As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (P.S.) [Paperback]

John Colapinto (Author)

Book Description

Series: P.S. | Publication Date: August 8, 2006

In 1967, after a twin baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment that would alter his gender. The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine—and a total failure. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his medical history, made the decision to live as a male. A macabre tale of medical arrogance, it is first and foremost a human drama of one man's—and one family's—amazing survival in the face of terrible odds.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Colapinto has written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Esquire, Mademoiselle, Us Weekly, and Rolling Stone, where the landmark National Magazine Award-winning article that was the basis for As Nature Made Him first appeared. He is also the author of the novel About the Author. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 2 edition (August 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061120561
• ISBN-13: 978-0061120565
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Transgender
  • #1 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Transgender
  • #30 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Surgery

More About the Author

John Colapinto was born and raised in Toronto, and has a Master's in English literature from the University of Toronto. After freelancing for Canadian magazines for four years, he moved to New York in 1989 and wrote for many magazines, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times magazine and New York. In 1995 he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone where he won a National Magazine Award for a story about a medical scandal and expanded the story into a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which became a New York Times bestseller. In 2001, he published a novel, About the Author. Since 2006 he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker where he has written about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches, shoplifting prevention, Karl Lagerfeld and Michelin food inspectors.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars IT'S NATURE...NOT NURTURE..., October 10, 2006

By 

Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (P.S.) (Paperback)

This is a wonderfully written book and a fascinating look into the debate of nature versus nurture in the area of gender assignment. Intelligent and insightful, the author draws a compassionate portrait of a family who, faced with a decision in the wake of a tragedy, relies upon the advice of a well-respected doctor, which reliance turned out to be misplaced. The book details the aftermath of the family's fateful decision and the impact it was to have on them all.

In August 1965, Canadians Janet and Ron Reimer gave birth to identical twin boys, whom they named Brian and Bruce. When they were about eight months old, they arranged to have them circumcised due to a medical condition that caused them pain during urination. Circumcision was to remedy the problem. Little did they know that the circumcision for Bruce would be botched, resulting in the loss of his penis.

A plastic surgeon with whom the Reimers had consulted in connection with the catastrophe that had struck Bruce had spoken to a sex researcher who had recommended that they raise Bruce as a girl. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic had suggested that they ought to get a second opinion with regards to that suggestion. The parents then consulted with a doctor affiliated with John Hopkins Hospital, Dr. John Money, a renowned doctor in the area of gender transformation, who had been the driving force behind the then controversial surgical gender re-assignment procedure for which the hospital was becoming known.

In 1967, the distraught parents met with Dr. Money and shortly after, Bruce became Brenda and clinical castration followed. Thus, their child, who genetically and anatomically had been born a boy, was for all extent and purposes now deemed to be a girl. Brian was now on the other side of the gender divide of his identical twin brother, the twin formerly known as Bruce.

Moreover, Dr. Money now had a dream scientific experiment, because he had a set of twins for which the unafflicted twin could act as a control by which to measure the afflicted one. In 1972, Dr. Money disclosed his "twins case" to the medical world, giving a slanted version of the experiment that made it appear to be an unqualified success. Unfortunately, his analysis of the situation did not disclose the difficulties that Brenda was having and her seeming inability to adjust to being a girl.

Apparently, though Brenda had no idea as she was growing up that she had originally been born a boy, she never felt that she was a girl. Years of follow-up visits with Dr. Money for both twins proved to be unsettling for them, as Dr. Money employed somewhat bizarre methods and procedures. Moreover, as Brenda grew older, she would resist additional surgeries and initially resisted the hormone therapy that was introduced on the eve of puberty. Even when confronted with a totally rebellious Brenda, Dr. Money, however, remained in denial about the failure of his experiment. He would continue to tout his treatment of Brenda as an unqualified success.

It was not until March of 1980 that Brenda was finally informed by her father about what had happened to her years ago and what had been decided in light of the circumstances. It was a revelation that was to dramatically change Brenda's life. What followed was a repudiation of Dr. Money's assertions with respect to his treatment. The book details the changes that Brenda was to make in her life, changes that would find her living the life she was originally meant to lead. Brenda would now become David and live the life of a male. Unfortunately, happiness would continue to elude him.

This is a simply wonderful, intimate look at a family that survived a hideous tragedy. It also sympathetically and sensitively details the personal journey of one family through the labyrinthine differences in opinion surrounding the age old debate over nature versus nature. I would certainly assert that nature, and not nurture, controls. This is a very well thought out book on the issue, grounded in the tragic experience of one family. Bravo!

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars a terrible tragedy, December 18, 2008

By 

Nora Freeman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (P.S.) (Paperback)

I just finished reading this book about the tragic case of Bruce-Brenda-David Reimer. It was compelling reading, to say the least. Making it worse is learning from the reviews on this site that David ultimately committed suicide two years after his twin brother's possibly suicidal death from a drug overdose (the edition I read was published before both of those events).

The event that set the whole heartbreak in motion was a botched circumcision performed on the baby Bruce, which had been recommended because the twins, as babies, were having trouble urinating. Apparently at that time in Canada and the U.S., circumcision was routine in such cases, although more recently it has been questioned by many medical authorities. This cost Bruce his penis, and it was decided, for obvious reasons to cancel the surgery on his brother Brian. At the time, penis reconstruction surgery was in its very earliest days and outcomes were not promising. Ron and Janet, his parents, young, uneducated, and miserable as a result of the incident, came under the sway of a prominent sex researcher named Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Money saw this case as a miraculous opportunity, with a built-in control subject in the form of the twin brother Brian, to prove his theory that sex identity is malleable in early childhood and recommended to Bruce's parents that Bruce's gender be reassigned to female. His testicles were surgically removed, with more surgery and hormone therapy planned for later to complete the process, and Bruce was renamed Brenda. The entire family was required to travel to Baltimore annually to firm up (no pun intended) Brenda's female identity. As the years went on it became clearer and clearer to anyone without an axe to grind that Brenda's female identity, rather than solidifying, was if anything disintegrating. Her school experience was a dismal failure. She had few if any friends. Ron became an alcoholic, Janet sank into a severe depression, and Brian, the supposedly "normal" sibling struggled on with limited parental attention. However, Dr. Money refused to admit the truth and continued to mislead Ron and Janet. The annual visits became more and more disturbing to both Brenda and Brian. Some of Dr. Money's methods were unorthodox to say the least, and in any case, even when he was not showing the children pornography or insisting that they simulate sex acts, he grilled them relentlessly about their knowledge about and views of "proper" male and female sex roles. It all came to a head when the children were 14 and Brenda steadfastly refused to undergo the surgery that was intended to create a more realistic vagina. Although Brenda had been seeing a mental health care team that was committed to furthering Dr. Money's agenda, she now came under the care of a psychiatrist who was more interested in what Brenda wanted. Her parents saw no alternative other than to explain what had happened to her; she decided to reclaim her male identity and took the name David. Things did get better after that, especially with the help of the new psychiatrist. David was clearly more at ease with himself as a male. He soon learned that there had been advances in penis reconstruction surgery and took advantage of that. Although he had an adjustment period during which he was fearful of dating, he ultimately overcame his fears and got married. The outlook at the end of the book was so hopeful. It is terribly sad to learn of the tragic outcome.

The book also discusses the related issue of intersex children, those who are born with ambiguous genitalia. For years these children were subjected to similar invasive surgeries in their early years to preclude any gender "confusion," with similar results to those in David's case.

But the book does leave some unsettled issues: what about transsexuals, who know in their hearts as truly as Brenda did, that their physical sex does not correspond to their true gender? Why must we be so rigid about sex roles, thereby lending credibility to people like Dr. Money who insist that a child's gender must be absolutely clear and unambiguous? Also, it was not clear to me what other choices Ron and Janet had to deal with their penisless baby boy in 1965 when penis recconstruction surgery was in its infancy and outcomes were highly uncertain. When Bruce left the hospital he was catheterized to enable urination. The book does not explain how he, and later she was urinating with neither a penis nor vagina, except to mention Brenda's unusual habit of urinating standing up even though "she" was a "girl." All in all a disturbing, thought-provoking but ultimately unsatisfying look at medical malpractice and our sex-role-obsessed society.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book!, October 5, 2009

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C. Carter - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (P.S.) (Paperback)

This book is utterly fantastic! I hope that people will read this before making a decision to "correct" a baby's birth defect or surgical accident. It just goes to show that you cannot force someone to outwardly become something that they are not on the inside.