Free As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto

heard of anything like this.”
    Back home, Ron and Janet canvassed opinions. Their pediatrician recommended against such drastic treatment and stuck by his earlier advice that Ron and Janet wait until the child was of preschool age before beginning the long process of phalloplasty. Janet’s mother, Betty, was inclined to trust the expert from Baltimore but had no real opinion of her own. Ron decided not even to bring it up to his parents since he felt sure they would be against it.
    Finally Ron and Janet realized that only they could decide the fate of their child. They alone were the ones living with the reminder, at each diaper change, of his terrible injury. Janet saw the benefits of changing their son into a daughter. “I didn’t know much back then,” she says, “and I thought women were the gentler sex. Mistakenly. I have since learned that women are the hard-core knockabout tough guys. Men are the gentler sex, by far, from my experience. But I thought, with his injury, it would be easier for Bruce to be raised as a girl—to be raised gently. He wouldn’t have to prove anything like a man had to.”
    Ron, too, could see the benefits of changing Bruce’s sex. “You know how little boys are,” Ron says. “ Who can pee the furthest? Whip out the wiener and whiz against the fence. Bruce wouldn’t be able to do that, and the other kids would wonder why.” And then, of course, there was the entire question of Bruce’s sex life. Ron could not even imagine the humiliations and frustrations that would entail. As a girl and woman, though, Bruce wouldn’t face all that, Ron reasoned. If what Dr. Money told them was true, she could live a normal life, she could get married, she could be happy.
    Within days of their return from Baltimore, Ron and Janet stopped cutting the baby’s hair, allowing the soft, light brown locks to curl down past the ears. Janet used her sewing machine to turn his pajamas into girlish granny gowns. Their son had become, for Ron and Janet, their daughter. Dr. Money had counseled them, when deciding what to call their new daughter, to select a name beginning with the same letter as her former name and to avoid calling her after any female family members with whom her identity could become confused. Janet, following Dr. Money’s instructions, called her new baby daughter Brenda Lee.
    There was, of course, still one more step to take. That summer, Ron and Janet left Brenda’s twin brother, Brian, with an aunt and uncle, then flew back to Baltimore with their daughter. Now twenty-two months old, she was still within the window that Money had established as safe for infant sex change. On Monday, 3 July 1967, Brenda underwent surgical castration in a gynecologic operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The surgeon was Money’s Gender Identity Clinic cofounder, Dr. Howard Jones. Today Jones says he can recall few specifics about the case. He says that all decisions regarding reassignment of sex were the responsibility of Money and pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Blizzard.
    “My chief interest was the physical situation and the surgical potential,” Jones says. “Was the patient healthy and able to withstand the operation?—all that kind of stuff. The case was pretty well worked up before I ever got involved.” For Jones, the surgery on Brenda Reimer was like the routine castrations he had been performing on hermaphrodite babies over the previous twelve years—and apparently Johns Hopkins Hospital viewed the operation the same way. Officials of the hospital have declined all comment on the case, but a Johns Hopkins public relations person, JoAnne Rodgers, told me in the winter of 1998, “In all surgeries that were considered, in the sixties, to be experimental, there were protocols in place to have those approved by appropriate committees and boards.” Dr. Jones cannot recall that the hospital convened any special committee or board in the case of Bruce Reimer’s historic