Eventually, he did date a girl two years his junior, a pretty but flighty 16-year-old. Several months into the relationship, John entrusted her with his secret, telling her that he had suffered an “accident.” Within days, John says, “everyone knew.” Just as in his childhood, he was suddenly the object of muttered comments, giggling, ridicule. Days later, he swallowed a bottle of anti-depressants and lay down on his parents’ sofa to die. His parents discovered him unconscious. “Me and Linda looked at each other,” Frank recalls, “and we were wondering if we should wake him up.”

Linda recalls her doubts: “I said to Frank, ‘I wonder if we should just leave him, because that kid has done nothing but suffer all his life. He really wants to die.’ Then I said, ‘No, no, I can’t let him die. I have to try to save him.’ ” They lifted him and rushed him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. On his release a week later, he tried it again. This time, Kevin saved him.

John withdrew from the world. He spent sojourns of up to six months at a time alone in a cabin in the woods, winter or summer. Unable to face people, he fantasized about committing a crime that would land him in solitary confinement for the rest of his days. “I despised myself; I hated myself,” he says. “I hated how my life turned out. I was frustrated and angry, and I didn’t know who I was angry at.”

At age 21, he underwent a second operation on his penis that yielded a significant improvement over his first phalloplasty (his penis resembled a real one, and nerve grafts from his arm supplied the organ with sensation), but it would be two years before John used it for sex. The delay had less to do with his feelings of confidence about his penis, he says, than with the legacy of what had been done to him by Dr. Howard W. Jones in the operating room at Johns Hopkins when he was 22 months old. “I kept thinking, ‘What am I going to say to the woman I meet who I want to marry?’ ” John remembers. “ ‘What am I going to say to her when she says she wants children and I can’t give her children?’ ”

His brother, Kevin, had by that time married and become a father – everything that John had wanted for himself since high school. “I got so terribly lonely,” John says. “I decided to do something I’d never done before. I wound up praying to God. I said, ‘You know, I’ve had such a terrible life. I’m not going to complain to you, because you must have some idea of why you’re putting me through this. But I could be a good husband if I was given the chance; I think I could be a good father if I was given a chance.’ ”

Two months later, Kevin and his wife introduced John to a young woman they had met. At age 26, she was three years John’s senior – a pretty, loving single mother of three children by three separate fathers. “By the time I met John,” she says with a rueful laugh, “I’d come to the end of my rope with men. I kept trusting them – then it was, ‘You’re pregnant? I’m out of here.’ ” She says that John’s condition did not make a difference to her. “It probably would have if I didn’t already have kids. But after what I’d been through with men, I figured, ‘What does it matter what he’s got between his legs? If he’s good to me and the kids that’s all that matters.’ ”

The two immediately hit it off. She liked John’s old-fashioned gallantry. “He still sends me flowers and writes me notes,” she says. “How many people have that after nine years together?” John fell in love with what he calls her “true heart.”

Less than a year after they started going out, John asked her to marry him. She accepted, and when John was 25, they wed. John landed a well-paying factory job, bought a house in a trim and tidy middle-class neighborhood near his parents, and settled down with his wife and three adopted children into a life of domestic anonymity.

For years, Keith Sigmundson had been seeing the advertisements. They appeared like clockwork every year in the American Psychiatric Society Journal, and they always said the same thing: “Will whoever is treating the twins please report.” Below this entreaty was always the same address: Dr. Milton Diamond, University of Hawaii. “I would see it,” Sigmundson says, “but I couldn’t bring myself to answer.”

In the past, Sigmundson himself had toyed with the idea of publishing the true outcome of John’s case. But he hadn’t done it – and for a very simple reason. “I was shit-scared of John Money,” he admits. “He was the big guy. The guru. I didn’t know what it would do to my career.” So he would put the idea out of his head. Diamond’s annual ad was an awkward reminder. A couple of times, he’d almost answered it. But he’d always resisted the urge.

Diamond, however, was not one to give up so easily. At 63, he’s a sad-eyed man with the white beard of a scholar, his intensity hidden behind soft-spokenness. Diamond is the author of more than a hundred journal articles and eight books on sexuality. The majority of Diamond’s time in Honolulu during the past 30 years has been spent hunched over his computer in the cluttered, windowless office he calls his “cave,” his work habits obvious to anyone who has seen his pale skin. It was from his cave that Diamond, in early 1991, decided to redouble his efforts to locate, and learn the fate of, the famous twins. That spring, he managed to track down Dr. M., the psychiatrist who had treated Joan Thiessen almost 21, years earlier. She had moved from the Thiessens’ hometown soon after referring Joan to a new psychiatrist and thus knew nothing of the girl’s sex change. She did, however, offer to give Diamond a phone number for the man who had overseen Joan’s psychiatric treatment: Keith Sigmundson.

“It’s funny,” Diamond says with a chuckle, “I remember the first words Sigmundson said to me [when I called]. It was to the effect of, ‘I was wondering how long it would take for you to get here.’ ”

Sigmundson shakes his head at the memory of the call he’d been half hoping for, half dreading

“Mickey said, ‘Keith, we gotta do this,’ ” Sigmundson recalls. “I said, ‘Well, I haven’t really got the time and the energy....’ So Mickey kept on badgering me a little bit.”