I was in the elevator on my way out of the doctor's office when a woman pushing a stroller noticed the book in my hand: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto.

"Good book?" she asked.

"It's a great book," I said. "It's a horrible story."

She said, "It's about Ernest Hemingway?"

"Huh?" I said. Tucked away deep in the back of my mind I already had some photograph of Ernest Hemingway as a young man in a dress that was struggling to come to the surface, but at that moment I really had no idea what she was talking about.

"I heard on the radio that Ernest Hemingway was raised as a girl."

"Wow. I've never heard that before," I said, even though as soon as she'd said it I was pretty sure I had. "I'll have to check that out."

Wikipedia confirms it, of course. Grace Hemingway dressed her son as a girl for at least two, possibly six, and as many as thirteen years. (That last one can't possibly be accurate -- it's Wikipedia, handle with care.)

It explains a lot about him, actually.

In any event, the Colapinto book really is a horrible story. I couldn't put it down. When a pair of twins is born and the circumcision for one is horribly botched, doctors conclude that the best option is to remove what's left of the penis altogether and fashion simulated female genitalia in the infant's nether regions. Bruce was raised as Brenda for 14 years, until she was finally told the truth about her past and allowed to reclaim a male identity as David Reimer.

It's a true story, and Colapinto does an masterful job of letting you into Brenda/David's private, confusing hell.

All these bad things happen thtough the pernicious influence of the book's villain, an insane sexologist named Dr. John Money, who is convinced that biology plays absolutely no role in assigning gender difference, and that intersex or disfigured children should be subjected to radical sex-change operations in infancy and then reared as the new gender. And that's the least crazy thing he believes.

Like I said, it's all true. It's an unbelievablely awful, gut-wrenching story, and an astounding book to read. And googling for links I just found its sad coda: this past summer, David killed himself.