The American Spectator

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Special Report

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Colapinto shared his profits with David, and that and the sale of movie rights allowed him to quit his job at a slaughterhouse. But leisure was no blessing. "David was the last person in the world that needed to be sitting around thinking," Colapinto told National Public Radio after David's death. "His past was so horrific that when that seeped up into consciousness, only bad things could happen." David himself told Colapinto, "I'd give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it's torture."

A torture that was more than his mutilated mind could bear. David's wife left him; he lost thousands in a failed investment; and couldn't find new work. Brother Brian took his own life in 2002, overdosing on his schizophrenia medication. Two years later, in a supermarket parking lot, David blew his brains out.

And what of John Money? His brother Donald told the New Zealand Herald that John Money never expressed any regret for an operation that managed to leave two corpses. According to the Guardian, he has "no comment to make." Money remains an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins, and no one has rushed forward to retract some of the honors he was showered with.

It is some small consolation that the John/Joan case proved that sexual identity is more than a "social construct." It is a pity that David and Brian Reimer had to die to prove what all sane people know already.