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"A boy," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," he explained, obviously surprised that I didn't already know, "he's got a penis."

The "penis" he showed me was the little pee-hole between the doll's legs. Not much of a penis -- it wouldn't have been much of a vagina either -- but it served its signifying purpose admirably, allowing my son to impose a desired meaning on the matter at hand.

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl By John Colapinto HarperCollins, 279 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com The Danish Girl By David Ebershoff Viking, 270 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Gender is always a meeting of meaning and matter, and sometimes that meeting is fraught. Do we impose meanings on the matter of bodies -- or is it, in Judith Butler's phrase, the bodies that matter? The title "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl" certainly makes the case for the primacy of nature -- matter -- as, ultimately, the book itself does. But author John Colapinto tells the story with enough richness to ensure that gender remains a complexly meaning-laden issue throughout.

Bruce Reimer lost his penis to a botched circumcision in infancy, in 1966. Phallic reconstruction was primitive at the time; desperate for a solution, his grieving and guilt-stricken young parents visited Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins when Bruce was one-and-a-half years old. Money contended that it was possible to assign a baby a gender and -- with the help of surgery, hormones and gender-specific socialization -- successfully raise the child as either a girl or a boy.

Money told Ron and Janet Reimer that the baby could develop into a "normal" girl and woman. Surgery could provide her with a functional vagina adequate for intercourse and even orgasm. She wouldn't be able to bear children, of course, but she would develop psychologically as a female and form erotic attachments toward men.

What Money may not have made entirely clear, according to Colapinto, was that all his experience had been with hermaphroditic or intersexed children. He had never worked with a child whose prenatal genital and sexual development had been entirely within normal limits. Turning baby Bruce into Brenda was -- the words don't seem too harsh -- experimentation on a human subject.

In fact it was a researcher's dream experiment, because Bruce was an identical twin, sharing DNA with his uninjured brother, Brian. If Bruce could be successfully reared as a girl, the case would serve as a dramatic illustration that socialization was the decisive influence in gender identity.

The "twins case" made headlines when Money described it in his 1972 book, "Man and Woman, Boy and Girl," which the New York Times Book Review called "the most important volume in the social sciences to appear since the Kinsey Reports." Summing up Money's findings on sexual reassignment, the Times said, "If you tell a boy he is a girl, and raise him as one, he will want to do feminine things."

The trouble was, "Brenda" didn't want to do "feminine things." The notes from Money's yearly interviews with the twins do show that the little girl sometimes told him what he wanted to hear (although sometimes she manifestly did not). But in the distressingly univocal testimony of teachers, local therapists and relatives, she was an angry, miserably unhappy child who didn't make girlfriends and hated dolls and dresses. Brenda was always a tougher, more enthusiastic fighter than Brian: Sometimes she'd defend him, sometimes she'd beat him up. And although her parents never told her that she'd been born a boy, one therapist reported that she repeatedly insisted she was "just a boy with long hair in girls' clothes."

"I sort of knew it wasn't working after Brenda was 7 or something," Ron Reimer told Colapinto. "But what were we going to do?" Ron sank into alcoholism and workaholism, Janet suffered from depression, Brian shoplifted in order to get attention from his parents. As for Brenda, her confused but consistent resistance to just about everything imposed upon her seems little short of heroic. Meanwhile, back at Johns Hopkins, Money was writing "Sexual Signatures," a popular account assuring his readers that "the little girl ... preferred dresses to pants, enjoyed wearing her hair ribbons, bracelets and frilly blouses, and loved being her daddy's little sweetheart."

The Reimers gave up the project when Brenda was 14, persuaded partly by the opinions of local therapists, but mostly by Brenda's insistence that she'd kill herself if forced to see Money again or to undergo any more surgery. Brenda is now David, a name he chose after he'd learned the truth of his situation: He wanted to be either Joe (as in your average Joe) or David, after the biblical hero who had prevailed against an enormous enemy. In an eloquent and loving gesture, he asked his parents to choose between the names. He's married to a woman whose three children he's raising as a father. And you'll probably want to know that phallic reconstruction has made considerable advances -- he's genitally sexually active.

Next page | Shit-scared of John Money