AS NATURE MADE HIM

Born a boy, brought up a girl, David Thiessen always knew in his genes that he was a male, despite his eminent doctor's

self-serving pronouncements. Colapinto, the reporter who won a National Magazine Award for a piece on David's story, engrossingly recounts this tale of grotesque medical hubris and a life dragged slowly from the ashes. 30 years ago, David—a pseudonym used in review galleys, his actual name to be revealed upon publication—"lost his entire penis to a botched circumcision." When he was just a year old, John Money, M.D., a pioneer in transsexual surgery at Johns Hopkins, convinced David’s parents to have the boy’s sex changed, arguing that subsequent social, mental, and hormonal conditioning would turn him into a happy woman. Publicly and falsely touted as an unqualified success, David’s case—exploited as a gaudy feather in the cap of nurturists over naturists, proof that the gender gap was not biological but environmental—ushered in a period when sex-reassignment surgery became standard treatment in situations where newborns had injured or irregular genitals. David, on the other hand, was deeply confused about his gender identity long before his operation was disclosed to him. He suffered the cruelty of peers who didn't appreciate his tomboyism, had few friends but his identical-twin brother (who makes a fascinating comparative profile), and came to dread any contact with Money, a bully who deployed "pressure tactics, cajoling, pornography, and unorthodox inspections and posings" when Brenda, as David was known, resisted further surgery. As soon as David learned his birth sex, he applied for phalloplasty and began to pick up the pieces of his malignantly manipulated life. Colapinto's storytelling, taut and emotive, never plays the grim tale for its sideshow qualities, nor claims the last word on

nature versus nurture. (First printing of 125,000; Literary Guild super release; author tour)