Word: joans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...follow-up study published last week in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Milton Diamond, a professor of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaii, and Dr. Keith Sigmundson, a psychiatrist with the Canadian Ministry of Health, report that the child, whom they called "Joan," never really adjusted to her assigned gender. In fact, Joan was surgically changed back to "John" in the late 1970s, and is now the happily married father of three adopted children...
Almost from the beginning, Diamond and Sigmundson write, Joan rebelled at her treatment. Even as a toddler, she felt different. When her mother clothed her in frilly dresses, she would try to rip them off. She preferred to play with boys and stereotypical boys' toys--in one memorable instance walking into a store to buy an umbrella and walking out with a toy machine gun. By second grade, she had come to suspect she would fit in better as a boy. But her doctors insisted that these feelings were perfectly normal, that she was just a tomboy. "I thought...
Although the other kids didn't know about Joan's surgical history, they teased her about her tomboyish looks and behavior. Public bathrooms proved to be a source of particular discomfort. Joan often insisted on urinating standing up, which usually made a mess. In junior high school, she stood so often in the stalls of the girls' rest room that the girls finally refused to let her in anymore, forcing her to use the boys' room instead...
...this time, Joan was pretty sure she was a boy. But no matter what she told her doctors and psychiatrists, they kept pressing her to act more feminine. Eventually, she gave up trying to convince them. "You can't argue with a bunch of doctors in white coats," John recalls. "You're just a little kid, and their minds are already made up. They didn't want to listen...
...when she was 14, Joan decided she had only two options: either commit suicide or live her life as a male. Finally, in a tearful confrontation, her father told her the true story of her birth and sex change. "All of a sudden everything clicked," John remembers. "For the first time things made sense, and I understood who and what I was." With the support of a new set of doctors, Joan underwent a pair of operations to reconstruct a penis--albeit a diminutive one without the sensitivity of a normal sex organ...