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As Nature Made Her
This is snotty, biased, and unreasonable. You have been warned.
It's also really an item for mouth organ, but I can't put it there because 1) I have no concrete point to make and 2) I don't want to look more petty than I already seem and 3) I don't want a flamewar.
But here, Ardent Readers, it is the land of Full Disclosure. Whether you like it or not.
So.
Iko-chan, bless her, asked me if I had seen or heard of the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.
As it happens, I own it. But I have not read it, only skimmed it. And I confess that I am not likely to read it unless the wind changes dramatically. You might say I have issues.
The book, written by John Colapinto, is the story of David Reimer, one-half of a pair of identical twins, both born boys. At the age of eight months, he lost his entire penis due to a botched circumcision. As a means of making the best of a bad situation, an expert at Johns Hopkins suggested that the child undergo a clinical sex change. As the preface to the book says:
The process involved chemical castration and other genital surgery when he was a baby, followed by a twelve-year program of social, mental, and hormonal conditioning to make the transformation take hold in his psyche. The case was reported in the medical literature as an unqualified success, and he became one of the most famous (though unnamed) patients in the annals of modern medicine.
The latter was partly because this was a scientist's wet dream: Because of Reimer's unaltered twin brother, the "experiment" came with a built-in control group. The case rewrote science textbooks, and ended up establishing a precedent for sex-changing infants with damaged or irregular genitals.
But it wasn't a success. Reimer (who broke his lifelong anonymity for this book) rebelled against what he now calls "brainwashing" from the beginning, resisted it actively as soon as he could gain any measure of autonomy, and reverted more or less completely to a male existence from age fourteen on.
The reason it took twenty years for this to come out was largely because of the man who reaped most of the glory from this experiment, the man who had suggested it in the first place: the ironically-named Dr. John Money, psychologist. Not until outside researchers followed up on the case was the truth revealed.
The answers ... also brought to light a thirty-year rivalry between eminent sex researchers, a rivalry whose bitterness not only dictated how this most unsettling of medical tragedies was exposed, but also may have been the impetus behind the experiment in the first place.
And that is reason number one why I can't read this book right now. I distrust the mental-health crowd even on good days. This sort of thing plays directly to all my worst fears about, not just psychologists, but doctors in general. That they are cold, impassive creatures who only view their patients as lab rats. That they are subject to rivalries and petty drives which their profession requires them to be above. In short, that they're just as messed up and half-assed as the rest of us.
There are some professions where I expect that all the practitioners are corrupt until proven otherwise. There are some professions where I figure the ratio's about what you'd expect - some good, some bad. And there are some professions where I expect the person to be a saint, not given to human failings - at least not when on the clock. There is nothing in the world so dangerous as a vindictive, power-hungry, or jealous doctor. These are the people we trust with our lives. Who gives them psychological exams?
So, given that I already want to strangle Dr. Money sight unseen, I'm probably too venomous to read this book right now.
And that's the good reason. The defensible one. My other reason is far, far more horrible.
Not only do I already hate Dr. Money, I'm also not too fond of David Reimer.
There is no good way to say this: There's a part of my brain that considers him an ingrate. Which keeps saying, childishly, "How dare he! He was given a chance to be female and he threw it away! What an ass!" Never mind that Reimer obviously didn't want to be female. Tell that to the little voice in my head - I've already tried and it doesn't work.
A slightly more reasonable objection (not much more, but slightly): Assuming that you can act any way you want, dress any way you want, why choose a set of non-working genitals over a set of working ones? What does he have between his legs now? Does he have sex? I'd pick either set of genitals over being neutered. Period. No question. Remember, I can see few worse fates than being sexless - the root of the attitude that got me in so much trouble over on mouth organ when the celibacy topic came up.
If I read the book at all, it'll be from curiosity about the anatomical details. But I can see right now that, unless my mood shifts, it'll be rough going getting there. It's hard to read a book that you want to hurl at the wall every five pages.
Anyway, Iko, I've seen the book. Thank for the pointer, though.
Aren't you sorry you asked?
© Columbine
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