The ultimate fantasy experiment to separate biology from socialization would be to take a baby boy,
give him a sex-change operation, and have his parents raise him as a girl and other people treat him as
one. If gender is socially constructed, the child should have the mind of a normal girl; if it {349}
depends on prenatal hormones, the child should feel like a boy trapped in a girl's body. Remarkably,
the experiment has been done in real life — not out of scientific curiosity, of course, but as a result of
disease and accidents. One study looked at twenty-five boys who were born without a penis (a birth
defect known as cloacal exstrophy) and who were then castrated and raised as girls. All of them
showed male patterns of rough-and-tumble play and had typically male attitudes and interests. More
than half of them spontaneously declared they were boys, one when he was just five years old.50
In a famous case study, an eight-month-old boy lost his penis in a botched circumcision (not by a
mohel, I was relieved to learn, but by a bungling doctor). His parents consulted the famous sex
researcher John Money, who had maintained that “Nature is a political strategy of those committed to
maintaining the status quo of sex differences.” He advised them to let the doctors castrate the baby and
build him an artificial vagina, and they raised him as a girl without telling him what had happened.51 I
learned about the case as an undergraduate in the 1970s, when it was offered as proof that babies are
born neuter and acquire a gender from the way they are raised. A New York Times article from the era
reported that Brenda (nee Bruce) “has been sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.”52
The facts were suppressed until 1997, when it was revealed that from a young age Brenda felt she was
a boy trapped in a girl's body and gender role.53 She ripped off frilly dresses, rejected dolls in favor of
guns, preferred to play with boys, and even insisted on urinating standing up. At fourteen she was so
miserable that she decided either to live her life as a male or to end it, and her father finally told her the
truth. She underwent a new set of operations, assumed a male identity, and today is happily married to
a woman.