Casting doubt on gender theory

Baltimore Sun ^ | 1/22/04 | Jonathan Bor

[jaime1959]

In a new twist on the age-old question of nature vs. nurture, Johns Hopkins scientists following 14 boys who were surgically altered as infants and raised as girls found that the majority grew up identifying strongly as males.

Some of the patients spontaneously took on boys' names and began wearing male clothing before anyone told them the circumstances of their births - while others decided to live as boys once they found out.

Warning against sweeping conclusions about the foundations of gender identity, the researchers noted that the study was limited to boys who were "assigned" to the female gender because of a severe birth defect involving the abdominal organs and penis.

But the doctors said their finding casts further doubt on a theory, made popular in the 1960s by a Hopkins sex researcher, that gender is largely a function of how you look and how you're raised.

[jaime1959]

Score one for nature and against the "gender as a social construct" crowd.

[Jaysun]

"Warning against sweeping conclusions about the foundations of gender identity, the researchers noted that the study was limited to boys who were "assigned" to the female gender because of a severe birth defect involving the abdominal organs and penis."


This makes me feel better. I was wondering how in the hell they got away with "experimenting" with boys by whacking off their jewels and putting them in dresses.

[CSM]

"In a new twist on the age-old question of nature vs. nurture, Johns Hopkins scientists following 14 boys who were surgically altered as infants and raised as girls found that the majority grew up identifying strongly as males."

Who would surgically alter a human in order to perform a social experiment? I guess the mothers never declared them to be alive!

[philosofy123]

"whacking off their jewels"

That has always been the fiminists dream.

[sarasota]

That still doesn't make sense to me. Altering gender of an infant? No, this is absurd.

[MineralMan]

Who would surgically alter a human in order to perform a social experiment? I guess the mothers never declared them to be alive!
_________________________

I'll assume you're serious with this question. A certain number of infants are born with ambiguous genital organs. This generally is caused either by a genetic problem, but can also be caused by some medications taken during pregnancy.

When this occurs, it's very difficult to recognize whether the genitals are male or female. It often involve the structures very severely.

While done less frequently today in infancy, surgery is done in some cases to make an assignment of gender. Since a malformed or tiny penis is a common part of the malformation, it was the practice in the past to assign a female gender to these unfortunate infants and to perform surgery to make the deformed genitals more like those of a girl.

Today, such reassignment surgery is very rarely done in infancy.

This was not done as an experiment. The study was made on people who had had this surgery for the reasons described above. The results should minimise such sex assignment surgeries for infants or young children. The current trend is to wait several years to make such decisions, but the decision must be made at some point and reconstructive surgery done to make the genitals conform better to the gender.

You can imagine the embarassment such a child would feel in school restrooms or other such places. It's a very serious matter, and is taken seriously by the medical profession.

[Jaysun]

That still doesn't make sense to me. Altering gender of an infant? No, this is absurd.

You're right. This experiment was done "Third Reich" style. Disgusting.

[thoughtomator]

Agreed... any surgeon who would do such a thing should be jailed for good as a menace to society. It's Dr. Mengele all over again... disgusting!

[Jaysun]

This was not done as an experiment. The study was made on people who had had this surgery for the reasons described above. The results should minimise such sex assignment surgeries for infants or young children. The current trend is to wait several years to make such decisions, but the decision must be made at some point and reconstructive surgery done to make the genitals conform better to the gender.


You're right. I saw a documentary showing several cases recently. The article is misleading. It leaves you with the belief that they used kids like test rats, when in reality they simply monitored several boys who had the procedure done for different reasons.

[Paradox]

I didn't think the article was misleading, maybe some of the other posters didn't read the entire article? Perhaps I didnt think it was misleading because I was already aware of the procedure...

[CSM]

Yes, I was serious. Thanks for the info and clarification.

[GovernmentShrinker]

It's done when male organs are so deformed or damaged (i.e. circumcision accidents) that they cannot be reconstructed so as ever to be functional. Since it's technically easier to make functional and externally normal-appearing female organs, that's what the surgeons have done. However, it's falling out of favor, as evidence mounts that it just results in a horribly confused adult.

[MineralMan]

"Agreed... any surgeon who would do such a thing should be jailed for good as a menace to society. It's Dr. Mengele all over again... disgusting!"

You have misread the article. These surgeries were not done so for the study. They were done as a matter of course on infants who had ambiguous genitalia when born. Such malformations occur in about 1 in 1500 births. Sometimes, they are so severe that it is impossible to tell the gender of the infant.

As I wrote before, surgical gender assignment surgery used to be done on infants as a matter or course when these deformities were severe. These days, that is less common, with gender assignment surgeries reserved until later so that the personality of the child can develop.

However, the surgeries are still done. Imagine being a boy with no penis, or a girl with a penis-sized clitoris. Both occur with alarming frequency, as does pseudohermaphrodism, which also comes with serious other risks to the child's health.

What this study did was to examine people who had had such surgery to see how well they adapted to it. No surgeries were done for the study. The surgeries had occurred for other reasons.

No monsters here...just doctors doing their best to correct mistakes of nature.

You can do some research on the web by Googling terms like "ambiguous gender" "sex assignment surgery" and "pseudohermaphroditism."

Just because you aren't aware of these congenital problems does not mean they do not exist.

[#1CTYankee]

TORONTO (Reuters) - Brenda Reimer was an awkward child, who did not engage in girlish activities and was mercilessly teased by schoolmates for her gunslinger stride and lack of interest in boys.

Doctors told her that her discomfort was due to a passing phase of ``tomboyishness.''

What they didn't tell her was that she had in fact been born ``Bruce'' and had been subjected to gender reassignment surgery at 18 months, 10 months after doctors botched a circumcision and destroyed most of his penis.

Instead of raising their child as a boy, Bruce's young parents took the advice of a famous American medical psychologist, John Money of Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, who said that Bruce could be a happy ``Brenda'' with the proper treatment and hormones.

But the experiment did not go as planned, plunging Bruce into a life of angry depression and isolation before surgery in his mid-teens transformed him back into a man.

Bruce is now 34 and is known as David. He has decided to cast aside his veil of anonymity to set the record straight about the failed experiment in psychosexual engineering. He tells his tale in a book, ``As Nature Made Him,'' written by Canadian journalist John Colapinto.

Case Hailed As Medical Triumph
Based on this case -- known as the ``twins case'' because he was born with an identical twin brother who was raised a boy -- sex reassignments became, and remain, a widely accepted medical practice for newborns with injured or irregular genitalia.

Although Reimer grew up miserably aware that something was wrong, the John/Joan case, as it was known in the medical books, was hailed by Dr. Money in 1972 as a medical triumph.

It was seen as proof of the idea that a person's sexual identity is ultimately determined by environment, leading doctors around the world to perform thousands of sex reassignments on infants with similarly injured or abnormal genitalia.

``I was surprised at the fact that other people wound up going through what I had (gone through), because of my so-called 'success story' -- that wasn't so much a success story,'' Reimer told Reuters with thinly veiled sarcasm as he recounted the horrific calamity of his early life.

Even as Reimer (as Brenda) plunged into suicidal depression, the fabled version of her life was accepted by virtually everyone, especially the feminist movement which saw it as proof of their conviction that gender identity and sexual orientation are a result of rearing and environment.

Scientific Paper Exposes Case As Failure In 1997, journalist Colapinto learned through an article in the New York Times that Dr. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii had exposed, in a scientific paper some 30 years after the experiment began, that it had indeed been a failure. The case captured his imagination and inspired the book.

``Scientists had just relied on this case as being a precedent for the fact that you could assign the sex and gender to children,'' Colapinto said in a telephone interview. ``Those who believed that and taught it and based their clinical practice on it, and who actually performed similar procedures, were scandalized.''

For Reimer, the experiment was a failure from the start.

One of his earliest memories is the day his father sheepishly informed him that he would have to take female hormones to grow breasts.

``I was wondering why ... He told me it was so I could wear a bra. I threw a fit,'' Reimer said in a telephone interview from Winnipeg, where he lives.

After the botched circumcision destroyed most of his penis at eight months old, Reimer's parents, a working class couple from Winnipeg, agreed to submit their son to a radical sex-change procedure -- clinical castration, removal of the remaining shred of penis and hormone therapy.

``I was raised as a girl. I was not comfortable with the situation. That was not the true me,'' Reimer said.

The tragedy of David Reimer, however, was considered a boon for science because David was born with a twin brother, Brian, who -- with his genitals still intact -- would provide a perfect matched control for their study.

Fine Features Bear Witness To Hormone Tampering Reimer's rumbling baritone voice fits strangely with his fine facial features, which bear the mark of years of hormonal tampering.

``You were expected to wear girl's clothing and to behave in a certain manner and you were expected to play with girls' toys,'' he said.

But Reimer knew he wasn't a girl. ``I thought I was an it,'' he said.

Reimer's mother recalled that even as a baby Brenda hated it when she was outfitted in a dainty dress: ``She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off,'' she said in the book.

Later in life, ``Brenda'' developed an ``angular gunslinging stride'' that was a source of ridicule among her peers. She wasn't interested in boys and thought sprouting breasts and developing hips abhorrent.

And although doctors had removed Reimer's testicles, the then-Brenda began to show the ominous signs of incipient manhood -- growing muscles on her shoulders, neck and biceps and sometimes a strange, high-pitched break in her voice.

Regardless of these signs, Dr. Money pressed the family to continue with the experiment and take it to its final phase: creating female genitalia.

Only when Brenda's defiance had turned to suicidal depression when she was 14 did her parents reveal the truth -- that she was a boy. ``An amputee,'' Reimer said.

Although they had all deceived him for more than 13 years, David said he harbored no resentment toward his parents, who, barely out of their teens, were persuaded easily by the opinions of highly educated doctors.

Reimer Puts Blame On Doctors The responsibility, he believes, rests squarely on the shoulders of those doctors, especially Dr. Money, who had developed an international reputation for the ``twins case.''

Despite the apparent harm it was doing to the Reimer family, Money appeared bent on seeing it through to the end.

``I thought it was very ignorant for them to think I was no longer a male because my penis was burned off,'' Reimer said. ''A woman who loses her breasts to cancer doesn't (become) any less of a woman.''

After his return to being male and his adoption of a new name, no one suspected the truth about his upbringing, despite his slim build, relative lack of facial hair and youthful appearance. He looks 10 years younger then his twin brother, Brian.

``He's just so masculine that the minute he just starts being David -- rolling his cigarettes and working his machines and stuff -- I think people just accepted that that's him,'' said John Colapinto, the author who coaxed him out of anonymity. ``There's no sense that this is a performance whatsoever.''

Admittedly, it would have been easier for Reimer and his family -- a wife and three adopted children -- to remain hidden but he said he is driven by the conviction that he has something important to say.

His lifelong ordeal has left Reimer deeply distrustful of the medical establishment and although he is leery of doctors, he admits they were, at least, able to restore some of what had been taken away 34 years ago.

``I'm like the six-million-dollar man,'' he said. ``They could rebuild me and they did.''

A truly amazing story. I'm suprised this poor guy didn't off himself

[Sofa King]

"assigning" gender is incredibly immoral. The psychological effects on the people it has been done to can be horrible. Seriously, there needs to be a law against this.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Some of the reassignment cases (not sure if any on this particular study) have been due to circumcision or other accidents, and the results from long term study of those individuals are perhaps more significant. After all, we can't really know whether an infant born physically abnormal re gender wasn't also invisibly abnormal in terms of brain structure/chemistry, etc. In the cases of infants born perfectly normal, however, the only unusual variable is the physical gender reassignment, and the results have been lousy in those cases too.

[Jaysun]

I didn't think the article was misleading, maybe some of the other posters didn't read the entire article? Perhaps I didnt think it was misleading because I was already aware of the procedure...

It could be that I'm the only one who felt that the article was misleading. I saw the words "scientists", "boys", "surgically altered", and "raised as girls" then I freaked. I guess I'm easily confused, but I'm back in the ball game now.

[thoughtomator]

I am aware of the hermaphroditic condition. What I don't understand is why the babies which are genetically male were "assigned" to be girls. That's the point where it crosses the line into barbarity, in my view.

[gcruse]

Score one for nature and against the "gender as a social construct" crowd.

But, then, what are we to do with our homofoamia?

[GovernmentShrinker]

I agree, but when they first started doing it, they reasonably believed that the psychological results might be as good or better than for a male growing up without a male organ. They know better now (but either option must be pretty tough to live with).