54 pages • 1 hour read
John ColapintoAs Nature Made Him
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Testimony
Testimony is a central plot point and mode of Colapinto’s writing. Throughout her childhood, Brenda’s testimony to doctors—including, but not exclusive to, John Money—is inconsistent and difficult to follow. That testimony is the bedrock of Money’s research, but it is largely vague and unreliable.
When Brenda is able to speak clearly about her life, to Mary McKenty, McKenty sees that Brenda most deeply desires the truth about her childhood. Testimony, from all parties involved, later becomes a central part of Colapinto’s storytelling. Implicitly, the absence of Brenda/David’s perspective from Dr. Money’s research is the source of its danger; Colapinto’s work seeks to rectify this danger by countering obscure references with specific detail.
As David learns to live as a man, his friends work to pull him out of his deep depression. When he voluntarily raises “the secrets of his past” to a friend on the airplane to Hawaii, his friends come to feel that David is prepared to move into his future (189). One of the remarkable features of David, as an adult, is his desire to speak for others. His testimony becomes powerful, but it is gradually produced once it emerges voluntarily, without a doctor’s profit orientation to pull it forth in a specific, guided form.
Medicine
The medical field shapes Colapinto’s writing in form and content. From the first chapters, Colapinto describes each of Bruce/Brenda/David’s surgeries in detail, explaining how “the foreskin is stretched over a bell-shaped metal sheath,” for example, in a routine circumcision (11). Using reconstructed medical records and his own research into surgical practices, Colapinto seeks accuracy in his reproductions of medical procedures and research.
Colapinto’s infusion of medical discourse is important because it provides historical depth to the lived reality of being Brenda and David. Though the field of medicine is far outside Brenda/David’s mind, it shapes their existence throughout life, until David learns of the field built around his childhood. The broader intention of Colapinto’s text, though, is to address the medical field and inspire change in its practices; in order to do so, he must establish mastery of medical practices and understandings of the nature/nurture debate.
Silence
Because Brenda so often feels “trapped” inside her body, she becomes silent as often as possible (128). Though as a young child, Brenda seeks to please her doctors and parents, often as a way of escaping Dr. Money’s treatments, as a teenager she sinks further into silence. Childhood friends like Heather and Esther remember this silence as part of an overarching anxiety: She could hardly form sentences.
Brenda’s “anxiety, social isolation, and fear” draw the attention of school leaders, who place her in the care of doctors and counselors (111). Ironically, medicine both produces the conditions for Brenda’s silence and attempts to heal that silence. Dr. McKenty’s friendliness breaks through that silence but only after Brenda, who seems to have an innate distrust of doctors (perpetuated by Dr. Money), tests that friendliness repeatedly.
David’s decision to speak about his experiences with childhood sex reassignment surgery allows intersex movements to grow and helps reshape the medical field that so profoundly shaped his own experience. Silence, and the ability to break it, are then commingled with the medical field. Medicine can produce, heal, and be changed by silences and speech.
Trust
Brenda’s story begins with Janet and Ron Reimer’s decision to trust Dr. Money. His power and authority convince them, and though he breaks the conditions of that trust with their children, he recognizes that he requires the Reimers’ continued faith in him. Doctors throughout Brenda’s childhood trust Money’s theories, which become public and publicly accepted. These double trusts in a single figure cause Brenda damage.
She, in turn, struggles to trust anyone with her story. Money, who perverts her story, and other doctors, who seem to want to reshape it, move Brenda further away from an ability to trust anyone. When she first meets Dr. McKenty, she cannot “afford to trust [her] completely” because she fears that McKenty will trick her into vaginal surgery, which she fears deeply (152). McKenty’s ability to earn Brenda’s trust helps her gain her voice back.
The broader trust of the medical community in Money’s word becomes a cautionary tale by the end of the book. Because of unquestioning trust in a single study, numerous lives are shaped by childhood sex assignment surgeries. Though trust is key on an individual level, Colapinto’s writing suggests that trust is also dangerous when it is founded on limited information.
