John Colapinto

Who is John Colapinto?

John Colapinto is an award-winning journalist, author and novelist and is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Prior to working at The New Yorker, Colapinto wrote for Vanity Fair, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and in 1995 he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he published feature stories on a variety of subjects ranging from AIDS, to kids and guns, to heroin in the music business, to Penthouse magazine creator, Bob Guccione. In 1998, he published a 20,000 word feature story in Rolling Stone titled "The True Story of John/Joan", an account of David Reimer, who had undergone a sex change in infancy—a medical experiment long heralded as a success, but which was, in fact, a failure. The story, which detailed not only Reimer's tortured life, but the medical scandal surrounding its cover-up, won the ASME Award for reporting and in 2000, Colapinto published a book-length account of the case, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. The book was a New York Times bestseller and the film rights were bought by Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.