This programme contains strong language and scenes some viewers may find disturbing
Downloaded from YTS.BZ
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ
MUSIC: Piano Lumineuse by Scott Twynholm
Growing up in 1980s suburban Baton Rouge
was pretty idyllic for Kristi.
She loved spending time with her friends,
running around the neighbourhood.
Growing up, Kristi and I lived in the same neighbourhood,
so we were childhood friends.
We were both obsessed with soccer.
We were good, too.
She was fearless and...
Oh, I have to smile.
Erm, she wasn't even five feet tall.
A little tomboy, mouthy, mouthy little kid.
Just really feisty.
Kristi's dad, John, he was a really nice guy.
You know, expected 100% all the time.
Her mum, Alice, very, very sweet, nice lady,
very supportive of her kids.
They seemed to be very giving, loving people -
but always seemed like there was this aspect of secrecy.
I never... I never, in a million years,
could have guessed the truth of Kristi.
I am Kristi - or at least, I was.
And I know what you're thinking,
this is a transgender story.
But it's not.
I have the utmost respect and admiration for
the trans community worldwide.
But this story is not a trans one.
And it's important that I tell it in full.
ON PHONE: Hello, my Jim.
I'm just thinking about you right now.
I know you're going to do something difficult...
..and I just wanted you to hear
the voice of somebody who really loves you.
Hello, Sheriff.
When I think of Baton Rouge, I think of the lies.
That's why I don't like coming back here.
But I've come back to speak to the man who started it all.
You know, started a chain of events that continue on.
I just want to talk to him
and tell him that what he did...
..was wrong.
This is the street I grew up on, Antioch Boulevard.
Oh, man, and here comes...
This is where I grew up.
I do want to pop out, and I just want to see
what the driveway looks like.
Wow. OK, it's starting to come back.
This is a picture of me and my mother holding my sister.
It looks like it's time to leave,
and I don't want to leave.
I'm playing a game with my mother, sort of pulling away,
and she's like, "I know you, kid. Come on."
I'm clearly delighted with myself... with glee.
This is one of my favourites.
This is a picture of my dad.
I would have been four or five in this photo.
I just love the way I'm looking up into his eyes.
It's just that I trust him so much.
Yeah, I used to just blanket,
it was like the childhood was shit.
All of it, shit, because of this lie.
You know? But it wasn't.
You know, it wasn't all shit.
This was right around the time that Sheila started coaching me.
Sheila was an excellent coach.
And she's just very invested in me doing well,
and really developing a rapport.
I definitely felt like I was a mentor to her.
We talked a lot about life, about,
"What do you want to do in the future?"
She knew, whatever she was going to tell me,
I wasn't going to judge.
There were a lot of girls like me
when I started playing organised soccer.
Tomboyish.
So, yeah, I was camouflaged.
But then, I'm like, girls on my soccer team
started to wear earrings,
and started to put on make-up,
and started thinking about their appearance, and I wasn't.
I mean, I wasn't interested in that at all.
I know Kristi didn't fit into that mould,
and neither did I.
We probably found great comfort to each other.
I remember just having a random conversation again one day.
We were like, "If you were on a desert island,
"who would you want to be there with you?"
And we both went,
"Laura Hepner, absolutely!"
LAUGHTER So, just...
So, it was just... It wasn't anything that we talked,
like, we never even had the conversation.
"Oh, do you like girls? You like...?" It just, we...
You grew up in a place like Baton Rouge, you know,
like, for me personally,
liking girls was not what you're supposed to do.
They say that water and sunshine are the essence of life -
so life must be good in Louisiana.
It's very - this is a very, very conservative place.
Christian conservative family values.
Going to church together.
Very southern.
ECHOING: God can set you free! Hallelujah!
The expectation was definitely that boys were going to
become athletes, become engineers,
and girls were going to find a spouse and get married...
..basically, and have some kids.
We used to laugh and say you were going to get an Mrs Degree -
meaning you were going to get a degree to be missus,
and become married.
It's just that Christian and that conservative here.
Something must have kicked in for my parents,
or at least my mum, that, you know, "I need to feminise this kid."
And I started getting these sort of mandatory permanents in my hair.
They'd dump a bunch of chemicals in your hair,
just to...nuclearize your hair
and, I don't know, break its will.
SIGHS Didn't win this battle.
BASEBALL GAME ON TV
I was around the age of 12.
My mum took me into her bedroom.
I remember there was a baseball game that I wanted to watch,
and that I didn't want to go in the bedroom and talk to her.
She was sitting next to me and...
..she said, "Soon, you'll have to start taking these pills
"that are going to help you grow and develop breasts
"and make you look like other girls.
"And then, one day later on,
"you're going to have to have a surgery."
I just, I...
I didn't know what a future surgery meant.
And finally, she said,
"But you'll never be able to have children of your own."
That's when she sort of got choked up.
She breaks down and starts crying, and I'm caring for her.
Like, I'm telling her, "It's OK, Mama."
You know, "It's all right."
I was like, "OK.
"I'm not interested in that at all anyway."
I just...and I-I went back to watching the baseball game.
That's what I cared about.
Erm, like a child knows what his parents need him to be.
That's the thing, is that...
And I know I'm flipping back, I know.
There are milestones in my life where I remember
not asking questions..
..because my parents were screaming inside of themselves,
"Please don't ask."
I think there's some corps, fundamental thing, right?
Mum, dad equals safety,
equals shelter, equals food, equals love.
I just didn't want my mum to be upset.
As soon as I started taking those pills,
I started to really grow.
I guess I was happy to be growing taller, but...
..I wasn't that excited about growing breasts.
I didn't like the way my body was changing at all.
But again, there actually wasn't much I could say or do about it.
I don't think I ever knew Kristi
to be comfortable in her own skin, honestly.
And I just remember her girlfriend at the time
having a conversation with me,
super upset about Kristi not allowing her to touch her,
have that physical intimacy,
and just really struggling and hurting about that.
So, of course, me being... just asked, like,
"What's going on?
"You know, she feels like - that you don't love her.
"You won't open up. Like, what are you afraid of?
"You don't... She's the best thing that's ever happened to you.
"Y'all are so happy, like..."
That was when she looked at me and said, you know,
"I don't have a hole down there."
And, of course, you know, you try not to let your jaw drop,
or things like, you know, erm...
Everything about women turned me on.
But I wasn't interested at all in them touching me.
It was very much a one-sided experience.
I didn't think I was capable of physical pleasure.
You know, I just didn't have a relationship with my own body
for the longest time.
I was 19.
I was at college on a soccer scholarship.
And I was taking this feminist studies course.
They had given us a selection to read from this book,
but I hadn't done the reading.
That room right there, that's the class.
I had no idea that, when I walked into this class,
my whole fucking world was going to turn upside down.
The tables, the desks were all in a circle, because the professor
wanted us to be looking at each other when we talked.
And...I just started looking around.
You could see the people just shaking their heads
in disbelief or disgust.
And I thought, "This has got to be good.
"What is this?"
And so, I just started flipping through the book and...
CHUCKLES
..I start reading about how some children are born...
..with bodies, with genitals
that fall outside an arbitrary acceptable norm.
The length is measured...
..you know, this long, you get to be a boy.
If it's less than that,
then you lose your phallus,
and you're raised as a girl.
The choice is made by the parents and the doctors.
The child is having their gender designated, imprinted,
selected for them.
People were just sort of,
"Oh, my God, I can't believe this happens regularly.
"What, they just mutilate babies?"
And it just hit me.
HEARTBEAT ECHOES
"I think this is about me."
Click, click, click, clink. You know?
My mind immediately went to, "Everything makes sense,
"and this is - I've got to go get my records."
Like, "I've got to go and get them."
I drove myself to the doctor's office.
I remember going to the desk and saying, "I'm a current patient,
"and I'd like if you could give me a copy of the medical records
"you have for me."
So, I get in, I immediately start shuffling through the papers,
and I just start at the top, and it just says,
"Karyotype XY."
And I'm like, "Wait, what the fuck is that?
Like, XX, XY.
And I'm like, "XX is chromosomally female.
"And it says XY.
"Why are they running chromosome tests on me?
"XY, if it's supposed to be XX?
"Then, what does that...tell me?
"Oh, I was a healthy baby.
"But then, there's all this other documentation about how
"my genital presentation needed to be altered
"and so many things needed to be removed, these healthy organs."
And I'm like, "What the fuck?"
And it had this name,
it had Richard Carter's name all over it.
So, those things were taken out,
and my genitals were crafted to have a very satisfying,
pleasing vulva presentation,
so I could then be safely taken home by my parents.
I started in labour about 4am in the morning,
and went on to the hospital.
When we arrived, the gynaecologist was just very
excited about - that it was a boy.
And then, he said, "Oh, wait,"
you know, he changed his mind right in midstream.
I was called to the Woman's Hospital
to see an infant that had ambiguous genitalia.
Ambiguous genitalia is a condition
where you're really not sure,
in looking at the genitalia,
whether you're looking at a female or a male.
The most obvious thing was that the phallus was nowhere near
the size of a penis that you would expect in an infant.
They said that they could correct the problem,
and that was, you know,
we could raise her as a girl.
In 1976, the medical thought was that these patients needed
to be surgically constructed
the way they most likely look.
It was strictly an anatomical decision,
because it was so much easier to make it look more like a clitoris,
as opposed to trying to make a penis.
So, that's what we did.
PHONE RINGS
I believe it was a phone call at first,
a very solemn phone call to my mother telling her
that I had gone to get my records,
and that I was upset by what I'd found.
Obviously, we're taking their advice,
and I feel very confidently there was nothing malicious
or anything of that order.
They just thought that was the best way to handle it.
You know, it says I'm, you know,
it says my chromosomes are male,
and that I had these surgeries that took away parts of my body.
I was like, "I had testes, you know, I had a...
"..a phallus between my legs, and they were gone.
"I had those things, and they were gone."
She was not...not very happy at all during, what,
about a year or so there. She was getting...
She was real angry.
She was angry toward us and towards the doctors. And the doctors.
"You cut my genitals out.
"What did you think was going to happen?"
You know, "What is the meaning of all...? What is the...?
"Why didn't you tell me this?
"And I had to find it out on my own, in my car, by myself
"with no-one to talk to?"
We tried to explain to her this was the best thing
that we thought to do and, including the doctors,
and we agreed.
There's not much else you can say.
That was not good enough.
All that did was...
..it was just gasoline on a fire.
MUSIC INTENSIFIES
I started running through every memory that I'd had.
Every time I was bullied for how I looked.
Every time I didn't meet a standard
when I was measured up to other girls.
Every time I felt like a fish out of water.
And just filling in the blanks with these lies.
Just so much unnecessary suffering.
So much unnecessary suffering.
A-And why?
I was a psychology student at UCLA.
And a very famous pioneer in sexual science gave a lecture
in abnormal psychology.
And most of the other kids in the class were kind of giggling,
because he was talking about sex.
But he finally put up a slide
that showed a child who had atypical genitalia.
And I recognised the name of the syndrome
that he had on his slide.
I knew because I was one of those kids.
I was born with intersex.
Intersex is an umbrella term for all kids who are born
with differences in their appearance of their genitalia,
differences in the formation of their gonads,
of their sexual organs,
and also, to kids who have different kinds of genetics.
It was not typically male or typically female.
At the beginning, foetuses have female-looking genitalia,
and the intervention of testosterone and other androgens change that
to look like what are typical male genitalia.
From here to there, things stop.
Depending upon where they stop,
you'll get a mix of appearance,
so it can be more to the female,
more to the male,
very much in the middle.
I didn't even know that a kid could have surgery at age three months,
but I did.
And I had a dozen surgeries before I was 12 years old.
So, I know very well what that history is like,
and what it can do to a kid.
My mentor, he was introducing me to all these other sexual scientists,
and I was learning a lot from these people who were
real pioneers in the field.
..To be joined by Dr John Money.
He's from Johns Hopkins. He's a world-famous sexologist.
Dr John Money is a professor...
Oh, he was the hero at the time.
John Money was an undisputed genius.
He made huge contributions in the field of sexual science.
Welcome, Dr Money.Thank you. APPLAUSE
He had become known for his interest in intersex.
John was the only person
who was studying the psychology
and the development of people
who were born with atypical genitalia.
And I wanted to do my dissertation on that.
So, I became an intern with John at age 24.
Good evening.
I'm working overtime tonight,
for I want to be able to tell you something about gender identity.
One of the big debates in all of science is nature versus nurture.
Is it what happens because you have a genetic encoding?
Or is it because of how it is that you're raised,
how it is that you're trained?
John believed very strongly that human beings could be trained
to live in a gender of choice, regardless of their chromosomes.
It is a characteristic of the human species
that men and women have a gender identity,
that newborn babies don't have one,
and that developing infants and young children develop one.
They develop it in much the same way
as they develop their native language.
John believed that how you're raised can make all the difference
in how it is that you identify.
And he had this case.
I'm referring now to identical twins,
genetic males looking perfectly normal.
At the age of seven months,
the first of the twins was scheduled for circumcision.
And there, an accident occurred.
The result?
There was absolutely no structure
of the penis left at all.
I was in shock,
and I could not comprehend.
"Oh, my God. What are we going to do now?"
It is not wise to assign, or, I should say,
to condemn a baby to live as a boy.
For, in fact, it is surgically possible
to rehabilitate this baby surgically as a female.
These surgeries have been happening for a while,
where kids who were born with atypical genitalia were being
fixed up to look more like males, or more like females.
But the psychological model,
the kind of script for how to reinforce gender
and how to teach them how to live as boys or girls,
that was something that wasn't so widely disseminated
until this case came out.
He seemed highly intelligent
and very confident of what he was saying.
Certainly made an impact.
And I thought, "Here's our answer.
"Here's our salvation. Here's our hope."
John was really, really good at selling his theory,
and these parents agreed.
And this one child was assigned female.
And John started working very, very directly with the family.
John and the team at Hopkins established a script and a protocol
for how to tell families about what was going to happen to them.
Do the sex of assignment.
The child would need surgery to have
a more female-appearing genitalia.
What's going to happen to them at puberty,
and if that included hormonal therapy.
If that included further surgeries - which it often did.
John Money's main advice to us was,
"Don't let her think that she was ever a boy.
"Keep that secret."
Part of the script was to keep this a secret from them.
They were never to know that they were anything other than a normal
little boy or a normal little girl.
So, it's quite an undertaking,
and it takes a lot of effort by the family to maintain this.
The fact of the matter is that now,
the child has grown-up to have a female gender identity,
which is in no way similar to that of her brother.
When the two children are seen together,
it's not possible to mistake them,
for one is a girl and the other is a boy.
The book that John published in 1972,
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl,
made John my hero in a lot of ways.
I mean, it was like, "Here's the guy who's finally doing
"what I'm looking for somebody to do."
In the '70s, the sexual revolution was happening.
Differences in gender were something where kind of those ideas
were kind of falling apart.
And this guy, John Money, coming up with this amazing statement about
gender being fluid, and gender being something that is a construct,
people really latched on to it.
It was a very popular idea,
and it fit with the spirit of the times.
This became the basis for surgically changing certain baby boys
into girls throughout the medical world.
Once this case was published,
it gave a lot of power,
a lot of justification for that model.
Physicians and surgeons, not just in the United States,
but around the world were willing to take on the script about
how to deal with kids who are born with atypical genitalia.
Parents everywhere could be far more easily convinced
that this will work.
So, yeah, like a cookbook,
that's how it got disseminated.
It makes it very exciting, don't you think,
to live in an age of discovery of human personality this way?
A few months after I discovered my records
and confronted my parents,
I was still upset by what I had found,
wrapping my head around the idea that I had this body
when I was born, and it was taken away from me.
And that information - information that had been kept from me.
APPLAUSE
Welcome back to Northwest Afternoon.
We have a very important and sensitive topic
that we're touching today,
though it may not be appropriate for children.
I was doing laundry at their house, watching TV.
..For children born with mixed-up genitals, doctors usually recommend
fixing the genitals as soon as possible.
That's what's happened to our guests -
only they say the fix did more harm than good.
Cheryl was surgically altered...
"We'll be speaking to Cheryl Chase
"of the Intersex Society of North America about..."
But all I heard was "intersex".
We've now managed to connect, erm,
hundreds of intersex people in North America
and throughout the world.
I heard her describe intersex adults - plural -
speaking out publicly.
Would you like one of our leaflets?
I thought, "Oh, holy shit.
"Is this woman really on TV talking about this?
What we do know from talking to intersex adults,
is that a huge number of people have experienced
the treatment as punishment.
Where is she? How did she get there?
Speaking so concisely and intelligently about a subject
I was just beginning to understand.
When doctors are confronted with this, they say,
"Well, we are positive that all of our other patients" -
who we have never heard from and we haven't followed -
"are fine now."
But they can't produce one.
It wasn't satisfactory for her.
She's pissed off, and she's super smart.
I thought, "Holy shit, I am not alone.
"And, in fact, there is a burgeoning political movement behind it."
I blew my mind, and I thought,
"Holy shit, I've gotta find this Cheryl Chase."
I stumbled across San Francisco Sex Information Hotline,
where you can call and get nonjudgmental,
impartial information.
And they gave me a phone number
for the Intersex Society of North America.
And I called from my dorm room,
and Cheryl Chase picks up the phone,
and it's the voice of this woman that I saw on TV.
And I was terrified and exhilarated at the same time.
There we go, terror and exhilaration.
And I...couldn't believe she was on the phone.
She ran me through a sort of gauntlet of questions
to make sure I wasn't full of shit.
Make sure that I wasn't a wanna-fuck.
CHUCKLING
Wanna-fucks - like, people who had a prurient interest in intersex.
I had so many weird inquiries.
I remember there were people sometimes who wrote to me
about intersex animals.
Like, there was this one guy who said he has an intersex monkey,
and what should he do about it?
And I said, "Well, why do you want to do anything about it?
"Does the monkey have a problem? Then don't do anything."
"What do you want?"
And she let the silence hang.
"I want to meet the youngest intersex person that you know,
"closest to my age."
So, she got back in touch with me and said,
"I have someone who's willing to speak with you.
"She's 26, and she lives in Saint Louis."
Great.
At the time, I was still 20.
So, I spoke to a young person,
and we spoke for a couple of hours and got on really well.
She said, "Why don't you come to Saint Louis, and we'll hang out?
And I was like, "OK, yeah, that'd be great."
And I went up there, and we had dinner, and she said,
"Hey, do you want to...?
"We had we had this retreat back in California a few years ago,
"and we made this film.
"It's called Hermaphrodites Speak! Do you want to see it?"
And I was like, "Yeah!"
Here we are at the first-ever
International World Intersex meeting.
Woo! Yeah.
Cheryl had this little microphone that she would just hand to people.
It feels absolutely incredible to have come all the way
from New Zealand for the first-ever gathering.
Yeah. How did you find out about the Intersex Society?
They were just a bunch of people
sitting in the woods, telling their story, why they were there.
A friend of mine had the newsletter,
Hermaphrodites With Attitude, cross her desk.
Hermaphrodites With Attitude?
That's right, cross her desk...
Are you a hermaphrodite with attitude?
I'm a hermaphrodite with major attitude. Yeah!
LAUGHTER
I was transfixed.
I knew that there were people like me out there,
but I just didn't know what the chances were of ever finding them.
It's not something you can ask somebody
in kind of conversations.
Erm, so...
SIGHS
So, this has been, yeah,
just like a turning point for my life.
Wow. Yeah.
LAUGHS
The Intersex Society was founded in 1993,
and at that time,
I had come to realise that I wasn't the only person
who had an experience like that.
There were a lot of people who had similar experiences,
and...medical practice hadn't acknowledged that what
they were doing was hurting us.
They really tried to ignore us at first, doctors,
and they said, "Blah, blah, blah, blah.
"We're pretty sure everybody's happy. Blah."
But they wouldn't talk to us.
Cheryl spoke to me right away.
She was serious about this.
I knew it.
There was no going back.
I've written to Dr Money, very politely asking him
if we can talk.
"I regret being unable to take on any new commitments.
"I don't have time. I don't have money.
"I decline your invitation to talk with you directly.
"I do not see patients. John Money."
You know, I really did want to practise
"you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar".
How do you feel about the fact that was done to you?
At times, I feel like hiding in the closet,
because it's like, how can anybody accept somebody
who's been this mutilated?
And at other times, I get so mad that I just want to get a dull,
rusty knife and start hacking off other doctors' genitals,
and say, "Here, you son of a bitch, how do you...?
"Now, how do you think it feels?"
Watching this film, it hit me that all these folks in this film
had bodies that were different,
but that they all suffered...
..the same fate that I did.
Let's see, hold on. Just give me a second.
SIGHS
Yeah. '97.
A friend called me up and said,
"Go buy a copy of Rolling Stone now.
"There's something in it you gotta read."
I was 20 at the time, and I had moved out of the dorms,
and I was actually staying at my friend Heather's house,
just in her spare room.
All right, one here.
I ran out to the gas station...
Yeah, these are my... ..got a copy...
These are my Reimer files, indeed.
..and I remember running back to the spare room and shutting the door,
and jumping on the bed and opening it up, flipping the pages.
I was, like, in this whole spread,
and I'm reading it, and I'm like, "Oh, God."
"In 1967, an anonymous baby boy was turned into a girl by doctors
"at Johns Hopkins Hospital."
I mean, every other word, I'm like, "Oh, God. Oh, God."
"For 25 years, the case was called a medical triumph.
"Proof that a child's gender identity could be changed.
"And thousands of sex reassignments were performed based on this exam.
It was just like, "Wait, what? What?"
And I was like...
"But the case was a failure, the truth never reported..."
"..And a medical controversy erupts."
I did not know this story. This was news to me.
I was a journalist at Rolling Stone magazine in the 1990s
when this academic paper came out.
That really was jaw-dropping for what it revealed
about a world-famous case of infant gender reassignment.
The child has grown up to have a female gender identity,
which is in...
Absolute bombshell of a paper.
And so, I set out to try to find the patient.
And we were lucky enough at Rolling Stone, and persistent enough
to actually find this patient,
and for this patient to agree to be interviewed.
That's really how I ended up with this story
that was a world exclusive.
The part of it that you couldn't - you wouldn't make up in fiction,
because no-one would believe it.
The patient was now living at
the age of 32 as a man,
married, with children that were from the previous
relationship of his wife.
I mean, this was just rocking everybody on their heels.
When he found out this is being done to thousands of kids
around the world because of your case being misreported
by this John Money character.
..Impossible to mistake them, for one is a girl
and the other is a boy.
That's all it took, like, David was just...
He was dumbstruck. He couldn't believe...
He thought he was the one guy.
And, you know, wild horses couldn't have held David back at that point.
I was appalled, disgusted, and angry when I heard about it.
People thought that my case
was a success story?
There was nothing further than the truth.
This poor kid was a guinea pig.
Patient zero for all the fucking treatment and torture
that me and so many of my friends had to experience.
It was just an experiment.
My first impression of David,
it just couldn't be summed up by anger.
He was angry at John Money for having recommended reassignment,
but then, he was angry at his parents for having agreed
to the reassignment.
But then, he was angry at his parents for having followed through
on a programme of not telling him the truth.
He really was lied to.
Now, this was a programme of lying that was imposed by Money
as being the only way this could work.
I had doubts all the time,
because it was just so obvious to everyone,
not just to me,
that she was masculine.
I remember his mum saying to me that, at the age of 22 months,
when he was first put in dresses, he was tearing them off.
When she first agreed to try to reassign him
and call him Brenda.
Obviously, the mother informs John Money,
but he will not report that.
I didn't like dressing like a girl.
I didn't like behaving like a girl.
I didn't like acting like a girl.
Yeah, well, honestly, like, looking at this photo,
and I-I started seeing myself in these, you know,
these old photos, you know, of old photos of mine.
I never played with girl stuff.
I usually got stuck with Barbie dolls, clothing.
I mean, consider myself lucky that I did get the bicycle
the same year I got the Barbie.
But one got far more used than the other.
The mother writes some letters to Money,
and Money writes back, saying,
you know, "Don't worry, it's fine. That's tomboyishness,
"and it is indeed going well."
They just have to stay the course.
I could see that Brenda wasn't happy as a girl.
No matter what I tried to do for her,
I could not persuade her to do anything feminine.
I was never happy as Brenda.
Never.
Dr Money says that this child provides, and I quote,
"Dramatic proof that the gender identity option is open at birth."
It was in 1974 when the case was referred to me as the head
of the Department of Psychiatry
at the Child Guidance Clinic of Greater Winnipeg.
She was nine.
Is that your view?
The preliminary information would suggest that the girl is having
considerable difficulty in adjusting as a female.
I first heard about this case
because of my training in child psychiatry.
This was being reported as a huge success.
But when I first met Brenda,
it was evident to me that this was not working.
There was clearly nothing feminine about her at all.
Doctor, is she likely to have a memory of what
has happened to her?
I can't answer that.
You can't answer it because you don't know?
Or you can't answer it because you don't want to answer it?
There were lots of politics involved.
But I believe there was a social pressure for this to succeed,
and it was entrusted to me to make it happen.
I was even warned that, should it fail,
my academic career would be ruined,
and that I would find myself being blamed for
the failure of the outcome.
Doctor, this case disturbs you.
Yes.
It got so bad where you end up having a...
I wound up having like a breakdown,
I'd shake like a baby and cry,
and huddle in the corner.
I didn't know why I was behaving like that.
Dr Doreen McGee,
the member of my senior staff that worked with her,
firmly came out and said, "You gotta tell her."
She did say to them, in no uncertain terms,
"The other route continuing this lie
"looks very much like it's leading to suicide.
And that's when Ron Reimer, the father,
decided he had to do just this remarkable thing.
Tell Brenda the truth.
I don't remember 90% of what happened in the car.
Dad told me, and I just had a glaze over my eyes,
and I was staring over the dashboard,
and I had ice cream all over me that was melted.
You know, I said to David at the time, you know,
"What was your reaction?"
And he surprised me by saying, you know,
"I was angry, I was upset, "I was unbelievably...
"..but I was relieved."
The main thing was relief.
And I thought to myself, "Well, I'm not crazy.
"I'm not turning insane."
I thought I was turning insane.
I feel embarrassed that I did not come clean.
As a responsible member of the team,
when it became evident that it was not going well,
and the literature was reporting that it was,
it was my responsibility to report to the literature.
I did not do that, and I deeply regret it.
That's the truth.
I could say that, I suppose.
John was so anxious for his theory to be true.
Just got to a point where he just wasn't willing to be questioned.
John was not somebody who was willing to be wrong,
and it didn't matter if the entire staff was looking
at him and saying, "You're wrong about this, John.
"You need to think about this again."
He laughed at us. He dismissed us.
He thought that we were stupid.
John was a very difficult person.
He was not a nice man.
So, yeah, I knew that I wanted to get the hell out of there.
If I was asked, "When did Money commit sort of the greatest act
"of fraudulence around this whole thing?"
I would have to say it was 1975,
when he published Sexual Signatures.
Because by this time, it was just undeniable that
this case was in total meltdown.
I mean, it was a disaster.
The lesson I learned from such examples as the twins,
that we should respect individuals for their individuality,
and we should not try to push them...
To continue to sit on the truth
meant that this just kind of virally expanded
across the globe.
You know, countless children would have been operated on,
intervened upon, assigned and reassigned
thanks to that book.
JIM: Realising that, even a few years before my birth,
John Money, the orchestrator of this experiment,
this human experiment,
knew that he had failed miserably,
and he kept walking around talking about how his experiment was
a success, and how important he was,
and how his ego and his reputation were more important than telling
the truth and saving children like myself from mutilation,
and shame and the, you know, brutal secrecy.
I could've been saved and spared.
My family could've been saved and spared.
I could've been... I could've been saved.
When my mother told me that,
"One day, you're going to have a surgery down the line,"
I didn't know what that meant as a kid.
But this was all planned out.
Once they removed my testicles as a baby...
..the dominoes just had to start falling.
There was no, like, "Oh, should this domino fall?"
They HAD to fall.
She came home for Christmas, and she said,
"Oh, I'm going to be here for a couple weeks."
She said, "I have to have some female surgery."
And I was like, "OK." I said, "Are you OK?"
And she said, "Yeah, yeah."
I could tell she was a little uncomfortable talking about it.
I always felt like her safe space,
and I didn't want to cross that line.
I figured, if she wanted to tell me, she would tell me.
And so, I said, "Tell Mum to let me know that you're OK,
"and if you need something, let me know."
I knew it was a secret.
Lies we had to tell.
But when you prescribe secrecy and isolation,
you're prescribing that to an entire family.
It was in December of 1994.
And my birthday is December 10th.
We went down to Children's Hospital in New Orleans.
They brought us in.
I was scared, and I was putting on a brave face.
I knew that's what my parents wanted.
Especially, I knew that's what my mother wanted.
"This is a family secret.
"Get us through this together."
What we're going to do is they'll cut out
a piece of my actual colon,
and then, we'll cut between my legs
where a vagina should be,
and they'll place that piece of colon between my legs -
a vaginal vault, they would call it -
and then, presto.
There is a hole for my husband to have sex with.
Right, this idealised man, this, you know, All-American quarterback
who's going to have somewhere to put his penis,
that he expects there will be a vessel for him to..
..for you to receive him, and give him what he wants.
And this vessel we have made in between your legs,
we've hooked up to a bloodstream.
And it's a living organ.
It won't die inside you.
It's pretty elaborate.
I remember waking up in a lot of pain.
You know, being hooked up to all these tubes,
and these tubes going between my legs.
And it hurt a lot.
It hurt to walk.
Just to walk to the bathroom, it hurt.
I had to walk so slowly.
I remember thinking, "God, I must be like an old person,"
when I was 18.
You know, I just turned 18 and...
SHAKY SIGH
My girlfriend at the time came to visit,
and...it was so good to see her.
I didn't say to my mum and dad, "This is my girlfriend.
"We're in a relationship."
I didn't say any of that.
This is this coded language.
They knew.
I wasn't having this surgery for her.
She didn't want it. She didn't care.
I didn't want it.
I was doing my duty.
I remember Alice giving me a call, like, a day or two after,
saying that she was all right.
And then, there wasn't a whole lot other than that.
I didn't know that she was having surgery.
It was one of those things where, "Oh, she's in town.
"Let me go ride my bike over there and, you know,
"and, 'Hey, let's hang out.'"
That's when I found out.
Honestly, I wish I would have known that,
you know, cos that's...
It's a lonely place. You know?
She went back to school...
..and I would hear from her late at night.
I could tell she just wasn't in the best space mentally.
She was unhappy.
She was struggling to focus academically.
I could tell she was not herself at all.
At all.
She was, you know, drinking a lot more around that time,
and smoking - good God.
Erm...lost.
It was scary...
..that I didn't really understand what this thing was on my body.
I didn't really understand.
I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to play.
I don't remember her playing soccer again after her surgery.
That's...
I never put that together, but that's... Yeah.
Well, that makes me sad.
You know, lose something you love so much.
I was so depressed.
And that's when I walked into that lecture for that class,
and I found out the truth.
Remembering how painful the vaginoplasty was for me...
..I never realised, like, I was just on a course -
a course set back in 1976.
I was being managed and manipulated on the instruction
of the doctors and attendants...
..one of whom was Dr Carter.
This man, Dr Richard Carter, was the man who performed
these feminising surgeries on me as a baby.
This is the place.
It's 5238 Essen Lane, where Carter's office was.
You know, he must have been in his late 30s, mid 30s
when I came into the world,
and I became his problem.
You know, a man looking at a,
you know, a genetically-male baby with a very small penis,
and be like, "Gotta do something about that.
"There's no way we can let this baby out into the world."
Now I know - now I know -
I was never going to leave that hospital unmutilated.
I had to be made lovable.
I just want to talk to him...
..and tell him I am very unhappy with his work...
and the choices that he made on my behalf,
and on my family's behalf.
When I was 19 and I found out the truth behind these surgeries,
I was like, "These are my records.
"Fuck you, Mum and Dad. Fuck you, medical establishment.
You know, "You don't get to hear anything about me from now on,
"and I need to go out and take care of myself.
"I need to go and fucking fend for myself, because this is
"the kind of care that I'm being offered from all of you."
Yeah, all it did was spike my resentment and rage,
and make me more determined than ever.
I knew Bo was in San Francisco,
and I knew I wanted to be a part of this movement.
And I got myself there.
I started my new life.
# This is my conquering song
MUSIC: Love Survive by Michael Nau
# Played on a wave so strong...
I started meeting queer women at the book shop that I was working at.
# Played on a wave so strong...
Hanging out, having a rollicking good time.
# Where only my love survived # Love survived...
But I really didn't dive into the San Francisco queer community
until I started working as a bike messenger.
# The long crawl to the tide...
It was technically called Lickety Split All-Girl Courier.
LAUGHTER # All else at the door be denied...
I was so happy.
# Only my love survive...
I started making friends, going out,
and really immersing myself in the queer scene in San Francisco.
It was...
# This is my thankful song
# For all that has been and gone...
And when I wasn't doing that,
I was tagging along with Bo,
trying to go wherever she went.
# For the spirit of the eternal drum...
I was just a kid.
I mean, really, just tagging along.
Kristi was eager to get involved and help out.
What we had to do was convince medicine to change.
I hoped that, if doctors listened to this, they would change.
I wanted them to stop doing these things to people.
Kristi helped with mailing parties,
events where we were learning skills
to help build our nonprofit organisation...
..learning things and making friends.
I tried to learn from her,
because there was so much to learn from her.
You are going to be the doctors in the future who are going
to change practice, and we hope that you'll work with us.
And I met Tiger through the activist community in San Francisco.
OK.
I'm Dr Howard Devore. I'm a clinical psychologist.
I was born with ambiguous...
Tiger was kind to me, welcomed me into the fold.
I was very taken by his deep voice.
And he was very bulky and big.
And he had a very sharp haircut.
Very smart haircut.
He was very confident.
Despite all the efforts to make me as much a boy
as they possibly could, with the support of both my parents
and the physicians involved in my case,
I do not feel like a man.
Do not feel like a woman.
I, in fact, am an intersex person.
He spoke like somebody who knew like he had something to say.
Please ask difficult questions.
Do not think that you're going to embarrass us.
We really want to educate you as directly and plainly
as we possibly can today.
When I first met Kristi, she was very much at the beginning of
her intersex awareness journey,
and she was angry, and she was powerful in her presentation,
and she wanted to do something with all that anger,
and she was willing to work.
I'm very young,
and I felt it was very important to become a volunteer,
to become an activist.
I would tell my story to anybody who would listen.
Many, many doctors say that microsurgery is the way to go.
Say that, when we remove the clitoris and remove the testes,
and when we remove this and that, when we build this and that,
it's all better. It's all better.
I think it was really empowering for Kristi to be able to do that.
I remember being at events, and Kristi's there,
proudly telling people about what we're doing
and what happened to her.
I'm a 22-year-old female, as the world sees me.
But I'm an intersex person with no sexual function whatsoever.
There was something really charismatic about Kristi,
and it was great to see that.
A person that's supposed to be at their sexual peak, you know,
you're supposed to be young, you're supposed to be alive,
and I'm not, I'm not.
It was all taken from me, and not even with my consent.
Here is an awesome picture of me
and Kristi, and Tiger speaking to UC Berkeley medical students.
Doctors didn't want to hear from us,
but medical students were really eager to hear from us.
I felt confused about basic biology.
XX, XY, XX, XY.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
"If I'm a female, then I should be XX.
"Why does it say XY?"
She participated in a documentary short film,
and she involved her family.
Every soccer game, every...
..activity, we were always concerned
that somebody would find out and approach her.
And she told me later that a number of people called her names,
and I cried over that.
And I said, "Honey, I'm sorry.
"There's nothing I can do about it."
I was really inspired by how brave and how honest,
and how direct she could be.
The first couple of months that I was a messenger,
I was in so much pain that I could hardly sit down on the seat,
because the vaginoplasty is so fucking disgusting
and so...barbaric.
It's starting to come out.
Like, the inner part of the intestine is starting
to come out and, like, stick out.
And I was told that I would probably have to wear a maxi pad
for the rest of my life.
I don't know if you've ever tried to, like,
ride a bike with a maxi pad - it does not work.
Er... Hmm.
I want to make it clear that the surgery that I did not choose
was a nightmare for me.
But this surgery for people who choose it
saves people's lives.
So, yeah, you know, I wasn't a trans person,
but from the moment I started speaking on intersex stuff,
I connected with trans people.
And I was right in there.
I was right where I wanted to be.
Might be gay or lesbian, or trans, but...
..I was a part of a community.
And it was an intense education.
It was a real activist education
that I was getting from Bo, I was getting from Tiger.
My name is Kristi.
I'm a resident of Northern California.
I gave interviews in radio and magazines, on television,
worked at a legal organisation that advocated for the legal rights
of intersex kids and their families.
Lying by omission is what it's called,
and the heart of the matter is self-determination.
I give my personal testimony at
the San Francisco Human Rights Commission on Intersex.
The operative word is moratorium.
It should be placed at the very least...
..on surgeries in San Francisco. It's a great place to start.
And you guys can do that. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Yeah, it was good for her.
We were trying to extend our reach as far as possible
to illustrate the truth that these things,
these surgeries happen all over the world.
And I was just like, "What is keeping people from absorbing...?"
It's not just my story, it's so many people's stories.
David's story came out and, you know, made a splash
in publishing circles in Manhattan,
but had no effect on the medical community,
the protocols for intersex kids,
the surgeries and so on continued.
It takes a lot to change medical opinion and protocols.
It just does.
And one article in Rolling Stone ain't going to do it.
A baby is born perfect in every way.
At six, she wore dresses.
At 14, she discovered the truth.
So, we had this whirlwind tour of New York
and other places publicising the story.
For years, this case was called a medical triumph.
But in truth, the case was a failure.
It was amazing. The story was getting around.
This is great, this is great.
And then, David decided to be on TV,
and I thought, "This is even better."
And it's fucking Oprah. "Great!"
Devastating the lives of just about everybody involved.
You know, we walked out on the street.
Someone that had just been watching it on TV
recognises David and says,
"You know, I just saw you on TV, you are incredible!
"You walk in the light, man!
I'll never forget that, "You walk in the light,"
and she shook David's hand.
I think it symbolised the way the world accepted him now,
and took him and took his story.
It was... Let's just put it this way,
it was a net positive all the way around.
It was awesome.
TIGER: So, after the case fell apart,
I don't think it was possible for John to say,
"Oh. My mistake. Oh, well."
I think that what happened was that John believed that his success
was ruined by an outside influence.
And he stood firm on that position.
It didn't work because that's life.
Because you're human,
and eventually, you wind up being who you are.
People started coming after Dr Money,
and I think it was very uncomfortable for him.
Yeah, eventually they had a psychiatrist who was able
to get John booted off campus,
and I just think he stopped answering the phone
and answering his door.
He really kind of barricaded himself.
These days, John Money works here
in the basement of this off-campus building in Baltimore.
We wanted to talk to Money about his theories.
Hello? Yeah? We're were the Canadian television programme
called the Fifth Estate. We'd like to see Dr Money.
OK, hold on a second.
We had contacted John Money by phone, and also written to him
in hopes of getting an interview. But...
Says you don't have an appointment, I'm sorry.
Yeah, he got relegated to a basement, motherfucker.
CHUCKLES That was my favourite part.
I was already thinking about getting rid of this vaginoplasty.
I wanted to decolonise my body as much as I was able,
and was within my power to do.
I had a double mastectomy, and then,
I had the colon vaginoplasty removed.
This man, Dr Richard Carter,
you know, realising that he was not some lone wolf acting irresponsibly
toward one family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
But I was still not...
I wasn't happy about any of it.
The people that mattered and the people with authority.
It was shared blame across the board.
Kristi was the only infant that I ever was associated with
in my 40 years of practice that had ambiguous genitalia.
These children...
..problems that they would have faced
if nothing at all had been done...
..in my opinion, would have been astronomical.
Even though I knew she was - this infant was going to have
problems down the road, I was hoping that she'd have less problems
if she looked a little bit more like a girl than not one at all.
When I was 19 and I found out the truth behind these surgeries,
I stopped taking oestrogen immediately.
There were a few years that I just was not on any hormones at all,
and that was when my bones began to disintegrate.
My doctor told me the bone scan results showed that I was...
..that I currently had osteopenia,
which is a precursor to osteoporosis,
and I was on the royal path to having my bones disintegrate
by the time I was 25 or 30.
She said, "You must go back on oestrogen,
"or you must start taking testosterone."
Yeah, I didn't... I wasn't so sure about testosterone.
I wasn't psyched about getting a beard,
getting a receding hairline, or dying earlier.
You know, all that stuff that, you know, gets laid on men.
And, you know, I-I wasn't into that at all -
but I was pretty into having a functional skeleton.
My voice started getting deeper.
At some point, you know, I told my co-workers, my managers
that they needed to start calling me he.
I was so lucky and so fortunate.
Nobody told me there would be so much hair,
but my body just soaked it up!
The girlfriend at the time was just like, "Wow.
"This was clearly what your body's been dying for, for so long."
She was very happy about all these changes,
and she was very happy to see me grow happier -
happy in my body and content,
and comfortable in my own skin.
When Kristi was in California, we kind of lost touch,
and I never saw her again until he came home
when his dad died.
And then, it hit me.
"I'm going to see Kristi as Jim for the first time."
This is a person I've known as Kristi my whole life,
and now it's going to be a different person.
And so, I was very, very anxious.
I remember, night before, I could not sleep,
I stayed up all night.
When I got to their house, I walked in,
and he was standing there.
And it was like... it was it was so...
It was remarkable, almost - this calm came over me.
We gave each other a big hug, and I was just like,
"Oh, my God," you know,
there was this calm about him that I had never known.
It was like he had finally found this thing
he had been searching for all these years.
It was very emotional.
God, look at those trees. Jesus.
I have been gone that long.
Hey!
How's it going? It's going OK.
LAUGHING: Oh, my God.
Oh, my boy!
MUFFLED LAUGHTER
SNIFFLING MUFFLED SOBS
It's been so long. I know. Ah, how are you?
Good.
It's good to see you. Yeah.
Er, and of all places. I know, right?
We spent most of our life...
Right, in that mud pit. Yeah. In that mud pit.
That was your favourite mud pit right there, that one.
That one, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, let me look at you.
You look wonderful. Aww! God.
Thank you. Well, you saved me.
Well... You know, like, you really put me in a position to succeed.
You really did.
You put me in a position to succeed, and it gave me a lot.
You had something special, and I knew you did.
Yeah. Aww, well... Thank you so much.
My mother was giving me hell about
not coming home to visit as often, and...
..I was like, "You're asking me to come back to a place,
"even to visit, that people are fleeing."
I remember when I was living in Montana,
and my favourite aunt died.
I came home. We get to the funeral.
I hadn't seen my uncle in 30 years.
I walked up to him.
He didn't say hello.
And he said - he quoted some Bible passage at me about,
"As you were born, so shall you die
"and be seen in the eyes of God."
Told me I was an abomination.
And then, I walked over and hugged his wife.
CHUCKLES
And I sat down next to my mum, and I said,
"Your brother just threatened me."
And she was like, "Oh, no, I'm sure he didn't."
You know...
..the 10,000th reminder that my mother and I live in
completely different worlds.
You know, it's not her fault.
It's where she lives.
I was so lucky to be able to reach out to Bo, in San Francisco,
and wanting desperately for the world to open up,
I knew that there was more.
Like, I was like, right, I intended to survive,
And to do that, I had to leave.
Eventually, the fanfare died down.
OPRAH: Thank you for sharing your story.
I moved on to other stories that I had to do.
He returned to Winnipeg.
Four years went by and, in that four years,
Brian, the brother - the ignored brother -
Brian had this troubled sister
that all the attention went to.
He was just expected, because he wasn't an injured person,
or sex-reassigned, "You should be just fine."
So, he had to kind of be just fine.
He wasn't just fine.
Brian was definitely seriously depressed.
In 2003, he died of a... possibly accidental overdose
of alcohol and drugs.
When I heard that Brian died, I thought, "Oh, my God.
"Better keep our eye on David,"
because I knew how important Brian was to David.
10.30pm at night, the police came to the door.
And I think I was screaming, "No, no, no."
In May of 2004...
..I was actually just rising from bed,
so it was kind of early morning.
The phone rang, and it was David's father.
and he said, "Er, John, I've got some very bad news."
And I knew what he was going to say at that point.
They asked us to sit down,
and they said they had some bad news.
That David was dead.
TEARFULLY: And...I just cried.
Yeah, where was I? I was living in Berkeley when he died.
My girlfriend forwarded an article to me,
that David Reimer died by suicide.
It was so sad. I remember being so sad.
A man named David Reimer has taken his own life.
A sad end to a life story already filled with pain.
I was horribly shocked and entirely unsurprised.
I mean, you knew him for seven years, was he happy at all?
I mean, what was his life like?
David was perfectly capable of happiness for periods of time,
but his dark childhood always was there.
He says, "This will never leave me."
DAVID: I thought he was perverted.
I thought he was a sick man.
These very strange, therapeutic actions that Money
had made David and Brian perform when they were children -
sexual rehearsal play, that's what he called it.
The experiments that he made us do...
..going into sexual positions
with no clothes on,
taking pictures of us.
How degrading for seven-year-olds.
The man believed that this was a critical and crucial way
to reinforce gender.
I mean, he didn't exactly tell the parents about it,
but he wrote about it endlessly in his books and papers.
It became a hobby horse by his final years.
When my folks weren't around,
well, then, we did what we were told, and if we didn't,
then we got yelled at to the point where we thought
we were going to get backhanded.
Well, eventually we took our clothes off and sat on the couch,
Had photos of us taking...
He made them inspect each other's genitals.
He showed pornographic images of sexual penetration,
and he simply went further and further.
The type of questions that were asked were sexual in nature,
to the point where it would make me blush.
It was very explicit.
You know, those episodes were so damaging to them.
They were both off-put and frightened of it,
and fearful of him.
It was a house of horrors, period.
You know, seeing a kid cower,
and be repulsed and frightened of sexual imagery,
why would you...?
You know, that's almost a sadistic thing.
I don't know.
TIGER: This experiment really ruined the family.
It was terrible.
One of the things that used to really get to me about
the Johns Hopkins record was that,
as we were following patients from birth into hopefully adulthood,
one of the things that you would see come up on the charts
were "lost to follow up."
Quote-unquote, "Lost to follow up."
And what we came to realise over time -
not the people at Hopkins, but the intersex awareness community -
"lost to follow up" means suicide
at least as often as "I won't come to see you at
"your institution any more".
And the people at Hopkins would never admit it,
because they just said, "Oh, we stopped hearing from them.
"They just disappeared."
I had found that community that saved me,
and David had to go back to Winnipeg alone.
If I'd have had to go back to Baton Rouge and stay there
the rest of my life, it would have broken me.
I have no expectation that I would have...
..be alive.
SKYPE RINGING TONE
TIGER: OK, can you hear me?
Hi, Tiger. How are you?
I'm good. How are you?
Good.
Hello.
What's up, Tiger?
Looking good.
Man, that is some sharp facial hair you got there.
Hey, Bo. Hey.
So, more than 30 years we've been working on this,
and they're still doing it. Yes. Very frustrating.
Yeah. I was naive.
I thought I was - when I was out in San Francisco,
and I was 21, and I was thinking, "Oh man," you know,
in my head - I mean, I'm sure I didn't voice this -
but I was like, "I'm going to be part of this generation
"that'll really flip this shit." I really did.
The kind of activism that I did,
I don't do any more.
I had to step away around 2015.
I just couldn't keep up anymore. I couldn't bear.
And the good news is, is that there's a whole new generation
of young people out there who are loud and pissed off,
and determined to get their message across,
and to get policy changed.
INDISTINCT SHOUTING
There's so much... so much more to do.
But the wheels of history bend toward justice, however slowly.
At the end of the day, it's all about bodily autonomy.
It's all about intersex people having affirming,
supportive health care
that they get to choose what to do with their own bodies.
I wasn't as successful as I thought or hoped I would be.
I didn't get surgeries to stop.
But I had a revelation in my early 30s that
the thing that hurt the most
wasn't that I was different,
and it wasn't that I was sexually mutilated -
it was that I was made to feel ashamed.
And that there's no earthly reason why I should be ashamed.
And I was going to change that.
I was going to decide, by force of will,
that I'm not going to be ashamed.
Part of not being ashamed is being able to talk about your story.
So, I got to make meaning out of it
and turn it into a mission in helping people,
and have a feeling of accomplishment about it.
The intersex awareness movement that has sprung up as a result of
all these efforts that so many of us made,
has saved innumerable lives.
But do these surgeries still happen? Yes.
All those bad things still happen.
And I want to do all I can to try to get a few more people
to know better, than to just follow that old model.
YVONNE ON RECORDING: Hello, my Jim.
I'm thinking about you.
I know you're going to do something difficult.
And I just wanted you to...
My mum's greatest fear was that she was afraid
no-one would ever love me.
That I wouldn't be able to, you know, build a life with someone.
And I have.
And with someone wonderful.
Someone truly wonderful.
Hey, Jim.
Where are we? In Pennsylvania.
OK. What is this place?
It's in Riemer. YVONNE LAUGHS
It's the Youghiogheny.
Youghiogheny.
I'm thinking about holding little Jim in my heart.
Show him some love
while you're doing this difficult thing.
I love you very much.
And I'll talk to you later.
Bye, sweetheart.
I'm about to sit down with the man
who pushed the first domino over
and, you know, started a chain of events that continued
through my childhood and my adolescence,
and my adulthood, and...
I just made some notes here, just some questions. And...
..it's important to say my piece,
and I have this opportunity to tell Carter what my life has been like
in a way that I feel like I can go to my grave with him knowing.
If you had the opportunity to sit down with the person
who was in charge of your care,.
not only what would you say,
but how would you...
..like, posture yourself? Like, what outcome?
Anyway, that's like three questions in one. But...
From the standpoint of just...
..the raw experience of walking into this kind of a meeting,
I think it's incredibly important.
We know that most of these doctors, they'll tell you straight out
they've never had any complaints.
You just can't expect to get to get anybody to sit across from you
and say, "Yeah, we've looked back at this,
"we've all decided we were doing the wrong thing,
"and maybe we jumped the gun" - and nobody's going to say that.
No physician is going to say that,
especially if they're still practising.
A lot of intersex people fantasise about meeting the surgeon
that mutilated them as children.
But it almost never happens.
That space is never - hardly, almost never provided for them.
It's like Heidi Wolcott, in Hermaphrodites Speak!
You know, saying, "I would love to take a rusty, dull knife and..."
..A dull rusty knife... "..chop up my..."
..and start hacking off other doctors' genitals and say,
"Here, you son of a bitch! Now, how do you think it feels?"
Like, the fantasy of a hostile confrontation.
Like, I just know that wouldn't give me anything anymore.
I mean...
I just want to have a conversation with him.
I just want him to hear me.
Even though he might just possibly clam up and be reserved.
It can be, you know, briefly humiliating and disappointing,
but whatever.
Hi. How are you doing?
Just lay it down.
Jim. Richard. Richard, yeah. It's nice to see you.
So good to see you. Yeah.
I mean, you just look great.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Yeah.I shaved today. RICHARD LAUGHS
I did not anticipate getting all this body hair.
Turns out I look pretty OK with the beard.
Oh, you look great with one.
But tell me, like, you were a young surgeon
when my family and your paths crossed.
I was...in 1976, I had just come to Baton Rouge.
When - what's your birth date? December 10th, 1970.
So, I'd been in practice five months...
Five months. ..when I was called that day that you were born
to come evaluate and give an opinion.
Wow.
And I don't know what is being done today,
as far as, if you were born today,
I don't know how the situation would be handled.
And how would you have liked to have been handled back then?
I think I would have liked to have been let to go home.
Yeah. You know? Nothing, right?
I wish that my parents would have just taken me home as I was,
as their healthy baby, and been braver.
You know what I mean?
But I realise that is asking a whole lot in the late '70s. Absolutely.
That would be asking an awful lot.
What were my parents' concerns? I mean, again, I know...
They were in la-la land.
They had no clue what was going on.
I mean, "My son has... my child has what?"
Mm-hm. "Well, what do we do?"
Yeah, so they were terrified like any other parent would be?
Sure, absolutely, they were.
Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine what they went through.
I really can't What my parents were experiencing
was terror through a social emergency, right?
There was nothing genetic that I was going to have
to be dealing with going forward,
except for this problematic presentation.
What proof did you have that pursuing that path
of constructing a vulva,
you know, just cutting off the penis
and castration of whatever was there,
where was the evidence that would work?
Er, I really can't answer that.
Er, I...
I don't know what the evidence was,
and there probably was no evidence, in retrospect, that that would work.
Have you ever heard of John Money?
I had never heard of him,
but once I got involved in what we were doing,
I went back to my textbooks, and he is in the textbook.
Yeah. And, like, these surgeries were happening
before John Money came along.
But John Money gave it, like, a psychological framework
that would sort of would just...
He was okaying what we were doing.
He was okaying what you were doing. Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those things, though, that, right,
if you're performing surgery, you know...you know,
invasive surgery on a healthy baby,
like, if you're going to go out of your way to...
..really harm a healthy child, and cut into healthy skin...
Well, when you say "harm"...
.."harm a healthy child," I understand what you're saying.
But at the time, we...
..o-our thought process was, we're not harming someone,
we're helping someone.
Maybe the question also is, who are you doing it for? Right?
The child's not asking for it. Well, that's a good point.
It just seems like the surgeries were prescribed for the parents.
Definitely not me.
Well, I-I would disagree a bit with that.
The surgery was for you. Mm.
What we thought was the best thing for you. Mm-hm.
Times have changed.
Back in 1976, that's what was done.
That's what we had been taught to do.
That's what we did.
And unfortunately, that was... the wrong thing to do.
Thank you.
I can't tell you, it's just kind of revolutionary for you
to say that it was wrong.
And you understand, in retrospect, it was wrong. Mm-hm.
Yeah. At the time, we thought it was right.
Obviously, we wouldn't have done it. Right.
But...from what I have learned since then,
in talking to you... Mm-hm.
..is that we did the wrong thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I would ask, does that constitute an apology?
Well, sure. Yeah?
PHONE LINE RINGS
Hello?
Hey.
It's over.
Yeah?
It was so surreal the whole time.
Oh, Jim.
Erm... Yeah.
I was really just focused on trying to get him to hear
that you pushed over a domino.
And...I've been dealing with the fallout ever since.
I don't know, I could see regret in his eyes.
You know, he wished... Yeah.
Er...
I feel like I am supposed to be here doing this.
And it's not in any sort of self-important bullshit.
I'm just saying, you know, I feel like that really helps
just to open up the dam, just get it out, you know?
Just get it out. Erm...
My father died in 2010.
And my mother is still in Louisiana.
My mum is somebody that leads with her heart.
And...I still have work to do with her.
And she has apologised on more than one occasion
for not defending me as a baby,
for not being stronger,
for not standing in the way.
She doesn't forgive herself for what happened to me as a baby,
and as a child, and as an adolescent.
But sometimes, forgiveness doesn't come...
..easily.
Yeah, there's no finish line here.
I'll be dealing with the fallout from this bullshit
for the rest of my life.
I will.
TEARFULLY: But Goddamn it, that is not a reason not to do this film.
That is a reason TO do it.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, man.
Right. I'm just keeping in my mind that hopefully,
somebody will see something like this.
If I have to be - if my story has to be a cautionary tale,
let me use it in such a way
that other people can avoid these same fates, you know?
These surgeries are going to stop, you know?
And if they stop within the next five, ten, 15 years -
and they will, they will stop in my lifetime -
they'll stop in my lifetime,
and I'll get to talk to little hermaphrodites running around.
I'll get to hold them in my arms.
I'll get to tell them, you know...
I'll get to tell their parents...
..TEARFULLY: how wonderful their children are.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media