A Boy Raised as a Girl Killed Himself 19 Years Ago Today

Today, May 5^th, is the 19^th anniversary of David Reimer’s suicide.

Raising a child with atypical genitals

David, born Bruce, lost his penis to a botched circumcision as an infant in 1966. After this event, his parents, Janet and Ron, though they lived in Canada, were referred to the leading “sexologist” at the time, John Money. Money was a psychologist who ran a clinic at Johns Hopkins University, where surgeons performed pediatric genital constructions. Genitals, then and now, are what we rely on to define an infant’s sex. It’s easier to "make a hole" than to "build a pole,” as one surgeon put it, so Money advised that Bruce be castrated and have his genitals modified to look as typically female as possible, then be raised as a girl, while keeping the real story secret.

Money hypothesized that a consistent and unambiguous upbringing as either a boy or a girl is sufficient to impart a clear gender identity to the child. He felt that such an upbringing is necessary for a child’s well-being, given how poorly other children and Western society generally treat children of ambiguous sex, including intersex children. The Reimers took Money’s advice, renamed their child Brenda, dressed Brenda in typical girl’s clothing, encouraged Brenda to participate in traditionally feminine activities, and so on, while visiting Money’s clinic annually for psychological check-ups and progress reports.

The perfect case study

Meanwhile, Money regularly published research reports about Brenda and spoke about the case (without identifying information) at seminars and conferences. Money saw this case as an ideal test of his hypothesis about the potency of consistent and unambiguous gender-specific upbringing, for two reasons.

First, unlike the intersex infants that Money’s clinic typically treated, there was no ambiguity or mismatch in this child’s genetic or hormonal makeup. Bruce/Brenda had typical male chromosomes—XY—and had experienced typical male prenatal hormones from the fetal testes—testosterone and other androgens—“male sex hormones.” So if Brenda became a happy and typical girl, this would mean that upbringing was key to gender identity, trumping chromosomes and prenatal hormones, even for infants who were unambiguously of the opposite sex biologically.

Second, Bruce/Brenda had an identical twin, Brian, who avoided a similar fate just by chance, having been the second in line for circumcision. The existence of a perfectly matched control child made the case study even more compelling.

Tragic consequences

Money always portrayed this case as an unadulterated success, but it was not. Despite the best efforts of Janet and Ron to bring up Brenda as a typical girl, Brenda never felt comfortable in this gender role and suffered greatly in childhood trying to act like a typical girl, especially in school. The situation got worse and worse until Ron finally told 14-year-old Brenda what had really happened. Brenda immediately asserted a masculine identity and became David.

David felt much more comfortable as a boy and later a man. He married a woman and became stepfather to her children. But he was always haunted by his horrific childhood. This reached a crescendo on May 5^th, 2004, soon after his wife said she was leaving him and two years after his twin, Brian, died of a drug overdose. David shot and killed himself that day.

Although Money never admitted failure in this case, the truth was eventually revealed in research articles by other scientists and physicians, notably Milton Diamond, and in an exposé by journalist John Colapinto in Rolling Stone magazine and later in a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl.

Lessons

One obvious lesson from David Reimer’s story is that gender identity cannot be imposed by upbringing alone. Genes and prenatal hormones do matter.

Another lesson—perhaps less obvious—is that nuances of sex and gender exist, and if we ignore them, this can endanger those who do not fit neatly into a male or female box.

In some ways, John Money knew this very well. Money was well aware that biological sex characteristics, including chromosomes, gonads, hormones, hormone receptors, and genitals, can be a mixture of typically male and typically female, or be intermediate between them, as his practice focused on such intersex children. Money also opened the first gender identity clinic in the U.S. in 1965, where he and colleagues helped transgender (then called transexual) adults with hormones and surgery to adjust their biological traits to match their gender identity. And although treating intersex infants with surgery and hormones should have been regarded quite differently than treating adults—because infants can’t consent to such treatments—Money was aware that intersex children could grow up to be well-adjusted adults even without surgery, because that had been the subject of his own Ph.D. dissertation. But Money was also aware that Western society is cruel to children with ambiguous genitals. Ultimately, he apparently felt that avoiding society’s cruelties outweighed the possible negative consequences of infant genital surgeries.

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Thus, although it would be easy to view Money simply as the villain of this story, we might take a more nuanced view of him as well and recognize that he had some good intentions to help people with ambiguous sex and/or gender characteristics, though the consequences of his actions were nonetheless tragic for David Reimer, as well as for many intersex children.