Winnipeg, Canada
— The death certificate listed suicide as the
official cause of death. But the real cause of his demise
was a controversial gender experiment lead by one of the
most influential sex researchers of the 20th
century.
Bruce Reimer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer>
was born in 1965 to a blue-collar family in Winnipeg,
Canada. Eight months later, he was victimized by a
botched circumcision, and baby Bruce ended up without his
sex organ.
The distraught family
eventually contacted John Money <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money>,
a charismatic psychologist at Johns Hopkins University
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_University>
in Baltimore. Dr. Money was a leading advocate of the
idea that sex-role identification is determined by
one’s environment, not one’s genetic
make-up.
Money recommended sex
re-assignment surgery, a dubious procedure that had never
been performed on a boy born with normal genitalia. Bruce
would be given a vagina, his name would be changed to
Brenda, and he would be raised as a girl. It would be as
easy as that.
So one month before his
second birthday, little Bruce was wheeled into the
operating room as a boy, and came out as a
girl.
But back in Winnipeg,
Brenda had other plans. When her mom put a dress on her,
little Brenda tried to tear it off. Later she informed
her startled parents she wanted to become a garbage man
when she grew up.
Enrolled in school, she
was more competitive than her female classmates. When
girls got into fights, they used their open hands. But
Brenda used her fists. Then Brenda’s girlfriends
discovered that she urinated standing up.
Dr. Money was apprised of
all this, and more.
But when Money released
his book, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl in 1972, he
portrayed Brenda’s sex-change operation as a
resounding success. The book reviewer at the liberal New
York Times wrote approvingly: “if you tell a boy he
is a girl, and raise him as one, he will want to do
feminine things.”
Feminists were elated.
They needed to prove that women were just as determined
as men to ascend the corporate ladder. Women just needed
to overcome the oppressive conditioning of patriarchal
society. And Money’s research was just the
ticket.
Meanwhile things in
Winnipeg went from bad to worse. When Brenda reached
puberty and her voice deepened, the folly of the charade
could no longer be denied. About to undergo her annual
breast exam one day, Brenda refused to disrobe. When
asked by the doctor, “Do you want to be a girl or
not?,” she defiantly answered
“No!”
Brenda’s parents
knew the time had come to tell her the truth.
Brenda immediately
reverted to her male identity. Choosing the name David,
he underwent penile reconstructive surgery. In 1990,
David put the past behind him when he and Jane Anne
Fontane tied the knot.
During all these years,
John Money was the toast of the town. He was hailed as
the world’s leading expert on sex reassignment.
Media interviews, professional awards, and NIH grants
– all were showered on him. After all, he had proven
that gender identity is a product of nurture, not
nature.
He just didn’t
bother to tell anyone that Brenda was no longer a
she.
John Money’s world
began to collapse in 1997 when a journal article finally
revealed the truth of his ill-fated experiment. Money
could only sputter, “It’s part of the
anti-feminist movement.”
Money’s demise was
sealed three years later by the book, As Nature Made
Him, which revealed the psychologist to be a
charlatan, tireless self-promoter, and intellectual
fraud.
Two years ago,
David’s life began to unravel when his brother
unexpectedly died. Then he separated from his wife. After
38 years of indignity and torment, David Reimer took his
own life on May 4 <Man
raised as girl, dies>.
The feminist dogma that
gender is socially constructed is still widespread in our
society. Boys receive constant messages that they should
start acting more like girls. The sad tale of David
Reimer should make us pause to reconsider our mass
experiment in gender re-education.
Further
reading What
were the real reasons behind David Reimer's
suicide?
