The John Joan Case
The John Joan Case
The John Joan Case
John Colapinto
In late June 1997, I arrive at an address in a working-class
suburb in the North American Midwest. On the front lawn, a
childs bicycle lies on its side; an eight-year-old secondhand
Toyota is parked at the curb. Inside the house, a handmade
wooden cabinet in the corner of the living room holds the
standard emblems of family life: wedding photos and school
portraits, china figurines and souvenirs from family trips.
There is a knockoff-antique coffee table, a well-worn easy
chair and a sofa which is where my host, a wiry young
man dressed in a jean jacket and scuffed work boots, seats
himself. He is 31 years old but could pass for a decade
younger. Partly its the sparseness of his beard just a few
blond wisps that sprout from his jaw line; partly its a certain
delicacy to his prominent cheekbones and tapering chin.
Otherwise he looks, and sounds, exactly like what he is: a
blue-collar factory worker, a man of high school education
whose fondest pleasures are to do a little weekend fishing
with his dad in the local river and to have a backyard
barbecue with his wife and kids.
Ordinarily a rough-edged and affable young man, he stops
smiling when conversation turns to his childhood. Then his
voice a burred baritone takes on a tone of aggravation
and anger, or the pleading edge of someone desperate to
communicate emotions that he knows his listener can only
dimly understand. How well even he understands these
emotions is not clear: When describing events that occurred
prior to his 15th birthday, he tends to drop the pronoun I
from his speech, replacing it with the distancing you
almost as if he were speaking about someone else altogether.
Which, in a sense, he is.
It was like brainwashing, he is saying now as he lights a cigarette. Id give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out
my whole past. Because its torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the
mind with the psychological warfare in your head.
He is referring to the extraordinary medical treatment he received after suffering the complete loss of his penis to a botched
circumcision when he was 8 months old. On the advice of experts at the renowned Johns Hopkins medical center, in Baltimore, a
sex-change operation was performed on him, a process that involved clinical castration and other genital surgery when he was a
baby, followed by a 12-year program of social, mental and hormonal conditioning to make the transformation take hold in his
psyche. The case was reported as an unqualified success, and he became one of the most famous (though unnamed) patients in the
annals of modern medicine.
But as the mere existence of this young man in front of me would suggest, the experiment was a failure, a fact revealed in a March
1997 article in the Archives of Adolescent and Pediatric Medicine. Authors Milton Diamond, a biologist at the University of
Hawaii, and Keith Sigmundson, a psychiatrist from Victoria, British Columbia, documented how the twin had struggled against
his imposed girlhood from the start. The paper set off shock waves in medical circles around the world, generating furious debate
about the ongoing practice of sex reassignment (a procedure more common than anyone might think). It also raised troubling
questions about the way the case was reported in the first place, why it took almost 20 years for a follow-up to reveal the actual
outcome and why that follow-up was conducted not by Dr. Money but by outside researchers. The answers to these questions,
fascinating for what they suggest about the mysteries of sexual identity, also bring to light a 30-year rivalry between eminent sex
researchers, a rivalry whose very bitterness not only dictated how this most unsettling of medical tragedies was exposed but also
may, in fact, have been the impetus behind the experiment in the first place.
The young mans sole condition for talking to me was that I withhold some details of his identity. Accordingly, I will not reveal
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