Midnight Mutterings | Minding our pronouns: part 2

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

I wrote this Friday night, saved it (I thought) to read, maybe edit, and send to Lin early this morning. Now, many hours in, I still can’t find it. Tech Hell resulting from a stolen laptop in February, and an inadequate replacement. However, what I did find
in my search for yesterday’s column was a lot more internet information on David Reimer’s treatment that I had not seen before, some of which is so horrifying I am too uncomfortable to write about here today.

Now I am trying to re-create from memory some of what I wrote last night:

In my independent graduate studies about gender identity development (which I mentioned in my previous Mutterings: Minding Our Pronouns, Part 1) was not a legitimate ‘field of study.’ One was born, assigned a binary gender solely based on genital morphology at birth. End of story. Early on, before my interest in the subject developed, I met a child, ‘Ellen,’ who, at age 5, did not feel or think her gender assignment was accurate. Then, a year or so later, when I began my graduate studies on the West Coast, I started my own reading and did a bit of original research I won’t bore you with here. During that time I came upon a book by New Zeeland born, Harvard trained, Psychologist/Sexologist, John Money, who co-developed the Gender Identification Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His book, Man & Women, Boy & Girl: Gender Identity From Conception to Maturity, was published in 1967, and was the ‘bible’ of gender development information at that time. Money’s thesis was that gender identity is almost wholly the result of experience gained by being born with male or female genitalia and experiences thereafter. He apparently
also generated the term ‘gender identity.’

In his reasoning, Money included his involvement in, and case study of, David Reimer, one of identical male twins whose penis was accidentally destroyed in a cautery circumcision before his first birthday. (The time frame differs in reports beginning as early as six months). The second twin was not circumcised. Money became involved in the case and convinced David’s parents to raise the child (born Bruce) as a girl re-named Brenda. Money closely followed the twins, including arranging for sex change surgeries for Brenda and psychological counseling for both twins, and reported his ‘success’ in his book. The book was republished in 1996, with co-author Anke A. Ehrhardt, and is listed on Amazon today under the genre ‘Psychological Fiction,’ a genre I wasn’t aware existed.

In spite of Money’s assertion of his success in gender reassignment, the injured twin insisted otherwise, beginning at about age two, when he tore off his dress, even though ‘Brenda’ was not told of the reassignment until about age 13 or 14, when John Money was insisting on further surgery to complete the genital re-assignment.

You can read all about this by entering ‘David Reimer’ in Google and see his interviews on Oprah and a dramatization of his story, which he (if I understand correctly, initiated) and participated in (confirmed), ‘in order to prevent John Money and others from harming in the future. Warning, that video is not for family viewing and I, in spite of my interest, was unable to watch in its entirety.

Why am I going into such detail? If you read part I of my Mutterings on this subject, then you know that my experience with the five year old child ‘Ellen,’ was in direct contradiction of what I read later in John Money’s book a year or so later. ‘Ellen’ was gender assigned female at birth, raised female by loving, caring, if concerned, parents, apparently had no genital abnormalities, no surgeries, yet knew by age five that she was emphatically male. ‘I always see myself as a man,’ as she said.

The main difference in this version of MM: Minding Our Pronouns-Part 2 is that I included the websites of the Oprah interviews with David Reimer in the earlier version.You can find those for yourself if you choose. I am including a more coherent view of Money and his work and the effect on David Reimer HERE.

One more personal experience: Before graduate school and before I met ‘Ellen’ in Chapel Hill, I was doing an internship toward a Medical Technology certification at a hospital in Detroit. As the only student that year, I inherited a lot of grunt tasks in the name of free labor (um, ‘practical experience’). One was to arrive at dawn and wake up inpatients, mostly on the adult surgical units and draw fasting bloods for the lab. One morning I had an add-on request to draw extra tubes of blood from a twelve year old male patient whose discharge (after an emergency appendectomy) was delayed for a reason not specified. I was asked to deliver his blood to a chromosome research lab rather than the general lab, which I did. Of course I was always interested in anything that wasn’t routine and talked to the techs in there.

Bored techs are always willing to talk about their research if they have time. This particular project was working on something about chromosome mapping and printing hard copies of the karyotypes. You can see what I mean HERE.

The 23 pairs of human chromosomes depicted here show the pair of sex chromosomes on the lower right, with the Y chromosome always smaller in size, though not in importance. This particular project in the Detroit hospital was something about how to get cells to divide more quickly or at a specified time so they could be mapped more easily.

In any case, when I followed up on the 12 year old patient with the appendectomy, apparently there had been something unusual discovered in the surgery. He had already been diagnosed with undescended testicles, though he had a normal penis with an ‘empty’ scrotum. (Recall that this was a time when patients had no privacy rights or even the right to refuse tests or procedures. Today, he would be rightfully protected from my prying eyes.)

On further examination in the research lab determined that this ‘normal’ twelve year old boy was actually a girl, with normal ovaries, which were removed before he was discharged. Why am I discussing this here? Well, about the time Money was publishing his work, it was determined that this child in Detroit would be raised male, would receive male hormone therapy, beginning soon. What I do not know is who made the decision. Doctors? Doctors with parental consent? What I do know is that the child (like David Reimer) was not involved in the decision about gender assignment. Would he even be informed? If so, when? Of course I have no information about the follow up of this momentous decision. Nor do I know what happened to ‘Ellen’ who would be more than fifty, if still alive. (And as David Reimer is not. As David Reimer’s twin is not.) David Reimer was able to make the decision to go public, to help prevent others from harm. And, I hope we have finally learned something.

In the first years I moved to Orcas I heard an interview with Reimer on NPR, and later, a story about him, also on NPR, after his suicide. I recognized it because John Money was named in the interviews. John Money died in 2006. As far as I know, he was never charged with anything.

A last hopeful note: I learned recently that one of our recent graduates from Orcas High School has a declared major in Gender Studies. I hope I get to talk to that person one day.