Posted on 10/30/2004 10:29:18 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows
ON MAY 4 this year, 38-year-old handyman David Reimer drove to a supermarket car park, put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.
His suicide was the tragic end to a life so bizarre it sounds like a horror story.
Born a boy and christened Bruce, David's penis was burned off in a catastrophically botched circumcision.
Then, in a grotesque experiment, his distraught parents were persuaded to turn Bruce into a girl called Brenda.
It was a decision that would eventually rock the scientific community, destroy the lives of the entire Reimer family and end in the tragic death of two brothers.
The story of David's life, and untimely death in Winnipeg, Canada, will be told on British television for the first time in a Horizon documentary to be shown on BBC2 next Thursday.
The programme first interviewed David four years ago and makers were given access to transcripts of his sessions with sex-change guru Dr John Money.
Money wanted to prove his controversial theory that whether we consider ourselves to be male or female is not the result of genetics, but how we are brought up.
He believed that any boy could be raised as a girl. And little Bruce became his unwitting guinea pig.
Bruce was just a seven-month-old baby when, in April 1966, he and his twin brother Brian went for a routine circumcision operation. The hospital then phoned their mother Janet and told her there had been an accident.
"The doctor said Bruce's penis had been burnt off. I didn't understand how that could happen because I thought they were going to use a knife. I didn't know there was electricity involved."
The cauterising equipment had malfunctioned and Janet was horrified to see what remained of her son's penis resembled a tiny piece of burnt string.
At the time, plastic surgery was not sufficiently advanced for doctors to reconstruct Bruce's penis.
Several months later, Janet and her husband Ron saw an item on TV about a gender identity clinic that had recently opened at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Psychologist Dr John Money was a pioneer in sex-change cases. He had worked with children with genital abnormalities - now known as intersexed.
Janet wrote to Dr Money who quickly replied, inviting her to visit his clinic, where he explained that it was possible to "convert" Bruce into a girl.
Dr Money seemed to be the answer to the Reimers' prayers - what they didn't realise was that, in fact, they were the answer to his.
Dr Money hoped to use them to prove his controversial theory that nurture is more important than nature in deciding gender identity, and he needed to test his theory on twins.
He wanted one who would be raised as a boy, and another who would be brought up as a girl. Now the perfect opportunity had landed in his lap.
Janet and Ron were desperate to do whatever was best for their child.
"I thought if it was simply a matter of nurture, I could educate my child to be feminine," Janet explains, sadly.
Dr Money stressed that if "she" ever found out the truth, the sex change would fail. So they changed Bruce's name to Brenda.
In July 1967, when "Brenda" was almost two, he was surgically castrated at the Johns Hopkins hospital. Without his testicles, he could no longer produce male hormones. The surgeon also fashioned a rudimentary vulva for him.
Janet recalls that as a little girl, Brenda was very pretty. "She wore her hair long and I made her the fanciest dresses of any of the girls in the school," she smiles wistfully.
She bought Brenda dolls, and showed her how to bake cookies and once a year, Brenda and her twin brother Brian visited Dr Money to be assessed.
When the twins were seven, Dr Money announced to the world, in his book Man, Woman, Boy, Girl, that he had proved his theory.
He didn't reveal the twins' identity and the Reimers were unaware that he was trumpeting their child's sex change as a success. But the reality was very different.
"I had doubts all the time because it was so obvious to everyone that she was masculine," says Janet.
"Brenda had almost no friends. Girls didn't want to play with her because she wanted to play boy games and, of course, boys didn't want to play with a girl."
As David later recalled, he had no idea why he was so unhappy.
"I was told I was a girl. But I didn't like dressing or behaving like a girl. You don't wake up one morning and decide that you're a boy or a girl - you just know."
Dr Money became increasingly frustrated with Brenda and resorted to ever more extreme ways of persuading "her" that she was a girl.
He repeatedly quizzed Brenda and Brian on the difference between male and female genitalia - to convince Brenda that because she didn't have a penis she must be a girl.
"Some questions he asked were very explicit about sexual parts - to the point where it makes me blush if I think about talking in that way to my son," David later remembered.
David also claimed that Dr Money made him and Brian take off their clothes and photographed them naked in sexual positions.
But the doctor will not allow the files from this period to be released.
"I thought he was perverted, a very sick man," said David. "My parents didn't know what was going on."
To help Brenda accept her sexual identity, Dr Money also put pressure on her to have a vagina constructed using a section of her intestine.
David found the idea terrifying. "I was scared to death," he said. "I felt if I went through with this surgery it would change me for the worse."
The operation was planned to happen when Brenda turned 13, but she told her parents that she would kill herself if she had to see Dr Money again.
At age 14, her parents decided to tell Brenda the truth. Ron took her for a drive and bought her an ice cream.
"I don't remember 90 per cent of what he told me in the car," said David. "I remember I had a glaze over my eyes and my ice-cream was dripping over me. And I thought, 'I'm not crazy, I'm not turning insane'."
Meanwhile, Janet was breaking the news to Brian. But, instead of being pleased, Brian reacted violently, punching a wall. The twins' relationship deteriorated from this point.
Tears well in Janet's eyes as she recalls how David never blamed her or Ron for what they had done.
"He said, 'I know you and dad only wanted to do what was best for me'.'"
Armed with the truth, Brenda knew she wanted to be a boy. She called herself David, and taking advantage of the advances in plastic surgery, underwent complicated surgery to have a new penis constructed.
But when he confessed the truth to his first girlfriend she laughed and told all their friends at school. Devastated, David tried to kill himself by taking an overdose but his mother found him just in time.
David's luck seemed to change when he met Jane Fontaine, a single mum with three kids. "We hit it off straight away," said David.
They were married in September 1990 and Jane says David became a great father and husband.
Then David discovered that Dr Money was still publicising his sex-change as a success, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Appalled that the doctor might try to ruin other people's lives as well, he made the brave move to denounce Dr Money in a TV programme in 2000 and persuaded brother Brian to join him.
After the broadcast, Brian's mental health deteriorated. Two years later, he was found dead from an overdose. It was never established whether this was accidental or deliberate.
David took his twin's death very hard. On top of this, he couldn't get a job, his investments were stolen, and his depression led to problems with his marriage.
And finally, in despair, David Reimer killed himself.
Janet and Ron Reimer know that Dr Money didn't cause David's death. But they believe his experiment traumatised him to such an extent that he was robbed of any chance of a normal life.
Dr Money, who is now in his 80s and in ill health, has only recently retired from medicine. But to this day he has never apologised to David or his family for destroying their lives - and all for the sake of a theory.
May G-d grant the Reimers peace.
This story sounds odd. She takes kids to hospital for routine 3 minute surgery and the doctor PHONES her. What did she do, drop them off and leave??
I've heard of assembly-line surgery in Britain, where a doctor performs minor procedures on several patients at once. Maybe something like that?
I heard about this story a few years back, and how David Reimer was trying to put his life back together. Hadn't known it ended this way.
I'd hate to pay a medical bill from a Dr. Money!
Maybe the father took them for the circumcision procedure. I had seen this story on tv, but not up to the suicide. I thought the victim also threatened the doctor at some point. Very sad.
Anecdotal evidence that social engineering is a hideous evil.
I read about this situation some time ago, but not the latest. What a sad ending to a sad story.
Dr. money sounds like a student of josef mengele.
twins , bizarre theories,and abuse.
Even though he is elderly and infirm, there should be an investigation----johns hopkins as well for permitting this.
horrendous.
well, that makes sense if its the UK. =o)
Dr. Money meets Dr. Mengele
Money has been a hero of the radical feminist/gay rights people. He has been the source of the "gender as a social construct" theory. And he appears to have been a pervert himself. I wonder how many other lives he has ruined.
Thanks. Good G-d, there are some sick people in the world.
Yeah, but how many students does Dr Money have lurking about?
Another legacy of the Leftists, feminists and homosexuals and their champions of "Liberal" psychology: Dr. Money, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and Benjamin Spock, but to name a few.
The Left's practice of moral relativism and "celebration" of perversion and deviancy is destroying our society. This is a blatant case of the damage that they do. But if you think this is bad, wait until the ACLU and NY Times start really pushing NAMBLA's agenda down America's throat.
NAMBLA?
Strange bedfellows - Judith Reisman and Dennis Jarrard 8/21/02 (WashTimes)"...Catholic bishops are getting their "expert" advice on pedophilia from people who have covered up or even defended sex between men and children. The bishops recently chose Dr. Paul McHugh...for their new clergy sex crimes review board. Yet Dr. McHugh once said Johns Hopkins' Sexual Disorders Clinic, which treats molesters, was justified in concealing multiple incidents of child rape and fondling to police, despite a state law requiring staffers to report them....He agreed with his subordinate, clinic head Fred Berlin, who broke the then-new child sexual abuse law on the grounds that it might keep child molesters from seeking treatment. Dr. Berlin admitted he had covered for the sex criminals....Dr. Berlin also considers Sexual Disorders Clinic founder John Money, who openly defends pedophilia, to be one of his most important mentors. Dr. Money once gave an interview to PAIDIKA - the Journal of Paedophilia, an "academic" publication that advocates adult sex with children alongside ads for the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and other pro-pedophilia groups. He told PAIDIKA that a "relationship" that is "totally mutual" between a boy of 10 or 11 and an adult male "would not [be] pathological in any way." Dr. Money is also notorious for leading the medical team that surgically mutilated a young boy in a disastrous attempt to turn him into a "girl"
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http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/9/21/193911.shtml
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27924
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