How Could All Those Doctors Go Along With It?

here's how

The validity of the Milgram experiment has been challenged, but we have a bigger and uglier story about authority and submission.

I want to show you a single moment that was replayed many times, a recurring confrontation between established narrative and observable fact that led to a choice over and over again. It won’t make sense without background, so here goes a story in three parts. It’s one of the ugliest things you’ll ever read, or at least a piece of it, but it illustrates an important point. Several people have written about this story on Substack, but they tend to focus on a different part than the choice I want to look at today. This post is drawn from John Colapinto’s book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.

Part One:

Bruce and Brian Reimer were identical twins born in 1965 in Winnipeg. A doctor using an unfamiliar electric cauterizing device to circumcise Bruce burned off his penis when he was eight months old. The parents, high school dropouts who had grown up in isolated Mennonite communities, were at a loss about how to respond, as doctors told them they couldn’t reconstruct a fully functioning penis. Finally, though, as they made the rounds of doctors, they were advised to contact Dr. John Money, the world’s foremost expert on gender identity. Money ran a prestigious research clinic at Johns Hopkins University that frequently treated intersex babies born with ambiguous genitalia — by picking a gender and assigning it. Vaginas were easier for surgeons to build, so they tended to pick “girl.”

In a longrunning debate between the “nature” and “nurture” wings of gender identity scholarship, Money was an aggressive nurturist. He argued for social construction, full stop: cultural signals make gender identity. So he was exceptionally excited by the appearance in his clinic of a perfect medical experiment, identical twins who were both born as biological “boys,” one who could now be transitioned to female identity through socialization and cultural signaling. He told the Reimers to put Bruce in a dress, give him a girl’s name, and raise him as a girl — assuring them that she would never know the difference. Surgeons removed Bruce’s testicles, and the experiment started.

For years, the Reimer twins traveled to Baltimore for a week of annual therapy and evaluation. Believing that gender identity was socially constructed, Money believed a bunch of other things were purely cultural constructions, too — like pedophilia, which he regarded as a nonsensical hangup from a stodgy culture. Teaching Brenda and Brian about their sexual identity, he showed them hardcore pornography throughout their therapy, and stripped them naked to teach them the sexual positions that boys and girls used together — photographing the sexual positions of the naked six year-olds, for example, for his clinical records. (The journalist John Colapinto, given waivers of confidentiality by the Reimer family, accessed their clinical files many years later and found those pictures, and session notes describing the clinical application of pornographic material.) Money told the Reimer parents that he was involved in complex clinical work that they wouldn’t understand, and — having been told that they had the good fortune to have their children treated by the most important expert in the world — they didn’t question why they had to wait outside the room.

This is important: Over the years, Money wrote a long series of books and articles describing the stunning success of his experiment. The boy he turned into a girl was wonderfully and cheerfully feminine, her happy family was thrilled with the success of the transition, and the two twins, appearing together, were unmistakably a boy and a girl.

At puberty, Money had “Brenda” placed on hormone therapy, and began preparing “her” for the surgery that would give her a vagina to complete the transition.

Part Two:

Meanwhile, both twins — but especially Brenda — relentlessly and aggressively spiraled down into depression and unmanaged anger. Brenda spent her childhood asking what was wrong with her body. “She” was also consistently viewed as the more masculine of the twins, showing up at school with long hair and a dress and then fighting with boys and expressing distaste for the girls and the stupid ways they played together. Both twins became increasingly withdrawn and depressed as their therapeutic trips to Baltimore continued. Finally, Brenda said she would kill herself if her family ever took her to see Dr. Money again, and the visits stopped — but not Money’s clinical supervision, as he led Canadian practitioners in the effort to prepare Brenda for surgery.

At puberty, forced to take estrogen, Brenda grew breasts, and then started frantically overeating to get fat and hide them. She stopped bathing, and her hair grew in greasy clumps. As doctors and her parents told her the wonderful news that she was about to get her vagina, she fell into catastrophic rage and despair. She refused to wear makeup and girl’s clothing, and was exiled from the girls’ bathroom at school because she insisted on peeing standing up. Fat, dirty, often nearly catatonic, many years behind in basic academic skills, and plainly suicidal, Brenda told people she would never submit to her upcoming genital surgery — while her doctors kept telling her that the surgery was still being planned.

Part Three:

Now, finally, Brian and Brenda attended a series of schools, as their parents looked for one where Brenda would be comfortable. They never found it. At every school, teachers immediately became alarmed by Brenda’s strange appearance and obviously disturbed behavior, and immediately began making urgent referrals to school counselors, who began making referrals to school psychologists, who began making urgent referrals to outside psychiatrists and pediatricians. Everyone saw. They couldn’t quite process what they saw, but they saw.

Whenever Brian and Brenda sat down with counselors and psychiatrists, a light bulb went off. Professionally trained in child psychology and gender development, they all knew Dr. John Money’s extremely famous “twins” case, and they all knew what the annual updates on the case said: very happy girl, extremely feminine, easy gender adjustment, happy family. Even though Money used pseudonyms in the scholarly literature to protect the privacy of research subjects, they knew who was in their offices. And they saw, right in front of them, a miserable, angry, depressive, suicidal child who was miserable in, and increasingly at war with, “her” very obviously masculine body. They also saw her angry, confused brother, and her alcoholic father, and a mother who was so depressed she was sometimes hospitalized for weeks of inpatient psychiatric treatment.

This is the moment I want you to see.

For more than a decade, a long series of counselors, pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists understood very clearly that they were sitting face-to-face with Dr. John Money’s famous twins. They knew how Money described them, and they knew that the children sitting in front of them didn’t match his description at all.

They knew that Dr. John Money, the famous expert in sexual identity, was lying. They could see the lie; they stood in its physical presence.

And then, when that series of clinicians contacted Money over and over again to seek his advice, he reminded them that he was a highly regarded expert at a major university, and they were provincial practitioners with no global reputation or significant published scholarship.

And then they agreed to adopt his plan of treatment.

Contacted years later, one of those psychiatrists said this to John Colapinto:

John Money tortured children, and sexually abused them, and led teams of people in mutilating their bodies. But a lot of doctors who knew he was lying in his published scholarship didn’t want to argue with him, because he was famous and they thought he might damage their careers.