THE TALE OF AN UNWILLING GENDERNAUT

Once upon a time, in a decade called the Sixties, a little boy named Bruce was born. He had a twin brother, and at first, life was fine for the children. They had a mommy and daddy who loved them and wanted to do the right thing for them. In fact, they started out life just the way most of us do in the US and Canada (Canada being the far-away land where this story takes place).

Then one day it was time to go down to the hospital to get circumcised. They did this delicate operation with an electrocautery gizmo, one of several methods that had been developed for doing the usually-unnecessary and painful procedure.

Can you tell that our idyllic story of two sweet twins is about to take a turn for the worse?

Little Bruce’s baby brother was circumcised, wailed, eventually healed; well, his circumcision did not go awry, anyhow. I know there are anti-circumcision activists all around me who would deny that “healing” is possible after circumcision: after all, part of your body is then by definition missing. I agree with you guys, OK? So don’t email me those awful pictures of circumcised babies you keep on your websites. Don’t snail mail me your pamphlets, either, unless you have published something new recently, in which case go ahead and I will put all literature in the Center for Sex & Culture archives.

But I digress from my story. Back to little Bruce.

Little Bruce’s circumcision did not go so well. His penis was lost. Yes, lost, dear reader: This is not an allegory, this is a story about a damned circumcision that went so far south that, when it was over, a little boy’s dick was gone.

Don’t be bashing Canada over this, now. The same thing happens here.

Because it was the Sixties, a brave new decade when it seemed that anything was possible and the future was close enough to touch, Bruce’s distraught parents and doctor called upon an Expert. The Expert they called upon was a pretty famous guy who was about to become, thanks to Bruce’s sad accident, a lot more famous indeed. His name was John Money, and he studied gender, among other things, and was convinced that the difference between the sexes was primarily one of genital plumbing and social construction. That is, babies were born, put into pink or blue blankets, and treated immediately in pink and blue ways by parents and everyone else. The little creatures were, in fact, infinitely malleable, but since grown-ups were not, rigid gender expectations began to be imposed on the tiniest kids, and the kids learned what the parents expected of them and turned into Boys and Girls and later Men and Women.

In the case of Bruce, one of these pesky problems of gender differentiation was no longer an issue: his genital plumbing was pretty much toast, and docs in that decade had yet to learn how to reconstruct an infant penis. No one thought they would have a good shot if they tried. So Dr. Money recommended they do something else. He suggested they do some basic reconstructive surgery to make Bruce’s damaged genitals look female, and to put the kid in a dress, call her Brenda, and turn her into a girl.

Now, there are many adult transgendered women who hated being the little boys they were raised to be and always wished someone would come along and get them a nice little yellow dress. This, however, was not Bruce’s situation. He did not yearn to be a girl, but he was also too young when this accident happened to have a clearly developed sense of himself as a boy. That’s what everybody thought, anyway. And Dr. Money was certain that he could not only help Bruce, a.k.a. Brenda, recover from this horrible damage, but also prove a huge point about gender to all of society. Especially good: Brenda had a twin! It was a built-in control group, a perfect experiment.

If you went to college in the 1970s or 1980s and took any Psych, Soc, or similar classes, you heard about Bruce/Brenda, except s/he was called John/Joan in Money’s influential book *Man and Woman, Boy and Girl*. Money made absolute hay over the twins, announcing their existence to the world, writing them up in scientific journals, showing up at their house every so often to monitor their progress or having them travel to his lab at Johns Hopkins. Money’s fame and influence was a done deal now, thanks largely to his role in the lives of the twins.

Brenda got dresses and dollies. She went to school and did everything else in her life dressed and in all other ways identified as a girl. She wasn’t happy... but for years and years she didn’t know why.

The world outside didn’t get the word that the twins study wasn’t a perfect example of social gender construction, that the happy little home into which the twins were born was fraught with tension over Brenda’s distress, that no one (including the great Money, whom people kept trusting until it was way too late) seemed to be able to help.

Finally a suicidal, troubled teen Brenda was told why “she’d” always felt so different.

She put her boy’s clothes back on and never took them off again. It’s a good thing this happened when it did, because she (and her family) had been putting off a big surgery she needed: vaginoplasty. How could she become a normal woman if she didn’t have a vagina?

Brenda did not take back the name Bruce. Instead, this young gendernaut took a new name, strove to construct a new identity that would allow him (and his hormones, and his chromosomes) to move on into adult maleness. His new name was David Reimer.

Reimer struggled to be a man without having had the back-up of male learning and conditioning. John Money was half right, you see: that part *is* critically important to the types of men and women we can become. It’s just not the only part of the equation. Reimer did his best: He married, raised his wife’s kids, tried to make himself and them a normal life after anything-but-normal beginnings. He consented, at first reluctantly, to let the story of his life be told. His biographer, John Colapinto, produced a fabulous, thought-provoking book called *As Nature Made Him*. It made John Money look like a royal jerk, making one think that perhaps gender problems weren’t the only obstacle young David had to overcome.
Then, about a month ago, David Reimer died: suicide.

DAVID REIMER, REST IN PEACE

It may be the first peace since before the circumcision. It is certainly a painful time for his friends and family, and is also a utterly painful moment for gendernauts of all kinds. Any of us who is gender-dysphoric, transgendered, intersex, or a fellow traveler who wants to see gender become a less-binding social construction (that’s where I come in) has suffered a little with David Reimer when we found out about his strange and distressing life. For Reimer’s example proves that it’s still hard for most to accept anything but Either/Or when it comes to gender. He couldn’t be a man, the Experts reasoned, because he doesn’t have a penis, so what does that leave? An artificial woman, not driven, as male-to-female transsexuals are, by her own sense of inner female identity, but rather by the directive of a supposedly-expert adult.

The fact is, no one is yet truly expert in matters like this. Yes, we’re getting a handle on gender dysphoria, and of course transpeople are experts on their own lives. But that’s not really what this case is. David Reimer was an unwitting and then unwilling gender explorer, a person thrust into some of the biggest existential questions of all because one doctor had an accident and another doctor had a theory.

I send blessings to Reimer’s spirit, the part that could be said to be free of gender, as many of us would like to be. I wish him peace, a man who just wanted to be an ordinary guy, thrust into a most extraordinary life.

POSTSCRIPT

Money’s pretty much been demoted. I hope he had a pang when the news of Reimer’s death came his way; he wasn’t exactly open to acknowledging he might have fucked up while the object of his experimentation was still alive. Certainly most of us in and near the gender studies field do not idolize Money they way he came, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, to expect. He was a rock star of sexology then; now, he’s inextricably linked to an experiment that ended badly, in fact tragically.

The community of people most touched by the ramifications of this case and Money’s theories are probably our intersex friends and neighbors. Even more than transpeople, intersex folk, who are often born with “ambiguous” genitals (that is, the doc can’t easily tell if the newborn is female or male), are put as infants into a gender role that may or may not match their own sense of themselves. Sex roles aren’t all; often surgeries are performed to make these kids’ teeny genitals match some doctor’s template of “normal” dicks and clits. And of course David Reimer’s life and struggles should be of passing interest to anyone who thinks about getting their little boy circumcised. In both cases – intersex and circumcision – doctors use sharp knives to shape the body, trimming off nerve-endowed tissue in the process. It’s even possible Reimer decided to check out because he couldn’t have a damned orgasm.

Speaking of “normal,” a word I don’t like much: That’s where David Reimer’s life touches every one of ours. Who hasn’t had someone try to keep us in line by questioning whether or not we were “normal”? Too often we keep *ourselves* in line this way. “Am I normal? Is this normal? Do I look/sound/seem normal?” Tiny Bruce got put in a pinafore because his young parents were terrified that their child would live a life that was not normal; sadly, that’s exactly what happened, but in a way completely different than they expected. And each of us is put into boxes marked “normal” and either learn to live within them, or escape, sometimes sustaining damage in the attempt.

That’s the genesis of pink and blue, two and only two genders. It’s what makes people afraid to be their individual sexual selves, too, whether that’s queer, kinky, or just enthusiastic. People, “normal” kills. It killed David Reimer, I’m sure.

In fact, circumcision kills, too. You may know I wrote about this ten years ago; the essay is part of my collection *Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture*. People circumcise their little boys mostly to make them look “normal,” when the irony is, a truly normal penis is uncircumcised. That’s how they come from the factory, right? Full of nice nerve endings which you’ll want to play with your entire life, given the opportunity. Once in a while, though, the doc slips. These things happen. And in fact a scary website exists to tell you about all the hazards of this common and almost always medically unnecessary procedure. Check it out, especially if you plan to have any kids: http://www.circumstitions.com/Complic.html.

If David Reimer’s fight for his own life is to have larger meaning, maybe it will be that we all use his example to examine attitudes about sex, gender, and professional expertise that do not serve us. I know that I will keep his memory alive in that way: his is a stunning example of expectations (and medical authority) gone awry, and I want change, in his name.


Here are some links to other stories and sites about David Reimer's life:

The True Story of John/Joan By John Colapinto (The article that led to “As Nature Made Him”)
The Rolling Stone, December 11, 1997. Pages 54-97
http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/Gender/intersexuals/article_john_joan.htm

Gender Gap
What were the real reasons behind David Reimer's suicide?
By John Colapinto
http://slate.msn.com/id/2101678/

David Reimer
The boy who lived as a girl
CBC News Online | May 10, 2004
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/reimer/

Bodies Like Ours Mourns The Death of David Reimer
http://p074.ezboard.com/fbutchdykeboy5326frm7.showMessage?topicID=894.topic

Complications of Circumcision
(small article towards bottom with photo):
http://www.circumstitions.com/Complic.html

Sex-Change Victim Recalls Life as a Girl
by Natalie James
http://www.moss-fritch.com/medical_error.htm

The Death of David Reimer- A tale of sex, science, and abuse
by Jesse Walker
http://reason.com/links/links052404.shtml

Subject: Important: Good-bye David, and thank you
http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/listserve/Good-byeDavid_thankyou.htm