Hope of the Hopeless
Graeme Hunter on Tragedy & the Life of David Reimer
In May 2004 the sad life of David Reimer ended where it began, in Winnipeg. He was not quite 40. In his earliest infancy, an unpracticed doctor botched the attempt to circumcise him, destroying his penis. His bewildered parents, not knowing where to turn, fell prey to an ego-driven sex researcher named John Money, employed at the Gender Identity Clinic of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Money persuaded the Reimers to do something almost inconceivable at that time: to press on with what the doctor had inadvertently begun and make David into a girl.
The Reimers were ordinary working people. They could not have grasped what a windfall their son represented for Money if they followed his advice. He was looking for some way to demonstrate his far-fetched theory that masculinity and femininity are not natural characteristics but acquired ones. If he was right, children could be raised to play either male or female roles in society, provided they were consistently reinforced in whichever role was selected for them.
Disaster & Escape
To John Money, the Reimer family’s mischance was a serendipitous gift, a test-case more perfect than he could have invented: Here were unsuspecting, ordinary parents with no theoretical axes of their own to grind, a perfectly bland background against which to display what he felt sure would be the successful and attention-grabbing transformation of David. Best of all, David Reimer had an intact twin brother who could function as a built-in case for comparison.
Taking advantage of the Reimers’ simplicity and cultivating their trust, Money persuaded them to become his guinea pigs. On their misery he built the case that would secure his reputation as what we quaintly name a “sexologist” and that for long after would be held up as proof that gender really is “socially constructed.” For years, Money would go on declaring in his lectures that David Reimer had successfully become a girl. That claim became a cornerstone dogma of the “gender identity” and “gender construction” industry. It helped justify teaching gender fluidity to our children in school and acting upon the assumption of its truth in what concerns gender politics in our society.
David became Brenda, but his transformation was a disaster. After enduring more than a decade as a girl, Reimer at last managed to escape the female identity that Money and pseudo-science had imposed upon him. In courageous independence of all the adult forces arrayed against him, the teen-aged David Reimer reclaimed his young manhood. He knew he could never lead a sexually normal life, but he refused to let that dark fact eclipse his hope for love and a proper family. Eventually he married and with his wife adopted three children.
Just after it was published, I reviewed in these pages As Nature Made Him, the well-written, hard-hitting study of Reimer’s case by John Colapinto. For the most part, it was gruesome reading, but Colapinto was at least able to leave the reader with a cautious word of hope. He ended by pointing to the fulfillment Reimer had found in those aspects of being a man that transcend the merely sexual—in providing food and strength and permanence for a family.
It was a thrilling conclusion because, amid so much that was dysfunctional, it revealed an unconquered human spirit. Deep called to deep in those final pages. In spite of everything, it seemed that David Reimer had become a man at a level John Money and his admirers would never understand.
Stalin & Rousseau
Colapinto did a great service in exposing Money’s account as the self-serving fiction it was. He also supplied a new ending to the Reimer story that was consistent with the facts as they were then known. It looked as if the real Reimer was going to live happily after all, and would do it “as nature made him,” that is, as a man.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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