Free As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto Page B

chores.”
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    Central to Dr. Money’s program for the sex assignment of hermaphrodites was his edict that the children, when very young, know nothing of their ambiguous sexual status at birth. Money put the same stricture into effect with baby Brenda Reimer. “He told us not to talk about it,” Ron says. “Not to tell Brenda the whole truth and that she shouldn’t know she wasn’t a girl.”
    It was shortly after the Reimers’ return from Baltimore, and not long before the twins’ second birthday, when Janet first put Brenda in a dress. It was a special dress that Janet had sewn herself, using the white satin from her own wedding gown. “It was pretty and lacy,” Janet recalls. “She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, Oh my God, she knows she’s a boy and she doesn’t want girls’ clothing. She doesn’t want to be a girl. But then I thought, Well, maybe I can teach her to want to be a girl. Maybe I can train her so that she wants to be a girl.”
    Ron and Janet tried their best to do just that. They furnished her with dolls to play with; they tried to teach her to be neat and tidy; and they tried, whenever possible, to reinforce her identity as a girl. So when, for instance, the twins had just turned four, and Brian was watching Ron shave and asked if he could shave, too, Ron gave him an empty razor and some shaving cream to play with. When Brenda also clamored for a razor, Ron refused. “I told her girls don’t shave,” Ron says. “I told her girls don’t have to.” Janet offered to put makeup on Brenda, but Brenda didn’t want to wear makeup.
    “I remember saying, ‘Oh, can I shave, too?’ ” David says of this incident, which forms his earliest childhood memory of life as Brenda. “My dad said, ‘No, no. You go with your mother.’ I started crying, ‘Why can’t I shave?’ ”
    Brian says that the episode was typical of the way their parents tried to steer him and his sister Brenda into opposite sexes—and how such efforts were inevitably doomed to failure. “I recognized Brenda as my sister,” Brian says. “But she never, ever acted the part.”
    Today, with the twins having rejoined each other on the same side of the gender divide, the stark physical differences between them eerily testify to all that David has been through. When David first introduced me to Brian in the summer of 1997, I instinctively assumed that the man who took my hand in a firm grip was an older brother, so different did this balding, dark-bearded, bearlike man look from his youthfully thin, smooth-faced brother. It was only when I looked a little closer at Brian’s face and recognized the startling familiarity of the eyes, nose, and distinctively shaped mouth that I realized I was meeting David’s identical twin, and that he was in fact the younger of the two (albeit by a scant twelve minutes).
    As children, their physical differences were, if less pronounced, equally deceptive. Photographs of them as preschoolers show a pair of exceptionally attractive children: a puppy-eyed little boy with a crew cut, and a slim, brown-eyed girl with wavy chestnut hair framing a face of delicate prettiness. However, by all accounts of family, teachers, guidance clinic workers, and relatives, this illusion of two children of opposite sexes disappeared the second Brenda moved, spoke, walked, or gestured.
    “When I say there was nothing feminine about Brenda,” Brian laughs, “I mean there was nothing feminine. She walked like a guy. Sat with her legs apart. She talked about guy things, didn’t give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup. We both wanted to play with guys, build forts and have snowball fights and play army. She’d get a skipping rope for a gift, and the only thing we’d use that for was to tie people up, whip people with it. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys, dump trucks. This toy sewing machine she got just sat.” That is, David recalls, until the day