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As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl Kindle Edition

4.7 out of 5 stars 837

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“We should aspire to Colapinto's stellar journalist example: listening carefully to the circumstances of those who are different rather than demanding that they conform to our own.” —Washington Post

The true story about the "twins case" and a riveting exploration of medical arrogance, misguided science, societal confusion, gender differences, and one man's ultimate triumph

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. The boy's uninjured brother, raised as a boy, provided to the experiment the perfect matched control. 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.

Writing with uncommon intelligence, insight, and compassion, John Colapinto sets the historical and medical context for the case, exposing the thirty-year-long scientific feud between Dr. John Money and his fellow sex researcher, Dr. Milton Diamond—a rivalry over the nature/nurture debate whose very bitterness finally brought the truth to light. 

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

Amazon.com Review

Once you begin reading As Nature Made Him, a mesmerizing story of a medical tragedy and its traumatic results, you absolutely won't want to put it down. Following a botched circumcision, a family is convinced to raise their infant son, Bruce, as a girl. They rename the child Brenda and spend the next 14 years trying to transform him into a her. Brenda's childhood reads as one filled with anxiety and loneliness, and her fear and confusion are present on nearly every page concerning her early childhood. Much of her pain is caused by Dr. Money, who is presented as a villainous medical man attempting to coerce an unwilling child to submit to numerous unpleasant treatments.

Reading over interviews and reports of decisions made by this doctor, it's difficult to contain anger at the widespread results of his insistence that natural-born gender can be altered with little more than willpower and hormone treatments. The attempts of his parents, twin brother, and extended family to assist Brenda to be happily female are touching--the sense is overwhelmingly of a family wanting to do "right" while being terribly mislead as to what "right" is for her. As Brenda makes the decision to live life as a male (at age 14), she takes the name David and begins the process of reversing the effects of estrogen treatments. David's ultimately successful life--a solid marriage, honest and close family relationships, and his bravery in making his childhood public--bring an uplifting end to his story. Equally fascinating is the latest segment of the longtime nature/nurture controversy, and the interviews of various psychological researchers and practitioners form a larger framework around David's struggle to live as the gender he was meant to be. --Jill Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Forget sugar, spice, snails and puppy dog tails: discussions of how little boys and little girls are made have become quite complicated over the past three decades, as scientists, feminists and social theorists debate the relative impact of "nature" and "nurture" on gender and sexual identity. Focusing on the real-life story behind sexologist Dr. John Money's famous sexual reassignment case of 1965, Colapinto, an award-winning journalist, has penned a gripping medical melodrama. After Bruce Thiessen, one of two identical male twins, lost his penis during a botched circumcision, he underwent surgery that made him anatomically female, later received estrogen injections and was raised as a girl under Money's supervision at the Psychohormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins. All of Money's reports of the case--which quickly appeared in textbooks as a prime example of environment trumping biology--portrayed Bruce (now Brenda) as a well-adjusted girl, although the reality was quite different. Angry, sullen and having always insisted that "she" was a boy, Brenda finally decided at age 15--after "she" finally learned of the surgery-to revert to her original sex and take the name David. Drawing on extensive interviews with the Thiessen family, "Brenda"'s therapists and friends, Colapinto has written a wrenching personal narrative and a scathing indictment of Money's methods and theories, including instances of what Colapinto and David Thiessen see as extraordinarily invasive behavior and sexual abuse in his examinations of "Brenda" and her twin brother. Although Colapinto runs into trouble when he tries to generalize about nature vs. nurture from this single case, his book is illuminating, frightening and moving. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00AXXUB2G
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; 2nd edition (March 5, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 5, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 879 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 out of 5 stars 837

About the author

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John Colapinto
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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

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
837 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2024
The story of a vulnerable family, an arrogant doctor and a horribly confused child straining to make sense of a horrible tragedy. We are told to trust medical science only to find out later they really don’t have a clue.
This is a well researched and compassionately written book. It touches on issues central to today’s “gender wars.”
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2024
This book is a difficult read but a must. In this cultural moment of gender discussion, this book digs into the origins, and the manipulations involved in gender studies long ago.
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2016
The book "As Nature Made Him" is a very interesting read overall and it totally caught me by surprise and was not what I expected to read about at all. The book tells a true story of the horrible tragedy of a young boy, caught in one of the most obscure medically documented mishaps in today's modern society. Non-the-less, the book is a very interesting read overall and very well written in my opinion. The fact that the book is based upon a very real dramatic true story, always adds a bit of excitement and a chance to look at the story from a real world perspective, because it is not a fiction novel but rather a heart wrenching tragedy in modern medical history.
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2024
A must read for anyone in this day and age. We cannot escape our essential biology. This horrifying book explains every reason why.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2023
This was very well-researched and written about with compassion and care. This book will provide a load of background information that will help the reader understand where and why our culture is in its current state -- with the lies and cover-ups surrounding the rapidly accelerating transgender movement. My heart breaks for the family.
7 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2014
When I started reading this book, I was rather wary of it. The author has a habit of launching into a long (as in pages upon pages) backstory of pretty much every character in this book. I don’t like that.

But, I will go on to say that the author’s habit of providing long backstories is really the only negative I can see in this book. This book provides exactly what I was hoping to get out of this book: (1) A peek into the life of a boy who was raised as a girl, not just in the clinical notes sense, but in the psychological sense. In other words, how did he live his life, and how did he feel as he was doing it? (2) A more expansive overview of the nature versus nurture gender debate, including both the scientific and social advancements that have been made.

This is the kind of book that is hard to put down. As soon as David starts living as a girl, we as the reader can instantly tell that the experiment isn’t working, that he keeps acting like a boy even as he dresses like a girl. So we, or at least I, keep reading almost feverishly, desperate to come to the point in the story where David is told of his true past, and allowed to once again live as a boy. But it takes so long for that to come, and in the meantime, we see his life get even worse and worse. Some of the stuff John Money makes David do in his therapy sessions are absolutely horrifying, and when he begins to pressure David into having a vaginoplasty so he can become completely female, my heart was absolutely aching for the poor boy.

Once David is finally allowed to live as a boy, we are able to see yet another point of view: what it’s like to live as a young man without a functioning penis. It was interesting to see what ways in which he felt held back by his mutilated genitals, and in what ways he didn’t. There was one insightful quote from him, in which he said something to the effect of: the medical community seemed to place my entire identity in my genitals. It was rather eye-opening to put it that way.

The author does go on to explore the plight of intersex people in America, because even though David was not intersex, the experiment done on him was often referenced as a reason to perform sex reassignment surgery on intersex infants. The book explored how intersex conditions are typically seen as this shameful, dark secret, and yet the person did nothing wrong, and there’s no reason that intersex people should feel the kind of shame they do. It also explored (and seemed to support) the argument for not performing any sex reassignment surgery until children are old enough to give informed consent.

If this topic interests you, then I can assure you that the book will not disappoint.
50 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2023
This story broke my heart. I felt David Reiner’s emotions as he desperately tried to fit in. God bless him.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2013
David Reimer was easily one the most unfortunate people to have ever lived. Having his manhood destroyed by a botched circumcision was bad enough. Falling into the hands of a well-regarded quack, however, made his life a living mental nightmare in which his well-meaning but screamingly gullible and determined parents, kept trying to convince him he was a girl despite his obvious resistance, behavior problems and utterly non-girl-like physical features. It reads like a horror novel written by a disciple of Stanley Milgram, whose experiments showed the appalling barbarities people will inflict on others if told to by authority figures. And barbarities are no less worse for being well intentioned.

At the heart of this is the struggle between David and the unspeakable Dr. John Money, who, it is to be hoped, was the worst non-fictional doctor ever to be associated with John Hopkins Medical Center (thus excluding Dr. Hannibal Lector from what would certainly be very close competition). As such it functions as a cautionary tale of just how influential a charismatic egomaniac can become if he is an indefatigable self promoters, has theories which fit into the intellectual fashions of the day and feels unbounded by accurate factual information, including his own. Almost as horrible was the infuriating slowness it took even the most sympathetic therapists endeavoring to help David to get the assorted psychological gimcrackeries out of their heads and face the simple, blatant truth: David's problem was that he was a boy constantly being told he was a girl even though he could feel that he was a boy and that was making him crazy. How much do these people get paid again?

If I have any criticism of this extremely fine book, it's that Colapinto, in my opinion, goes far too easy on how feminists have either continued to insist that gender is a social construct or simply become silent on the matter despite the implosion of their prime exhibit when the honorable thing would be to openly admit error. David came out of the closet because he wanted his case to stop being misused. Feminists, despite being unpopular even among women, are extremely influential in educational and social services. By creating policies based on social conditioning theory they continue to perpetuate willfully ignorant damage and, unlike Dr. Money who has since had the courtesy to expire, should be held accountable for their destructive hooey (if readers will please forgive my political two cents).
28 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Cathy
5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening
Reviewed in Canada on June 13, 2023
No matter one’s thoughts on this topic - this is a worthwhile read. This would be a book for high school students.
Jessica Elizondo
5.0 out of 5 stars Un libro que vale la pena leer
Reviewed in Mexico on June 10, 2017
Muy claro, repleto de fundamentos científicos y muy interesante. El experiemento más cruel de la historia científica. Vale la pena leerlo.
Sacha Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars Hooked
Reviewed in Australia on September 28, 2023
I couldn’t put this book down; an immensely sad story of the medical profession and naive parents robbing a boy of his life, told in a detailed and direct voice.
FrauG
5.0 out of 5 stars Can I say enjoyable?
Reviewed in Germany on September 14, 2014
Considering the subject matter I really don't want to say this was enjoyable. The fact that it is a true story makes it actually quite horrific. I would advise anyone reading this book not to skip the long chapters concerning the medical past of Dr. Money (chapter 2 is a bit of a slog, I admit) because only by thoroughly understanding what was going through the minds of the medical community can you really appreciate the book as a whole. After finishing I went on to Youtube and found an interview with Colaptino which was made shortly after the book was released and it also contained interviews with David and his mother. Had a hard time getting the fate of this young man out of my head. No, enjoyable is the wrong word - harrowing may be the right one.
One person found this helpful
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Eleonora
5.0 out of 5 stars True story
Reviewed in Italy on September 8, 2014
Purtroppo questa povera creatura è stata sottoposta ad un esperimento disumano, quasi nazista per la sua crudeltà, purtroppo la fine è tragica ed è un monito per ognuno di noi.
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