As nature made him

"As nature made him" was a deeply disturbing and important book about the way doctors and hospitals can destroy people's lives with the best of the intentions.

Author John Colapinto is clearly against accepted opinion that babies with genital defects have to be operated and sometimes operations are so drastic that kids get a sex change - he points that rarely if ever, this children grown into happy individuals for a simple reason that genes and hormones are much stronger than any clothes parents might dress a kid into.To illustrate this point he turns to the most celebrated baby sex change case of David Reimer who was born as a twin but something went terribly wrong during circumcising and doctors basically burned off his little penis,leaving parents wondering what to do. They contacted celebrated surgeon who advised them the best thing would be to change sex of the baby and raise him as a girl.It was excellent for a surgeon who built his career out of this case and became world-known but parents and the child had really hard time with this,because it didn't work out so easily as expected. Poor little boy suffered terribly during childhood because he never behaved like a girl should have and was cruelly teased in any school he went to. During puberty he was forced to take female hormons that would start a grow of breasts but he always felt deeply unhappy until parents finally told him about unlucky incident and than he realized nothing is wrong with him, "I am not crazy after all" he said to himself and refused to wear girl's clothes from than on.

Unfortunately the damage has already been done and change of clothes did not erase the years of sadness and confusion in David who even got married and later went on TV with his experience. All this time hospitals and medical teams were still doing operations on little babies (surely with best intentions) pointing how successfully David Reimer lived where in fact this operation was a complete disaster not only for him but also for his parents (father became an alcoholic and mother ended up in sanatorium). When author of this book faced surgeons and asked them to show one happy child who actually lived as a satisfied later,they always gave vague answers about patients who wanted to keep their privacy. This goes as even now an official group of activists from San Francisco (ISNA) protests and writes about this problem, but they rarely get acknowledged in the media and big hospitals are ignoring them.

Sadly,both David Reimer and his twin brother committed suicide later. I am really saddened to hear about this (I found it on internet,it happened after the book was already published) and I am sure that it could have been different if they had friends who could help them and support them. I can't even imagine how the parents must feel now.