Undoing Gender

Norms set the conditions of legibility, which Foucault calls the politics of truth. Butler describes the “Joan/John” case, in which David Reimer was assigned male at birth but lost his penis in a surgical mishap. Dr. John Money convinced Reimer’s parents to raise David as a girl named “Brenda.” However, Reimer did not feel comfortable as “Brenda.” Milton Diamond, a sex researcher, assisted in transitioning Reimer back to being male in Reimer’s adolescence. Money used “Brenda” to support a social constructionist view of gender, insisting that gender can be changed early. After Reimer transitioned back to male, theorists used it as evidence of an “essential gender core” (62). Diamond argued that the presence of a Y chromosome justifies alignment with masculinity, but Cheryl Case, founder and director of the Intersex Society of North America, argued that Reimer’s case is further evidence against coercive surgery on intersex infants. Reimer’s case is also used as an allegory for “transsexual” experiences, and Butler cites Kate Bornstein’s assertion that gender is a “becoming.”

Money used “transsexual” women, psychologists, images of genitalia, forced mock sex with Reimer’s brother, and accounts of “normalcy” to convince “Brenda” to be a woman, opening a