experiments that would provide truly conclusive answers to the riddle of psychosexual differentiation in humans. “The ultimate test of the thesis that gender identity differentiation is not preordained in toto by either the sex chromosomes, the prenatal hormonal pattern, or the postnatal hormonal levels would be undertaken, if one had the same ethical freedom of working in experiments with normal babies as with animals,” he wrote. “Since planned experiments are ethically unthinkable, one can only take advantage of unplanned opportunities, such as when a normal boy baby loses his penis in a circumcision accident.”

Then Money revealed that just such an “unplanned opportunity” to experiment on a developmentally normal infant had come his way—and that he had seized it. Describing how the injured baby’s parents had allowed their son to be surgically reassigned as a girl, Money also pointed out what he called an “extreme unusualness” to the case: the child in question was one of a pair of identical male twins. The momentous import of this would not have been lost on either Money’s readers or his AAAS audience. Money was saying that he had used for his experiment a pair of children whose biology was as close to identical as any two human beings could be: a pair of children whose lives had begun with the same primordial zygote cell, whose DNA bore the same genetic blueprint, and whose brains and nervous systems had developed in the womb within the same bath of prenatal hormones. In short, the ultimate matched pair.

That Money recognized the very special place Brenda Reimer’s case occupied in his work—and indeed within the entire history of sex research—was clear from the emphasis he gave it in
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
. First mentioned in the book’s introduction, it was then cited at various key points throughout the text: in Chapter 8 on “Gender Identity Differentiation,” in Chapter 9 on “Developmental Differentiation,” in Chapter 10 on “Pubertal Hormones.” It was in Chapter 7, on “Gender Dimorphism in Assignment and Rearing,” that Money explored the case at greatest length, his account having been assembled from firsthand observation of Brenda during the family’s annual visits to his Psychohormonal Research Unit and from letters and phone calls with Janet during the year.

Money made mention in passing of Brenda’s “tomboyish traits” but dismissed these as insignificant next to the myriad ways she conformed to the stereotypes of female behavior—examples of which were selected from Janet’s hopeful cataloging over the years of Brenda’s fitful attempts to act more like a girl. Money did make reference to Brenda’s extraordinary bathroom habits, but as he had done with Janet, he assured his readers that “many girls” attempt standing to urinate like boys, and he hinted that by age five Brenda no longer stood to pee—and that any sporadic reversion to her old habits was merely her effort at “copying her brother.” No mention was made of the academic, social, and emotional difficulties that had obliged Money to intervene on Janet’s behalf with the Winnipeg school authorities a year and a half before the book’s publication.

By any measure, the account portrayed the experiment as an unqualified success. In comparison with her twin brother, Brenda provided what Money variously described as an “extraordinary” and a “remarkable” contrast. Brian’s interest in “cars and gas pumps and tools” was compared with Brenda’s avid interest in “dolls, a doll house and a doll carriage”; Brenda’s cleanliness was characterized as wholly different from Brian’s total disregard for such matters; Brenda’s interest in kitchen work was placed alongside Brian’s disdain for it. Money did describe Brenda as always the “dominant twin,” though he gave the impression that this was changing over time. By age three, he reported, her dominance over Brian had become “that of a mother hen.” All in all, the twins embodied an almost miraculous division of taste, temperament, and behavior along gender lines and seemed the “ultimate test” that boys and girls are made, not born.

The significance of the case was not lost on the then-burgeoning women’s movement, which had been arguing against a biological basis for sex differences for decades. Money’s own papers from the 1950s on the psychosexual neutrality of newborns had already been used as one of the main foundations of modern feminism. Kate Millet, in her bestselling 1970 feminist bible,
Sexual Politics
, had quoted the 1950s papers as scientific proof that the differences between men and women reflect not biological imperatives, but societal expectations and prejudices. The twins case offered still more dramatic, and apparently irrefutable, evidence to support that view.

“This dramatic case,”
Time
magazine duly reported on January 8, 1973, the week after Money debuted the case at the AAAS meeting in Washington, “provides strong support for a major contention of women’s liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered. It also casts doubt on the theory that major sexual differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.”

The
New York Times Book Review
hailed
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
as “the most important volume in the social sciences to appear since the Kinsey reports.” It summed up the book’s argument on the power of nurture to override nature thus: “[I]f you tell a boy he is a girl, and raise him as one, he will want to do feminine things.”

The twins case was quickly enshrined in myriad textbooks ranging from the social sciences to pediatric urology and endocrinology. “The clear message here is that even if biologically based sex differences in behavioral predispositions exist, social factors such as the sex which the child is assigned and in which the child is reared can substantially override and obscure them,” wrote Alice G. Sargent about the case in her 1977 women’s studies text,
Beyond Sex Roles
. Sociologists were equally enthralled by the case and cited it as the premier example of society’s power to mold the most fundamental building block of human identity. Typical was the textbook
Sociology
, first published in 1977, in which Ian Robertson wrote that Money’s work “indicates that children can easily be raised as a member of the opposite sex” and that what few inborn sex differences might exist in humans “are not clear-cut and can be overridden by cultural learning.” The 1979 volume
Textbook of Sexual Medicine
, by Robert Kolodny and renowned sex researchers Masters and Johnson, cited the case as compelling evidence of the power of nurture over nature: “The childhood development of this (genetically male) girl has been remarkably feminine and is very different from the behavior exhibited by her identical twin brother. The normality of her development can be viewed as a substantial indication of the plasticity of human gender identity and the relative importance of social learning and conditioning in this process.”