David Reimer -
1965-2004
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 life—as a baby, after a botched
circumcision, he underwent an operation to
change him from boy to girl—would 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.
David Reimer was one of the most famous
patients in the annals of medicine. Born in 1965
in Winnipeg, he was 8 months old when a doctor
used an electrocautery needle, instead of a
scalpel, to excise his foreskin during a routine
circumcision, burning off his entire penis as a
result. David's parents (farm kids barely out of
their teens) were referred to Johns Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore, home of the world's
leading expert in gender identity, psychologist
Dr. John Money, who recommended a surgical sex
change, from male to female. David's parents
eventually agreed to the radical procedure,
believing Dr. Money's claims that this was their
sole hope for raising a child who could have
heterosexual intercourse—albeit as a
sterile woman with a synthetic vagina and a body
feminized with estrogen supplements.
For Dr. Money, David was the ultimate
experiment to prove that nurture, not nature,
determines gender identity and sexual
orientation—an experiment all the more
irresistible because David was an identical
twin. His brother, Brian, would provide the
perfect matched control, a genetic clone raised
as a boy.
David's infant "sex reassignment" was the
first ever conducted on a developmentally normal
child. (Money had helped to pioneer the
procedure in hermaphrodites.) And according to
Money's published reports through the 1970s, the
experiment was a success. The twins were happy
in their assigned roles: Brian a rough and
tumble boy, his sister Brenda a happy little
girl. Money was featured in Time magazine and
included a chapter on the twins in his famous
textbook Man & Woman, Boy &
Girl.
The reality was far more complicated. At age
2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She
refused to play with dolls and would beat up her
brother and seize his toy cars and guns. In
school, she was relentlessly teased for her
masculine gait, tastes, and behaviors. She
complained to her parents and teachers that she
felt like a boy; the adults—on Dr. Money's
strict orders of secrecy—insisted that she
was only going through a phase. Meanwhile,
Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide;
her father lapsed into mute alcoholism; the
neglected Brian eventually descended into drug
use, pretty crime, and clinical depression.
When Brenda was 14, a local psychiatrist
convinced her parents that their daughter must
be told the truth. David later said about the
revelation: "Suddenly it all made sense why I
felt the way I did. I wasn't some sort of
weirdo. I wasn't crazy."
David soon embarked on the painful process of
converting back to his biological sex. A double
mastectomy removed the breasts that had grown as
a result of estrogen therapy; multiple
operations, involving grafts and plastic
prosthesis, created an artificial penis and
testicles. Regular testosterone injections
masculinized his musculature. Yet David was
depressed over what he believed was the
impossibility of his ever marrying. He twice
attempted suicide in his early 20s.
David did eventually marry a big-hearted
woman named Jane, but his dark moods persisted.
He was plagued by shaming memories of the
frightening annual visits to Dr. Money, who used
pictures of naked adults to "reinforce" Brenda's
gender identity and who pressed her to have
further surgery on her "vagina."
When David was almost 30, he met Dr.
Milton Diamond, a psychologist at the
University of Hawaii and a longtime rival of Dr.
Money. A biologist by training, Diamond had
always been curious about the fate of the famous
twin, especially after Money mysteriously
stopped publishing follow-ups in the late 1970s.
Through Diamond, David learned that the supposed
success of his sex reassignment had been used to
legitimize the widespread use of infant sex
change in cases of hermaphroditism and genital
injury. Outraged, David agreed to participate in
a follow-up by Dr.
Diamond, whose myth-shattering paper
(co-authored by Dr. Keith Sigmundson) was
published in Archives of Pediatrics and
Adolescent Medicine in March 1997 and was
featured on front pages across the globe.
I met David soon after, when he agreed to be
interviewed by me for
a feature story in Rolling Stone. He
subsequently agreed to collaborate with me on a
book about his life, As
Nature Made Him, published in February
2000. In the course of our interviews, David
told me that he could never forget his nightmare
childhood, and he sometimes hinted that he was
living on borrowed time.
Most suicides, experts say, have multiple
motives, which come together in a perfect storm
of misery. So it was with David. After his twin
Brian died of an overdose of antidepressants in
the spring of 2002, David sank into a
depression. Though the two had been estranged,
David had, in recent months, taken to visiting
Brian's grave, leaving flowers and, at some
point prior to his own suicide, a note.
David also had marital difficulties. He was
not easy to live with, given his explosive
anger, his cyclical depressions, his fears of
abandonment—all of which Jane weathered for
almost 14 years. But with David spiraling ever
deeper into sloth and despair, she told him on
the weekend of May 2 that they should separate
for a time. David stormed out of the house. Two
days later, Jane received a call from the
police, saying that they had found David but
that he did not want her to know his location.
Two hours after that, Jane got another call.
This time the police told her that David was
dead.
Genetics almost certainly contributed to
David's suicide. His mother has been a clinical
depressive all her life; his brother suffered
from the same disease. How much of the Reimers'
misery was due to inherited depression, and how
much to the nightmare circumstances into which
they had been thrown? David's mutilation and his
parents' guilt were tightly entwined,
multiplying the mental anguish to which the
family members were already prone.
In some press reports, financial problems
were given as the sole motive in David's
suicide. While this is absurdly reductive, it is
true that last fall David learned that he was
the victim of an alleged con man who had
hoodwinked him out of $65,000—a loss that
ate at him and no doubt contributed to his
despair.
In his final months, David was
unemployed—for him, a disastrous
circumstance. When I first met him, seven years
ago, he was a janitor in a slaughter
house—tough, physically demanding work that
he loved. But when the plant closed a few years
ago, David never found another full-time job.
And thanks to me, he didn't have to. I split all
profits from the book with David, 50-50. This
brought him a substantial amount of money, as
did a subsequent movie deal with Peter Jackson,
the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
With no compelling financial need to work, David
was able to sit around his house and
brood—a state of affairs for which I feel
some guilt.
In the end, of course, it was what David was
inclined to brood about that killed him. David's
blighted childhood was never far from his mind.
Just before he died, he talked to his wife about
his sexual "inadequacy," his inability to be a
true husband. Jane tried to reassure him. But
David was already heading for the door.
On the morning of May 5, he retrieved a
shotgun from his home while Jane was at work and
took it into the garage. There, with the
terrible, methodical fixedness of the suicide,
he sawed off the barrel. Then he drove to the
nearby parking lot of a grocery store, parked,
raised the gun, and, I hope, ended his
sufferings forever.
— ©John Colapinto, 2004
