David Reimer, 38, Commits Suicide
Canadian media reported this month that David Reimer, 38, committed suicide on May 4 after losing his life savings in a shady investment deal.
Reimer achieved a modicum of fame in the early 1990s when he was the subject of a book by John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl..
As an infant, Reimer’s penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision. After seeking help from a number of experts, Reimer’s mother ended up at the door of Dr. John Money who decided to use Reimer as part of an experiment to test his theory that gender was socially assigned rather than genetic.
Under Money’s advice, Reimer’s testicles and his remaining genitalia were removed and Reimer was raised as a girl (complete with hormone treatments), with his parents being told never to reveal the truth. Money published a number of scholarly articles comparing Reimer’s development with that of his twin brother which portrayed the reassignment as an unqualified success, but the reality was that the experiment was an utter failure. Reimer had a very difficult childhood due to the attempted gender change and threatened to kill himself rather than continue to see Dr. Money which prompted his parents to reveal the truth.
Reimer later said that he was shocked to find out that while he was experiencing a miserable childhood trying to fit in as a girl that Money’s chronicling of this “success” was being used to inflict the same nightmare on other children.
Reimer tried to kill himself at least three times and expressed a desire to kill Dr. Money. Eventually he abandoned his feminine identity, and underwent reconstructive surgery to restore his genitalia.
Money’s view that gender is assigned socially has been all-but-refuted by studies showing that prenatal exposure to hormones appears to be largely responsible for sex assignment (although it is still the prevailing view of many academic feminists for whom evidence is always a poor substitute for ideology).
Source:
Man raised as a girl commits suicide. Associated Press, May 12, 2004.
The David Reimer, 38, Commits Suicide by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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