As Nature Made Him Read Online Free PDF Page B

Baransky explained, had solved all her problems of being teased and “singled out.” Until her sex change, she had felt completely alone. Now she was accepted as a woman and had recently married her husband, a fellow hairdresser. “I was different,” she said. “I was never complete. I was neither a man nor a woman.”
    “And now you feel complete as a woman?” Davis asked.
    Her response was unequivocal: “Oh, yes, definitely. Yes. Completely—body and mind.”
    The audience was then invited to ask questions. It was near the end of the segment that a young man asked the question that had been forming in Janet’s mind. He asked about “the other group of sex patients” whom Dr. Money treated—newborn babies with what Dr. Money had earlier called “unfinished genitals,” babies whose private parts were neither male nor female at birth. In replying to this question, Dr. Money explained that he and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins could, through surgery and hormone treatments, make such children into whichever sex seemed best, and that the child could be raised happily in that sex. “The psychological sex in these circumstances,” as Dr. Money put it, “does not always agree with the genetic sex nor with whether the sex glands are male or female.”
    Despite the big words and the rapidity with which Dr. Money spoke them, Janet and Ron caught their meaning. Dr. Money was saying that the sex a baby was born with didn’t matter; you could convert a baby from one sex to the other.
    Janet turned to Ron. “I think I should write to this Dr. Money,” she said.
    Ron agreed. When the segment ended a few minutes later, Janet wrote a letter to Dr. Money describing what had happened to Bruce. Dr. Money’s reply was prompt. He expressed great optimism about what could be done for the Reimers’ baby at Johns Hopkins and urged them to bring the child to Baltimore without delay.
    After so many months of grim predictions, bleak prognoses, and hopelessness, Dr. Money’s words, Janet says, felt like a balm. “Someone,” she says, “was finally listening .”

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    D R. M ONEY WAS indeed listening. In a sense, Janet’s cry for help was one that he might have been waiting for his entire professional life.
    At the time the Reimer family’s plight became known to him, John Money was already one of the most respected, if controversial, sex researchers in the world. Born in 1921 in New Zealand, he had come to America at the age of twenty-five, received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, then joined Johns Hopkins, where his rise as a researcher and clinician specializing in sexuality was meteoric. Fifteen years after joining Johns Hopkins, he was already widely credited as the man who coined the term gender identity to describe a person’s inner sense of himself or herself as male or female. He was also known as the world’s undisputed authority on the psychological ramifications of ambiguous genitalia and was making headlines around the world for his establishment of the pioneering Johns Hopkins clinic for transexual surgeries.
    As his unflappable appearance on This Hour Has Seven Days would suggest, Money was also a formidable promoter of his ideas. “He’s a terribly good speaker, very organized, and very persuasive in his recital of the facts regarding a case,” says Dr. John Hampson, a child psychiatrist who, with his wife, Joan, coauthored a number of Money’s groundbreaking papers on sexual development in the mid-1950s. “I think a lot of people were envious. He’s kind of a charismatic person, and some people dislike him.”
    Money’s often overweening confidence actually came to him at some cost. His childhood and youth in rural New Zealand had been beset by anxieties, personal tragedies, and early failure. The son of an Australian father and an English mother who belonged to the Brethren church, he was a thin, delicate child raised in an atmosphere of strict religious observance—or what he would later