John Colapinto

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.