Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger

work brought to national attention the story of one male child whom John Money had recommended sex-changing after the baby’s penis had been accidentally burned off during a medical circumcision at eight months of age. The patient, now known as David Reimer, had not been born intersex, as most of Money’s patients had been; David Reimer had been born a typical male, with an identical twin brother. But after his circumcision accident, the family was referred to Johns Hopkins and, on Money’s recommendation, the baby had been surgically and socially turned into a girl named Brenda. After all, a boy without a penis (or with a very small one) couldn’t grow up to be a real man! At least that’s what Money et al. had been saying for years. Money must have been thrilled when he encountered the Reimers: Here, in a set of identical non-intersex twin baby boys, was the perfect case to prove his theory that gender identity development depended primarily on genital appearance and upbringing. If one of the Reimers’ twin boys could be turned into a girl, this would be the Hope Diamond in Money’s crown.
    Thanks to Money’s desire to use David Reimer to prove that gender is mostly a product of genital appearance and nurture, not inborn nature, Reimer had gotten caught in the Johns Hopkins intersex vortex and had had the same history of shame, secrecy, loss of function, trauma, and anger as many intersex adults. Importantly, Reimer also failed to prove Money’s theory . As little Brenda, he kept acting boyish, and upon being told the truth of his medical history as a teenager, he immediately declared himself a boy and socially became a boy again. Nevertheless, Money simply lied about the outcome, leading everyone to continue believing his experiment with “Brenda” had worked.
    Although
As Nature Made Him
entailed great coverage of our work at ISNA, Colapinto’s account moved people for a reason we had come to resent: The public was ever so upset that a “real” little boy had been turned into a girl. They were upset about the sex-change of a non-intersex child and about having been led to believe that gender is a product of nurture, not nature. To us, the primary issue in these cases wasn’t the nature of gender. Yes, the reason all these kids—Reimer and his born-intersex cohort—had been traumatized was because of a wrong theory of gender that said that we can make you into a boy or a girl if we just make your body look convincing in infancy. But the trauma for most of these folks didn’t come from getting the wrong gender label as a baby.
    Bo and I knew what the clinicians knew—that most intersex people kept the gender assignments they were given, whether surgeons made their genitals look typical for their gender or not. And we knew that people who changed their gender labels as teenagers and adults did not find misidentified gender to be the core of their suffering. The problem in intersex care wasn’t a problem of gender identity per se. The problem was that, in the service of strict gender norms,
people were being cut up, lied to, and made to feel profoundly ashamed of themselves.
Bo said it as plainly as she could : Intersex is not primarily about gender identity; it is about shame, secrecy, and trauma. Doctors were so obsessed with “getting the gender right” that they didn’t see that they were causing so much harm. If they could have obsessed less about gender identity outcomes in these cases and focused on actual physical and psychological
health,
they might have done a lot less damage. They needed to stop treating these cases as gender identity experiments and start treating them as
patients
.
    But most people didn’t want to hear about shame, secrecy, and trauma when we talked about intersex. They wanted to hear about the nature-nurture debate. Just like John Money, they wanted to use intersex people in the service of their theory building about gender identity. All that happened when people started