THE CASE OF JOHN/JOAN
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The young man’s sole condition for talking to me was that I withhold some details of his identity. Accordingly, I will not reveal the city where he was born and raised and continues to live, and I have agreed to invent pseudonyms for his parents, whom I will call Frank and Linda Thiessen, and his sole sibling, the identical twin brother, whom I will call Kevin. The physicians in his hometown I will identify by initials. The young man himself I will call, variously, John and Joan, the pseudonyms given for him by Diamond and Sigmundson in the journal article describing the macabre double life he has been obliged to live. No other details have been changed.

“My parents feel very guilty, as if the whole thing was their fault,” John says. “But it wasn’t like that. They did what they did out of kindness, and love and desperation. When you’re desperate, you don’t necessarily do all the right things.”

The irony was that Frank and Linda Thiessen’s life together had begun with such special promise. A young couple of rural, religious backgrounds, they grew up on farms near each other and met when Linda was just 15, Frank 17. Linda, an exceptionally pretty brunette, had spent much of her teens fighting off guys who were too fresh. Frank, a tall, shy fair-haired man, was different. “I thought, ‘Well, he’s not all hands,’ ” Linda recalls. “ ‘I can relax with him.’ ” Three years later, at ages 18 and 20, they married and moved to a nearby city. Linda remembers Frank’s joy soon after, upon learning that he was going to be the father of twins – and his euphoria when the brothers were born, on Aug. 22, 1965. “The nurse asked him, ‘Is it boys or girls?’ ” Linda recalls. “And he said, ‘I don’t know! I just know there’s two of ’em!’ ”

Shortly before the births, Frank had landed his highest-paying job ever, at a local unionized plant, and the couple now moved with their newborns into a sunny one-bedroom apartment on a quiet side street downtown. But when the twins were 7 months old, Linda noticed that their foreskins were closing, making it hard for them to urinate. Their pediatrician explained that the condition, called phimosis, was not rare and was easily remedied by circumcision. He referred them to a surgeon. The operations were scheduled for April 27, 1966, in the morning. Because Frank needed the family car to get to his job on the late shift, they brought the kids in the night before. “We weren’t worried,” Linda says. “We didn’t know we had anything to worry about.”

But early the next morning, they were jarred from sleep by a ringing phone. It was the hospital. “There’s been a slight accident,” a nurse told Linda. “The doctor needs to see you right away.”

In the children’s ward, they were met by the surgeon. Grim-faced, businesslike, he told them that John had suffered a burn to his penis. Linda remembers being shocked into numbness by the news. “I sort of froze,” she says. “I didn’t cry. It was just like I turned to stone.” Eventually she was able to gather herself enough to ask how their baby had been burned. The doctor seemed reluctant to give a full explanation – and it would, in fact, be months before the Thiessens would learn that the injury had been caused by an electro-cautery needle, a device sometimes used in circumcisions to seal blood vessels as it cuts. Through mechanical malfunction or doctor error, or both, a surge of intense heat had engulfed John’s penis. “It was blackened,” Linda says, recalling her first glimpse of his injury. “It was like a little string. And it went right up to the base, up to his body.” Over the next few days, the burnt tissue dried and broke away in pieces.

John, with a catheter where his penis used to be remained in the hospital for the next several weeks, while Frank and Linda, frantic, watched as a parade of the city’s top local specialists examined him. They gave little hope. Phallic reconstruction, a crude and makeshift expedient even today, was in its infancy in the 1960’s – a fact made plain by the plastic surgeon when he described the limitations of a phallus that would be constructed from flesh farmed from John’s thigh or abdomen: “Such a penis would not, of course, resemble a normal organ in color, texture or erectile capability,” he wrote in a report to the Thiessens’ lawyer. “It would serve as a conduit for urine, but that is all.”

Even that was optimistic, according to a urologist: “Insofar as the future outlook is concerned,” he wrote, “restoration of the penis as a functional organ is out of the question.” A psychiatrist summarized John’s emotional future this way: “He will be unable to consummate marriage or have normal heterosexual relations; he will have to recognize that he is incomplete, physically defective, and that he must live apart....”

Now desperate, Frank and Linda took baby John on a daylong train trip to the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., where he was examined by a team of doctors who merely repeated the dire prognoses delivered by the Thiessens’ local physicians. Back home, with nowhere to turn, the couple sank into a state of mute depression. Months passed during which they could not speak of John’s injury even to each other. Then one evening in December 1966, some seven months after the accident, they saw a TV program that jolted them from their despondency.

On their small black-and-white television screen appeared a man identified as Dr. John Money. A suavely charismatic and handsome individual in his late 40s, bespectacled and with sleekly brushed-back hair, Dr. Money was speaking about the wonders of gender transformation taking place at the Johns Hopkins medical center, where he was a medical psychologist. Also on the program was a woman – one of the satisfied post-operative transsexuals who had recently been converted at Johns Hopkins.

Today, with the subject of transsexualism a staple of daytime talk shows, it’s difficult to imagine just how alien the concept seemed on that December evening in 1966. Fourteen years earlier, a spate of publicity had attended the announcement by American ex-GI George Jorgensen that he had undergone surgical transformation to become Christine. But that operation, performed in Denmark, had been roundly criticized by American doctors, who refused to perform such surgeries. The subject had faded from view – until now, when Johns Hopkins announced that it had not only performed two male-to-female sex changes (a first in America) but also established the world’s first Gender Identity Clinic, devoted solely to the practice of converting people from one sex to the other. Along with gynecologist Howard W. Jones Jr., the driving force behind Hopkins’ pioneering work in the study and treatment of transsexuals was the man on the Thiessens’ television screen: Dr. John Money.

“He was very self-confident, very confident about his opinions,” Linda recalls of her first glimpse of the man who would have such a lasting effect on the Thiessen’s lives. “He was saying that it could be that babies are born neutral and you can change their gender. Something told me that I should get in touch with this Dr. Money.”

She wrote to him soon after and described what had happened to her child. Dr. Money responded promptly, she says. In a letter, he expressed great optimism about what could be done for her baby at Johns Hopkins and urged her to bring John to Baltimore without delay. He also happened to inquire, Linda says, about the twin brother whom she had mentioned in passing. “He asked if they were identical twins,” Linda says. She informed him that they were. Dr. Money replied that he would like to run a test on the babies at Johns Hopkins, just to make sure.

After so many months of grim predictions, bleak prognoses and hopelessness, Dr. Money’s words, Linda says, felt like a balm. “Someone,” she says, “was finally listening.”

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