Saturday, January 5, 2008

About Transgender—Book Review

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl; John Colpitano; Harper Collins Publishers(©2000)-ISBN 0-06-019211-9

I suppose that one’s prurient interest might draw one to read John Colpitano’s As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, however, this is not a book that lends itself to that sort of thing. The title brings to mind shades of Christine Jorgenson but this is not about elective gender reassignment surgery, it is about gender, manipulation on a grand scale, secrets, imposition and the presumption that nurture trumps nature. It is about Bruce Reimer, a Canadian child of a working class family, who at the age of eight months is circumcised badly. His penis is destroyed. He is an identical twin. Since it is easier to remove body parts than it was to build them anew in 1966, Bruce’s parents, at the urging of the pop medical community, assent to gender reassignment for their baby. They raise Bruce as a girl--Brenda. They become caught in the middle of a decades old debate of nature being a mutable factor in personality development--if you raise a child as a female, it will be a female.

At the center of this controversy are two figures: Dr. John Money and Dr. Mickey Diamond. Money makes John’s Hopkins Hospital the vanguard of sexual reassignment surgery in America from 1965 to 1985. It is said that he coined the term “gender identity.” The presentation of Money’s career show him to be a consummate manipulator, arrogant and more interested in playing with sex and gender, at least on an academic level, than exercising due diligence on his experimentations. In this sense, Money was psychology’s poster boy for the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s. It is also the story of Money’s nemesis—Dr. Mickey Diamond who found fault with Money’s theories as early as 1959 with studies conducted by Dr. Harry Benjamin, the father of American surgical gender reassignment, who stated he “could find no evidence that childhood conditioning” was involved in the conviction of transsexuals that they were living with the wrong sex.

Throughout this poignant story, we see two twins affected by the attentions paid to the angry tomboy sister and the development of emotional distance by the mild mannered brother. It is a story of well meaning parents keeping a vital secret from their children and presuming that the doctor is always right. It is a true-life story, Colapinto does a great job of digging out the research and presenting the medical/psychiatric climate that drives it. It is a good read and a great science project, a must read for parents.

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