As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

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THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION. All passages of dialogue are taken verbatim from tape transcripts of psychological interviews, from contemporaneous psychiatric session notes, or from the direct recollection of witnesses to, or participants in, these events. No dialogue or scenes have been invented for the purposes of “narrative flow,” “atmosphere,” or any other quasi-novelistic purpose. The account of Dr. Money’s appearance on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television show in 1967 is taken from a videotape of that program—a tape that was, miraculously, not destroyed in the thirty years since its broadcast. Direct dialogue from the Psychohormonal Research Unit sessions (published here for the first time) is taken from tape transcripts which Dr. Money supplied to the patient in June 1998 upon the request of the patient’s local physician.

ON THE MORNING of 27 June 1997 I paid my first visit to David Reimer’s home, a small, nondescript dwelling in a working-class neighborhood of Winnipeg, Manitoba. There was nothing about the house to suggest that its owner might arouse the interest of a journalist from New York City—not to mention the fascination of scientists and doctors the world over. On the well-tended lawn, a child’s bicycle lay on its side. At the curb was parked an eight-year-old secondhand Toyota. Inside the house, a handmade wooden cabinet in a corner of the living room held the standard emblems of family life: wedding photos and school portraits, china figurines, and souvenirs from family trips. There was a knock-off antique coffee table, a worn easy chair, and a sofa—which was where my host, a wiry young man dressed in a jean jacket and scuffed work boots, seated himself.

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