A review by yoshitreats
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

 

I love this book. It's intense & the science can get a little dense, yet I breezed through it & had trouble putting it down. It sent me down a rabbit hole, looking up videos of David Reimer speaking on Youtube. Many of the best parts of this book are when David is quoted telling his story in his own words.

The Reimer brothers, Brian & David, were born identical twin boys in the mid-1960s. David lost his penis as an infant during a botched circumcision. Their parents Janet & Ron, desperate to give their child a happy life, turned to psychologist John Money, who recommended reassigning David's gender to female & raising him as a girl, without ever telling the child the truth of his birth. Unfortunately John Money turned out to be a terrible scientist who was dogmatically attached to his pet theory that gender is 100% nurture & 0% nature: a theory he clung to despite mounting contrary evidence, to David's great mental & emotional detriment.

Basically, David knew he was a boy, all along. It didn't matter how many dresses Ron & Janet bought him or how much Money argued with him during their interviews at the Psychohormonal Research Unit. David had an unshakable innate sense of himself as male & even began to suspect, as a child, that something had been done to his genitals which no one was telling him about. Janet & Ron were encouraged by Money to suppress the doubts they had about the reassignment, so David's brother Brian became his only confidant. The 1st half of this story has a feeling of "Brian & David against the world", as they try to make sense of the world around them that isn't matching up with what every adult in their lives is telling them.

David's case is closely related to the topics of transgender & intersex people. This book was published in 2000, long before a "transgender tipping point", & it includes fascinating background on the history of gender & sexuality studies. Money's writing about his "success" in the Reimer twins case, which turned out to be quite influential in the medical community, is directly responsible for thousands of infant sex reassignments, which in turn are surely responsible, in part, for the gender dysphoria experienced by certain people. It's disturbing to consider how much anguish may have been caused by one doctor's stubbornness & oversized ego — not only in David's life, but in the lives of many others. A small but intriguing section of this book discusses Cheryl Chase, founder of the Intersex Society of North America.

In discussion of the book online, I've found certain right-wing anti-trans types who are trying to co-opt David's story for their own agenda, pointing to Money & claiming he's proof that the transgender movement has its ideological roots in a quack doctor. That's not what's going on here at all. If anything, David's story reinforces that there is an element of gender that is deeply present in the brain. Sometimes it matches a person's assigned gender at birth & sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't take a lot of extrapolation to imagine how the dysphoric feelings David experienced as a child could be similar or nearly identical to those experienced by a child whose incorrect gender assignment happens at birth, rather than as the result of a failed circumcision. To author John Colapinto's credit, he approaches the whole topic with a high level of nuance & specifically disavows any "simpleminded biological determinism" that could somehow be construed from the work he's done in this book. When it comes to gender & sexuality, I think most of the "just asking questions" crowd is speaking in bad faith & being manipulative (the answers are out there, after all), but I don't doubt there are some individuals who are genuinely still a bit confused, perhaps just not exposed to certain ideas & statistics, or perhaps attached to older forms of feminism that embraced a "gender is 100% nurture" philosophy similar to Money's. If here in the year 2024 or later, you're someone who uses the term gender critical or doesn't quite understand what's so wrong with what J. K. Rowling's said lately (and I see you people going by on my Goodreads feed), I think this book could be a great read for you, if you're willing to give a good listen to what it has to say.

In David's words:

"You know, if I had lost my arms and my legs and wound up in a wheelchair where you're moving everything with a little rod in your mouth — would that make me less of a person? It just seems that they implied that you're nothing if your penis is gone. The second you lose that, you're nothing, and they've got to do surgery and hormones to turn you into something. Like you're a zero. It's like your whole personality, everything about you is all directed — all pinpointed — toward what's between the legs. And to me, that's ignorant. I don't have the kind of education that these scientists and doctors and psychologists have, but to me it's very ignorant. If a woman lost her breasts, do you turn her into a guy? To make her feel 'whole and complete'?

"I feel sorry for women. I've been there. 'You're a little lady — go into the kitchen.' Or 'We don't want you to chop wood — you might hurt yourself.' I remember when I was a kid and women were fighting like hell to get equal rights. I said, 'Good for them.' I kind of sensed what position women had in society. Way down there. And that's how I was portrayed. And I didn't want to go way down there. I felt, I can do what anybody else can! But 'Oh, you're a girl — you might get hurt playing ball.'

"At Agassiz Drive school there was this guy, Tubby Wayne. He was a male chauvinist pig. 'Women are dirt; they can't do anything men can do.' He kept saying, 'You don't know anything. You're a girl; girls don't know anything.' So I finally said to him, 'You think you're so tough? Then hit me. C'mon hit me.' He says, 'No, I'm not going to hit you; you're a girl.' 'No. Hit me. I'm not going to put up with this.' He wouldn't, so I punched him — and he laughed at me. It was a good thing he didn't hit me, I guess. But I was thinking, Don't hide behind the 'I don't hit girls' excuse.

"The guys at work don't know about what happened to me. I mean, I work in a slaughterhouse. All men. Can you imagine? — 'There's the freak who wore dresses as a kid.' They give you that male chauvinist crap all the time. Like they're always saying that they're the boss at home. They look at me and ask me, 'Who's the boss?' I say, 'Look, man, in my home it's a partnership. It doesn't mean I wimp out; sometimes I get my way, and sometimes I don't get my way. But either way, it's a partnership.' I mean, who wants a woman with no brains, who follows you blindly? That's more like a slave than a wife. You don't want a slave, you want somebody with her own opinions, somebody who puts you on the right track, someone to show you the right direction. It's very hard to talk to somebody who's stone-cold stupid, who follows you blindly.

"But you know, if I had had a normal life, and none of this had ever happened to me, I'd probably be one of those chauvinistic kind of guys, where the guy goes to work, breaks his back, comes home, and sucks down a beer and watches sports. And if I saw someone like me out on TV, I'd sit there saying, 'Oh God that's sick.' That's how I would be. So knowing that that person is me, you can realize how sick I feel looking back on all this. You wish to God you could switch places with anybody."