Bruce Brenda and David. The Story of the Boy Who Was Turned into a Girl book

Editions Denoel 2014. Very rare book.

Author: John Colapinto

1967, Janet Reimer gives birth to identical twins. Following a surgical error during a circumcision, one of the boys loses his penis. The parents, desperate, put the fate of their son in the hands of a surgeon with questionable procedures, Dr. Money. He convinces them to transform little Bruce into a girl, and that is how Bruce becomes Brenda. The author tells everything: the parents' moods, the hallucinatory visits to the psycho-hormonal research unit and, above all, the malaise of this child who will have an increasingly acute awareness of his difference and the flagrant contradiction between his "nature" and the injunctions to which he/she is subjected. At fourteen, irrepressibly attracted to girls, he decides to find his sex again with the help of reverse hormones and changes his first name, his identity again. This time he will be called David. But his problems are not solved for all that, and it will be the beginning of a long descent into hell. In addition to introducing us to the astonishing theories of Dr. Money and the extraordinary strength of character of a child like no other, Bruce, Brenda and David naturally invites us to think about the burning issue of gender and sex, while offering a great lesson in humanity.