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J. Steven Svoboda is a member of TheMensCenter Advisory Council, an Independent attorney active in human rights law and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC).
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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
By John Colapinto. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
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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.
©2000 J. Steven Svoboda
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