In 1972, when Brenda was 7, Money touted his success with her gender conversion in a speech to the American Assn. Money continued to perform annual checkups on Brenda, and despite the signs that Brenda was rejecting her feminized self, Money insisted that continuing on the path to womanhood was the proper course for her. “I recognized Brenda as my sister,” Brian was quoted as saying in the Colapinto book. When she fought with her brother, it was clear that she was the stronger of the two. She favored toy guns and trucks over sewing machines and Barbies. When she saw her father shaving, she wanted a razor, too. She tried to rip off the first dress that her mother sewed for her. But Brenda rebelled at her imposed identity from the start.
She was, on the surface, an appealing little girl, with round cheeks, curly locks and large, brown eyes. After bringing the toddler home, the Reimers began dressing her like a girl and giving her dolls. The Reimers went to see Money, who with unwavering confidence told them that raising Bruce as a girl was the best course, and that they should never say a word to the child about ever having been a boy.Ībout six weeks before his second birthday, Bruce became Brenda on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. He was credited with coining the term “gender identity” to describe a person’s innate sense of maleness or femaleness. Money, a Harvard-educated native of New Zealand, had already established a reputation as one of the world’s leading sex researchers, known for his brilliance and his arrogance. He said that through surgeries and hormone treatments he could turn a child into whichever sex seemed most appropriate, and that such reassignments were resulting in happy, healthy children. He was describing his successes at Johns Hopkins University in changing the sex of babies born with incomplete or ambiguous genitalia.
Told that phallic reconstruction was a crude option that would never result in a fully functioning organ, they were without hope until one Sunday evening after the twins’ first birthday when they happened to tune in to an interview with Money on a television talk show.
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