Most of David Reimer’s tragedies have been well-documented: how his penis was burned off during a botched circumcision, how doctors tried surgery and hormones to make him a girl and how the experiment went horribly wrong. But only his friends knew the 38-year-old Winnipegger was agonizing over yet another personal catastrophe in the months before he committed suicide last week.

Mr. Reimer was distraught after losing at least $65,000 in an investment scheme last year, friends say. “He was crying on my shoulder, because he said they’re not worth the paper they’re written on,” one said. The Manitoba Securities Commission issued a warning in November about Gary Perch, who ran the shop where Mr. Reimer worked. “Gary Perch has been soliciting money from the public to invest in his Winnipeg-based pro golf shop,” the statement said. “If you have invested your money with him, your money may be at risk.”

Mr. Reimer’s wife recently hired a lawyer to recover about $65,000 that seems to have gone missing, said author John Colapinto, whose book about Mr. Reimer’s bizarre medical ordeal made him famous. “What an absolute horror,” Mr. Colapinto said. “One has to wonder if this didn’t contribute to his despair.”  Mr. Colapinto had believed that Mr. Reimer was financially comfortable, because he gave him half the proceeds from his book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised A Girl. “David made a wad of money on the book and movie options,” Mr. Colapinto said.

But people who knew Mr. Reimer from his days at the Transcona Golf Club in the eastern suburbs of Winnipeg said the boyish handyman was often short of cash. The club kept him busy washing windows, changing light bulbs and scrubbing the bathrooms, they said, but he often talked about hunting for a weekend job to supplement his income. “He didn’t have money to feed the family,” said Brian Andrews, a member of the golf club’s board of directors. “So what the members did was we put together $800, I think it was, for food.”

Mary Mogg, 64, remembers giving him leftovers after she finished her shift at the clubhouse. “He’d have a pot of soup if we made it, and at the end of the day he’d take it home,” she said. “I think he appreciated it.” The indignity of poverty was just one of many cruelties Mr. Reimer endured. The trouble started eight months after he was born in 1965, when he went for a routine circumcision at a hospital in Winnipeg. The regular surgeon wasn’t available that day, so a general practitioner tried the operation herself. Something went wrong while she was using an electric cauterizing machine, which produced a puff of smoke around Mr. Reimer’s genitals. “I heard a sound,” said a witness quoted in Mr. Colapinto’s book, “just like steak being seared.” The boy’s penis was so badly burned that it dried up and fell off. His family eventually asked for advice from John Money, a well-known sex researcher at Johns Hopkins University hospital in Baltimore, Md.

Dr. Money had theorized that gender depends on how a child grows up rather than genetic coding, and the burned child with a twin brother offered a chance to prove it. The doctor oversaw a series of procedures that cut away the boy’s remaining genitalia and gave him female hormones. His parents started calling him Brenda. But Mr. Reimer never felt comfortable being female, and when he learned about the accident at age 15 he rebelled against the experiment and began acting like a young man. He renamed himself David, after the Bible story, and began more surgery to remove his breasts and create an artificial penis from muscle and cartilage. For years, he quietly tried to live a normal life in Winnipeg. He worked a series of menial jobs and got married to a woman named Jane. His hobbies included fishing, camping, antiques and collecting old coins. “He absolutely loved Elvis,” his eulogy stated. When he went public with his story in the mid-90s, it forced sexologists to re-evaluate their practices, said Ken Zucker, psychologist-in-chief at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. “His legacy is that his case has encouraged a lot more research,” Dr. Zucker said.

Mr. Reimer committed suicide May 4. His family has not released the cause of death. At his funeral yesterday, his father, Ron, just shook his head when asked whether he wanted to talk. His mother, Janet, leaned forward with tears in her eyes and whispered: “He was a hero. He showed the doctors. He was a worldwide hero.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/boy-raised-as-a-girl-suffered-final-indignity/article18264922/

 

 

 

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David Reimer, the Canadian man raised as a girl for most of the first 14 years of his life in a highly touted medical experiment that seemed to resolve the debate over the cultural and biological determinants of gender, has died at 38. He committed suicide May 4 in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. At 8 months of age, Reimer became the unwitting subject of “sex reassignment,” a treatment method embraced by his parents after his penis was all but obliterated during a botched circumcision. The American doctor whose advice they sought recommended that their son be castrated, given hormone treatments and raised as a girl. The physician, Dr. John Money, supervised the case for several years and eventually wrote a paper declaring the success of the gender conversion. Known as the “John/Joan” case, it was widely publicized and gave credence to arguments presented in the 1970s by feminists and others that humans are sexually neutral at birth and that sex roles are largely the product of social conditioning.

But, in fact, the gender conversion was far from successful. Money’s experiment was a disaster for Reimer that created psychological scars he ultimately could not overcome. Reimer’s story was told in the 2000 book “As Nature Made Him,” by journalist John Colapinto. Reimer said he cooperated with Colapinto in the hope that other children could be spared the miseries he experienced.

Reimer was born on Aug. 22, 1965, 12 minutes before his identical twin brother. His working-class parents named him Bruce and his brother Brian. Both babies were healthy and developed normally until they were seven months old, when they were discovered to have a condition called phimosis, a defect in the foreskin of the penis that makes urination difficult. The Reimers were told that the problem was easily remedied with circumcision. During the procedure at the hospital, a doctor who did not usually perform such operations was assigned to the Reimer babies. She chose to use an electric cautery machine with a sharp cutting needle to sever the foreskin. But something went terribly awry. Exactly where the error lay — in the machine, or in the user — was never determined. What quickly became clear was that baby Bruce had been irreparably maimed. (The doctors decided not to try the operation on his brother Brian, whose phimosis later disappeared without treatment.)

The Reimers were distraught. Told that phallic reconstruction was a crude option that would never result in a fully functioning organ, they were without hope until one Sunday evening after the twins’ first birthday when they happened to tune in to an interview with Money on a television talk show. He was describing his successes at Johns Hopkins University in changing the sex of babies born with incomplete or ambiguous genitalia. He said that through surgeries and hormone treatments he could turn a child into whichever sex seemed most appropriate, and that such reassignments were resulting in happy, healthy children.

Money, a Harvard-educated native of New Zealand, had already established a reputation as one of the world’s leading sex researchers, known for his brilliance and his arrogance. He was credited with coining the term “gender identity” to describe a person’s innate sense of maleness or femaleness. The Reimers went to see Money, who with unwavering confidence told them that raising Bruce as a girl was the best course, and that they should never say a word to the child about ever having been a boy. About six weeks before his second birthday, Bruce became Brenda on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. After bringing the toddler home, the Reimers began dressing her like a girl and giving her dolls. She was, on the surface, an appealing little girl, with round cheeks, curly locks and large, brown eyes. But Brenda rebelled at her imposed identity from the start. She tried to rip off the first dress that her mother sewed for her. When she saw her father shaving, she wanted a razor, too. She favored toy guns and trucks over sewing machines and Barbies. When she fought with her brother, it was clear that she was the stronger of the two. “I recognized Brenda as my sister,” Brian was quoted as saying in the Colapinto book. “But she never, ever acted the part.”

Money continued to perform annual checkups on Brenda, and despite the signs that Brenda was rejecting her feminized self, Money insisted that continuing on the path to womanhood was the proper course for her. In 1972, when Brenda was 7, Money touted his success with her gender conversion in a speech to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., and in the book, “Man & Woman, Boy & Girl,” released the same day. The scientists in attendance recognized the significance of the case as readily as Money had years earlier. Because Brenda had an identical male twin, they offered the perfect test of the theory that gender is learned, not inborn. Money already was the darling of radical feminists such as Kate Millett, who in her bestselling “Sexual Politics” two years earlier had cited Money’s writings from the 1950s as proof that “psychosexual personality is therefore postnatal and learned.”

Now his “success” was written up in Time magazine, which, in reporting on his speech, wrote that Money’s research provided “strong support for a major contention of women’s liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered.” In other words, nurture had trumped nature. The Reimer case quickly was written into textbooks on pediatrics, psychiatry and sexuality as evidence that anatomy was not destiny, that sexual identity was far more malleable than anyone had thought possible. Money’s claims provided powerful support for those seeking medical or social remedies for gender-based ills.

What went unreported until decades later, however, was that Money’s experiment actually proved the opposite — the immutability of one’s inborn sense of gender. Money stopped commenting publicly on the case in 1980 and never acknowledged that the experiment was anything but a glowing success. Dr. Milton Diamond, a sexologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, had long been suspicious of Money’s claims. He was finally able to locate Reimer through a Canadian psychiatrist who had seen Reimer as a patient.

In an article published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in 1997, Diamond and the psychiatrist, Dr. H. Keith Sigmundson, showed how Brenda had steadily rejected her reassignment from male to female. In early adolescence, she refused to continue receiving the estrogen treatments that had helped her grow breasts. She stopped seeing Money. Finally, at 14, she refused to continue living as a girl. When she confronted her father, he broke down in tears and told her what had happened shortly after her birth. Instead of being angry, Brenda was relieved. “For the first time everything made sense,” the article by Diamond and Sigmundson quoted her as saying, “and I understood who and what I was.” She decided to reclaim the identity she was born with by taking male hormone shots and undergoing a double mastectomy and operations to build a penis with skin grafts. She changed her name to David, identifying with the Biblical David who fought Goliath. “It reminded me,” David told Colapinto, “of courage.”

David developed into a muscular, handsome young man. But the grueling surgeries spun him into periods of depression and twice caused him to attempt suicide. He spent months living alone in a cabin in the woods. At 22, he prayed to God for the first time in his life, begging for the chance to be a husband and father. When he was 25, he married a woman and adopted her three children. Diamond reported that while the phallic reconstruction was only partially successful, David could have sexual intercourse and experience orgasm. He worked in a slaughterhouse and said he was happily adjusted to life as a man.

In interviews for Colapinto’s book, however, he acknowledged a deep well of wrenching anger that would never go away.  “You can never escape the past,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000. “I had parts of my body cut away and thrown in a wastepaper basket. I’ve had my mind ripped away.” His life began to unravel with the suicide of his brother two years ago. Brian Reimer had been treated for schizophrenia and took his life by overdosing on drugs. David visited his brother’s grave every day. He lost his job, separated from his wife and was deeply in debt after a failed investment. He is survived by his wife, Jane; his parents, and his children.

Despite the hardships he experienced, he said he did not blame his parents for their decision to raise him as a girl. As he told Colapinto, “Mom and Dad wanted this to work so I’d be happy. That’s every parent’s dream for their child. But I couldn’t be happy for my parents. I had to be happy for me. You can’t be something that you’re not. You have to be you.”

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-13-me-reimer13-story.html

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LESSONS HAVE NOT BEEN LEARNED. THE STORY OF KIWI BORN JOHN WILLIAM MONEY SHOULD BE TOLD  TIME AND TIME AGAIN PUBLICALLY. Firstly the theory of ‘gender neutrality’ namely ‘gender identity’ was developed primarily as a result of gender theory of social learning ‘nature vs nurture’ from early childhood, that it could be changed, just like changing your clothes everyday with behavioral interventions. Below I will share with you some of my research I have undertaken of Kiwi born psychologist David William Money and the identical twins Bruce & Brian Reimer who lived in Winnipeg Canada.  At 6 months old the twins had problems urinating, at 7 months of age they underwent circumcision,  the operation on Bruce went badly wrong, his penis was burned beyond surgical repair. The twins parents contacted many doctors for help to no avail. Then one day the Reimers were watching a program on Canadian News of John Money being interviewed about gender. They contacted John Money who was a psychologist at the John Hopkins Medical Institute in 1967. Money was known as a pioneer in his field of sexology and gender’

John Money’s theory was ‘gender neutrality, he based his work on intersex patients, that gender identity could be changed through using the appropriate behavioral interventions. A gender identity theory as a result of social learning. (I noted that this is exactly what is happening in schools in NZ across the world today, the sexualization of children through behavioral interventions eg using pronouns, choosing what gender school students want to be- gender diversity teaching (gender fluidity). Plus the governments introduction of changing an individual’s biological sex on birth certificates if they so require.. The identical Reimer twins became the guineapigs of John William Money’s gender theory. He decided that Bruce Reimer would be happiest living as a woman with functioning genitalia.

He used Brian Reimer in the guineapig human experiments. This was known as ‘Joan and Joan Case Study’, where one boy would be raised as a girl the other a boy. Because Brian shared his brothers genes he was used as a ‘’control’ in the experimentation. (Nature vs Nurture). John Money persuaded Bruce’s parents that Bruce should have a ‘sex reassignment’ surgery, saying it was in Bruce’s best interests. This was performed and a rudimentary vulva was fashioned to replace Bruce’s testes so he could be raised as a female in his biologically male body he was then renamed as Brenda. The twins visited John Money every year for consultations, a social learning concept of gender identity. The boys visited John Money’s clinic until they were 13 years old.

John Money’s guinea pig experiments on the twins included ‘childhood sexual rehearsal play’ where the boys were ordered to play at thrusting movement and copulation. They were forced to do sexual acts with Bruce (now Brenda) playing the female role. John Money placing Brian crotch between Brenda’s buttocks, forcing Brenda’s legs open with Brian laying on top. Money took photo’s of the sexual acts, and often other students-colleagues would be the audience. If the twins resisted John Money’s orders he would become very angry and aggressive, ill tempered with the children. He made Bruce (Now Brenda) take of his clothes, when he resisted money would shout at him louder and louder ‘NOW, NOW, NOW”, so he fearfully obeyed him, standing their naked and shaking. These boys were 6 years old when these sexual acts were forced upon them by John Money, both the boys were highly traumatized by being Money’s gender guineapig theory. They suffered extreme depression, especially Bruce (Brenda) being stuck in a female body being biologically male. He never ever accepted he was female.

Later Brenda who had received Estrogen hormones through John Moneys experiments had grown breasts, then underwent reconstruction surgery and took testosterone and renamed himself David Reimer. Both the twins suicided in their 30’s. David shot himself and Brian overdosed. Their parents said that their sons suicides were because of John Moneys guineapig study on them. But John Money proclaimed the his study on the Reimer twins as successful. By the time David was 15 years old he was living as a  male. David in going public tried to discourage similar practices. At 13 years old he experienced suicidal depression he ceased going to school at 14 and was tutored privately. On March 14^th 1980 the Reimer twins were told the truth about the sex reassignment by their parents. David underwent a double mastectomy and other operations including hormone treatment in an effort to return to his maleness. At school he had been bullied and called a ‘cave woman’. Later David was employed in a slaughterhouse, he then met Jane Fontane, they got married and David adopted her three children., he continued to suffer severe depression and the threat of a marriage breakup lead to David shooting himself in the head with a sawn off shotgun. His identical twin brother Brian had suicided by an overdose only 2 years earlier..

The Reimer twins story, the biography of David Reimer was published by John Colapintgo in the ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine in December, it won the ‘National Magazine Award’. The New York Times published ‘As Nature Made Him: The Boy Was Raised As A Girl’ (2000) this included how in John Moneys experiments. David refused to be identified as a girl, he was ostracized, bullied by peers dubbed him a ‘cave woman’. Davis said “that no frilly dresses nor hormones made him feel female” David’s relationship with is parents was difficult..

 Researcher Mary Anne Case  reported that John William Money’s gender based theory also fueled the rise of the anti-gender movement. John Money deliberately concealed the fact that David Reimers sex reassignment to being a female was not going well.

John Money was referred to by Judith Butler in her 2004 book ‘Undoing Gender’ which examines gender, sex, psychoanalysis and medical treatment of intersex people.

Horizon a BBC series based 2 episodes on the life of ‘The Boy Who Was Turned Into A Girl’ in year 2000 and also a documentary on ‘Dr Money and the Boy With No Penis’ in 2004. A PBS Documentary series ‘Nova’ entitled ‘Sex: Unknown’, investigated David Reimers life.

A BBC radio episode called ‘Mind Changers’ was about the ‘John & Joan Case’- The boy who was raised as a girl, the impact of two psychological theories of ‘Nature vs Nurture’ Other related stories about David and his identical brother Brian were:-

Chicago Hope episode ‘Boys will be girls’’ year 2000. Explored the theme of a child’s right to undergo sexual reassignment surgery without consent. David Reimer and his mother appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000 and the ‘Laws & Order Special Victims Unit’ episode called ‘Identify’ (2005) was based on David & Brian Reimers lives and their treatment by John William Money.

A song by Winnipeg ‘Indie Rock Band called ‘The Weakerthans’ had concerns about David Reimer and produced the  ‘Hymn of the Medical Oddity’. A 2016 play titled ‘Boy’ produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre was inspired by the Reimer story and a Taiwanese film ‘Born to be Human’ (2021) shared a similarity to the Reimer story where a child undergoes sexual reassignment surgery without consent at the insistence of an authoritative doctor.

WHO WAS JOHN WILLIAM MONEY?  He performed one of the most immoral experiments that helped give birth to the trans-movement  due to his sinister origins of gender ideology (Lauren Smith 5/2/2023). Biological sex does not determine ones gender identity. the being born biologically male or female. Trans gender ideology can be traced back to John William Money (1921-2006).  He was born in Morrinsville in 1955, the first person in his field of sexology to use the word ‘gender. He popularised the term ‘gender identity’, founded the worlds first ‘gender identity’ clinic at John Hopkins University Baltimore in 1966. Above all John Money pushed the view that is so central on todays trans-movement. Without John Money its unlikely that trans ideology, especially the phenomenon of ‘trans-kids’ would exist the way it does today. (The social engineering in schools namely ‘gender diversity’ teaching.). John Money believed that children at the age of 2 yrs old pass through a ‘gender identity gate’. He determined whether one is male or female biologically this could be socially engineered into another fender (gender fluidity- gender diversity)

Without Money, it’s unlikely that trans ideology, especially the phenomenon of ‘trans kids’, would exist today in the way that it does. His ideas uphold trans activists today namely male or female is not biologically determined. That some-one born with male sexual organs can still become female. John Money is rarely heard of because his experiments were cruel, creepy and immoral, he left a trail of misery, pain and suicide in his wake. John Money has been criticized as his main interests were that gender identity development of children with normal sex characteristics, that he wanted to apply his theory about the malleability of gender to all children.

To test his theory on normal biological infants male or female it had become a problem for Money because what parents would allow their healthy babu to be streamed into the opposite gender, undergo countless operations, intensive therapy sessions/ Rolling Stones magazine article of David Reimers story fell into their hands. The media championed John Reimers work in 1973 in the New York Book Review described ‘Man, Boy and Girl as ‘ the most important volume in social sciences to appear in the Kinsey Reports, solved the age old question of ‘Nature vs Nurture’, landing on the side of ‘Nurture’. This became the foundation of future writings that helped to legitimise sex assignment surgery for children worldwide.

 At the onset of David Reimers puberty David Money decided that David should have female hormones asap. The ‘Sigmundson’ Paper  this became controversial was published in 1997 this became controversial in the scientific community, however it convinced a large number of paediatricians that John Money’s theory on the gender neutrality of babies was flawed that his treatment of intersex babies in most cases caused more harm than good. Lessons have not been learned from the John Money’s cruel callous human guineapig experiment of the Reimer twins, that gender is not fluid cannot be shaped at will through medical interventions and hormone treatments. The Reimer twins were sacrificed at the alter of gender ideology, it was a tragedy, but the ideas of gender identity and gender fluidity are still promoted even in our schools.

 Many politicians treat trans gender ideology as ‘progressive’ however they should be held accountable, responsible for using children as the gender fodder for gender diversity experimentation. Now the schools from a tender age embrace gender ideology, do the teachers know about  John William Money how be trailblazed the idea of the ‘trans-child’, have they any idea of the devastating impact he has on the Reimer family life, of the Reimer twins? The Central and Local Government (Councils) in New Zealand and other country’s governments are promoting ‘gender diversity’ on children from Kindy age to the end of senior school and beyond. The tragedy, cruelness, misery, heart breaking sadness, the  inhumane immoral undignified experimentation of the Reimer twins by Kiwi born John William Money must be continuously publicly shared, it is a tragedy that should never have happened, one that must be learned by. New Zealand politicians need to be held accountable for the unacceptable sexuality gender diverse teaching of our children in schools. Drag Queen Story Time to children in council run libraries must be stopped now.

This is adult entertainment, and disrespectful imaginary that depicts women. Men dressed up in drag queens. This is not so called family fun as advertised. This is genderised insanity. In our adult sanity we as sane caring adults demand that ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH’ this stops NOW. United must stand as caring, loving parents, family, friends to protect our children from this evilness.  The message to the NZ political cronies in the toilet bowl of Wellington is “KEEP YOUR GRUBBY POLITICISING, SEXUALISING HANDS OFF OUR CHILDREN” NOW’

NOTE: Of all the governments in the world NZ Government have the most numbers of LGBT+ Transgender political cronies. Newshub headline   reports  that New Zealand has the ‘Queerest’ Parliament In The world  18^th October 2020

I URGE YOU TO SHARE THIS STORY SEND IT TO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. Thank you Carol Sakey (WakeUpNZ)

NOTE: The Reimer Twins story can be found on my website at https://wakeupnz.org  

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/10/new-zealand-now-has-the-gayest-parliament-in-the-world.html

https://wakeupnz.org     Carol Sakey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/05/dr-john-money-and-the-sinister-origins-of-gender-ideology/

 

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David Reimer and John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy:( The John/Joan Case ( By: Phil Gaetano-Published: 2017-11-15)

In the mid-1960s, psychologist John Money encouraged the gender reassignment of David Reimer, who was born a biological male but suffered irreparable damage to his penis as an infant. Born in 1965 as Bruce Reimer, his penis was irreparably damaged during infancy due to a failed circumcision. After encouragement from Money, Reimer’s parents decided to raise Reimer as a girl. Reimer underwent surgery as an infant to construct rudimentary female genitals, and was given female hormones during puberty. During childhood, Reimer was never told he was biologically male and regularly visited Money, who tracked the progress of his gender reassignment. Reimer unknowingly acted as an experimental subject in Money’s controversial investigation, which he called the John/Joan case. The case provided results that were used to justify thousands of sex reassignment surgeries for cases of children with reproductive abnormalities. Despite his upbringing, Reimer rejected the female identity as a young teenager and began living as a male. He suffered severe depression throughout his life, which culminated in his suicide at thirty-eight years old. Reimer, and his public statements about the trauma of his transition, brought attention to gender identity and called into question the sex reassignment of infants and children.

Bruce Peter Reimer was born on 22 August 1965 in Winnipeg, Ontario, to Janet and Ron Reimer. At six months of age, both Reimer and his identical twin, Brian, were diagnosed with phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin of the penis cannot retract, inhibiting regular urination. On 27 April 1966, Reimer underwent circumcision, a common procedure in which a physician surgically removes the foreskin of the penis. Usually, physicians performing circumcisions use a scalpel or other sharp instrument to remove foreskin. However, Reimer’s physician used the unconventional technique of cauterization, or burning to cause tissue death. Reimer’s circumcision failed. Reimer’s brother did not undergo circumcision and his phimosis healed naturally. While the true extent of Reimer’s penile damage was unclear, the overwhelming majority of biographers and journalists maintained that it was either totally severed or otherwise damaged beyond the possibility of function.

In 1967, Reimer’s parents sought the help of John Money, a psychologist and sexologist who worked at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In the mid twentieth century, Money helped establish the views on the psychology of gender identities and roles. In his academic work, Money argued in favor of the increasingly mainstream idea that gender was a societal construct, malleable from an early age. He stated that being raised as a female was in Reimer’s interest, and recommended sexual reassignment surgery. At the time, infants born with abnormal or intersex genitalia commonly received such interventions.

Following their consultation with Money, Reimer’s parents decided to raise Reimer as a girl. Physicians at the Johns Hopkins Hospital removed Reimer’s testes and damaged penis, and constructed a vestigial vulvae and a vaginal canal in their place. The physicians also opened a small hole in Reimer’s lower abdomen for urination. Following his gender reassignment surgery, Reimer was given the first name Brenda, and his parents raised him as a girl. He received estrogen during adolescence to promote the development of breasts. Throughout his childhood, Reimer was not informed about his male biology.

Throughout his childhood, Reimer received annual checkups from Money. His twin brother was also part of Money’s research on sexual development and gender in children. As identical twins growing up in the same family, the Reimer brothers were what Money considered ideal case subjects for a psychology study on gender. Reimer was the first documented case of sex reassignment of a child born developmentally normal, while Reimer’s brother was a control subject who shared Reimer’s genetic makeup, intrauterine space, and household.

During the twin’s psychiatric visits with Money, and as part of his research, Reimer and his twin brother were directed to inspect one another’s genitals and engage in behavior resembling sexual intercourse. Reimer claimed that much of Money’s treatment involved the forced reenactment of sexual positions and motions with his brother. In some exercises, the brothers rehearsed missionary positions with thrusting motions, which Money justified as the rehearsal of healthy childhood sexual exploration. In his Rolling Stone interview, Reimer recalled that at least once, Money photographed those exercises. Money also made the brothers inspect one another’s pubic areas. Reimer stated that Money observed those exercises both alone and with as many as six colleagues. Reimer recounted anger and verbal abuse from Money if he or his brother resisted orders, in contrast to the calm and scientific demeanor Money presented to their parents. Reimer and his brother underwent Money’s treatments at preschool and grade school age. Money described Reimer’s transition as successful, and claimed that Reimer’s girlish behavior stood in stark contrast to his brother’s boyishness. Money reported on Reimer’s case as the John/Joan case, leaving out Reimer’s real name. For over a decade, Reimer and his brother unknowingly provided data that, according to biographers and the Intersex Society of North America, was used to reinforce Money’s theories on gender fluidity and provided justification for thousands of sex reassignment surgeries for children with abnormal genitals.

Contrary to Money’s notes, Reimer reports that as a child he experienced severe gender dysphoria, a condition in which someone experiences distress as a result of their assigned gender. Reimer reported that he did not identify as a girl and resented Money’s visits for treatment. At the age of thirteen, Reimer threatened to commit suicide if his parents took him to Money on the next annual visit. Bullied by peers in school for his masculine traits, Reimer claimed that despite receiving female hormones, wearing dresses, and having his interests directed toward typically female norms, he always felt that he was a boy. In 1980, at the age of fifteen, Reimer’s father told him the truth about his birth and the subsequent procedures. Following that revelation, Reimer assumed a male identity, taking the first name David. By age twenty-one, Reimer had received testosterone therapy and surgeries to remove his breasts and reconstruct a penis. He married Jane Fontaine, a single mother of three, on 22 September 1990.

In adulthood, Reimer reported that he suffered psychological trauma due to Money’s experiments, which Money had used to justify sexual reassignment surgery for children with intersex or damaged genitals since the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Reimer met Milton Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu, Hawaii, and academic rival of Money. Reimer participated in a follow-up study conducted by Diamond, in which Diamond cataloged the failures of Reimer’s transition.

In 1997, Reimer began speaking publicly about his experiences, beginning with his participation in Diamond’s study. Reimer’s first interview appeared in the December 1997 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. In interviews, and a later book about his experience, Reimer described his interactions with Money as torturous and abusive. Accordingly, Reimer claimed he developed a lifelong distrust of hospitals and medical professionals.

With those reports, Reimer caused a multifaceted controversy over Money’s methods, honesty in data reporting, and the general ethics of sex reassignment surgeries on infants and children. Reimer’s description of his childhood conflicted with the scientific consensus about sex reassignment at the time. According to NOVA, Money led scientists to believe that the John/Joan case demonstrated an unreservedly successful sex transition. Reimer’s parents later blamed Money’s methods and alleged surreptitiousness for the psychological illnesses of their sons, although the notes of a former graduate student in Money’s lab indicated that Reimer’s parents dishonestly represented the transition’s success to Money and his coworkers. Reimer was further alleged by supporters of Money to have incorrectly recalled the details of his treatment. On Reimer’s case, Money publicly dismissed his criticism as antifeminist and anti-trans bias, but, according to his colleagues, was personally ashamed of the failure.

In his early twenties, Reimer attempted to commit suicide twice. According to Reimer, his adult family life was strained by marital problems and employment difficulty. Reimer’s brother, who suffered from depression and schizophrenia, died from an antidepressant drug overdose in July of 2002. On 2 May 2004, Reimer’s wife told him that she wanted a divorce. Two days later, at the age of thirty-eight, Reimer committed suicide by firearm.

Reimer, Money, and the case became subjects of numerous books and documentaries following the exposé. Reimer also became somewhat iconic in popular culture, being directly referenced or alluded to in the television shows Chicago Hope, Law & Order, and Mental. The BBC series Horizon covered his story in two episodes, “The Boy Who Was Turned into a Girl” (2000) and “Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis” (2004). Canadian rock group The Weakerthans wrote “Hymn of the Medical Oddity” about Reimer, and the New York-based Ensemble Studio Theatre production Boy was based on Reimer’s life.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-reimer-and-john-money-gender-reassignment-controversy-johnjoan-case

http://embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/13009.

Gaetano, Phil, “David Reimer and John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy: The John/Joan Case”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2017-11-15). ISSN: 1940-5030

 

Sources

Carey, Benedict. “John William Money, 84, Sexual Identity Researcher, Dies.” New York Times, 11 July 2016.

Colapinto, John. “The True Story of John/Joan.” Rolling Stone 11 (1997): 54–73.

Colapinto, John. As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.

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Sexual and Gender Disorders; Money, John, 1921-2006; Reimer, David, 1965-2004; Reimer, Brenda, 1965-2004; Reimer, Bruce, 1965-2004; Sex change; Sex reassignment; Gender identity; Psychology; Gender; Concept

 

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