Dutch playwright Carly Wijs, centre, with the two men at the heart of her play "Boy": David Reimer, left, who was raised as a girl after a medical accident, and controversial New Zealand sexologist John Money, who recommended his sex change. Photo / Getty Images, Melvin Simons
What makes someone a “boy”? Dutch writer Carly Wijs talks to Joanna Wane about the heartbreaking true story behind her play at the Auckland Arts Festival this month — and its bizarre New Zealand connection.
The story is an extraordinary one, even before you discover there’s a Kiwi at the tragic heart of it.
In 1966, Janet and Ron Reimer — a young Canadian couple who’d extracted themselves from the hyper-conservative Mennonite community — took their twin baby sons to be circumcised, as was the custom of the day. The operation on the first boy, Bruce, went horrifyingly wrong, burning his penis so badly it was “unrescuable”. By all accounts, the family was simply sent home with no advice or support. The sight of her baby’s mutilated genitals, his mother would later recall, made her cry at every nappy change.
Hope appeared on the horizon when the Reimers watched a TV show where New Zealander John Money, a renowned sexologist who founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, talked about his radical new theories. “He was saying it could be that babies are born neutral, and you could change their identity,” Janet told journalist John Colapinto, who wrote a book about what happened next. None of it is pretty.
Born in Morrinsville to Christian fundamentalists (they must have been dismayed how he turned out), Money taught in the psychology faculty at Otago before doing a PhD at Harvard. It was Money who convinced a young Janet Frame, one of his former students, to admit herself to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Public Hospital, where she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and nearly lobotomised. And it was Money who coined the term “gender role” in his pioneering sex research in the 60s, a time when the concept of gender was rarely discussed, even in academic circles.
Money’s clinic was the first in the US to perform sexual reassignment surgery, and his ideas resonated with the second-wave feminist movement, which was pushing back hard against the nature-over-nurture paradigm of women being born for the kitchen (and the bedroom). With nowhere else to turn, the Reimers wrote begging for his help. For Money, it was a gift from heaven. Here was the ideal opportunity to prove his hypothesis that gender was a social construct, with Bruce’s identical twin brother, Brian, as the perfect counterpoint. The solution to their problems, he told the desperate couple, was to raise their disfigured son as a girl.
For the next 12 years, Bruce lived as “Brenda” after surgery to remove his penis and create some sort of vagina. His parents were advised not to disclose any of this to either twin as they became old enough to understand, but it was a disaster pretty much right from the start. Ostracised and bullied at school, Brenda never identified as a girl, despite the female hormones she was given and the frilly dresses she was made to wear.
By the time her father told her the truth in 1980, the young teenager was under psychiatric care and had attempted suicide more than once. Almost immediately, she reversed her sex change, undergoing a double mastectomy and having reconstructive surgery that eventually restored a working penis. At the age of 23, David (as Reimer now called himself) got married.
There’s no such thing as a happy ending to this story, though. In 2002, Brian Reimer (the uncircumcised twin) overdosed on antidepressants. Two years later, David killed himself too. John Money died in 2006 the day before his 85th birthday from the complications of Parkinson’s disease, without ever having publicly accepted that the Reimer case had been a complete failure.
If Dr Money is remembered at all in New Zealand outside his psychological niche, it’s for the extensive art collection he gifted to the Eastern Southland Gallery in Gore — the tiny South Island town known for its country music and iconic giant trout statue. More than 400 pieces are housed in a dedicated John Money Collection wing, from works by Rita Angus and Theo Schoon to Māori art and African artefacts.
Years ago, I’d visited the gallery when I was down in Gore for the Hokonui Moonshiners Festival, a lively tribute to the area’s rich history as a supplier of bootleg liquor in the early 1800s. But when I mention Money’s art legacy, it turns out to be one of the few things Dutch writer/director Carly Wijs hadn’t come across about the man whose shadow haunts her play Boy, which opens at the Auckland Arts Festival next week. “Really?” she says, in a video call from Brussels, where she lives when she’s not back home in Amsterdam. “I did not know that. Well, he was single his whole life, so I guess he could spend all his money on art.”
Wijs, who’s heading to Auckland for a Q&A session after one of the arts festival performances, first heard about David Reimer when she saw him being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Shocked to discover his treatment was still being touted as one of Money’s great successes, Reimer had gone public with his story in Colapinto’s book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, published just a few years before Reimer’s death. So Wijs already knew some of the background when a Swedish theatre company, Teatri, asked her to rework a script based on the case.
It wasn’t only Money’s misguided advice to the Reimers that had come under scrutiny in later years but his often bizarre approach to the twins’ regular therapy sessions, where they were required to take part in sexualised play. In the 60s, there were few good options available to the family. Wijs sees Money as a man of his time who went in with the right intentions but allowed his ego to get in the way.
“He was a very colourful, extremely intelligent man and an important figure in how we consider gender to be fluid nowadays. A frontrunner. But he was terribly wrong in this case and so cruel,” she says. “Everything was nurture; that was very much his philosophy. He was blinded by the fact that he was so convinced he was right. Yet if we look at the way he treated these boys, it’s very old-fashioned. It’s very binary. And of course, you have this very young couple opposite him who were not as educated and found themselves confronted with an immense tragedy. The Dutch expression is that they were food for the cats. He could just eat them.”
It’s this inequity of social class and intellect that Wijs sees as the core of her play, rather than a commentary on the inflammatory transgender debate that seems to consume our society today. As the world becomes more and more complicated, she’s worried the rise of artificial intelligence and disinformation will only deepen the divide between those who can “read” the internet and those who can’t identify reliable sources or discern myth from truth — creating an underclass vulnerable to manipulation by a more educated or self-interested elite, as the Reimers were. As for the whole nature/nurture debate, all she’ll say is that her son isn’t the slightest bit interested in the arts and plans to study maths and physics at university next year. “There’s nothing in my nurturing that’s moved him in that direction.”
The Auckland season will be the first time Boy has been staged outside Europe and there are plans for an international tour. Belgian actors Jeroen Van der Ven (from the TV drama series Rough Diamonds) and Vanja Maria Godée tell the story primarily from the parents’ perspective. A real-life couple, they were with the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022 and are bringing their young daughter with them to New Zealand.
Wijs was nervous about taking the play to the UK, where transgender issues have become so politicised. In Holland, the use of hormone blockers is considered a private matter between a patient and their doctor. “I was afraid it was going to be hijacked by this whole transgender polemic,” she says. “Thankfully it wasn’t, because people realised it’s just this story about two people. It might broaden your vision, that’s what you hope [as a writer]. I like to encourage people in their thinking. But I really dislike telling them what to think.”
Her approach might not be preachy, but Wijs doesn’t shy away from controversial storylines and refuses to put trigger warnings on her plays. Sometimes the role of theatre is to face the unimaginable, she says. An earlier work, Us/Them — which was performed at the 2018 Auckland Arts Festival — centres on a boy and girl caught up in the horrific Beslan school siege by Chechen rebels in 2004. More than a thousand parents, teachers and children were trapped in the school gym for 52 hours. A shootout between the terrorists and the Russian army as fire ripped through the school left a third of the hostages dead.
Wijs came up with the idea of Us/Them after noting her then 8-year-old son’s detached response to a TV news item on the 2013 shopping mall siege in Kenya. It’s hard to get your head around, given the horrific subject matter, but her script takes an almost playful approach, with events viewed through the eyes of two (fictional) children who are portrayed by adult actors. The play presents a different way to engage with young people and help them process trauma, she says, in a world where acts of terror are an increasing reality.
Born in Amsterdam and currently teaching at a theatre school in Brussels, Wijs talks with a bluntness she describes as typically Dutch. Her mother is from Scotland and she feels connected to that part of her heritage, too — the ironic sense of humour that’s so quintessentially Scottish and the ruggedness of the Highlands, where she still dreams of living one day.
Originally an actor by trade, she hit peak celebrity in 2012 playing a rich, snooty character in the hit Dutch series Divorce. People would do a double take, she says, when they saw her taking the bus. A producer once told her she had to engage with social media or they’d replace her with an actress who had more followers. Recent Instagram posts show her sniffing parmesan cheese, wielding a head of broccoli, and posing with a Pikachu plush toy. In her profile picture, she’s brushing her teeth.
“I take Instagram as seriously as I think you should,” she says. “Of course, I’m an opinionated person, but right now, we live in a very narcissistic world and people are forcing themselves to be opinionated on every subject, even on subjects that are just too complicated to have an opinion on. I have many opinions, like everybody, but like my Instagram accounts, I keep them to myself.”
What I do learn from Instagram is that she’s an ambassador for MetaKids, a fundraising organisation for research on metabolic disease. Her sister has PKU disorder, she tells me, and is permanently in care. PKU, which causes severe brain damage, can be successfully treated if it’s identified at birth, but her sister was born before routine screening was introduced in Holland and wasn’t diagnosed until she was 6.
Like so many in the arts, Wijs has multiple projects on the go. With two other women, she’s doing an opera version of the 1978 Ingmar Bergman film, Autumn Sonata, scheduled for October in Brussels. She’s also writing a novel. After its Auckland season, Boy will be performed at Germany’s oldest theatre festival and there’s talk of staging a double bill in the UK with Us/Them.
Both plays somehow pull off the trick of taking something truly horrendous and making it palatable. In Boy, the Reimers’ story begins when Janet and Ron meet and ends with David’s death. “These parents were thrown into a terrible situation and dealt with it in the most compassionate way they thought possible,” she says. “You don’t want to traumatise your audience. As with Us/Them, we tried to deal with it in a light way, without being disrespectful. There’s kind of a Kafka-esque element to it. By stressing the absurdity, it becomes bearable to watch.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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