Nature V. Nurture II: David Reimer, Ruined for A Concept

Nature Versus Nurture, II: Of David Reimer, and; A Man Who Tampered With A Human Being For The Sake of His Career

David Reimer, 1965-2004

(SeeNature V. Nurture I, 29 May 2004 for the first part.)

The tragic story of David Reimer can be traced to one man, John Money, who put career, ideology, and dogmatism above any real concern for a human being. He wanted to prove that nurture could prevail over nature and used Reimer as his guinea pig, trying to make the boy think like a girl, messing with his mind, and generally making a wreck of the lad. "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."

John Colapinto: "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. . . ."

"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, 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. . . ."

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, petty crime, and clinical depression. . . ."

"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."

"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 and Woman, Boy and 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. 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."

From Slate Magazine, 3 June 2004, "Gender Gap: What were the real reasons behind David Reimer's suicide?" By John Colapinto.

( 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.)

Nature Versus Nurture I: How David Reimer Became Brenda

Nature Versus Nurture I: Of Twins and How David Reimer Became Brenda

David Reimer. 1965-2004

They were meant to show that gender was determined by nurture, not nature - one identical twin raised as a boy and the other brought up as a girl after a botched circumcision. But two years ago Brian Reimer killed himself, and last week David - formerly Brenda - took his life too. Oliver Burkeman and Gary Younge unravel the tragic story of Dr Money's sex experiment.

"Until a few years ago, the name David Reimer meant little to those outside his immediate circle, and by the time he killed himself last Tuesday in unknown circumstances in his hometown of Winnipeg, it was already slipping back towards obscurity - a name belonging to nobody more remarkable than a local odd-job man, a 38-year-old former slaughterhouse worker who was separated from his wife, and enjoyed shopping at flea markets and tinkering with his car.

In fact, to anyone taking an interest in the development of psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, Reimer's life story would have long been infamous, but also pseudonymous. Going by the name "John", and subsequently "Joan", David Reimer had been an unwitting guinea-pig - along with his identical twin brother Brian - in a medical experiment at first celebrated, then notorious. Masterminded by a prominent Baltimore physician, John Money, it was an attempt to settle, once and for all, the fraught nature-versus-nurture debate: to prove that gender was so fluid that by a mere change in childrearing practice, plus a little surgery, a boy could be turned into a girl, while his twin developed as a male.

It would split the world of sexual psychology in two. And after 12 years of traumatising treatment, followed by a further two decades spent attempting to repair the damage, it would drive David Reimer to his death."It was like brainwashing," Reimer once said, having resumed his male identity after a childhood spent as Brenda. "I'd give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it's torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind."

The tragedy has its roots in what seemed like a routine trip to hospital in 1966 for Janet and Ron Reimer and their twin baby boys, Bruce and Brian. Doctors had recommended circumcision, a practice still routine in much of north America, but Bruce's operation went distressingly wrong. Like almost every detail of the story, what actually happened is still fiercely disputed but what is clear is that the electric cauterising machine being used by doctors caused burning to his penis so severe as to render the organ unrescuable.

Reconstructive genital surgery was still rudimentary, and medical experts could offer only pessimism. So when the despairing parents happened to catch a television show, some months later, on which John Money was propounding his radical new theories about gender formation, it seemed to offer a lifeline. "He was saying that it could be that babies are born neutral, and you could change their gender," Janet Reimer later told John Colapinto, author of a book on the experiment entitled As Nature Made Him."

In photographs taken at the time, Money - then, as now, affiliated to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland - looks like a parody of a progressive "sexologist", turtlenecked and moustachioed, and his writings did nothing to dispel that impression. Raised in a conservative religious family in New Zealand, he had rebelled and become a self-described "missionary of sex", revelling in shocked responses to his tireless advocacy of open marriages and - a particular favourite - bisexual group sex.

At their most extreme, Money's public statements had appeared to endorse, or at least not to condemn, incest and paedophilia, but there was no hint of that in the television show Janet and Ron Reimer saw. They wrote to him, and he wrote swiftly back. He was confident, he said, that Bruce could be successfully raised as a girl. From an experimental perspective, Brian Reimer would provide the perfect control: his genetic inheritance was identical to Bruce's. The only difference was that one would be nurtured as a girl, and the other as a boy.

Money's emphasis on nurture over nature played well with the progressive spirit of the times, and especially with the women's movement, its proponents eager to establish that women's traditional social roles were not biologically pre-ordained. "Postwar, in any case, there was a move away from people being innately, biologically, inherently anything," says Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College in London. "We'd just seen Nazism, and the emphasis had been put on the idea that certain people were innately evil - Jews and gypsies, among others - so the emphasis on culture and society fitted well with social democratic ideals." The Reimers did not engage in this kind of debate. "I looked up to [John Money] as a god," Janet said simply.

Bruce Reimer started to become Brenda on July 3, 1967. Physicians at Johns Hopkins surgically castrated him, and the remaining skin was used to forge a "cosmetic vaginal cleft." Money sent the family back to Winnipeg with strict instructions. "He told us not to talk about it," Ron Reimer told John Colapinto. "Not to tell [Brenda] the whole truth, and that she shouldn't know she wasn't a girl."

Things started going wrong almost immediately. Janet Reimer recalled dressing Brenda in her first dress just before the child was due to turn two. "She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, she knows she's a boy and she doesn't want girls' clothing." Brenda was bullied viciously at school. When she urinated standing up in the school lavatories, she was threatened with a knifing.

Whether all the blame should lie with Money remains a matter of contention. His supporters argue that reconstructive surgery techniques of the time were such that trying to turn Bruce into Brenda might genuinely have been the least worst option. In public, Money advertised the "John/Joan" study as a resounding success. "This dramatic case," Time magazine reported, picking up on his salesmanship, "provides strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns on masculine and feminine behaviour can be altered."

In private, though, things were spinning into chaos. Brenda was required to attend regular therapy sessions with Money in Baltimore, in the company of her brother. According to Colapinto's account, they soon degenerated into horrifying encounters that deeply traumatised the two children. Showing the children "explicit sexual pictures" was seemingly central to Money's theories of gender reassignment. David Reimerlater recalled, as Brenda, "getting yelled at by Money ... he told me to take my clothes off, and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed 'No!' I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking."

In the children's grimmest recollection - one they found almost impossible to talk about years later - Money allegedly made "Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks", an element of Money's theory he referred to as "sexual rehearsal play". (The author John Heidenry, who wrote a recent review defending the sexologist, calls this charge "outrageous and offensive", and says Brian, the source of the claim, may have been suffering false memory syndrome.)

By the time Brenda reached her teens she had attempted suicide at least once; she refused further surgery but consented, though irregularly, to take oestrogen supplements to encourage the development of breasts. John Money gradually drifted from the Reimers' lives, but Brenda remained under constant psychiatric treatment. It was after one such session with a Winnipeg psychiatrist in 1980 that Ron Reimer collected his daughter in the car and, instead of taking her home, drove her to an ice-cream parlour, where he told her everything.

The upturn in Reimer's fortunes lasted several years. Brenda opted for a sex change within weeks of her father telling her the truth. Thanks to developments in phalloplasty, Brenda, taking the name David, received surgery that after five years left him with a reconstructed penis resembling a real one, with limited sensation, and usable for sex. When he was 23 he met Jane, a single mother of three, and married her soon afterwards. In 2000, he went public with his story.

But his happiness didn't last. For reasons that remain unclear, David and Jane eventually separated. Then, two years ago, Brian Reimer apparently killed himself, taking an overdose of drugs he was taking for schizophrenia. David reportedly felt responsible for the death, and visited Brian's grave daily, weeding the plot and bringing fresh flowers.

Despite Colapinto's claims that David made a large amount of money from the book, those who knew him said he was often hard up; at the Transcona golf club, in Winnipeg's eastern suburbs, where he did odd jobs, the members had a whip round for him so he could afford to eat. Friends say he had became particularly distraught during the last few months after he bought thousands of dollars' worth of shares in an investment that flopped.

The world of psychology learned of the failure of Money's experiment through a paper by a rival, Dr Milton Diamond, of the University of Hawaii, who eventually traced those who had taken over treatment of the twins. For Lynne Segal, the story of the experiment does not settle the nature/nurture debate one way or the other - her view, widely shared today, is that the dichotomy is false - but it shows the perils of psychologists trying to prove too much through research. "It's far too simplistic, and far too interventionist, this idea that we can control and model and shape people to prove one thing or another."

John Money remains an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins. "He's not commenting on this story," his assistant told the Guardian yesterday. "There is no comment to make." Click for Nature v. Nurture Part II.

As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto is published by Quartet, priced £10.

Quoted material from The Guardian, Wednesday, 12 May 2004.