John Colapinto: As Nature Made Him

Closer to home, I’d like to thank certain members of my family for the grounding they gave me in medical and scientific terminology and ideas which made my journeying in these areas a good deal less disorienting than it would otherwise have been: my mother Carol, a registered nurse; my brother Ted, a neurosurgeon; and my late father, Vincent, who was for many years the chief of Urology at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and who, nightly, regaled me and my three siblings with tales from the medical world—including, in the early 1970s, the amazing news that when newborn boys lose their penis to circumcision they are turned into girls. Not himself a pediatric urologist, my father did not perform infant sex reassignments, but he (like the majority of medical men) accepted the psychological rationale behind them. I hope he would be proud of my efforts, with this book, to disseminate to the medical community (and world at large) contradictory evidence not available for the past three decades.

Many thanks to my agent, Lisa Bankoff, who made sure my proposal came before the eyes of the superb Robert Jones at HarperCollins. Not only did Robert give this book the most meticulous and artful edit, purging it of longueurs , repetition, and other maladies, he also somehow found the time to write explanations for each suggested change in the margin. I took them all. Thanks, too, to Fiona Hallowell at HarperCollins. Any errors of fact or interpretation, meanwhile, are my own.

I want to thank my wife, Donna Mehalko, who is the first person to read everything I write and upon whose instincts I rely utterly. Thanks, too, to my son John Vincent. Born eleven months into the process of my writing this book, he gave me, with his beloved presence, a special insight into the unimaginable horror faced by Ron and Janet Reimer all those years ago, and whose newborn crying, at times a distraction, was also a happy goad to keep at the computer and press on to the end.

ON MAY 5, 2004, I received a phone call from Ron Reimer, David’s father. Over the four years since the publication of As Nature Made Him I spoke with the Reimers periodically—usually with David or his wife, Jane, most often about business relating to the book. To hear from Ron was a surprise, and the tone of his voice suggested that he was not calling with happy news. “David took his own life yesterday,” Ron said. “He shot himself in his car.”

It was a horrible shock to hear that David had killed himself; but I cannot say it was a complete surprise. The specter of suicide had hung over David’s life from early childhood. He was just six years old when the psychiatric treatment team in Winnipeg identified symptoms in Brenda (as David was then known) often associated with suicide: depression, panic attacks, anxiety. In Brenda’s early teens her psychiatrists formally diagnosed her with depression; it was Brenda’s suicidal thinking at age fourteen that prompted Dr. Mary McKenty to insist to Brenda’s parents that she be informed of the circumstances of her birth so that she could begin trying to resolve her conflicts and confusion. Brenda, of course, did manage to make the transition from a female to a male identity. As David, he had the courage and strength to find a wife and become a father through adoption. But even after David had settled into the “normal” life he so craved his demons persisted. Haunted by memories of his blighted childhood, David had threatened to kill himself on several occasions; shortly before Dr. Milton Diamond discovered David’s identity and invited him to participate in the follow-up paper on his case David had tried to asphyxiate himself in his car in the family garage, but was discovered by Jane in time.

So it was impossible to write about David, or interview him, without being aware of his tumultuous inner life and the precarious path he constantly walked. His dark moods would blow in, seemingly from nowhere, and engulf him. His rage and frustration and humiliation over what had been done to him—his anger over his literal and figurative impotence—were terrifying and painful to witness. On more than one occasion during our interviews I asked David if he truly felt up to revisiting his nightmare past; he always insisted that our conversations were therapeutic—he was determined in any case to make the world aware of the dismal failure of the experiment conducted upon him. I took David’s mission seriously. I shared his outrage over the fact that Dr. John Money’s misreporting of his case had resulted in similar infant sex reassignments in thousands of other children; I agreed with David that the risks of our shared venture were worth taking in order to alert the medical and scientific worlds to the actual outcome of this seminal case. And because David always pulled out of his emotional nosedives—his mental landscape cleared as quickly as it clouded over—I trusted, or hoped, that he would always find some reason to carry on.

Experts say most suicides have multiple motives, which come together in a perfect storm of misery. So it was with David. A major contributing factor in the despair of his final years was the sudden death of his brother, Brian, in the spring of 2002. Brian had long been on a downward spiral. Like his mother, Brian suffered from cyclical depression exacerbated by the chaos and unhappiness that gripped the family after David’s circumcision accident and subsequent sex change. Brian had attempted suicide at age sixteen by drinking drain cleaner; in later years he became a self-medicating alcoholic. Like David, he enjoyed periods of relative stability, holding down a job and becoming a husband and father. But the renewed attention lavished on David when his case was once again on the front pages seemed to plunge Brian back into the resentment and hostility that characterized his childhood. Brian’s alcoholism, which he once had under control, flared up in his final years. He lost his job, his marriage, and custody of his children. In the spring of 2002 he was found dead in the small apartment where he was then living. A coroner’s report said that the cause of death was a toxic combination of antidepressants and alcohol. The death was ruled accidental.

At the time of Brian’s death the brothers were estranged. David could not tolerate Brian’s drinking; Brian resented David’s refusal to bail him out of his deepening financial crisis. The brothers’ fighting was nothing new. David and Brian had bickered and feuded since childhood—a function, it always seemed to me, of their mutual envy. Brian was jealous of the attention that David had always received because of his medical problems; David was jealous because in his estimation Brian was the lucky one: Brian had intact genitalia and could father biological children. But despite the intractable emotional impasse at the center of their relationship, the brothers did share the preternatural closeness often observed in identical twins. Both told me they could practically read one another’s thoughts. At the end of the day they were unwavering allies, having relied on one another to survive their hideous childhoods: the visits to Money’s Psychohormonal Research Unit, their parents’ rocky marriage, their mother’s depression, and their father’s alcoholism. Their fundamental closeness had always insured that they got back together, no matter how furious their fights as adults. But with Brian dead there was nothing David could do to repair the relationship and he was severely burdened by guilt. According to his parents, David was never the same after Brian’s death. He became depressed and took to visiting Brian’s grave, leaving flowers and, at some point shortly before his suicide, a note.

There were other stressors in David’s life at the end. When I first met him in 1997 he had a steady, well-paying blue-collar job as a janitor in a slaughterhouse—tough, dangerous work that required him to use highly toxic and flammable chemical solvents; if improperly mixed these compounds could explode in his face or release lethal gasses into the air. His job also obliged him to climb among the huge cutting blades and turbines of massive industrial meat-grinding machines. It was grueling work done during the graveyard shift, but David loved it; the work gave him a sense of pride. He was able to support his family on his wages and enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow workers. So it was a source of worry when the plant closed a few years ago and David was laid off. He never found another full-time job. He didn’t have to. Profits from As Nature Made Him brought David a substantial amount of money, as did a subsequent movie deal. With no compelling financial need to work he was able to sit around his house and brood—a disastrous state of affairs for him. If anyone needed the distractions of regular employment it was David. He began to dwell on his horrible past and became obsessed with the difficulties of his uncertain future. For despite the financial windfall he enjoyed, David soon found himself with money worries. An ill-advised business venture involving vending machines for factories went bust; soon after, David invested some $65,000 in a local golf course owned by a man later charged with defrauding multiple investors. David was understandably enraged at finding himself the victim of an alleged con man and sank further into despair.