Posted on 05/12/2004 8:13:22 AM PDT by billorites
Winnipeg man who was born a boy but raised as a girl in a famous nurture-versus-nature experiment has died at the age of 38. David Reimer, who shared his story in the pages of a book and on the TV show Oprah, took his own life last Tuesday.
His mother, Janet Reimer, said she believes her son would still be here today had it not been for the devastating gender study that led to much emotional hardship.
"He managed to have so much courage," Janet told The Sun yesterday. "I think he felt he had no options. It just kept building up and building up."
After a botched circumcision as a toddler, David became the subject of an experiment dubbed the John/Joan case in the '60s and '70s.
Janet said she still harbours anger toward a Baltimore doctor who convinced her and her husband, Ron, to give female hormones to their son and raise him as a daughter, Brenda. Kids were cruel to Brenda growing up in Winnipeg.
"They wouldn't let him use the boys' washroom or the girls. He had to go in the back alley," Janet recalled.
MATCHED CONTROL SUBJECT
This gender transformation was widely reported as a success and proof that children are not by nature feminine or masculine but through nurture are socialized to become girls or boys. David's identical twin brother, Brian, offered researchers a matched control subject.
But when David discovered the truth about his past during his teenage years, he rebelled and resumed his male identity, eventually marrying and becoming a stepfather to three children.
In 2000, author John Colapinto wrote As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, providing David an opportunity to tell the real story. It was difficult but David wanted to save other children from a similar fate, his mother said.
MEDIA SWIRL
While he had spoken anonymously in the past, David was launched into a media swirl after Colapinto's book was published, starting with an appearance on Oprah in February 2000.
"I thought the Reimers were just the most dignified, fantastic people on that program," Colapinto told The Sun at the time.
"I think in a way these wonderful working-class people from Winnipeg just kind of stepped onto the world stage on Oprah and were a lesson to us all in dignity and survival and openness and courage."
David recently slumped into a depression after losing his job and separating from his wife.
He was also still grieving the death of his twin brother two years earlier, their mother said. A cause of death was never confirmed but Janet suspects it might have been an overdose of medication which Brian required to treat schizophrenia.
Daily, David would visit his brother's grave, placing fresh flowers and pulling weeds to keep it tidy.
Just last week, David told his parents that things would get better soon but they never imagined he was planning to commit suicide.
Janet said she'll remember her son as "the most generous, loving soul that ever lived."
"He liked music. He liked jokes. He was a very funny guy," said Janet, who spent Mother's Day grieving the loss of her son. "He was so generous. He gave all he had."
The funeral is today at 2 p.m. at Klassen Funeral Chapel.
”Guns Before Butter.”
Being Brenda
They were meant to show that gender was determined by nurture, not nature - one identical twin raised as a boy and the other brought up as a girl after a botched circumcision. But two years ago Brian Reimer killed himself, and last week David - formerly Brenda - took his life too. Oliver Burkeman and Gary Younge unravel the tragic story of Dr Money's sex experiment
Oliver Burkeman and Gary Younge
Wednesday May 12, 2004
The Guardian
Until a few years ago, the name David Reimer meant little to those outside his immediate circle, and by the time he killed himself last Tuesday in unknown circumstances in his hometown of Winnipeg, it was already slipping back towards obscurity - a name belonging to nobody more remarkable than a local odd-job man, a 38-year-old former slaughterhouse worker who was separated from his wife, and enjoyed shopping at flea markets and tinkering with his car. In fact, to anyone taking an interest in the development of psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, Reimer's life story would have long been infamous, but also pseudonymous. Going by the name "John", and subsequently "Joan", David Reimer had been an unwitting guinea-pig - along with his identical twin brother Brian - in a medical experiment at first celebrated, then notorious. Masterminded by a prominent Baltimore physician, John Money, it was an attempt to settle, once and for all, the fraught nature-versus-nurture debate: to prove that gender was so fluid that by a mere change in childrearing practice, plus a little surgery, a boy could be turned into a girl, while his twin developed as a male.
It would split the world of sexual psychology in two. And after 12 years of traumatising treatment, followed by a further two decades spent attempting to repair the damage, it would drive David Reimer to his death."It was like brainwashing," Reimer once said, having resumed his male identity after a childhood spent as Brenda. "I'd give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it's torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind."
The tragedy has its roots in what seemed like a routine trip to hospital in 1966 for Janet and Ron Reimer and their twin baby boys, Bruce and Brian. Doctors had recommended circumcision, a practice still routine in much of north America, but Bruce's operation went distressingly wrong. Like almost every detail of the story, what actually happened is still fiercely disputed but what is clear is that the electric cauterising machine being used by doctors caused burning to his penis so severe as to render the organ unrescuable.
Reconstructive genital surgery was still rudimentary, and medical experts could offer only pessimism. So when the despairing parents happened to catch a television show, some months later, on which John Money was propounding his radical new theories about gender formation, it seemed to offer a lifeline. "He was saying that it could be that babies are born neutral, and you could change their gender," Janet Reimer later told John Colapinto, author of a book on the experiment entitled As Nature Made Him.
In photographs taken at the time, Money - then, as now, affiliated to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland - looks like a parody of a progressive "sexologist", turtlenecked and moustachioed, and his writings did nothing to dispel that impression. Raised in a conservative religious family in New Zealand, he had rebelled and become a self-described "missionary of sex", revelling in shocked responses to his tireless advocacy of open marriages and - a particular favourite - bisexual group sex.
At their most extreme, Money's public statements had appeared to endorse, or at least not to condemn, incest and paedophilia, but there was no hint of that in the television show Janet and Ron Reimer saw. They wrote to him, and he wrote swiftly back. He was confident, he said, that Bruce could be successfully raised as a girl. From an experimental perspective, Brian Reimer would provide the perfect control: his genetic inheritance was identical to Bruce's. The only difference was that one would be nurtured as a girl, and the other as a boy.
Money's emphasis on nurture over nature played well with the progressive spirit of the times, and especially with the women's movement, its proponents eager to establish that women's traditional social roles were not biologically pre-ordained. "Postwar, in any case, there was a move away from people being innately, biologically, inherently anything," says Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College in London. "We'd just seen Nazism, and the emphasis had been put on the idea that certain people were innately evil - Jews and gypsies, among others - so the emphasis on culture and society fitted well with social democratic ideals." The Reimers did not engage in this kind of debate. "I looked up to [John Money] as a god," Janet said simply.
Bruce Reimer started to become Brenda on July 3, 1967. Physicians at Johns Hopkins surgically castrated him, and the remaining skin was used to forge a "cosmetic vaginal cleft". Money sent the family back to Winnipeg with strict instructions. "He told us not to talk about it," Ron Reimer told John Colapinto. "Not to tell [Brenda] the whole truth, and that she shouldn't know she wasn't a girl."
Things started going wrong almost immediately. Janet Reimer recalled dressing Brenda in her first dress just before the child was due to turn two. "She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, she knows she's a boy and she doesn't want girls' clothing." Brenda was bullied viciously at school. When she urinated standing up in the school lavatories, she was threatened with a knifing.
Whether all the blame should lie with Money remains a matter of contention. His supporters argue that reconstructive surgery techniques of the time were such that trying to turn Bruce into Brenda might genuinely have been the least worst option. In public, Money advertised the "John/Joan" study as a resounding success. "This dramatic case," Time magazine reported, picking up on his salesmanship, "provides strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns on masculine and feminine behaviour can be altered."
In private, though, things were spinning into chaos. Brenda was required to attend regular therapy sessions with Money in Baltimore, in the company of her brother. According to Colapinto's account, they soon degenerated into horrifying encounters that deeply traumatised the two children. Showing the children "explicit sexual pictures" was seemingly central to Money's theories of gender reassignment. David Reimerlater recalled, as Brenda, "getting yelled at by Money ... he told me to take my clothes off, and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed 'No!' I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking."
In the children's grimmest recollection - one they found almost impossible to talk about years later - Money allegedly made "Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks", an element of Money's theory he referred to as "sexual rehearsal play". (The author John Heidenry, who wrote a recent review defending the sexologist, calls this charge "outrageous and offensive", and says Brian, the source of the claim, may have been suffering false memory syndrome.)
By the time Brenda reached her teens she had attempted suicide at least once; she refused further surgery but consented, though irregularly, to take oestrogen supplements to encourage the development of breasts. John Money gradually drifted from the Reimers' lives, but Brenda remained under constant psychiatric treatment. It was after one such session with a Winnipeg psychiatrist in 1980 that Ron Reimer collected his daughter in the car and, instead of taking her home, drove her to an ice-cream parlour, where he told her everything.
The upturn in Reimer's fortunes lasted several years. Brenda opted for a sex change within weeks of her father telling her the truth. Thanks to developments in phalloplasty, Brenda, taking the name David, received surgery that after five years left him with a reconstructed penis resembling a real one, with limited sensation, and usable for sex. When he was 23 he met Jane, a single mother of three, and married her soon afterwards. In 2000, he went public with his story.
But his happiness didn't last. For reasons that remain unclear, David and Jane eventually separated. Then, two years ago, Brian Reimer apparently killed himself, taking an overdose of drugs he was taking for schizophrenia. David reportedly felt responsible for the death, and visited Brian's grave daily, weeding the plot and bringing fresh flowers.
Despite Colapinto's claims that David made a large amount of money from the book, those who knew him said he was often hard up; at the Transcona golf club, in Winnipeg's eastern suburbs, where he did odd jobs, the members had a whip round for him so he could afford to eat. Friends say he had became particularly distraught during the last few months after he bought thousands of dollars' worth of shares in an investment that flopped.
The world of psychology learned of the failure of Money's experiment through a paper by a rival, Dr Milton Diamond, of the University of Hawaii, who eventually traced those who had taken over treatment of the twins. For Lynne Segal, the story of the experiment does not settle the nature/nurture debate one way or the other - her view, widely shared today, is that the dichotomy is false - but it shows the perils of psychologists trying to prove too much through research. "It's far too simplistic, and far too interventionist, this idea that we can control and model and shape people to prove one thing or another."
John Money remains an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins. "He's not commenting on this story," his assistant told the Guardian yesterday. "There is no comment to make."
· As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto is published by Quartet, priced £10
Had it been me, NO WAY would I have preceeded the "doctor" into the grave.
The man's penis was destroyed (actually, it was BURNED off) during the circumcision. From that moment on, his life was ruined by "well-meaning" people, including IMHO his parents.
In fact, this story was one of the reasons why, after my own son was born, we decided to forego circumcision. Apparently, such "accidents" happen a LOT.
My wife and I agreed; we would not risk mutilating him for no good reason at all.
And does this moron harbour anger toward herself for cooperating in this child abuse for years on end?
Probably. This would not make life any easier, as all of us other morons would like to point out.
My question is, who's the greater moron? The moron, educated several orders of magnitude beyond his intelligence, who fancies himself a god able to remake the universe according to his whim, or the plain moron who goes to what is supposed to be a great professional wizard for advice, and believes what is told her?
While this "treatment" was going on, the psychiatrist and the other doctors could see that the family was suffering terribly, but none of them wanted to challenge the reputation of John Money. That is, until "Brenda/David" finally put "her/his" foot down and refused the surgery that would make "her/him" a woman.
I think his parents were "well meaning." They were desperate, and they were sold a bill of goods by a pervert with a lot of impressive credentials. Money, on the other hand, had an agenda. See Post #9. And he was willing to destroy these children to advance it. I repeat, the man should be in jail.
(steely)
lady lawyer wrote: I wonder what any of us would have done in this mother's situation. She had a little boy who was horribly mutilated. As the article said, at that time there was little hope of reconstruction offered. So Money, the snake oil salesman, offered them a choice for their baby: Life as an irreparably mutilated boy, or life as a girl who couldn't reproduce, but would be outwardly normal.
Nope, I don't buy it. If a child gets his arm chewed off by a lawnmower, you don't amputate the other one to make it "match", even if a doctor tells you to. Not if you love your child. Most likely, this man's parents were too morally and intellectually lazy to bother with raising a maimed child, so they turned it over to the guy with all the letters behind his name. And obviously, they knew that their other (uninjured) son was also in "counseling" with this doctor, and they purposefully looked the other way. I say they were willing participants in physical, sexual and psychological child abuse.
It's one thing when there is some legitimate gender-related ambiguity, like androgen insensitivity, though surgeons should not be surgically 'assigning sex' to infants in those cases, either. But this kid was perfectly normal genetically and phenotypically. The doctor was just mutilating him purposefully.
FR addict wrote: The doctor in this case sounded evil, but I think other doctors have been trying to figure out what is best for the child.
Sex chromosomes were identified nearly a century ago. There is no excuse for mid-to-late 20th century doctors pretending that they don't exist. BTW, I saw that Discovery show, too.
Really? I've only heard of such a thing a couple of times in my life, including this incident.
You have to understand that in the early sixties not many people had Ph.D's and so the ones that did were thought of as super smart people, and while he may have messed up, she had no other options, in her mind, and also people didn't sue people like they do today over hot coffee...
This quote was actually from a PBS program that interviewed the mother, David, and Dr. Diamond, not Dr. Money (of course he wouldn't comment)
ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING: I think she was faced with an extreme situation, that there were no resources available to her to figure out what would be the best thing to do. And so to have a well-known authority say, "I have a solution for you," must have been incredibly tempting.
The mother may claim she had "no other options" but that's simply false. The most obvious option would be to simply raise him normally (w/ a urinary catheter or whatever such means were necessary to accommodate hygiene, etc.). What they did was child abuse, playing sick psychological games with a kid's mind.
BTW, why'd you sign up to resurrect a thread from a year ago? Did this page come up in a Google search or something?
As a species, we will be found severely lacking. G-d help us.
A lone crackpot is hardly a member of an "elite." Lord what do you think makes an "elite?"
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