John Colapinto
- Actor
- Writer
The Toronto-born writer John Colapinto is an award-winning journalist
and novelist who lives in New York City, where he is a staff writer at
"The New Yorker" magazine. Before joining "The New Yorker", Colapinto
was a contributing editor at "Rolling Stone", where he contributed
feature stories.
Colapinto's most famous piece of journalism, arguably, is his 1998 "Rolling Stone" article "The True story of John/Joan". The piece detailed the plight of David Reimer, who was born a healthy baby boy in Winnipeg in 1965. After a botched circumcision destroyed the infant's penis, Johns Hopkins psychologist Dr. John Money, the leading expert on gender identity, recommended a sex change for the lad so that he could be raised as a girl who would be able to have a normal heterosexual relationship when he/she grew up. The case of Reimer was long held up as a medical success story and justification for the idea that there are no true genders, that gender identity solely was a result of enculturation into sex roles. As Colapinto revealed, the sex-reassignment was, in fact, a failure.
Reimer's life as an artificial girl caused him a great deal of pain, (he eventually took his own life in 2004). Colapinto's article also elucidated the cover-up of the botched sex-reassignment by the surgery-happy mainstream medical establishment. The article won the ASME Award for reporting. In 2000, Colapinto published "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl", a book-length account of the Reimer case.
John Colapinto is married to fashion illustrator and artist, Donna Mehalko. They have one son.
Colapinto's most famous piece of journalism, arguably, is his 1998 "Rolling Stone" article "The True story of John/Joan". The piece detailed the plight of David Reimer, who was born a healthy baby boy in Winnipeg in 1965. After a botched circumcision destroyed the infant's penis, Johns Hopkins psychologist Dr. John Money, the leading expert on gender identity, recommended a sex change for the lad so that he could be raised as a girl who would be able to have a normal heterosexual relationship when he/she grew up. The case of Reimer was long held up as a medical success story and justification for the idea that there are no true genders, that gender identity solely was a result of enculturation into sex roles. As Colapinto revealed, the sex-reassignment was, in fact, a failure.
Reimer's life as an artificial girl caused him a great deal of pain, (he eventually took his own life in 2004). Colapinto's article also elucidated the cover-up of the botched sex-reassignment by the surgery-happy mainstream medical establishment. The article won the ASME Award for reporting. In 2000, Colapinto published "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl", a book-length account of the Reimer case.
John Colapinto is married to fashion illustrator and artist, Donna Mehalko. They have one son.
