As Nature Made Him

Dr. Moggey leaves Winnipeg in Brenda’s sixth-grade year, so Brenda sees another psychiatrist, Dr. Ingimundson. Though “all the documentation claimed that this child had accepted her gender identity as a female,” Dr. Ingimundson is taken aback by these claims (121). Brenda tries to say “what she thought the psychiatrist wanted to hear,” but she would also “reveal contradictory feelings about herself” (122).

Ingimundson also presses Brenda “to submit as soon as possible to the vaginal surgery” (122). Still, she feels uncomfortable with the case: It seems as if Brenda knows there is nothing wrong with her, and she wonders why people want to cut her open. Ingimundson senses that Brenda’s hesitation “stemmed from her inkling that she was not being told the whole truth about herself” (123). Janet and Ron need to tell her the truth. Ron speaks to Brenda about the “accident” in veiled language, but Brenda does not understand “the fact that she was a male who had been surgically changed into a girl” (124).

Though Brenda struggles in school, she finally finds a small group of tomboy girls to spend time with. The leader of that group, Heather, is “the first friend” Brenda ever has (125). Heather appreciates Brenda’s honesty and loyalty, though she also notices Brenda’s crippling anxiety and the way that “she didn’t want to be a girl” (125).

In the fall of seventh grade, Brenda notices “awakening sexuality” all around her (126). Heather takes her to a party where kids pair off and make out. David remembers Brenda feeling “envious,” as other “people looked like they knew where they belonged” (128). Dr. Ingimundson’s notes reflect this sensation that Brenda is “trapped” inside her body (128). 

When, at the end of Brenda’s sixth-grade year, Dr. Money explains the hormone medications that will make her grow breasts, Brenda panics. The pediatric endocrinologist who administers the hormones to Brenda, Dr. Winter, is “the Winnipeg doctor least inclined to question the methods or conclusions of Money’s twins case” because he studied at Johns Hopkins (130). He feels that Brenda’s will be an easy case but quickly finds that it is “frustrating” (130).

Winter is desperate to have Brenda take estrogen, and so Brenda pretends to take the pills. When they catch on, Ron and Janet watch her swallow the pills. Brenda is deeply embarrassed when her body changes and “began prodigious bouts of eating” in order “to disguise the increasing feminization of her figure” (131). Strangely, as her body develops, her voice deepens dramatically, something that Winter cannot explain. Janet teaches Brenda to tell others that some women just have raspy voices.

At Glenwood Junior High, Brenda is again in the outcast social group. She has an “immediate kinship” with a girl named Esther, who dealt with Poland’s syndrome (132). They share what Esther calls a particular kind of “sadness” (132). Still, without a shared interest in boys, the two cannot grow significantly close.

Money requests a progress report from Ingimundson during Brenda’s seventh-grade year. On the tails of a “disastrous family session” with the Reimers, Ingimundson reports “that Brenda’s resistance to the surgery had abated not at all in the fourteen months since she had begun psychiatric treatment in Winnipeg” (133). When she reports that Brenda still refuses surgery, Money seems at a loss for words; his secretary replies to the letter (133).

Though Money’s most recent publication insists on consistent gender development, Colapinto notes that “an attentive reader” will notice “a less sanguine prognosis for the sex-changed twin” (134). Money suggests that a child who has undergone infant sex-change surgery might be more likely to be bisexual or homosexual. There is room in this idea for Milton Diamond’s theory of gender development in the womb, where a fetus is molded by increased testosterone, Colapinto suggests.

In spring of 1978, Dr. Winter meets John Money at Johns Hopkins. Winter tells Money about the trouble he had implementing treatment plans for Brenda. Money is, Winter reports, “supremely confident” that Brenda will choose, herself, to have vaginal surgery (135). The Reimers’ next visit will be “so traumatic for Brenda” that it will be “the last time she would ever consent to go to Baltimore” (136). Money recruits a student who underwent a male-to-female transition to persuade Brenda to have vaginal surgery; when the student speaks to Brenda, her “typically despairing mood turned to pure, deep-running panic” (137).

Money explains that Brenda does not need to have the operation and that she can make the decision later. He adds that no one can legally force her to have the surgery or even to take her estrogen pills. Nonetheless, he “relentlessly” works to convince her to get surgery (138). Brenda asks to leave, at which point Money grabs her shoulder, and Brenda, afraid, runs away and out of the building. The student who was in the room tracks Brenda down and offers to walk with her. By the time she is reunited with her parents, “Brenda told Janet that if ever again forced to see Dr. Money, she would kill herself” (140).