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.”

Dr. Money was, indeed, listening. But then, Linda’s cry for help was one that he might have been waiting for his entire professional life.