John Colapinto > Quotes

“You can go to thousand schools, and it's always the same. Because the standard rule of thumb is: There's the girls over here, and there's the boys over there. Separated. Which direction [do I go]?”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

“That's a typical tomboy thing; I did the same thing. You're just a tomboy.' But I was saying to myself, No, it's not quite like that. I don't think that's quite it.”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

“David remembers an incident from this period when Brenda found a pair of her mother’s black kid gloves in a closet. “They felt nice and soft inside,” David says. “I put them on. They reminded me of those cool Italian race car gloves that you see in the movies. I was thinking, These would give a good grip on the steering wheel. All of a sudden I realized my mother was behind me. I looked around and she was smiling at me, and she said, ‘Go ahead. If you want to wear them, go ahead.’ She thought I was trying to be feminine.”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl – The Riveting New York Times Bestseller About Medical Arrogance and Personal Triumph

“For as David explains, when seven-year-old Brenda daydreamed of an ideal future, she saw herself as a twenty-one-year-old male with a mustache, a sports car, and surrounded by admiring friends. "He was someone I wanted to be," David says today, reflecting on those childhood fantasies”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

“You know, if I had lost my arms and my legs and wound up in a wheelchair where you're moving everything with a little rod in your mouth--would that make me less of a person? It just seems that they implied that you're nothing if your penis is gone. The second you lose that, you're nothing, and they've got to do surgery and hormones to turn you into something. Like you're a zero. It's like your whole personality, everything about you is all directed--all pinpointed--toward what's between the legs. And to me, that's ignorant. I don't have the kind of education that these scientists and doctors and psychologists have, but to me it's very ignorant. If a woman lost her breasts, do you turn her into a guy? To make her feel 'whole and complete'?" - David Reimer”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

“Grumbach adds, "John Money is a major figure, and what he says gets handed down and accepted as gospel by some”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

“While Money's theory of human newborns as total psychosexual blank slates may strike a contemporary reader as science fiction, such was not the case in the mid-1950s, when it was met with almost universal acceptance by clinicians and scientists”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl