David Reimer committed suicide on May 4. He was a blue-collar
worker in Winnipeg, the Canadian city where East meets West. David
lived a quiet life: fishing with his father, backyard barbecues
with his wife and kids, tinkering with cars. If this were all there
was to the story, his death would be sad but not tragic. Except
that David Reimer — born Bruce, later known as Brenda — was
sacrificed to the strange god of post-modern sexuality.
Bruce Reimer and his twin brother Brian were born August 22,
1965. At eight months, the boys developed urination problems, and
doctors recommended they be circumcised. An April snowstorm kept
the regular physician from making it to the hospital the day of the
operation. The electric cauterizing machine the substitute used
burned David’s penis so badly that most of it was destroyed. (After
the accident, Brian’s penis healed without surgery.) Back then,
reconstructive genital surgery was in its infancy. The Reimers were
told Bruce could never live a normal life.
That was before the Reimers saw a CBC interview of John Money. A
psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, Money was one of the
world’s top “sexologists” — he coined the term “gender identity.”
He spoke of the successful surgeries he had performed on
hermaphrodites, children born with male and female sex organs, and
those born with underdeveloped sex organs. His contention that
“gender” was a “social construct,” that a male baby could easily be
raised as a female, seemed the answer to the Reimers’ prayers.
They flew to Baltimore. Money persuaded them to raise Bruce as a
girl, and he was castrated in July 1967. The Reimers were young,
barely out of their teens. They had been raised on farms, and
neither had even begun high school. Money did not tell them Bruce
was a guinea pig — no child born with normal sex organs had ever
been given a new “gender.”
But there was much John Money didn’t tell the Reimers. The CBC
interview didn’t mention that Money was a self-described
“missionary” of sex who celebrated nudism, open marriage, bisexual
orgies, and pedophilia. The Reimers had no idea to whom they had
entrusted their son’s future.
Money grew up hating his father, a relationship that seems to
have twisted his mind. It is no surprise he made his living in part
recommending that every child with ambiguous sexual organs be
carved into females. “I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality,” he
once claimed of his genitals. “I wondered if the world might really
be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human
males also were gelded at birth.”
GELDED-AT-BIRTH Bruce, now Brenda, grew up twisted as well. She
rejected her re-assigned sex wholeheartedly. She hated dresses and
refused to play with dolls, preferring her brother’s trucks. Things
got worse after she started school. There was simply nothing
feminine about her: She walked like a boy and fought like a boy,
enduring endless bullying. She later said she felt she must be
insane to feel as she did. Thoughts of suicide possessed her even
before puberty.
To the outside world, however, the John/Joan case, as it became
known, was a triumph. Money, who examined Brenda and Brian
annually, rarely gave a speech without extolling his experiment as
proof that nurture trumped nature. Brenda had completely accepted
herself as a girl, he claimed. And her twin brother, physically
identical in every respect save one, served as the perfect control
subject.
The world was more than willing to believe it. The theory of
behaviorism, popularized by B.F. Skinner, was in the ascendant. In
short, behaviorism posits that people do what they do based on how
well their actions are received by others — the ultimate “nurture”
argument.
Of course there was a political agenda at work. As Time
claimed in contemporary article, “This dramatic case provides
strong support for a major contention of women’s liberationists:
that conventional patterns on masculine and feminine behavior can
be altered.” Feminists heralded the case as proof there were no
significant differences between men and women.
The Reimers finally told Brenda the truth when she was 14. Her
social construct disappeared, and she became a boy again. He
rechristened himself David, after the giant killer and king. David
underwent surgery to remove the breasts that estrogen treatments
had produced and to replace the penis he had been robbed of.
The physical reconstruction made David happier, but his mind
remained mutilated. He took a gun with him when he tracked down the
doctor who had performed the botched circumcision. He left without
harming him, but made his first suicide attempt after a girlfriend
broadcast his bizarre history. On finding him unconscious, his
parents considered leaving him to die as an act of mercy.
The other Reimers were mutilated as well. Brian, enraged by the
continuous attention given to his twin, turned to petty crime in
adolescence and was later treated for mental illness. Ron drank
heavily, and Janet was plunged into depression.
BUT THEN THINGS GOT better for a time. David married a woman with
three children of her own, providing him with the family he could
never have himself. Brian made peace with David and his parents.
David forgave his parents.
The truth about David was revealed to the world with the
publication in 2000 of John Colapinto’s excellent, engrossing book,
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl.
David was inspired to tell his story after discovering that his
case had inspired a sexual mutilation industry. Colapinto’s book
estimates the number of infant sex re-assignments at over 100
annually in the U.S., and perhaps 1,000 globally.
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.
