#10: As Nature Made Him…Or Her

Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel tells the story of Wayne, a child with an intersex condition who struggles with his identity, and his shadow female self named Annabel. Wayne is assigned to the male gender at birth, although he never quite feels comfortable. He is forced to take hormone supplements and pills, and he is tutored in how to be “male” by his hyper-masculine father. We see the stress of Wayne’s situation taking its toll not only on Wayne himself, but also on his family, as Jacinta falls into depression and Treadway has his own inner struggles.

Coincidentally, when I was finishing Annabel for this class, another one of my classes began reading another novel which deals with the implications of assigned gender. As I read John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl, I found myself comparing the real-life story of Bruce Reimer to Kathleen Winter’s imagining of the character Wayne/Annabel. Colapinto tells the story of David Reimer, a man who had lived as both genders. Born in 1967 as a male named Bruce, he lost his entire penis at eight months old due to a botched circumcision. His parents, advised by a famous sex and gender researcher Dr. Money, were convinced to submit Bruce to a sex-change operation. Like Wayne, Bruce was submitted to years of hormone treatment and social conditioning, except in this case, to be feminized. Bruce was effectively reassigned to live as a female, living as the person of Brenda for fifteen years. In her teen years, Brenda experienced many psychological problems, emotional turmoil, and discomfort in her female role, similar to that which Wayne experiences in adolescence. These desperate years took a terrible toll on the Reimer family, with Mrs. Reimer becoming clinically depressed and Mr. Reimer becoming an alcoholic. Like in Wayne’s family, the stress of ambiguous gender took a toll on family life. Eventually, when Brenda’s parents eventually revealed her true gender, he/she made the choice to revert back to maleness, renaming himself David. Although David married and lived somewhat more happily as a male, he committed suicide in adulthood.

There are many things in David Reimer’s tale that are truly sad. I was upset with the practitioner who performed the messy circumcision in the first place; but even more, I was bothered by the societal attitude that without an intact penis, Bruce would have a defective, incomplete body, which would lead to his being ostracized. Ironically, the imposed “cure” of a sex change operation caused Bruce/Brenda to live an isolated, lonely life, probably more than if he had remained male. Our society is afraid of gender that does not conform to the strict dichotomy of male versus female. Bruce/Brenda was assigned into a particular gender by outside forces, when the truth is, he/she is the only one who intrinsically knew what gender felt right.

Perhaps what upset me most in this story was the advice and actions of Dr. John Money, the prominent researcher at Johns Hopkins University who advised the sex-change and monitored Brenda’s progress. Dr. Money seemed to have a personal agenda, or at least an academic one. He was motivated to prove his theory that gender is mostly socially constructed, as opposed to biologically rooted. If the course of treatment with Bruce/Brenda was successful, then Money would have significant proof to back his theory. Not only was Bruce’s case a very unique one, Bruce also had an identical twin brother, which created a perfectly controlled situation in which the two twins’ behavior might be compared. To me, it seems that Dr. Money was taking advantage of this situation, valuing his medical fame over this child’s life. It is not fair to experiment with someone’s life, without his or her consent, merely to advance scientific research. Furthermore, Dr. Money reported for 30 years that the Reimer case was a success. He completely ignored Brenda’s troubles fitting in at school, and her discomfort in her assigned female gender. Science cannot ignore the human side of the issues it tries to explore; to me, this is sad and wrong.

After reading As Nature Made Him and Annabel, especially so close together in time, I found myself challenged to examine the way our society forces gender into a strict male-female dichotomy. The stories of Wayne/Annabel as well as Bruce/Brenda pained me at times, made me uncomfortable at others. Both books raise the issue of what to do with the 1 in 2000 babies born with anomalous genitalia. Our society is very strict about placing people in one category, either male or female; ambiguous gender is something that makes us all a bit uncomfortable. These very provocative books bring to light some of the sensitive issues related to ambiguous sex, and the assignment of gender and sexuality. We see the ways in which it can be dangerous for society, and science, to attempt to fit someone’s gender and sexuality into a neatly packaged option.