Sex: A Horizon Guide Page #4

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of the immune system,

which can actively fight

the infection.

But HIV uses the Langerhans cells

as a gateway to the body.

It's a Trojan horse, basically.

The Langerhans cell is in fact

allowing the virus to enter the body,

and carry to the very system,

namely the lymph glands,

where those viruses

can start proliferating.

Circumcision reduces the risk of

being infected by HIV by over 60%,

and is now recommended

by the World Health Organisation

as an important part

of disease prevention.

It's hoped that HIV/ AIDS

will be vanquished one day,

but for the moment the disease

is being held at bay

by a mixture of anti-retroviral

drugs and sex education.

As well as tackling diseases

that spread amongst us

through sexual contact,

scientists have also tried to help

with problems of gender identity.

Biologically speaking,

it should be straightforward.

After all, the chromosomes we get

from our parents determine our sex.

Two X chromosomes for a girl,

an X and a Y chromosome for a boy.

Beyond that simple equation, though,

scientists are still studying

how exactly our genes

turn us into either men or women.

Of course, there's much more

to being female or male

than just which body parts

you do or don't have.

What makes us feel

and act like men or women?

There has been a long debate

over how much our gender identity

is controlled by nature or nurture.

And for the latter half

of the 20th century,

the argument focused

on the tragic story of one boy.

On 27th April 1966, Janet Reimer

took her baby twin boys

Bruce and Brian to her local

hospital in Winnipeg, Canada,

for a routine circumcision.

But instead of using a knife,

doctors chose to use an electric

cauterisation technique.

Bruce went first,

but the equipment malfunctioned,

and Bruce's penis

was burned beyond repair.

Janet was devastated.

Daily, I was crying.

Every time I changed his diaper

I'd cry.

I was in shock...

..for a while.

I guess about a year I was in shock.

Janet had no idea what to do

after the botched operation.

Until, one night,

she saw a glimmer of hope

when she was watching a talk show.

One of the guests was a radical

psychologist called Dr John Money.

Dr John Money, a psychologist

at John Hopkins,

is one of the leading advocates

of sex-change operations.

Dr Money is in the bear pit

tonight with Alvin Davis.

Dr Money, it's still a pretty

drastic procedure, isn't it?

Well, it's a drastic procedure

by your standards and mine,

but for the people

who are living in desperation,

perhaps the best way

to understand it

is that it seems no more drastic

to them than circumcision.

Hoping that something

could be done for her son,

Janet wrote to Dr Money.

He called back as soon as

he got her letter.

Dr Money needed Bruce's

unique case to prove a theory

he had been working on.

His theory was that gender

wasn't just down to genes -

that it was much more malleable.

He believed that you could take a

child who was genetically one sex

and raise it successfully

as the other -

provided you started in infancy.

His theory was known

as Gender Neutrality.

Faced with an almost impossible

decision,

on Dr Money's advice, Janet had

her two-year-old son castrated.

From then on he was dressed

and raised as a girl, called Brenda.

When Dr Money announced his work

with the Reimers to the world,

he was hailed as a genius.

His theory on the malleability

of gender became hugely influential

amongst doctors and psychologists

around the world.

But there was a problem.

Unbeknownst to

the scientific community,

the experiment had gone wrong.

I didn't like dressing like a girl,

I didn't like behaving like a girl,

I didn't like acting like a girl.

Brenda Reimer was now living

as a man called David.

After the operation, Brenda had been

taught to dress and act like a girl.

But she felt like a boy.

Well, I wore dresses on occasion.

And I never played

with girl's stuff,

I usually got stuck with dolls

or something like that,

for my birthday or Christmas.

They sat in a corner

collecting dust.

I played with my brother's things.

During the early years, I thought

we had made the right choice -

that it would work out. Dr Money

kept saying it would work out.

And I thought, well, he should know.

But when Brenda was 14, her parents,

realising the confusion and misery

caused by her changed identity,

told her and her brother the truth.

You don't wake up one morning

and say, "Oh, I'm a boy today."

You know? You know!

It's in you! You know, it's in

your genetics, it's in your brain.

Nobody has to tell you who you are.

Dr Money's experiment to

raise a boy as a girl had failed,

and the story of the Reimer brothers

ended with tragedy.

Unable to deal with

what had happened to David,

his brother Brian became depressed

and died from a drug overdose.

Traumatised by his brother's death,

and with a catalogue of personal

disasters in his adult life,

in 2004, David shot himself.

It didn't work because that's life.

Because you're human,

and you're not stupid,

and eventually...

you'll end up being who you are.

The tragic story of David Reimer

seems to show that

the roots of our gender identity

lie in genetics and not in nurture.

And indeed evidence that Dr Money's

theory might have been flawed

was already emerging

in the late 1960s,

just as he was announcing

his supposedly successful theory.

That evidence came from the brain

of a rat in Los Angeles.

A team from the University

of California

were comparing male

and female rat brains

in minute detail.

They were hoping to find

a physical difference

that would explain differences

in male and female behaviour.

Slice by slice,

millimetre by millimetre,

they mapped the tiny organs.

And one day, they found something.

Comparing tissue

from the hypothalamus,

right in the centre of the brain,

they noticed a structural

difference between the sexes.

A discrete part of the hypothalamus

was twice as big

in the male rat's brain,

on the left,

as in the female's, on the right.

Here's that part, isolated

from the brain of a male rat.

They called it the sexually

dimorphic nucleus, or SDN.

And here it is in

the female rat's brain.

Here was a clear

anatomical difference

between the brains of

male and female rats.

These differences are created by

sex hormones before the rat is born.

While a male rat is in the womb,

testosterone is already

shaping its brain.

The SDN is also larger

in the human male brain,

compared with the female.

And the SDN is involved

in sexual behaviour.

The discovery of the SDN was

important because it showed

that there were real differences

in the brains of men and women.

And other real-life cases

showed that gender identity

was already permanently

programmed at birth.

Dr Money's experiment

was ultimately flawed, because of

the way that hormones affected

the fledgling brain of the baby.

But while gender identity is

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