As Nature Made Him Read Online Free PDF Page A

tragedy. By February, Ron began to wake in the middle of the night from dreams that he was strangling Dr. Huot.
    Then on a Sunday evening in mid-February—some ten months after Bruce’s accident—Ron and Janet saw something that jolted them from their despondency. Their small black-and-white TV happened to be tuned to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular current affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days , where a man identified as Dr. John Money was a guest. A suavely charismatic individual in his late forties, bespectacled and with the long, elegantly cut features of a matinee idol, Dr. Money was talking about the wonders of gender transformation taking place at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
    Today, with the subject of transexual surgeries a staple of daytime talk shows, it is difficult to imagine just how alien the concept seemed on that February evening in 1967. Fifteen years earlier, in 1952, a spate of publicity had attended the announcement by American ex-GI George Jorgensen that he had undergone surgical transformation to become Christine. That operation, performed in Denmark, had been roundly criticized by American hospitals, which refused to perform the surgeries. The subject had faded from public view—until now, when Johns Hopkins announced that it had not only performed two male-to-female sex changes, but had established the world’s first clinic devoted solely to the practice of converting adults from one sex to the other. The driving force behind the renowned hospital’s adoption and promotion of the controversial procedure was the man who now appeared on the Reimers’ TV screen: Dr. John Money.
    The name rang a distant bell for Ron and Janet. Shortly after Bruce’s accident, one of the Winnipeg plastic surgeons had said that he had mentioned Bruce’s case to a leading sex researcher at a medical meeting in the United States; the man had suggested that Ron and Janet raise Bruce as a girl. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic had also said something to Ron and Janet about a man in Baltimore who could help them raise Bruce as a girl. While the Mayo Clinic doctors had not themselves recommended the procedure, they had said that the Reimers might like to get a second opinion. At the time, Ron and Janet had not even considered the idea of a sex change. Or so they had thought. As they watched Dr. Money on television, they realized that the idea had never completely left them; it had lodged in the backs of their minds, as Ron puts it, “like a seed that had been planted.” Now, as they watched and listened to Dr. Money speak, it was as if that seed had grown and burst into full flower.
    It was his confidence that was most striking. Even under the pressure of the staring television cameras and live studio audience, Dr. Money’s words, tinged with a highly cultured, British-sounding accent, issued forth with uncanny fluency. He did not stumble over a single syllable, even when the show’s interviewer—a bulldoglike young man named Alvin Davis—asked pointedly why psychiatrists were “so opposed” to the practice that Dr. Money was promoting.
    “Well,” Money said, “I suppose it’s a self-evident fact that there are many people who feel that this is not the psychiatric way to treat these patients, since the usual definition of psychiatry is in terms of psychotherapy and the talking treatment. However, there are a small group of people who, like myself, believe that it’s thoroughly justified in an attempt to constantly increase our ability to help human beings and to see exactly what the outcome is when, let’s say, twenty or thirty people can be followed for five to ten years after having received this kind of treatment.”
    “But isn’t it a fact,” Davis said, “that a homosexual will come to you and say, ‘I want to be castrated.’ And then you will make the judgment—or you and a board, a panel at Johns Hopkins will make the judgment—about whether to castrate that