Sex

The tragic story of David Reimer

Gender Identity

 

Nature v. Nurture

In August 1965, Bruce and Brian were born. They were identical twins and were healthy. However, six months later they began having trouble urinating because they had a condition called phimosis. As a solution, both of the boys underwent circumcision a couple months later. Instead of performing the typical procedure with a surgical blade, they decided instead to use an unconventional cauterizing needle which proved to fail. This unconventional method of circumcision burned Bruce's penis and genitals. After the failed surgery on Bruce, his parents decided not to do the surgery on Brian, and his phimosis resolved itself without the use of circumcision surgery.

Months later David's parents saw Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sexologist specializing in sexual identity on a Canadian news program called This Hour Has Seven Days and decided to take him to see Dr. Money at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The doctor believed that repair/construction of the penis was impossible. Backed up by absolutely zero scientific evidence, Dr. Money concluded that nurture was superior to nature in determining gender identity and suggested to surgically construct a vagina instead and raise Bruce as a girl. His parents agreed to Dr. Money's proposal and decided that Bruce should undergo sex reassignment surgery. His testes were removed through a procedure called orchidectomy. However, they did not surgically construct a vagina. Bruce Reimer was raised as a girl for the first 14 years of his life, as a girl named Brenda.

As part of Dr. Money's experiment, Bruce's parents should never tell him that he is actually a boy. Bruce had some female characteristics, but was also still masculine and had many "tomboy" traits. In Dr. Money's experiment, Bruce served as the experimental arm while Brian served as the control arm. I'm not going to go into Dr. Money's methodology of his case with David Reimer in great detail because it is very graphic, heinous, and disgusting to say the least. I have included 2 YouTube clips at the bottom of this blog post. The first is a short two-minute clip and the second is an hour-long BBC documentary called "Dr. Money and The Boy With No Penis" -- and I'm warning that this documentary has some of the graphic details of Dr. Money's experiment.

When Bruce was a teenager, he was lonely, rebellious, and suicidal. Dr. Money's theory was wrong. His experiment had failed. Being an "expert" in sexology, maybe his research and career got in the way of making a rational and objective judgement on what to do. Maybe he saw David Reimer as a potential "case". This is another example of how money and power blinds. Even though David Reimer never identified as female, his "caring" doctor published numerous papers that the sex reassignment was a success. In an act of desperation, Bruce's parents decided to tell him that he was actually a boy. From then on Brenda became David and had reconstructive surgery.

In 2002, David's twin brother Brian died from an overdose of antidepressants to treat schizophrenia. I wonder what caused his schizophrenia...Was it a chemical imbalance in his brain due to an overabundance of dopamine? Or perhaps was it the emotional scarring due to the horrible experiences he had with Dr. Money and experiencing what the doctor had done to his twin brother and himself and his entire family? David began suffering from depression. His brother's suicide, his unemployment, his strained relationship with his parents, and his divorce from his wife was too much to bear. In May 2004, when he was 38 years old, Bruce Reimer committed suicide.