In 1966, identical twin boys Bruce and Brian were born to a young couple
in Canada, and several months after birth, Bruce was circumcised. The operation
went terribly and tragically wrong, and his genitals were completely removed.
Doctors convinced his parents that his only hope for a normal life was to raise
Bruce as a girl—and so they tried.
Bruce,
renamed Brenda, always knew that something was different about “her,” but
until “she” finally confronted her parents as a young teen, “she” had no
idea what had happened to her. Years of therapy (some of it quite strange and
even abusive), girls’ toys and clothing—none of it could change the
neurological sense that Brenda had that she was really a male, and so she
confronted her parents and they admitted what had happened.
Brenda began retransforming herself into a boy and later underwent
reconstructive surgery to reclaim her physical self and now lives as a married
man.
This
incredible story describes a medical and psychological experiment gone horribly
awry, and the amazing miracle of how a young man managed to salvage a normal
life—and forgiveness—from the tragedy that had befallen him.