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

An amazing and heartbreaking story that formed the basis for a LAW AND ORDER episode some years ago. A baby boy suffered a botched circumcision at birth, and the decision was made by his radical-constructionist pediatrician to raise him as a girl, with hormones and everything. It didn't work, but the story is fascinating, upsetting, and extremely well-written.

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.

This was required reading for a Human Sexuality course that I took in college and it surprisingly became one of my favorite books. This story was very heartbreaking and an eye opening examination on gender identity.

After finishing this book, I looked up David Reimer and was very saddened to find out that he had committed suicide awhile after this book was published. Also, his twin brother Brian had killed himself 2 years prior to his death. I think John Colapinto wrote a very honest account of what the Reimer twins endured throughout their lives. David's story will hopefully provide genuine incite to many people discovering their own gender identity or who have had similar experiences.

I have been reading John Colapinto's book for the last few days: a suspenseful, agonizingly heart-rending and gut-wrenching page-turner about a young man who underwent appalling suffering throughout a misery-plagued life. What was subsequently done to Bruce/David Reimer as a result of a botched circumcision that was unnecessary in the first place (more conservative treatment would have remedied his phimosis) compounded exponentially what was already a horribly tragic accident. Bad choices by doctors and his parents were piled on more erroneous choices (all for the wrong-headed purpose of so-called "converting" him into a "girl"), which David only found himself later having to undo -- and only partially successfully (he committed suicide in 2004 in his late thirties after earlier attempts from which he was rescued in his twenties).

To me, the medical lesson is that when a mistake occurs, the parents and doctors should do their best to reverse just that single mistake -- not compound it with further immoral deeds involving additional deliberate mutilations beyond the original accidental mutilation. Two wrongs don't make a right; in fact, they immensely complicate what is already a terrible situation.

I hope both David and his tormented twin brother Brian (who was evidently driven to suicide two years before David) are finally happy in Heaven, and I pray for both of them. I also thank Mr. Colapinto for writing this important book: an object lesson on the harm that is done to innocent people by the arrogance of doctors who play God.

I read this in one day. I was utterly surprised by what I learned from this. As a man who struggled with sexual identification myself, I thought I knew everything there was to know on the subject. Not so.
I love when accepted theories are proved fallible, especially when smug, highly biased scientists and scholars are behind the tenets.
This is fantastic journalistic prose, unwavering in its ethical approach to such a controversial matter. I am forever changed by this book.