What Money Couldn't Do

If I ever hear anyone say, "Gender is learned" or "Gender is performative" again, I'll scream.  Trust me, you don't want to hear that.

I can't understand how anyone who knows the story of David Reimer can utter such nonsense.  He--originally named Bruce-- and his identical twin brother Brian  were born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on 22 May 1965.  At six months, concerns were raised about how both of them urinated.  They were diagnosed with phimosis and, as a result, circumcision was recommended. However, only Bruce underwent the procedure, which a urologist did by the unconventional method of cauterization.  It went horribly wrong, and Bruce's penis was burned beyond repair.  Brian's condition cleared up without surgery.

The parents, worried about Bruce's prospects for future happiness and sexual function without a penis, consulted with John Money, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.  At that time, Johns Hopkins was the chief center for research on gender identity disorders and of gender reassignment surgery.  Money was an early and prominent proponent of the idea that gender is learned and believed, as most practitioners did at the time, that a penis could not be replaced but a satisfactory vagina could be constructed.  Not surprisingly, he believed that Reimer could achieve a more satisfactory life as a female and recommended that he undergo gender reassignment surgery.  So, at the age of 22 months, Bruce's testes were surgically removed.  

He was renamed Brenda and underwent years of hormone treatments and attempts to socialize him as a girl.  According to Reimer, Dr. Money forced him and Brian to play sexual roles, with Bruce/Brenda on bottom, as he believed this would help both of them develop "healthy adult gender identity."  His parents made him wear frilly dresses in the harsh Canadian prairie winters.

Through it all, Bruce/Brenda always idenitified as a boy.  Never once, he said, did he believe himself to be a girl.  He fell into a deep depression and, at age thirteen, threatened to commit suicide if he were forced to see Dr. Money again.  His parents then told him the truth about his gender identity, and at age fourteen started to live as male and assumed the name David.  Later, he would undergo testosterone treatments, a double masectomy and a phalloplasty to reverse the effects of his estrogen treatments and earlier gender-reassignment surgery.

One of the cruel ironies of this story is that his brother Brian was, if anything, more "feminine", at least in the way people would define that term. Brian was gentle, introspective and had little interest in masculine pursuits.  In contrast, Bruce was, in the words of John Colapinto--who wrote As Nature Made Him:  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl--"a hellraiser".  Brian died of an overdose of antidepressants in 2002, as David was dealing with unemployment and difficult relationships with his parents and wife, whose three children he adopted.    On 2 May 2004, his wife told him she wanted to separate; two days later, David committed suicide.

As Colapinto points out, as terrible as this case is, it doesn't provide an answer of "nature" to the "nature vs. nurture" debate. Some people believe that a case like David's--or, for that matter, his brother's-- proves that gender is entirely a function of the genitalia one has at birth.  However, I think--based on my own experience and that of trans people I've known--that however we come to the way we identify ourselves--whether we're born with it or come to it in infancy, early childhood or whenever--no amount of behavior modification, pharmaceutical treatments or surgery will change it.  I identified as female, even when I didn't voice it, about as far back as I can remember.  And no attempt to "make me a man" could change it.

Here is an interview Colapinto gave on Canadian television:

Going Through It Again

Today I was talking someone who’s related to me but not part of my “nuclear” family.  (I won’t get into the implications of that term!)  He’s a couple of years younger than half my age.  We talked about one thing and another; he mentioned some high-school friends he’d recently seen.  Then, he told me something I was not expecting from him, or anybody:  “I’d really like to go through puberty again.”

As someone who experienced puberty “again”, I didn’t know whether to laugh, argue with him or react in some other way.  Before I started my transition, I simply could not imagine myself going through puberty—or, more precisely, what it meant for me—again.  For a long time, I wished that I didn’t have to experience it at all.

The difference between the way I used to feel about my puberty, and his wish that he could experience his again, could be summed up as follows:  He told me that in his puberty, he experienced his first attraction to a girl.  “I knew I was straight.  Nothing has ever made me happier,” he claimed.  On the other hand, my puberty meant—to my horror—that I was becoming a man. 

For a long time, I was angry about that.  Not only did I have to become a man—at least by the definitions that were accepted at that time—I had to deal with sexual feelings that I couldn’t reconcile with being a man or a woman, at least as I understood those terms at that time in my life.  Because I didn’t have what academics call a “frame of reference” and a vocabulary to describe my feelings in a way that would have made sense to anyone I knew at the time, having those feelings was even more bewildering and terrifying than seeing my pubic hair grow around a sexual organ I didn’t want.

I wouldn’t want to go through any of that again.  However, I am thankful that I did.  When I went through my second puberty, in my 40’s (when I started taking hormones), much of what I felt made more sense to me—and was even cause for joy—as a result of the changes that came during my early teen years.

One of the things I realized was that in puberty, the emotional and mental changes are even more important than the physical ones.  So, while I was happy to see my breasts grow and the lines in my face soften, I was even more thrilled to not only experience the giddiness and crying jags, and new depths of feeling about everything from songs I heard on the radio to a Shakespeare play, and to feel my senses open in ways I never imagined on walks and bike rides.  Best of all, I had ways of understanding those things, and the fact that I wasn’t developing new sexual feelings as much as I was able to more thoroughly experienced the ones I’d had since my first puberty.

Still, even though I am glad to have experienced my “second” puberty, I cannot understand why my relative, or anyone else, would want to re-experience his or her pre-teen puberty.  Then again, my first puberty brought me into a part of my life I’d never wanted to experience, while my relative got what he’d hoped for when he experienced what will most likely be his only puberty. At least I got what I’d hoped to have from my second.