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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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The Case of the Missing Penis

By Natalie Angier
Posted Monday, Feb. 21, 2000, at 1:12 PM ET

Jonathan,

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What a great bad-hair-day story, which I absolutely believe down to the last used-car salesman detail, even though I have been plowing through documents, national surveys, police reports and thunderous opinings on false rape allegations and the question of just how often women do cry, um, wolf--all part of my effort to metabolize that fairly indigestible new book, A Natural History of Rape, by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer.

I won't get into that now, but I will bring up another literary brickbat in the interminable sex dialectics, John Colapinto's As Nature Made Him, the absolutely riveting story of David Reimer, a k a Brenda/Bruce/John/Joan, or, more descriptively, "the boy who was raised as a girl."

I reviewed the book for the Times yesterday, so it's still on my mind, and I wonder what you think of the case. Here's a few of my free-floating queries:

The doctors who suggested that the accidentally penectomized baby Bruce had no chance of living a normal or functional life as a boy and that therefore the child would be better off being castrated, given a makeshift proto-vagina, and raised as a girl were all men. But honestly. Would you, or any of the men you know well enough to question about this over a few rounds of Guinness Stout, have wanted that choice made for yourself? Why do I seriously doubt it?

What does it mean to say that a child's gender identity is innate, and how concordant is "gender identity" and "gender-typical" behavior? Does a boy who is low-key and unathletic, who likes art, books, and stuffed animals, feel any less like a "boy" than does the boy who plays stickball and "Let's pretend we're invading Cuba"? I ask because I do believe that gender identity is profound, mostly binary and possibly inflexible, but that the expression of that identity is, for perfectly sound evolutionary reasons, facultative, whimsical, fungible, and cunning. My mother, upon reading my review yesterday, wanted to know, well, if David Reimer was told he was a girl and given dolls, but rejected those dolls, does that mean there is something innate about toy choice and other kiddie behaviors?

At which point I grew very annoyed, because she of all people has no right to ask such a flat-footed thing. As a girl she'd had no interest in dolls or doll accoutrements, and so assumed I had no interest either, with the result that she never, ever bought me what I really wanted: a dollhouse, a maternal lapse for which I will never ever forgive her.

My daughter now has a dollhouse, and so far, at least, she finds it--boring.

From Venus to Mars and back again,
Natalie