Boy raised as a girl suffered final indignity

Globe and Mail ^ | 05/11/2004 | GRAEME SMITH

[kaylar]

WINNIPEG -- 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."

[RipSawyer]

I have heard both of these versions before but I cannot prove or disprove either. Unfortunately, the practice has become so ingrained that it seems natural to most people, when in fact nothing could be more unnatural. I am all for it as long as it is done of a person's own volition after they have reached an age at which they can understand what they are doing, pay the medical costs and accept whatever happens afterward. I am totally against it when performed on newborn boys.

[TontoKowalski]

I'm circumcised. So is my son.

I had no choice in the matter for myself, and I regret agreeing to have it done on my son.

I've know men who were circumcised as adults, and they have told me that the decrease in intensity of sensation is marked.

I believe that sexual pleasure is a gift from God; I concede that, like many of God's gifts, it is often misused. I can't help but wonder if I agreed to rob my son of a portion of that gift so he could "look like Dad."

[kaylar]

My mom was an RN back in the 1960s. She told me that one of the worst things she had to do was assist at circumcisions. The doctors insisted that babies that young couldn't feel pain, so the boys were circumcised without anaesthesia (sp?). She said she never could understand why they would go on making this claim, when the babies would scream themselves hoarse. I hope at the very least that they now use painkillers , or deadeners, or something.

This story really tears me up. Just a few days ago, I was mulling over rereading As Nature Made Him.As horrible as what was done to that child was, at least at the end he seemed happy-married, surgically reconstructed, open about the treatment, and the recipient of a sizable damage award. Now this.

[Marie]

there may have been as many as 100 other circumcision-related accidents causing permanent damage to, or loss of, genitalia.

My husband and I had a friend who had terrible damage from a botched circumcision when he was a baby. (The machine didn't cut. Rather, it ripped off most of the skin.) It took 4 operations to put him back together and, even then, sex was always painful for him. I still regret having my son "done". Honestly, the only reason I went along with it was that I had a friend in college who had to have one at 19 due to chronic infections. He was in agony for days and I wanted to spare my son the pain.

[presidio9]

[valkyrieanne]

I don't think it was on account of "Jewish doctors." But in the 19th century circumcision *was* recommended by doctors as a "cure" for masturbation. Occasionally girls were excised too, in both England and the US, for the same reason. Barbaric.

[Alouette]

I hope this is just an antiJewish canard

It's an antiJewish canard. The physicians who initially recommended routine circumcision were not Jews. Anyway, Jews do not have circumcisions performed by a doctor.

[Ditto]

Perhaps the most significant research is that of Dr. Stephen Moses in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who says a male who is circumcised is up to 9.6 times less likely to contract AIDS.

I have to wonder how much of that stat has to do with ethnicity than with potential disease vectors. AIDS rates tend to be higher among some ethnic groups due to a propensity to engage in unsafe practices who also are also less likely for cultural reasons to be circumcised.

Is it cause and effect or simply coincidence? I don't know, but I'd just be careful with that stat.

[Salvation]

What a sad story!

[wimpycat]

That statistic is a correlation, and as I learned years ago in my statistics class in college, "correlation does not prove causation". Besides, most men with AIDS do not live in the U.S., and most men in the rest of the world are not circumcised.