After that class, Jim went to the doctor\u2019s surgery and requested his medical records. He read them in the car park. Almost the first thing he saw was that he was \u201cXY\u201d. He had male chromosomes. But there was more. His penis had been small. His genitals were \u201cambiguous\u201d. \u201cThere was all this documentation about how my genital presentation needed to be altered.\u201d<\/p>\n
The surgeon got to work. Or as Jim puts it, \u201cMy genitals were crafted to have a very satisfying, pleasing vulva presentation, so that I could then be safely taken home by my parents.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was, we learn, a simple pragmatism to this. One of the extraordinary aspects of Jim\u2019s tale \u2014 beyond the fact that we learn it is not so rare at all \u2014 is that Hughes-Hallett is able to get at it from all sides: she has interviews with Jim, but also archive interviews with his parents. <\/p>\n
And incredibly, she interviews his surgeon, who explains what he did that day. \u201cIn 1976 the medical thought was these patients need to be surgically constructed,\u201d Richard Carter says. \u201cIt was so much easier to make it look more like a clitoris, as opposed to trying to make a penis. So that\u2019s what we did.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"James](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/a88906d3-69be-4936-b1d1-02d2009e0edc.jpg\")
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The Secret of Me creators: producer James Rogan, director Grace Hughes-Hallett, star Jim Ambrose and producer Flora Stewart<\/p>\n
ROBBY KLEIN\/GETTY IMAGES; IMDB<\/p>\n
Hughes-Hallett came upon this story thanks to her brother, a urology surgeon. \u201cFour years ago he called me from a medical conference and said, \u2018Doctors here are talking about all of these adults that are coming to urologists having had surgeries done on them as infants. They are begging for them to be undone.\u2019 He said, \u2018There\u2019s something in this.\u2019 I really didn\u2019t understand what he was talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Depending on how expansively you define it, as many as 1 in 60 babies is born with a disorder (or difference) of sexual development (DSD), although the figure for children in which their genitals are hard to classify is many times lower. For example, Dsdfamilies, a UK charity, estimates that there are about 130 children diagnosed each year with DSD \u2014 about 1 in 4,000. Historically, and sometimes today, a decision was taken at birth to make their genitals accord more to one sex than another.<\/p>\n
But what do genitals, or gender, matter? Maybe they don\u2019t. In the 1960s and 1970s, amid sexual and social liberation, there came ideas of gender liberation. What if our idea of what it means, socially, to be a man or a woman is an imposition, a reflection of societal expectation? There was no doubt that a lot of it was. There is no evolved reason for girls to like pink, for instance. <\/p>\n
John Money, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist, went further. What if, in nature v nurture, it was all nurture? What if we were a blank slate, and what we thought of as inherently \u201cmasculine\u201d or \u201cfeminine\u201d behaviour was nothing but a mirror of our prejudices? <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a characteristic of the human species that men and women have gender identity, that newborn babies don\u2019t and that developing infants develop one,\u201d Money said. \u201cThey develop it in much the same way that they develop their native language.\u201d<\/p>\n
He had the evidence to prove it too \u2014 a natural experiment that could almost have been designed. There were twin boys, Bruce and Brian, in the 1960s who, at the age of seven months, went for a circumcision. It was botched, and Bruce lost his penis.<\/p>\n
![\"Bo](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/f30da1c8-509f-409f-afdd-336a88667497.jpg\")
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The film features the American intersex activist Bo Laurent, better known by her pseudonym Cheryl Chase<\/p>\n
Money advised the parents to raise him as a girl. And, according to Money\u2019s research, it was an astonishing success. In papers Money wrote about the case, Brenda was interested in dresses and dolls and sugar and spice and all things nice. Brian was a normal boy, Brenda a normal girl. Her gender had been constructed, just like her genitals. <\/p>\n
This evidence had coalesced just in time for Jim to be born. His doctors followed the Money protocol. Surgery at birth. Hormones at puberty. More surgery in late teens. Part of the Money protocol is that you don\u2019t say why this is happening. Don\u2019t tell the truth.<\/p>\n
So Jim\u2019s parents didn\u2019t. He remembers a childhood that was never quite right. Tomboyish. \u201cI consider myself lucky that I got a bicycle in the same year I got a Barbie,\u201d he says. \u201cOne got far more use than the other.\u201d He found a home in the football team, then found his teammates started getting earrings and boyfriends. <\/p>\n
At the age of 12, he sat with his mother while she tearfully explained what came next. \u201cShe said, \u2018Soon you\u2019re going to have to take these pills that will help you grow and develop breasts and make you look like other girls.\u2019 Finally, she said, \u2018You\u2019ll never be able to have children of your own.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, before college, came the surgery itself. They took part of his colon to construct a vagina. \u201cPresto!\u201d Jim says. \u201cBetween my legs there is a hole for my husband to have sex with.\u201d Today, Jim no longer has his colon-vagina, nor his breasts. He has a beard and he takes testosterone \u2014 the testosterone that should have been made in the testes that were removed.<\/p>\n
Brenda was not so lucky. Even while Money was writing papers about how feminine Brenda was, her mother was writing to Money about how tomboyish she was. When, decades later, Brenda was tracked down, she was living as a man called David. David later killed himself. Money never admitted the study had gone wrong.<\/p>\n
Jim cannot forgive him for that. \u201cHe knew before my birth it had failed completely. Ego and reputation were more important than telling the truth and saving children like myself from mutilation and shame and brutal secrecy.\u201d<\/p>\n
His is, he is clear, not a transgender<\/a> story. The intersex<\/a> community is tired of being co-opted into a different debate. Indeed, they suffer by being co-opted. Testosterone, for him, is a medical necessity. Hughes-Hallett said Jim is worried that, because of restrictions on transgender medicine, he will struggle to access the hormone. \u201cIt isn\u2019t an identity thing for him,\u201d Hughes-Hallett says. \u201cIt\u2019s a survival thing.\u201d<\/p>\n