The True Story of John / Joan

Central to Money’s program for sex reassignment of hermaphrodites was his edict that the children, when very young, know nothing of their ambiguous sexual status at birth. Money put the same stricture into effect in the case of the Thiessens’ baby, whom they now called Joan. “He told us not to talk about it,” Frank says. “Not to tell Joan the whole truth and that she shouldn’t know she wasn’t a girl.”

Linda had sewn dresses and bonnets for her new daughter. It was shortly before Joan’s second birthday when Linda first put her in a dress. “It was a pretty, lacy little dress,” Linda recalls. “She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, she knows she’s a boy and she doesn’t want girls’ clothing. She doesn’t want to be a girl.’ But then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can teach her to want to be a girl. Maybe I can train her so that she wants to be a girl.’ ”

Linda and Frank did their best to do just that. When Joan’s brother, Kevin, at age 4, was watching Frank shave and asked to shave, too, Frank gave him an empty razor and some shaving cream to play with. But when Joan also clamored for a razor, Frank refused. “I told her that girls don’t shave,” Frank recalls. “I told her girls don’t have to.” Linda offered to put makeup on her. But Joan didn’t want to wear makeup.

“I remember saying, ‘Oh, can I shave, too?’ ” John says of this incident, which forms his earliest childhood memory. “My dad said, ‘No, no. You go with your mother.’ I started crying, ‘Why can’t I shave, too?’ ” Kevin says that the incident was typical of the way their parents tried to steer them into opposite sexes – and how such efforts were, inevitably, doomed to failure.

“I recognized Joan as my sister,” Kevin says, “but she never, ever acted the part. She’d get a skipping rope for a gift, and the only thing we’d use that for was to tie people up, whip people with it. Never used it for what it was bought for. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys, dump trucks. Toys like this sewing machine she got just sat.”

Today, with the twins having rejoined each other on the same side of the gender divide, the stark physical differences between them eerily testify to all that John has been through. At 32, Kevin is a dark-bearded, bearlike man with the thickly muscled arms and shoulders of a manual laborer. To see him standing alongside his scarecrow-thin, scantily bearded brother, you would never guess that every cell in their bodies bears identical DNA – until you compare their eyes, noses and mouths, which are indistinguishable from one twin to the other.

As children, their physical differences were, if less pronounced, equally deceptive. Photographs of them as preschoolers show a puppy-eyed little boy with a crew cut and a slim, brown-eyed girl with wavy chestnut hair framing a face of delicate prettiness. But by all accounts, this illusion of two children occupying opposite sexes disappeared the second that Joan moved, spoke, walked, gestured. “When I say there was nothing feminine about Joan,” Kevin laughs, “I mean there was nothing feminine. She walked like a guy. She talked about guy things, didn’t give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup.... We both wanted to play with guys, build forts and have snowball fights and play army.” Enrolled in Girl Scouts, Joan was miserable. “I remember making daisy chains and thinking, ‘If this is the most exciting thing in Girl Scouts, forget it,’ ” John says. “I kept thinking of the fun stuff my brother was doing in Cubs.”

Linda and Frank were troubled by Joan’s masculine behavior. But they had been told by Dr. Money that they must not entertain any doubts about their daughter, and they felt that to do so would only increase the problem. Instead, Frank and Linda seized on those moments when Joan’s behavior could be construed as stereotypically feminine. “And she could be sort of feminine, sometimes,” Linda says, “when she wanted to please me. She’d be less rough, keep herself clean and tidy, and help a little bit in the kitchen.”

In her letters to Dr. Money describing Joan’s progress, Linda made sure to emphasize those moments so that the psychologist would know that she and Frank were doing everything they could to implement his plans. Meanwhile, Linda comforted herself by thinking of her daughter as a tomboy. “I have seen all kinds of women in my life,” she says, “and some of them, you’d swear they were men. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe it won’t be a problem, because there are lots of women who aren’t very effeminate. Maybe it could work.’ I wanted it to work.”

Kevin didn’t question his sister’s boyish ways until they went off to school. “I was in grade one or two,” he says, “and I saw all the other girls doing their thing – combing their hair, holding their dolls. Joan was not at all like that. Not at all.” At that time, Joan had voiced the ambition to be a garbage man. “She’d say, ‘Easy job, good pay,’ ” Kevin recalls. “She was 6 or 7 years old. I thought it was kinda bizarre – my sister a garbage man?” Indeed, Kevin would finally grow so perplexed with his sister’s unconventional behavior that he went to his mother about it. “Well, that’s Joan being a tomboy,” Linda told him. “I accepted that,” Kevin says and shrugs.

That was not an explanation Joan’s schoolmates were prepared to accept. Upon entering kindergarten, she became the object of instant ridicule from classmates, both male and female. “As you’d walk by, they’d start giggling,” John remembers. “Not one, but almost the whole class. It’d be like that every day. The whole school would make fun of you about one thing or another.”