Sociology of Gender, Film Review: Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis (Movie Review Sample)

Sociology of Gender, Film Review: Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis Student Full Name Institutional Affiliation Course Full Title Instructor Full Name Due Date Sociology of Gender, Film Review: Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis The film Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis tells the story of Bruce Reimer and his identical twin brother Brian, who led tragic lives due to Dr. John Money’s radical ideas on sex reassignment. Bruce had his entire penis cut off during a botched circumcision at the local hospital. The distraught parents sought the advice of Dr. Money, a highly renowned sexologist who believed that infants are gender neutral until they turn 2. He suggested that Bruce be brought up as a girl: in the documentary, Bruce is castrated at 18 months old and inserted with a rudimentary vulva (Stanley, 2014). However, Bruce continued behaving in a distinctly masculine fashion. As a young teenager, he came to reject the assigned female identity. Unfortunately, the trauma of Dr. Money’s controversial sex reassignment experiment would follow both twins into their adulthood. This essay will discuss what the documentary says about gender identity and the nurture over nature debate. The documentary Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis underline society’s need to fit individuals into the limited male/female gender classification. Bruce’s botched circumcision resulted in some form of gender ambiguity since the loss of his penis left him outside the rigid gender binary. Although Bruce was born male, the irreparable loss of his penis made it difficult for his parents to see him as such. The documentary illustrates the anxiety most parents experience when their children have ambiguous genitalia and cannot be categorized under either sex. More importantly, the film shows how society’s adherence to a binary knowledge of gender can result in disastrous consequences. Bruce’s traumatic gender ambiguity resulted in his parents trying to raise him as a girl, even removing his testicles and fashioning an undeveloped vaginal exterior from his scrotal tissue. While Bruce was biologically a male, he was treated as an intersex individual and reassigned to a female gender. The documentary illustrates the social emergency that surrounds gender ambiguity and the dangers of gender reassignment through social and genital normalization. Moreover, the medical management of children born with ambiguous genital configurations reflects the limiting cultural beliefs about the dichotomous nature of sex. In any society with a collective consciousness, labels are required to describe and clarify individual experiences and identities. People have long been classified as male or female based on their biological sex. This sexual binary divide is also a form of social control through which people are made to understand and adapt to conventional standards of masculinity and femininity (Spector, 2017). These widely held beliefs about the defining characteristics of masculinity and femininity have resulted in rigid, socially constructed binary categories. Gender and sex are interchangeable, and one’s biology dictates how the individual should behave and act. The documentary illustrates how cultural beliefs about the dichotomous nature of sex have tended to link one’s sexual anatomy with certain normative behaviors. Males are raised to behave and act like men. At the same time, females are taught to behave and act like women. However, associating a person’s sexual anatomy with specific social prescriptions for gender behavior and expression marginalizes those with ambiguous genital configurations (Alex et al., 2012). Individuals with ambiguous external genitalia who do not fit into the male-female dichotomy are faced with difficult questions about their gender identity. Consequently, the medical community has tended to apply surgical intervention during infancy to ensure children with ambiguous genitalia are assigned to a dimorphic sex category. In the case of Bruce, the traumatic loss of his penis resulted in an unclear gender identity that his parents tried to resolve through Money’s radical ideas of sex and gender reassignment. Parents have opted for medical intervention when their children have unclear gender identities. Bruce’s anxious parents sought Dr. Money, a pioneer in sex change surgery, who suggested that he be raised as a girl and undergo genital “normalization” to assign him a definite sex category. Dr. Money believed that a child was gender neutral until the age of 2. He claimed that a child’s sexual identification is determined by their social upbringing. In the documentary, Dr. Money suggests that Bruce be brought up as a girl and undergo surgical assignment to attain a more convincing aesthetic appearance (Stanley, 2014). The social upbringing of Bruce also reveals the power of gender stereotypes: for instance, Bruce’s parents thought it would be easier to raise him as a girl than a boy. They imagined the humiliations and frustrations Bruce would have to face as a boy and thought bringing him up as a girl would make it easier for him to fit in. Dr. Money suggested that Bruce be treated differently from Brian, his twin brother: the parents were to be gentle, sweet, and patient with Bruce, consistent with the gender stereotypes associated with femininity. The doctor insisted that Bruce (now called Brenda) wear women’s attire and studiously avoid pants as it would ruin the reassignment process. He was refrained from playing with boys’ toys and raised in the stereotypical trappings of femininity to reinforce his assigned female gender. In Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis, Dr. Money hails the rigorous sex and gender reassignment a success but Bruce has an unexplainable feeling that something isn...