Winnipeg, Canada
— 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. <http://www.amazon.com/>
David Reimer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 <http://www.infocirc.org/rollston.htm>.
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 is
the author of As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who
Was Raised a Girl. He is a contributing editor
at Rolling Stone magazine where
his
original story about David
Reimer
won a national magazine award for reporting. His 2001
novel About the Author is being
developed for the screen by
Dreamworks.
Further
reading Requiem
for David Reimer
