Word: sigmundson
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...know was that the celebrated sex-change success story was, in fact, a total failure. In a 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...
Unfortunately, no follow-up study reporting that John had rejected his initial sex change was ever published. As a result, say Diamond and Sigmundson, dozens of other boys may have been needlessly castrated. In defense of the original team, Johns Hopkins says it wasn't able to conduct a follow-up because the family stopped coming to see its doctors...
Diamond and Sigmundson suspect that most boys-made-girls will, like John, reject their female identity by the time they reach puberty. Other experts are not so sure. "We don't have the answers," says Dr. William Reiner, a surgeon and psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins (who was not involved in the original case). "Let's listen to these kids. They eventually are going to give us the answer...
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