As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl.
By John Colapinto. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Circumcision: The World’s Most Controversial Surgery.
By David L. Gollaher. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
These
two recent books make an interesting point and counterpoint. Both
concern circumcision, both boast impressive research and highly
accomplished authorship, and both approach their controversial topics
with impressive detachment and objectivity. And ultimately, the two
very different stories—one spanning millennia of history, the other
tightly focused on one person’s remarkable life--both have important
lessons to teach us.
John Colapinto is the Rolling Stone reporter whose
original article about David Reimer won him a National Magazine Award
and, more importantly, a request from its subject to tell his story at
book length. David is better known as "John/Joan," the boy who lost
his penis in a circumcision as an infant and then was "reassigned" as
a girl. Remarkably, the perfect control for this unintentional
experiment was born along with David in the form of his twin brother,
who in the wake of the disaster that struck David, was never
circumcised. The supposed success of this endeavor was trumpeted by
the famous and now notorious Dr. John Money as one of his premier
achievements, by feminists as proof of the malleability of gender
identification, and by psychologists as a demonstration of the
importance of nurture over nature.
There was only one "slight" problem: "John/Joan"
wouldn’t stay Joan. He beat up boys as well as girls, sometimes,
ironically enough, when protecting his twin brother. He ripped off the
dresses his parents tried to get him to wear, and stubbornly insisted
on only playing with male-oriented toys such as trucks and guns.
Perhaps most remarkably, well before his parents finally told him the
truth about his early life, he often urinated standing up. Contacted
twenty-six years later, the twins’ kindergarten teacher remembered the
child vividly enough that she emphatically stated she had never seen a
girl like her, before or since.
Eventually, David underwent further surgery and
different hormonal treatments and returned to life as a male. His
entire family suffered in different ways under the impact of his
problems, with a number of suicide attempts by David and other family
members, serious alcoholism, and equally grave dysfunction that nearly
ripped the family apart.
Today David is happily married and although unable
to father children of his own is ably step fathering his wife’s three
children. Of course, the money he received on turning eighteen which
had accumulated from his family’s out-of-court settlement of his case
can never give him back a normal childhood or even the ability to be a
biological father.
The story of David Reimer inevitably becomes also
the story of Dr. John Money. World-renowned as a premier expert on
gender reassignment, the man is both remarkably unstable and
breathtakingly unethical. Throwing tantrums at the slightest
provocation, manipulating David’s naïve parents into keeping their
child under his care, fabricating data for publication including
outright lies about David’s progress, disclosing intimate details of
his clients’ lives in published books without obtaining prior
permission, forcing David and his brother to view pornography and mime
sex acts with each other behind closed doors while not telling their
parents what he was doing, and blaming everyone but himself for
problems that were created by no one but himself. Given Money’s
reputation, his claims of the success of David’s sex reassignment were
widely reproduced and quickly accepted as gospel by most serious
researchers. Motivated by the quest for truth rather than any personal
animus, Dr. Milton Diamond did dare to confront and eventually debunk
Money’s frauds.
The human touches to this story are poignant:
David’s confrontation with his circumciser. After resuming life as a
male, David’s awkward claim to be the "cousin" of his twin brother
when he met a friend who knew him as a girl. The touching wedding vows
he and his wife created for each other.
Ultimately, the story of David Reimer is the story
of how credulous we can be toward authority, and how we owe it to
ourselves and our society to retain a healthy skepticism no matter how
trustworthy those in power may seem. And, of course, it is also the
story of how we carry our own inherent nature deep inside us and how
we cannot be flipped from male to female and back again as if we were
so many light switches.
Historian David L. Gollaher has a tale to tell us of
the world’s most controversial and the United States’ most frequent
surgery, circumcision. Invented so long ago that its origins are lost
in the shadows of history, circumcision has proven a stunning
persistent practice, found in various forms in many countries and in
many historical eras as well, of course, as in some leading religions.
It is difficult to imagine how any history could more fascinatingly
combine the strangest idiosyncrasies of sexuality, religion, and
psychology. Gollaher makes it clear in the book’s preface via a
compelling "thought experiment" that no one would today dare to invent
circumcision if it didn’t already exist. And yet, Gollaher notes, so
deeply intertwined with certain cultures and worldviews is it that it
is devilishly hard to recognize for what it is.
Anyone who fears that our culture stands alone in
its strange obsessions need only read a few pages of this book to
disabuse oneself of this notion. The Egyptians, the likely inventors
of circumcision, were preoccupied with the body’s excretions and
secretions. It was the Egyptians who first promoted circumcision as
advancing not only physical hygiene but also moral, spiritual and
intellectual refinement. Thousands of years later, Victorian
physicians in the United States resurrected this same parallel to
justify the same procedure.
It is impossible to imagine that anyone could do a
better job than Gollaher does of combing through millennia of arcane
primary sources and distilling a remarkably accessible summary which
nevertheless contains documentation sufficient to satisfy the most
exacting scholar. It is fascinating to see him pull together in one
place and provide more detail about many different authors and issues
relating to circumcision’s history, including the Egyptian roots and
Philo’s and Maimonedes’ early writings about Judaism and circumcision.
In the Twelfth Century, Moses Maimonedes noted that circumcision
served the same spiritual purposes accomplished by castration, without
depriving a man of his fertility.
Starting with Maimonedes, numerous authors over the
past centuries have recommended circumcision BECAUSE it reduced the
sexual pleasure for the man, putting the lie to those circumcision
promoters today who, stunningly, still attempt to deny that removing
half the surface area of the penis would affect sexual response. As
early as the Thirteenth Century, a French follower of Maimonedes noted
that the procedure reduced sexual pleasure for both the man AND THE
WOMAN, thereby freeing both from lascivious desire.
In religious symbolism, physical circumcision
represents spiritual circumcision, or circumcision of the heart.
Gollaher’s detailed religious history suggests that there is almost no
limit to the bizarreness which lies at the intersection of psychology,
circumcision, and religion. One author suggests that gentiles, by
accepting Christ’s sacrifice of his blood on the cross, are thereby
vicariously circumcised. Gollaher manages to avoid raising stylistic
eyebrows as he recounts to us the story of the search for Christ’s
foreskin and the numerous claims by its supposed possessors. Anything
combining the penis and religion obviously fascinated our ancestors.
Other cultures are no slouches at creativity either. In Madagascar,
immediately following a circumcision, an older male relative of the
boy’s puts the foreskin between two pieces of banana and gobbled down
the sandwich!
Chapter Four is equally invaluable in its detailed
recounting of the origin of the notion of circumcision as a panacea
and a routine prophylactic measure. Lewis A. Sayre, a highly prominent
and apparently completely well-intentioned surgeon in the 1870’s,
played a leading role in convincing the American public that
circumcision could prevent a now ludicrously expansive list of
diseases. Displaying a nice talent for understatement, Gollaher
ironically notes, "The ultimate popularity of circumcision depended
not on convincing normal men to undergo the ordeal of surgery, but on
targeting a group of patients who could not object." Gollaher again
proves his adeptness at distilling complexities, noting that in order
to induce parents to select it for their infants, surgeons had to
persuade them that it was a minor operation, neither dangerous nor
unduly painful. This was facilitated by two medical advances appearing
around this time, asepsis and effective anesthesia.
Gollaher also takes the time to carefully debunk all
asserted justifications of circumcision based on elimination of
diseases. He notes that the American Academy of Pediatrics has clearly
denounced female genital mutilation while issuing a number of
statements about circumcision which have been "models of ambiguity."
Gollaher goes on to examine the striking parallels between rationales
for male circumcision in this country and female genital mutilation in
Africa. He acerbically notes that "the themes the Western world abhors
[in female genital mutilation]—removing part of the genitals to reduce
sexual pleasure, carving children’s bodies to conform to certain
social ideals, visiting pain on helpless children—are all fully
present in the history of male circumcision."
The tale Gollaher tells gives us Colapinto’s
John/Joan lesson in a crazyhouse mirror. The same knife that cuts a
baby girl can cut a baby boy. As one anti-FGM activist once said,
"Pain is pain." We all need to work together so that boys can be boys
and girls can be girls, with all body parts intact, and hopefully all
possibilities intact as well. We have a long way to go, but if we can
muster the same admirably incisive thinking and clear writing of these
two authors, we have a chance to get our points as well as our intact
bodies and minds across and make it through to the other side.
