As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

The story of a vulnerable family, an arrogant doctor and a horribly confused child straining to make sense of a horrible tragedy. We are told to trust medical science only to find out later they really don’t have a clue.This is a well researched and compassionately written book. It touches on issues central to today’s “gender wars.”

This book is a difficult read but a must. In this cultural moment of gender discussion, this book digs into the origins, and the manipulations involved in gender studies long ago.

The book "As Nature Made Him" is a very interesting read overall and it totally caught me by surprise and was not what I expected to read about at all. The book tells a true story of the horrible tragedy of a young boy, caught in one of the most obscure medically documented mishaps in today's modern society. Non-the-less, the book is a very interesting read overall and very well written in my opinion. The fact that the book is based upon a very real dramatic true story, always adds a bit of excitement and a chance to look at the story from a real world perspective, because it is not a fiction novel but rather a heart wrenching tragedy in modern medical history.

This was very well-researched and written about with compassion and care. This book will provide a load of background information that will help the reader understand where and why our culture is in its current state -- with the lies and cover-ups surrounding the rapidly accelerating transgender movement. My heart breaks for the family.

A must read for anyone in this day and age. We cannot escape our essential biology. This horrifying book explains every reason why.

When I started reading this book, I was rather wary of it. The author has a habit of launching into a long (as in pages upon pages) backstory of pretty much every character in this book. I don’t like that.But, I will go on to say that the author’s habit of providing long backstories is really the only negative I can see in this book. This book provides exactly what I was hoping to get out of this book: (1) A peek into the life of a boy who was raised as a girl, not just in the clinical notes sense, but in the psychological sense. In other words, how did he live his life, and how did he feel as he was doing it? (2) A more expansive overview of the nature versus nurture gender debate, including both the scientific and social advancements that have been made.This is the kind of book that is hard to put down. As soon as David starts living as a girl, we as the reader can instantly tell that the experiment isn’t working, that he keeps acting like a boy even as he dresses like a girl. So we, or at least I, keep reading almost feverishly, desperate to come to the point in the story where David is told of his true past, and allowed to once again live as a boy. But it takes so long for that to come, and in the meantime, we see his life get even worse and worse. Some of the stuff John Money makes David do in his therapy sessions are absolutely horrifying, and when he begins to pressure David into having a vaginoplasty so he can become completely female, my heart was absolutely aching for the poor boy.Once David is finally allowed to live as a boy, we are able to see yet another point of view: what it’s like to live as a young man without a functioning penis. It was interesting to see what ways in which he felt held back by his mutilated genitals, and in what ways he didn’t. There was one insightful quote from him, in which he said something to the effect of: the medical community seemed to place my entire identity in my genitals. It was rather eye-opening to put it that way.The author does go on to explore the plight of intersex people in America, because even though David was not intersex, the experiment done on him was often referenced as a reason to perform sex reassignment surgery on intersex infants. The book explored how intersex conditions are typically seen as this shameful, dark secret, and yet the person did nothing wrong, and there’s no reason that intersex people should feel the kind of shame they do. It also explored (and seemed to support) the argument for not performing any sex reassignment surgery until children are old enough to give informed consent.If this topic interests you, then I can assure you that the book will not disappoint.

This story broke my heart. I felt David Reiner’s emotions as he desperately tried to fit in. God bless him.

David Reimer was easily one the most unfortunate people to have ever lived. Having his manhood destroyed by a botched circumcision was bad enough. Falling into the hands of a well-regarded quack, however, made his life a living mental nightmare in which his well-meaning but screamingly gullible and determined parents, kept trying to convince him he was a girl despite his obvious resistance, behavior problems and utterly non-girl-like physical features. It reads like a horror novel written by a disciple of Stanley Milgram, whose experiments showed the appalling barbarities people will inflict on others if told to by authority figures. And barbarities are no less worse for being well intentioned.At the heart of this is the struggle between David and the unspeakable Dr. John Money, who, it is to be hoped, was the worst non-fictional doctor ever to be associated with John Hopkins Medical Center (thus excluding Dr. Hannibal Lector from what would certainly be very close competition). As such it functions as a cautionary tale of just how influential a charismatic egomaniac can become if he is an indefatigable self promoters, has theories which fit into the intellectual fashions of the day and feels unbounded by accurate factual information, including his own. Almost as horrible was the infuriating slowness it took even the most sympathetic therapists endeavoring to help David to get the assorted psychological gimcrackeries out of their heads and face the simple, blatant truth: David's problem was that he was a boy constantly being told he was a girl even though he could feel that he was a boy and that was making him crazy. How much do these people get paid again?If I have any criticism of this extremely fine book, it's that Colapinto, in my opinion, goes far too easy on how feminists have either continued to insist that gender is a social construct or simply become silent on the matter despite the implosion of their prime exhibit when the honorable thing would be to openly admit error. David came out of the closet because he wanted his case to stop being misused. Feminists, despite being unpopular even among women, are extremely influential in educational and social services. By creating policies based on social conditioning theory they continue to perpetuate willfully ignorant damage and, unlike Dr. Money who has since had the courtesy to expire, should be held accountable for their destructive hooey (if readers will please forgive my political two cents).

This book greatly increased my knowledge on the subject; not just in a scientific but a very human way. My heart aches for David Reimer and I pray he rests in peace. This book like a great many others also draws attention to the degree of hypocrisy in academic with John Money a case in point. This book is a trail blazer.

Muy claro, repleto de fundamentos científicos y muy interesante. El experiemento más cruel de la historia científica. Vale la pena leerlo.

I couldn’t put this book down; an immensely sad story of the medical profession and naive parents robbing a boy of his life, told in a detailed and direct voice.

Considering the subject matter I really don't want to say this was enjoyable. The fact that it is a true story makes it actually quite horrific. I would advise anyone reading this book not to skip the long chapters concerning the medical past of Dr. Money (chapter 2 is a bit of a slog, I admit) because only by thoroughly understanding what was going through the minds of the medical community can you really appreciate the book as a whole. After finishing I went on to Youtube and found an interview with Colaptino which was made shortly after the book was released and it also contained interviews with David and his mother. Had a hard time getting the fate of this young man out of my head. No, enjoyable is the wrong word - harrowing may be the right one.

Purtroppo questa povera creatura è stata sottoposta ad un esperimento disumano, quasi nazista per la sua crudeltà, purtroppo la fine è tragica ed è un monito per ognuno di noi.