The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [67]
By way of contrast, Paul McHugh points to research being conducted today by William G. Reiner, a pediatric urologist who advises a reexamination of the practice of sex reassignment of intersexual children. Reiner, says McHugh, is “a wonderful pediatric urologist and he’s catching a lot of heat from people within the medical profession who have these very strong feelings about what should be done and why. But all he’s trying to do is collect data, and that’s what should have been done years and years ago.” In a 1999 paper, Reiner indicates that his data show “that with time and age, children may well know what their gender is, regardless of any and all information and child-rearing to the contrary. They seem to be quite capable of telling us who they are, and we can observe how they act and function even before they tell us.”
“This guy is terrific,” says Ben Barres. “He’s getting some papers in the journals. He feels very strongly, based on his research, that to operate on intersexual people before they can tell you is a tremendous mistake. And this is based on hard data.” Regretting that research like Reiner’s was not being conducted forty years ago, when the neonatal intersex protocol was being developed, Paul McHugh says that “maybe if all that kind of data had been collected, we would have known better. We would have our feet more firmly on the ground.”
Scientific hindsight is, of course, not very comforting to intersexual people who have suffered a lifetime of physical and emotional pain as a result of the recommendations that began flowing from Johns Hopkins in the fifties. However, in one of those painful paradoxes that often characterize biomedical research, the same theory that created agony for the intersexual has helped make surgical and hormonal treatment for transsexual people more accessible. Although the surgical reconstruction of the anomalous genitals of intersexual children was becoming standard practice in 1965, the sex reassignment of genitally normal adults was still taboo. Christine Jorgensen was not the only American who sought what was then called “sex-change” surgery in the fifties and sixties—far from it. As previously noted, Harry Benjamin alone saw more than 1,500 patients from 1953 until his retirement in 1978; no doubt thousands more were unable to find the help they sought, or were inhibited by shame from seeking help at all. Well-informed, well-connected, affluent people were able to travel overseas for medical assistance, but many who sought counseling, hormones, or surgery in the United States were turned away or, worse, subject to various forms of “aversion therapy.” My Unique Change by Hedy Jo Star, published in 1965, attests to the enormous difficulties and challenges faced by transsexual people in this era, and testifies to the great strength of will and determination that were necessary to pursue a “sex change.”
Like Christine Jorgensen and Aleshia Brevard, Hedy Jo Star, born Carl Hammonds in 1920, felt like a girl from a young age—but in Star’s case these feelings were reinforced by physical changes at puberty, including gynecomastia, or breast development. “Besides the rounding out of my hips and the slenderness of my legs (when I got into a gym uniform the boys would whistle and say, ‘Ain’t she sweet’), I noticed that my breasts were filling out. At first this didn’t surprise me, because I assumed that this happened to everyone. But when I saw that this