J. D. Radcliffe 2007-09-24
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Anyone who looked through a serious book on sex and gender in the 1970s was bound to come across the landmark John/Joan case. It seemed to indicate that children's sense of their sex (i.e., whether they were boys or girls) was soft and malleable. Counterintuitive and Marxian as that sounds now, it was presented as enlightened, forward-looking thinking.
By the time John Colapinto published his expose of the John/Joan case in Rolling Stone in 1997, the jig was already up. Intersex advocates were loudly complaining that they had been mutiliated and tinkered with. The weight of evidence now suggested that for most people, one's mental sex was as fixed at birth as one's physical form.
This book expanded on the original article by naming the actual principals in the tale and describing John/Joan's long and grueling experience of being a Johns Hopkins guinea pig: the transcontinental trips to the doctor once or twice a year, the psychological bullying, the constant reminder that you are some sort of freak.
The article and the book are both heavily biased against John Money, the eminent New Zealander who supervised the experiment, and suspiciously eager to believe any scurrilous tales that his colleagues might offer (e.g., that Money had sexual relations with some of his students; the implication is that this sort of behavior is transgressive to an extreme, seldom encountered among academics and sex researchers!). To which I say--well, whether John Money was good or evil, he accomplished his main objective, which was to push back the frontiers of ignorance about sexual identity. We can now feel fairly confident in saying that you cannot just change someone's sex, willy-nilly, and force the mind to go along. More pertinently, if a child who appears to be female insists that she/he is really a boy, that child should not be regarded as delusional.
Overall, the basic narrative of the Reimer family is not credible, and this is the basic weakness of the book. After all those trips to Baltimore, and the crushing awareness that "she" was some sort of sexual freak, Brenda/David Reimer certainly had some inkling of the truth long before she was 13. At the very least, Brenda and her twin brother must have had many intimate chats while they were growing up; surely there were some wild but accurate guesses in there. And it is inconceivable that the Reimer parents would never have alluded to Brenda's "accident." They probably discussed openly it all the time when the twins were two or three, the same way grown-ups often undress in front of their toddlers, regarding them as no more impressionable or sentient than the kitty-cat.
The death of both twins a few years ago (one by overdose, the other by suicide) suggests that the family dynamics were far more messed up than we knew. I got the idea (from the book) that the twins were seriously lacking in ambition, social skills, and other incentives to get on in life. This is disturbing for me to contemplate, since it makes me wonder if the John/Joan experiment might have had a different outcome in a happier, less dysfunctional family. Would Brenda have adapted better, perhaps as a tomboy? Would she have decided to remain a girl if she'd been happier socially, with more friends and an intellectually stimulating envrionment? Perhaps not. But the sad dynamics of the Reimer family are an annoying variable, making me sometimes wonder whether the John/Joan case teaches us anything useful.
