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The Death of David Reimer - Reason.com
Why did David Reimer commit suicide?
Dr. Money And The Boy With No Penis | Watch Documentary Online for Free
==========
Read how this devastated his life and the lives of his twin brother and their parents.
How can we demand that people live out their lives lying to themselves and to others about their sexuality?
Why would we even want to do that?
On May 4, 2004, David Reimer committed suicide in Winnipeg. Thirty-eight years old, he had been a slaughterhouse worker and an odd-job man. He had also been both a boy and a girl, thanks to one of the darker episodes in the history of pseudoscientific hubris.
Born Bruce Reimer in 1965, David suffered a botched circumcision when he was eight months old. Most of his penis was burned off, and reconstructive surgery was too primitive at the time to restore it. Dr. John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University, persuaded Reimer's parents to have their son completely castrated and raised as a girl.
This was not simply a matter of trying to make the best of a bad situation. Money had been a leading exponent of the theory that children were born psychosexually neutral and could be assigned to either gender in the first years of their life. He had retreated somewhat from the most radical statement of this thesis, but stood by the central contention that when it came to sexual identity, nurture trumped nature. Brucenow named Brendawas an ideal test case. Along with everything else, she was an identical twin; so as an object of study, she came bundled with a built-in control.
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Brenda Reimer resisted being classified as a girl from the beginning. The first time she wore a dress, she tried to rip it off. She preferred her brother's toys to her own. (A toy sewing machine was untouched, Colapinto writes, "until the day when Brenda, who loved to take things apart to see how they worked, sneaked a screwdriver from her dad's tool kit and dismantled the toy.") She got into fights, insisted on peeing standing up, and ran into terrible problems at school, where the other kids quickly recognized her as someone who didn't fit the ordinary sexual categories. By the time she was 10, she was declaring that she wanted to grow up to marry a woman, not a man.
Money's meetings with Brenda were a darkly comic study in how a scientist could refuse to see the evidence he didn't want to see, and how a subject can gradually learn to respond to his cues. Worse, his efforts to make her conform to his expectations were coercive and abusive. Her refusal to receive vaginal surgeriesher penis was gone, but her doctors had not yet put a vagina in its placewas met not with an effort to understand her stance but with a series of attempts to manipulate her into agreeing to the procedures. (She succeeded in avoiding the surgery but was compelled to take estrogen pills, though she flushed them when she could.) Also disturbing was Money's belief that Brenda, in Colapinto's words, "must understand at a very early age the differences between male and female sex organs." Not an objectionable idea in itself, except that Money accomplished it by showing Brenda and her brother pictures of adults having sex and by forcing them to disrobe and examine each other's genitals. Worst of all, he allegedly insisted, starting when the twins were six, that they "play at thrusting movements and copulation"more bluntly, that they pretend to have sex in various positions while he watched. (This last detail has been disputed.)
Finally, when Brenda Reimer learned the truth about herself, at age 14, she decided to start living her life as a boy. She had her estrogen-created breasts removed, took testosterone injections, changed her name to David, and eventually had surgery to create a penis. In 1990 David married. The allegedly successful transformation of a boy baby into a girl was in fact a complete failure.
Why did David Reimer commit suicide?
Just shy of a month ago, I got a call from David Reimer's father telling me that David had taken his own life. I was shocked, but I cannot say I was surprised. Anyone familiar with David's lifeas a baby, after a botched circumcision, he underwent an operation to change him from boy to girlwould have understood that the real mystery was how he managed to stay alive for 38 years, given the physical and mental torments he suffered in childhood and that haunted him the rest of his life. I'd argue that a less courageous person than David would have put an end to things long ago.
After David's suicide, press reports cited an array of reasons for his despair: bad investments, marital problems, his brother's death two years earlier. Surprisingly little emphasis was given to the extraordinary circumstances of his upbringing. This was unfortunate because to understand David's suicide, you first need to know his anguished history, which I chronicled in my book As Nature Made Him:The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.
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Dr. Money And The Boy With No Penis | Watch Documentary Online for Free
==========
Read how this devastated his life and the lives of his twin brother and their parents.
How can we demand that people live out their lives lying to themselves and to others about their sexuality?
Why would we even want to do that?