A Boyhood Stolen

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl
by John Colapinto
New York: HarperCollins, 2000
(277 pages; $26.00, cloth)

reviewed by Graeme Hunter

John Colapinto’s well-documented, lucid book is mainly an account of the devastating consequences of raising a boy as a girl. Unfortunately it deals with an actual case. It is a horror story of malpractice, incompetence, and evil among doctors, sex researchers, psychologists, and social activists. Colapinto reveals how the exploitation, manipulation, and mutilation of one unfortunate child was allowed to stand for years as a textbook case of progressive thinking and therapy, and lead to untold grief for many other children. Like a cutaway picture of a mineshaft, the book also lays bare down to the core one of the subterraneous structures on which the dark side of the culture wars is based.

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Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).

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