Books selected and reviewed by James Park,
existential philosopher and sexologist.

1.  John Money  
Sex Errors of the Body and Related Syndromes:
A Guide to Counseling Children, Adolescents, and Their Families

(Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks Publishing Company, 1994—2nd edition)       132 pages
(ISBN: 1-55766-150-2; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: RC881.5.M66 1994)
(Medical call number: WJ712M742s 1994)

    John Money—foremost sexologist of the 20th century—
presents in a small book of only 130 pages
all the basic information about sexual birth defects
and how they have been dealt with.  

    This book can be understood by every parent of an intersex baby
and by all who deal with persons
having some chromosome or hormonal defects
that lead to a body somewhere between female and male.  

    Money deal with the following anomalies:
gonads, fetal hormones, internal sex organs,
external sex organs, & pubertal hormones.

He also discusses:
Sexual orientations for persons born intersex.
Assignment problems:  Is it a boy or a girl?
Explaining the problems to children at levels appropriate for their ages.
The emergence and development of sexual responses
—both usual and unusual.  

    All-in-all, this is a good place to begin reading
about the various intersex conditions.  
This book presents in a very brief form
themes that are explored more comprehensively
in other books by John Money. 

2.  John Money 
Biographies of Gender and Hermaphroditism
in Paired Comparisons:
Clinical Supplement to the Handbook of Sexology

(Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier, 1991)                    375 pages

     Detailed case studies of 22 intersex individuals,
most followed from infancy thru adulthood.  Main themes:
(1) sex assignment confusions, problems, mistakes, & later corrections;
(2) hormonal problems prenatal and at puberty
—and their correction when possible;
(3) surgical correction of make the body more male or female;
(4) family histories of coping with sexual birth defects;
(5) male/female self-designation struggles for all the intersex individuals;
(6) sexual histories, romantic histories, marriage, adoption of children,
adjustment, & mal-adjustment.

     This book should be read by all intersex individuals,
their families, & all professionals who deal with them.

3.  John Colapinto 
As Nature Made Him:
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

(New York: HarperCollins, 2000)       279 pages
(ISBN: 0-06-019211-9; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: RC560.G45C65 2000)

     This book is journalism rather than science.
But it will introduce thousands of people to sexology
who would never have taken the opportunity to read a more technical book.

     Colapinto tells the story of David Reimer,
who lost his penis in a circumcision accident at age 8 months.
After his parents saw a television program featuring sexologist John Money,
they decided explore the possibility of raising their son as a girl.
In consultation with John Money
and other psychological and medical professionals,
they decided to raise Bruce (David's original name)
as a girl (Brenda) beginning at age 19 months.
The infant's testicles were removed at age 22 months.
In retrospect, this may have been too late to change the sex of a child.
Male/female self-designation ("I am a boy" or "I am a girl")
is probably set—imprinted—by age 18 months,
by the time a child begins to speak.

     David Reimer's story is a psychological experiment that failed.
After some troublesome years as a girl, at age 14 years,
when David learned that he was born a boy
(just like his identical twin brother),
he decided to begin living as a male once again.
And as of the publication of this book,
he has lived more than half of his life as a male again.
He married a woman who already had three children,
thereby becoming an instant father.

     Hormone treatments and a new constructed penis
have helped him to cross the sex-line for a second time.
Psychologically he seems well adjusted to being a male,
even tho he spent his childhood (ages 2-14) as a girl.

     As Nature Made Him is based mainly on interviews with David,
when he was an adult male in his early thirties,
and as many other people as John Colapinto could find
three decades after the story began.
When depending on recollections years after the events,
it now appears obvious that it was never a good decision
to try to raise David as a girl.
But David might have remembering mainly the facts
that supported his decision to live as a male again.
(In reading the life-stories of many sex-changed people,
we often note that the childhood recollections
almost always support the later decision to change sex.)
Here the adult David Reimer might want to remember
that he was always a boy,
even tho everyone around him tried to raise him as a girl.

     However, we do have some good records from her childhood
that show that Brenda always resisted having a vagina constructed.
She believed that she was a girl, but she did not want any more surgery.
Her sexual attractions (such as they were) were toward 'other' girls.

     To this reviewer's knowledge,
John Money never responded to this book,
which is highly critical of his role in advising the Reimer parents
to raise their damaged boy as a girl.
John Money is familiar with other cases of failed sex-changes,
in which the individual later decides to go back to the original sex.

     In this case, there are three possible explanations for the failure:

     (1) Perhaps 19 months was too late to try to switch the sex of a child.
If the child has already begun to speak
and has heard itself referred to as either a "he" or a "she",
the imprinting of male/female self-designation might already have taken place.
David Reimer might have had some unarticulated awareness of being a boy
from his life before he was switched to being a girl at age 19 months.

     (2) Even more important, his parents and other adult relatives
were already very accustomed to thinking of Bruce as a boy.
Even tho they were all told to treat the new Brenda as a girl,
they knew the truth of his birth as a normal boy
and the circumcision accident that destroyed his penis,
and they might have communicated this family secret unconsciously.
David's father now reports that he knew the experiment was a failure
when Brenda was 7 or 8 years old.

     (3) Even without testicles to supply testosterone (the male hormone),
Brenda developed in ways that were remarkably like
her identical twin brother, Brian.
So Brenda's body may have compensated,
still producing a boy, because all his cells said XY,
rather than XX, which is the genotype for a normal girl.
If this was the case, his body was pulling one way,
even tho his socialization was pulling in the other direction.

     When David learned the secret of his birth, he was relieved
—and immediately set out plans for becoming a boy again.
He was given all the necessary hormonal and surgical treatments,
which have helped him to be nearly a normal male as of the year 2000.

     All in all, this is a very interesting case study.
But even the author admits at the end
that one case is not a sufficient basis for drawing a scientific conclusion,
John Colapinto was able to convince David Reimer to go public
at least in part because his case was being misused
to show the ease with which children could be raised as either sex.

     Now that one person has been willing to tell the whole story,
others will doubtless come forward with other case histories,
some confirming that nurture cannot overcome nature
and some showing that people can successfully switch
from one sex to the other.
It will be an interesting time for sexology.

    Postscript 2004:  David Reimer ultimately killed himself in 2004,
two years after the suicide of his twin brother.
We might never know whether his sex-change problems
were a factor in his decision to end his life at 38.

Created April 22, 2001; revised 5-30-2004; 4-29-2008; 5-8-2008

    Please send additional suggestions
for books to include on this intersex bibliography to:
James Park: e-mail: PARKx032@TC.UMN.EDU

    This bibliography is related to several others in sexology.
Here is the complete list:

Sexology                                      B-SEXOLO

Sex-Script Hypothesis                 B-SEX-SC

Variations of Sex and Gender      B-V-SG

I. Intersex                                     B-CRIT

II. Transsexualism                        B-TS

Transsexual Autobiographies      B-TS-AB

III. Sex-Roles                                B-ROLE

IV. Gender-Personality                 B-GEND

V. Sexual Orientation                   B-ORNT

VI. Cross-Dressing                       B-TV