As Nature Made Him

The Boy Who Was Raised as A Girl

Author: John Colapinto
ISBN: 9780060192112

In 1967, after a baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment. On the advice of a renowned expert in gender identity and sexual reassignment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the boy was surgically altered to live as a girl. This landmark case, initially reported to be a complete success, seemed all the more remarkable since the child had been born an identical twin: his uninjured brother, raised as a boy, provided to the experiment the perfect matched control.The so-called twins case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine and the social sciences; cited repeatedly over the past thirty years as living proof that our sense of being male or female is not inborn but primarily the result of how we are raised. A touchstone for the feminist movement, the case also set the precedent for sex reassignment as standard treatment for thousands of newborns with similarly injured, or irregular, genitals.But the case was a failure from the outset. From th

Publisher: HarperCollins
Publish Date: 2000-02-02

Subjects: Psychology / General, Medical / Anatomy, Social Science / Gender Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Biography (BIO))