You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This important book, written not by a psychoanalyst but by a journalist, is painful to read. It tells two interweaving stories. One depicts a struggle to cope with great suffering by a child and his family following a devastating surgical error that occurred when he was eight months old. The other narrative line concerns a scientific debate about the effects of nature and nurture on gender identity development. This is given dramatic form because it involved a struggle between two brilliant men, John Money and Milton Diamond.
In 1965 a young Canadian couple became the parents of identical twin boys. During infancy the children developed symptoms of phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin contracts around the tip of the urethra, and whose treatment is circumcision. Rather than performing the ordinarily innocuous procedure with a scalpel, the physician used a cautery device. Tragically, the entire penis of one child was burned and “over the next few days, baby Bruce's penis dried and broke away in pieces” (p. 15). Understandably, it was decided not to circumcise the other twin, Brian, whose urethral symptoms remitted without treatment. Limitations of surgical technique were such that construction of a new, functional penis was not then possible. Medical authorities advised the parents that their son would never be able to live a normal life, and would have to resign himself to the role of a physically defective outcast.