As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by Colapinto John

Author:Colapinto, John [Colapinto, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Biography, Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9780060929596
Amazon: 0060929596
Goodreads: 41379
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2000-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

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Upon entering Dr. McKenty’s office at the Child Guidance Clinic for her first session on 2 January 1979, Brenda was surprised by the sight of the smiling, elderly, gray-haired woman who welcomed her. She was dressed in a tweed skirt and matching jacket and stood no more than five feet one inch tall. “She looked like she’d be baking cookies for her grandchildren,” David says. “She didn’t look like a typical psychiatrist.”

And indeed, Mary McKenty was not a typical representative of the profession. McKenty had always eschewed the strict Freudian rules governing psychiatrist-patient relations—rules that frowned on excessive personal contact, or even warmth, between doctor and patient. She had always preferred to use a nurturing approach that was, in part, a reaction to the circumstances of her own childhood. Born in 1916, McKenty had been reared in an affluent home (her Scottish immigrant father worked for Richardson’s, the province’s most profitable grain company) but one lacking in introspection and overt displays of warmth. “Her Scottish upbringing was not attuned to psychiatry,” says Evelyn Loadman, who first met McKenty in 1934 when the two were among the first women pre-med students in Manitoba history. “But Mary happened to be the kind of person who was very sensitive to others and couldn’t really figure life out until she started to think about what we are made of.”

It was in the early 1940s, in her first job at the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg, that McKenty’s unique gifts as a child psychiatrist emerged. McKenty made no apparent attempts to delve into the protected realms of her patient’s unconscious. Instead she would come down to the child’s level, playing games, encouraging her patient to draw, paint, and write. Thus lulled into a state of distracted absorption, children could reveal themselves by word and deed. Loadman recalls that McKenty’s nonpressuring approach lent an almost magical quality to her ability to rid her patients of neurotic behaviors—bed-wetting, hair-pulling—that had resisted the efforts of other therapists. “She was the only one who ever cured anybody as a psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital,” Loadman says with a touch of wonder in her voice.

McKenty was hired by the Winnipeg Child Guidance Clinic at its inception in the late 1960s and quickly established a reputation for success with even the most difficult children. Indeed, when Keith Sigmundson first inherited Brenda Reimer’s fraught and complex case in late 1976, he initially tried to assign it to McKenty, but she was recovering from a double mastectomy and thinking about retirement, and she turned down the case. Sigmundson returned to her only in the fall of 1978, when he was unable to find any other female psychiatrist willing to take Brenda on. Recognizing that Sigmundson was desperate, McKenty finally gave in and took the case.

Ron and Janet formed an immediate liking for the calm, grandmotherly psychiatrist. Brenda was, by necessity, more circumspect.

On the one hand, Brenda was drawn to McKenty. She liked how the psychiatrist spoke in a kindly, conversational voice and refrained from scribbling on a pad.

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