Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 18:55:36 EST

Sex-change victim recalls life as a girl

TORONTO, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Brenda Reimer was an awkward child, who did not engage in girlish activities and was mercilessly teased by schoolmates for her gunslinger stride and lack of interest in boys.

Doctors told her that her discomfort was due to a passing phase of "tomboyishness."

What they didn't tell her was that she had in fact been born "Bruce" and had been subjected to gender reassignment surgery at 18 months, 10 months after doctors botched a circumcision and destroyed most of his penis.

Instead of raising their child as a boy, Bruce's young parents took the advice of a famous American medical psychologist, John Money of Johns Hopkins Medical Centre in Baltimore, who said that Bruce could be a happy "Brenda" with the proper treatment and hormones.

But the experiment did not go as planned, plunging Bruce into a life of angry depression and isolation before surgery in his mid-teens transformed him back into a man.

Bruce is now 34 and is known as David. He has decided to cast aside his veil of anonymity to set the record straight about the failed experiment in psychosexual engineering. He tells his tale in a book, "As Nature Made Him," written by Canadian journalist John Colapinto.

Based on this case known as the "twins case" because he was born with an identical twin brother who was raised a boy sex reassignments became, and remain, a widely accepted medical practice for newborns with injured or irregular genitalia.

Although Reimer grew up miserably aware that something was wrong, the John/Joan case, as it was known in the medical books, was hailed by Dr. Money in 1972 as a medical triumph.

It was seen as proof of the idea that a person's sexual identity is ultimately determined by environment, leading doctors around the world to perform thousands of sex reassignments on infants with similarly injured or abnormal genitalia.

"I was surprised at the fact that other people wound up going through what I had (gone through), because of my so-called 'success story' -- that wasn't so much a success story," Reimer told Reuters with thinly veiled sarcasm as he recounted the horrific calamity of his early life.

Even as Reimer (as Brenda) plunged into suicidal depression, the fabled version of her life was accepted by virtually everyone, especially the feminist movement which saw it as proof of their conviction that gender identity and sexual orientation are a result of rearing and environment.

In 1997, journalist Colapinto learned through an article in the New York Times that Dr. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii had exposed, in a scientific paper some 30 years after the experiment began, that it had indeed been a failure. The case captured his imagination and inspired the book.

"Scientists had just relied on this case as being a precedent for the fact that you could assign the sex and gender to children," Colapinto said in a telephone interview. "Those who believed that and taught it and based their clinical practice on it, and who actually performed similar procedures, were scandalised."

One of his earliest memories is the day his father sheepishly informed him that he would have to take female hormones to grow breasts.

"I was wondering why ... He told me it was so I could wear a bra. I threw a fit," Reimer said in a telephone interview from Winnipeg, where he lives.

After the botched circumcision destroyed most of his penis at eight months old, Reimer's parents, a working class couple from Winnipeg, agreed to submit their son to a radical sex-change procedure clinical castration, removal of the remaining shred of penis and hormone therapy.

"I was raised as a girl. I was not comfortable with the situation. That was not the true me," Reimer said.

The tragedy of David Reimer, however, was considered a boon for science because David was born with a twin brother, Brian, who -- with his genitals still intact would provide a perfect matched control for their study.

Reimer's rumbling baritone voice fits strangely with his fine facial features, which bear the mark of years of hormonal tampering.

"You were expected to wear girl's clothing and to behave in a certain manner and you were expected to play with girls' toys," he said.

But Reimer knew he wasn't a girl. "I thought I was an it," he said.

Reimer's mother recalled that even as a baby Brenda hated it when she was outfitted in a dainty dress: "She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off," she said in the book.

Later in life, "Brenda" developed an "angular gunslinging stride" that was a source of ridicule among her peers. She wasn't interested in boys and thought sprouting breasts and developing hips abhorrent.

And although doctors had removed Reimer's testicles, the then-Brenda began to show the ominous signs of incipient manhood growing muscles on her shoulders, neck and biceps and sometimes a strange, high-pitched break in her voice.

Regardless of these signs, Dr. Money pressed the family to continue with the experiment and take it to its final phase: creating female genitalia.

Only when Brenda's defiance had turned to suicidal depression when she was 14 did her parents reveal the truth that she was a boy. "An amputee," Reimer said.

Although they had all deceived him for more than 13 years, David said he harboured no resentment toward his parents, who, barely out of their teens, were persuaded easily by the opinions of highly educated doctors.

The responsibility, he believes, rests squarely on the shoulders of those doctors, especially Dr. Money, who had developed an international reputation for the "twins case."

Despite the apparent harm it was doing to the Reimer family, Money appeared bent on seeing it through to the end.

"I thought it was very ignorant for them to think I was no longer a male because my penis was burned off," Reimer said. "A woman who loses her breasts to cancer doesn't (become) any less of a woman."

After his return to being male and his adoption of a new name, no one suspected the truth about his upbringing, despite his slim build, relative lack of facial hair and youthful appearance. He looks 10 years younger then his twin brother, Brian.

"He's just so masculine that the minute he just starts being David

rolling his cigarettes and working his machines and stuff I think people just accepted that that's him," said John Colapinto, the author who coaxed him out of anonymity. "There's no sense that this is a performance whatsoever."

Admittedly, it would have been easier for Reimer and his family a wife and three adopted children to remain hidden but he said he is driven by the conviction that he has something important to say.

His lifelong ordeal has left Reimer deeply distrustful of the medical establishment and although he is leery of doctors, he admits they were, at least, able to restore some of what had been taken away 34 years ago.

"I'm like the six-million-dollar man," he said. "They could rebuild me and they did."