Dr Money and the boy with no penis
On 22 August 1965 Janet Reimer was granted her dearest wish: she gave birth to twins. The two boys, Brian and Bruce, were healthy babies, but they would lead tragic lives, blighted by one scientist’s radical theory.
When they were seven months old, the boys, who lived in Winnipeg, Canada, were sent to the local hospital for a routine circumcision. Unfortunately the doctor in charge of the procedure was using electrical equipment, which malfunctioned several times. On the last trial, Bruce’s entire penis was burnt off. Brian was not operated on. The family were distraught. In the sixties plastic surgery was not an option: even today it is not recommended that new-borns undergo penis reconstruction operations.
It wasn’t until several months later that Janet and her husband, Ron, saw a programme on television that gave them some hope. Dr John Money, a highly renowned sexologist, featured in a debate about his practise of promoting operations on transsexuals to make them into the gender they wished to be. He had brought a transsexual with him who was incredibly feminine looking. Janet Reimer suddenly thought that perhaps this was the solution – they could turn their baby son into a daughter. She wrote to Dr Money immediately who responded swiftly and invited them to come and visit him in Baltimore, Maryland in America.
Dr Money is a highly intelligent, well respected, charismatic individual and he suggested to the Reimers that they bring their son up as a girl. Thus, when Bruce was 18 months old, he was castrated and a rudimentary vulva was created for him. The family now called him Brenda and tried to treat him like a little girl.
As for Dr Money, although he was the answer to the Reimers’ prayers, they were the answer to his too. He had studied people known then as hermaphrodites, now referred to as intersex, who are physically both male and female. As it was surgically easier to turn these people into females, this was standard practise. Dr Money had used pairs of with case studies of hermaphrodites to show that there was a window of opportunity for surgery – a ‘gender gate’, which lasted up to the age of two. During that period, if the parents chose the sex of the child, the way they brought it up would determine the child’s gender, not its physical characteristics. But until this point, Dr Money had never put his controversial theory into practise with a non-intersex child. Now he had the perfect and unplanned opportunity to do so: he had a set of identical twins, two biological boys, one of whom could be raised a girl.
Janet Reimer wrote to Dr Money of Brenda’s progress and once a year the whole family visited him in Baltimore. When Brenda was five Dr Money started to publish her case – disguising her by referring to her as Joan/John – in his books. The case became a sensation. It was the proof that feminists in particular were looking for. Thus, it was felt, there was no biological reason that boys are better at maths and men earn more than women. Nurture not nature determines whether we feel feminine or masculine. Widely cited in many text books, the case was a landmark study – hailed as proof of the overwhelming force of nurture - in spite of increasing evidence that hormones both in the womb and throughout a child’s life, play a huge part in an individual’s perception of themselves as masculine or feminine.
Meanwhile, back in Canada, things were not so good for the Reimer family. Brenda behaved in a distinctly masculine fashion. She liked running and fighting and climbing and loathed playing with dolls. She had no friends and was increasingly lonely as her twin Brian was embarrassed to play with her in front of his other friends. She hated going to visit Dr Money. The scientist insisted that to fully understand that she was a girl, she needed to grasp the difference between men and women, and frequently spoke to her about her genitalia. He took photographs of her and her brother naked. He tried to persuade her to have a vagina constructed, which, at the time, would have been made out of section of her bowel or else from the skin of her thigh, which would then be inserted into the pelvic region. Dr Money showed Brenda graphic photographs of a woman giving birth when she was seven years old in an attempt to get her to agree to having a ‘baby-hole’ made. He also suggested strongly that she take hormone tablets in order to make her grow breasts when she was twelve. Other scientists, including Dr Money’s ex-students, argue that he did these things in the best possible interests for his patient – to make her believe that she was indeed a girl. However, Brenda felt traumatised and became suicidal.
Finally when she was thirteen, the family told her and Brian the truth. Brenda was intensely relieved as she had felt she was going insane. Almost immediately she turned herself back into a boy and called herself David. David received compensation money for the circumcision and used this to pay for surgery to have a new penis constructed. In his early twenties he met Jane Fontane, who had three children of her own and they married. Unfortunately, his relationship with his brother worsened. Brian had felt that David, as Brenda, had received all the attention when they were growing up; once he discovered that he was no longer the only boy in the family, he became extremely angry. It was the start of mental disturbance that would develop into schizophrenia. After two failed marriages, he died, possibly of a drug overdose, which may have been a suicide attempt.
David had never managed to complete his education and had to take semi-skilled work. He was made redundant and was unemployed for a year. He sold the movie rights to his story, but lost the money when a business man absconded with his investment. Stricken with grief for his brother, his marriage started to fail. Jane asked him for a short separation period, but David took this very badly. He returned to his parents’ house for a few days, before driving to a supermarket car park on 4 May 2004 and shooting himself in the head. He was 38 years old.
Dr Money argues that he cannot be held to blame because David did not accept a female gender identity. He says that the family delayed making a decision until their son was almost two – the gender gate was about to shut, at this stage. However, others argue that he could have admitted he made a mistake when the case clearly was not working, for he continued to let people believe that it had been successful long after he had stopped seeing Brenda and she had become David. It is, perhaps above all, a cautionary tale of what may happen when a scientist falls in love with a beautiful theory and ignores the ugly facts.
Further information:
As Nature made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto, 2000, Harper Collins, London, NY.
Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt, 1972, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto-Sterling, 2001, Basic Books
Web sites:
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University
http://bms.brown.edu/faculty/f/afs/afs.html
Transsexuals: The Current Medical View
http://www.pfc.org.uk/medical/mediview.htm
The UK Intersex Association
http://www.ukia.co.uk/
At the time, plastic surgery was not advanced enough. It is not recommended that new-born babies have phalloplastic surgery since first, they do not have enough spare flesh to create a penis, secondly, the operation is traumatic, and finally, they grow, but the penis does not, which means that they would need further operations in later life.
Flesh from the patient’s arm is used to shape a new penis. Part of the skin is kept connected to nerves and blood vessels during the operation. One segment is rolled into a tube, which will be the urethra, the rest is formed into a tube around the urethra. When the nerves have been excavated in the groin area, the new penis is cut free from the arm and attached at the groin. Skin from the stomach or buttocks is used to fill in the flesh on the arm. Later the head of the penis is created using a piece of skin from the other arm, and may be tatooed. A saline reserve is buried in the abdomen, with a tube running to the penis. A valve, located in the groin, is turned to allow the saline solution to pump into the penis creating an erection. If the operation is on a female to male transsexual, the clitoris can be embedded in the penis so he can still orgasm.
David’s penis was made from flesh from his thigh, so was less sensitive. A piece of his rib was embedded within the organ to allow him to use his penis sexually, but he had to urinate through a fistula at the base.
Most medical experts would agree that a baby has been subjected to hormones in the womb even before it is born and so has a male or a female brain. Baby Bruce Reimer, if he were born now, would be considered a full biological male and would probably be allowed to grow up as boy and offered counselling to deal with the loss of his penis, and surgery when he reached adolescence. Intersex patients, people who are both male and female, believe they should be treated on an individual basis, depending on their exact condition. Many intersex patients are angry that their gender was chosen for them and believe that children now should be brought up as intersex and allowed to chose their own gender and surgery, if appropriate, at a later stage.
Dr John Money carried out the same procedure on another boy in Canada. Was this case successful?
Another Canadian baby also suffered loss to his penis and, on Dr Money’s recommendations, was raised as a girl. Called Paula, she is still living as a woman. She is a lesbian truck driver.
Why did Dr John Money believe that the case he called the Joan/John case was not a success?
Dr Money has not spoken about David Reimer publicly, but in Sin, Science and the Sex Police (1998, Prometheus books) he published the following reasons why David may not have accepted his gender identity: