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First of all, it's the sort of story that cries out to be a sound bite. "That's right, Biff, according to this riveting new book, nature is in and nurture is definitely out."

And at least some of the sound bites will be aimed against feminists and their foolhardy attempts to challenge "nature." Actually, the story has already been spun that way, though not by Colapinto. A few months before Colapinto's prizewinning article, "The True Story of John/Joan," was publishing in the Dec. 11, 1997, Rolling Stone, columnist John Leo delivered his own account in U.S. News and World Report. Indulging in some muted gloating at the expense of "campus feminists" and their wacky beliefs, Leo interpreted the case as a blow against the feminism of the "flower-power" '60s and '70s.

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl By John Colapinto HarperCollins, 279 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com The Danish Girl By David Ebershoff Viking, 270 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

David's story, moreover, has a fearsome Goliath. Now retired, Money has received numerous honors and published both academic and popular studies throughout his long, successful career. "He's the guru," one of David's local therapists told Colapinto, explaining that he had hesitated to challenge Money publicly because he was "shit-scared" of him: "I didn't know what he'd do to my career."

Money's pedagogical and clinical styles were often provocative, sometimes including sexual slang and pornography. I winced as Colapinto pushed all the panic buttons: pornography! prominently sexed African sculpture in his office! Money emerges from the narrative as an unpleasant avatar of self-regarding sexual permissiveness -- the scientist as Playboy Advisor.

But it's dangerous to infer too much from style, and anyhow, using pornography in a clinical setting is not necessarily a bad thing: Jeff Weinstein and Dorothy Allison, for example, have both written eloquently about how porn helped them understand their sexuality as gay youths. And I think you could make a case for the sexologist as rebel and provocateur in a puritanical society, as long as the provocation is not at his subjects' expense -- and as long as he is also responsive and responsible to his subjects.

How responsible was Money to the Reimers? Given the centrality of their case to his career, I'd think he would have wanted to follow it rather more closely than in yearly interviews. But it looks as if he'd already decided what he'd hear: Although he thanked one of Brenda's therapists for her input, he never responded directly to its highly negative content. It's also true that Janet Reimer reported any positive result she could find to Money -- as anyone might do who needed to believe in the ultimate success of a scary and radical project. However, when Colapinto suggested to Money that Janet may have been presenting an unduly rosy picture, Money strongly disagreed, as though the assertion were an insult to his acuity as a psychologist (which I suppose it was).

Money seems to have told Colapinto very little of interest or value. And so it's hard to extrapolate his side of the story, especially since he hasn't commented publicly on the twins case since 1980, when doubts about its success began to air in the media. I wish it weren't so easy to cast him as the story's "destroying angel" (to borrow the title of one of his books); it makes for a gripping read, but it tends to short-circuit the reader's effort to interpret and evaluate the story.

Money was crudely simplistic and overconfident; perhaps feminists who originally accepted his work should have cast a colder eye on his cooing over "daddy's little sweetheart." It's tempting to swing the pendulum widely in the other direction and to see all of Brenda's behaviors as responses to chromosomal or prenatal hormonal influences -- indeed, you'd hardly want to dismiss these factors. But it would be equally simplistic to ignore the fact that Brenda (or more accurately, Bruce) had been a boy for his first 19 months, in a household whose central event had been the traumatic circumcision. And if we interpret the fact that Brenda was always more of a fighter than Brian as proof of Brenda's hormonal or chromosomal "maleness," what does this say about Brian and his "maleness"?

Still, Colapinto cites compelling cases of intersexed or hermaphroditic children who were sexually assigned in infancy -- that is, castrated and raised as girls -- but who, like Brenda, also always "knew" they were boys. And on a more mundane level, we can all recite stories of well-intentioned nonsexist parents who wound up with a little girl who demanded to go to school dressed as though she was attending her First Holy Communion, a little boy who'd commandeer anything in the house as a gun. And what of the emerging genre of narratives by and about gender-crossers, people who for whatever reason -- biological or social -- choose to live within a different gender than the one they were born into?

Next page | A strange and happy tale of the first gender-crossing surgery