Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XX

Steyn On-line ^ | September 17, 2021 | Tal Bachman

[Twotone]

Over several interviews that summer of 1994, the 29 year old David Reimer told Dr. Diamond and Dr. Sigmundson everything.

...He wanted to forget it, not talk about it or help spawn a research paper about it. Besides, how embarrassing would it be if someone read the research paper Milton Diamond would write up and figured out his true identity?

But Reimer's reluctance to speak vanished after Dr. Diamond detailed what John Money had been saying about his surgery and treatment for the past twenty plus years. Reimer listened in shock. Until that moment, he had no clue Money had made him famous (albeit as an anonymous test subject), or that his tormentor had labeled the twins case an "outstanding success", or that millions believed, as per Money's claim, that Reimer was now happily living the life of a woman, unaware he'd been born male.

Most upsetting of all for Reimer was discovering that Money's false claims had come to form the basis of the standard worldwide protocol for treating small boys with damaged, underdeveloped, or intersexed genitals. By 1994, hundreds of doctors around the world were following the prescriptions Money made based on his "successful" Reimer case. They had surgically "reassigned" around 15,000 young boys to being "girls" only because the boys were born with unusually small penises, or had suffered injury, or some other such dubious basis. And in addition, in each case the doctors instructed the parents, as per Money's recommended treatment protocol, to raise their boy as a girl, never reveal his actual sex, and then put him on estrogen before puberty. Very little follow-up had ever been conducted on these cases, but Diamond suspected—based on his own years of research into prenatally determined sexual dispositions—that all the boys so treated had experienced something ...

[dadfly]

thank God, Tal, for this story. what a blessing to hear.