fixation of mental sex identity.31 In effect, he challenged Money to produce a psychosexually neutral, normal child, or one that had accepted sex reassignment.
Money brushed aside the criticism as he gathered the rewards of increasing fame. His paper had won a prize; that had led to a huge grant; and when his team began transsexual surgery, he became a celebrity profiled in newspapers and on television. But Diamond had hit a nerve, for the very next year Money took on a case of a normal boy who had lost his penis after a botched circumcision. The boy was a monozygotic twin, so the opportunity to demonstrate how he could be turned into a woman, while his twin developed as a man, was irresistible. On Money’s advice the boy was surgically reassigned as a girl then raised by his parents as a girl and never told of her origin. In 1972 Money published a book describing the case as an unqualified success. It was hailed in the press as definitive proof that sex roles were the product of society, not biology; it influenced a generation of feminists at a critical time; it entered the psychology textbooks; and it influenced multitudes of doctors who now saw sex reassignment as a simple solution to a complicated problem.
Money seemed to have won the argument. Then in 1979 a BBC television team began investigating the case. They had heard rumours that the boy who became a girl was not the success that Money claimed. They managed to penetrate the anonymity of the case and even briefly meet the girl in question, though they did not divulge her identity on air. Called Brenda Reimer, she lived with her family in Winnipeg and was then 14. What they saw was an unhappy youth with masculine body language and a deep voice. The BBC crew interviewed Money, who reacted with fury at the invasion of the family’s privacy. Diamond continued to press Money for details, but got nowhere. Money now dropped all reference to the case from his published work. The trail once more went cold. Then in 1991 in print Money blamed Diamond for inciting the BBC to invade the girl’s privacy. Enraged at the accusation, Diamond began trying to contact psychiatrists who might have treated the case. In 1995 at last he met Brenda Reimer.
Except Brenda was now called David, and was a happily married man with adopted children. He had endured a confused and unhappy childhood, constantly rebelling against girlish things, though he knew nothing of having been born a boy. When at 14 he still insisted on living as a boy his parents at last told him of his past. He immediately demanded surgery to restore a penis and adopted the life of a teenage male. Diamond persuaded him to let him tell the story to the world under a pseudonym so that they could prevent people having to endure the same fate in the future. In 2000, the writer John Colapinto convinced him to drop his anonymity altogether for a book.32
Money has never apologised either to the world for misleading it about the success of the reassignment, or to David Reimer. Today Diamond wonders what would have happened if the little boy had been a gay or transsexual who might have wanted to live either in an effeminate way or as a female, or had not been willing to come out of his closet and tell his story.
David Reimer is not alone. Most boys reassigned as girls declare themselves boys at adolescence. And a recent study of people born with ambiguous genitalia found that those who escaped the surgeon’s knife had fewer psychological problems than those who had been operated on in childhood. The large majority of those males that were switched to live as girls have reverted, on their own, to live as males.33
Gender roles are at least partly automatic, blind and untaught, to use William James’s terms. Hormones within the womb trigger masculinisation, but those hormones originate within the body of the baby and are themselves triggered by a series of events that begin with the expression of a single gene on the Y chromosome. (There are plenty of species that allow the environment to determine gender. In crocodiles and turtles, for example, the sex of the animal is set by the temperature at which the egg is incubated. But there are genes involved in such a process, too. Temperature triggers the expression of sex-determining genes. The prime cause may be environmental, but the mechanism is genetic. Genes can be consequence as well as cause.)
FOLK PSYCHOLOGY
Boys like David Reimer want to be boys. They like toys, weapons, competition and action better than dolls, romance, relationships and families. They do not come into the world with all these preferences fully formed, of course, but they do come with some ineffable preference to identify with boyish things. This is what the child psychologist Sandra Scarr has called ‘niche picking’: the tendency to pick the nurture that suits your nature. The frustrations of David Reimer’s youth were caused by his not being allowed to pick his niche.
In this sense, cause and effect are probably circular. People both like doing what they find they are good at and are good at what they like doing. But that implies that this sex difference is at least jump-started by instinct, by innate behavioural differences that pre-date experience. Like many parents who have had children of both sexes, I found the differences surprisingly strong and early. I also had no difficulty in believing that I and my wife were reacting to, rather than causing, such gender dissimilarities. We bought trucks for the boy and dolls for the girl not because we wanted them to be different, but because it was painfully obvious that one wanted trucks and the other dolls.
Exactly how early do these differences emerge? Svetlana Lutchmaya, a student of Simon Baron-Cohen’s at Cambridge, filmed 29 girls and 41 boys at 12 months old and analysed how often the baby looked at its mother’s face. As expected, the girls made far more eye contact than the boys. She then went back and measured the testosterone levels present in the womb during the first trimester of each baby’s gestation. This was possible because in every case the mother had had amniocentesis and a sample of amniotic fluid had been stored. She found that the foetal testosterone level was generally higher for the boys than the girls, and that, among the boys, there was a significant correlation: the higher the testosterone level, the less eye contact made by the baby as a one-year-old.34
Baron-Cohen then asked another student, Jennifer Connellan, to go back even further, to the first day of life. She gave 102 24-hour-old babies two things to look at: her own face, or a physical-mechanical mobile of approximately the same size and shape as a face. The baby boys slightly preferred to look at the mobile; the baby girls slightly preferred the face.35
So the relative female preference for faces, which gradually turns into a preference for social relationships, seems to be there in some form from the start. This distinction between the social and physical world may be a crucial clue to how human brains work. The nineteenth-century psychologist Franz Brentano divided the universe rather starkly into two kinds of entities: those that have intentionality and those that do not. The former can move themselves spontaneously and can have goals and wants; the latter obey only physical laws. It is a distinction that fails at the edges – what about plants? – but as a rule of thumb it works rather well. Evolutionary psychologists have begun to suspect that human beings instinctively apply two different mental processes to understanding such objects: what Daniel Dennett has called folk psychology and folk physics. We assume that a footballer moved because he ‘wanted to’, but that a football moved only because it was kicked. Even babies express surprise when objects appear to disobey the laws of physics – if they move through each other, if large objects seem to go into smaller ones, or if they move without being touched.
You can see where I am heading, I suspect: on average, men are more interested in folk physics than women, who are more interested in folk psychology than men. Simon Baron-Cohen’s research focus is autism, a difficulty with the social world that affects mainly boys. Together with Alan Leslie, Baron-Cohen pioneered the theory that autistic boys have trouble theorising about the minds of others, though he now prefers to use the term ‘empathising’. There are many other features of severe autism, including difficulty with language, but in what is
