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What should be done about the small proportion of babies born with genitals that are neither typically male nor typically female? Many of those affected believe parents and doctors are often too quick to schedule operations.
[T]he Secret of Me, a new documentary by British film-maker Grace Hughes-Hallett, . . .follows the life of Jim Ambrose, who was born in Louisiana in 1976. Like Luk, Ambrose had genitals that, as he puts it in the film, “fall outside of an arbitrary acceptable norm”.
The course of action that his parents had been advised to follow brought Ambrose a great deal of misery – he never felt like a girl growing up, and it was a massive blow to learn that such huge decisions had been taken about his body before he could have a say in them.
The Secret of Me draws a direct link between the harmful way Ambrose was treated and the work of psychologist John Money, whose theories about gender informed medical guidance about children born with atypical genitalia. In the 1960s, Money studied a pair of Canadian twin boys, originally called Bruce and Brian Reimer. Bruce was left without a penis after a botched circumcision, and the academic encouraged the boys’ parents to raise him as a girl, Brenda. Money studied both children as they grew, with his research claiming the experiment was a total success. Brenda, according to him, was a stereotypical and happy little girl, showing that a child’s gender could be moulded by the adults raising them.
In fact, there were clear signs that Brenda was never happy as a girl, which Money simply left out of his papers. As an adult, he began living as a man, changing his name again, this time to David. The brothers were left traumatised by Money’s research (which involved having them inspect each other’s genitals as children and “rehearse” sexual acts) and their story has an incredibly sad end – both Brian and David killed themselves in their 30s. Money’s work was eventually debunked – but its impact on medical treatment for children born with ambiguous genitalia was felt for years. Richard Carter, the surgeon who operated on Ambrose as a baby, appears in The Secret of Me, and apologises to his former patient. He says when he was tasked with treating Ambrose, he “went back to [his] textbooks” – which featured Money’s work.
Shocking as this all now seems, Money’s offer of a straightforward “fix” to non-stereotypically sexed babies clearly had an appeal, and perhaps still does: we live in a world in which many parents want to know whether to put their newborn in a blue or a pink hat, and gender reconstruction surgery for babies born with differences in sex development (DSD) is still legal in most countries, including the UK and the US.