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As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl Paperback – August 8, 2006

4.7 out of 5 stars 837

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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.


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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A page-turning story of heroes and villains that stirs both compassion and anger." — Philadelphia Inquirer

"A riveting account of medical arrogance and misguided science." — Playboy

"Colapinto's account . . . raises fascinating scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions—and also packs an irresistible narrative force from start to finish. — Providence Phoenix

"Colapinto's book is a stinging and overdue indictment of the 'sexual reassignment' of infants like baby Bruce and those born with both male and female sex organs....The book also serves as an intimate, heartbreaking diary of Bruce Brenda Reimer, the casualty of a ghoulish science project gone terribly wrong." — Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Colapinto, a writer of striking lucidity and compassion, inspired the very private man who now proudly calls himself David to reveal the entire story of his horrendous ordeal in hopes of preventing others from suffering his fate. The result is an arresting and invaluable narrative of personal tragedy, scientific arrogance, and societal confusion over the source and significance of gender differences." — Booklist

"Colapinto, the reporter who won a National Magazine Award for a piece on David's story, engrossingly recounts this tale of grotesque medical hubris and a life dragged slowly from the ashes....Colapinto's storytelling, taut and emotive, never plays the grim tale for its sideshow qualities, nor claims the last word on nature versus nurture." — Kirkus, starred review

"For the most part, As Nature Made Him is a story of innocence stolen, and of ill fate bravely born....But the book is also a testament to the immutability of self. Because David in the end is a triumph." — Dallas Morning News

"In the end, what makes As Nature Made Him impossible to put down is not the machinations of a misguided scientist but the suffering, courage and ultimate triumph of a truly unfortunate child." — Psychology Today

"John Colapinto debunks Money's version of Brenda's childhood in his fascinating, exhaustively researched As Nature Made Him. The result is a detailed and riveting account." — Seattle Post Intelligencer

"Raises fascinating scientific, philosophical questions--and also packs an irresistible narrative force from start to finish" — Boston Phoenix

"The hottest hypothesis in the academic world today is that nature always trumps nurture. John Colapinto's absorbing As Nature Made Him stands as exhibit A." — Tom Wolfe

"This is a mesmerizing tale that manages to balance an engrossing look at what happened to Brenda with a persuasive argument that biology, not environment, determines sexuality." — San Antonio Express

"This thoroughly researched and skillfully told profile of David Reimer deserves to be an early candidate for the best nonfiction book of the year." — Albany Times Union

"What happened to Bruce and his parents is a true-life medical horror to rival any of Robin Cook's science thrillers...a fascinating book." — Houston Chronicle

“Ultimately, the book stands as a passionate warning against social pressure and prejudice'whether medical, ideological or biological. As a society, 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

“With remarkable concision, Mr. Colapinto has telescoped this medical scandal, brilliantly weaving the perspectives of David [Reimer], his family, friends, doctors, and wife...The book's structure is that of a mystery.” — New York Observer

"An engaging book. Given access to Reimer's psychiatric files, family and friends, the author reconstructs a horrific tale: a scrappy kid made to wear pink and pearls; a bully of a doctor unwilling to admit failure; a family torn apart by guilt. David's courageous and unlikely victory--today he's a happily married stepfather of three--shows us how psychololgy's theories du jour can be painfully, dreadfully wrong. A gut-wrenching, absorbing account — People magazine

From the Back Cover

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; 2nd edition (August 8, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061120561
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061120565
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.76 x 8 inches
  • 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.