As Nature Made Him

David Reimer (1965 - 2004) 

I stumbled across news of David Reimer’s suicide (Read full CBC News article here) on the Internet by accident when I was surfing the web this week and it both shocked and saddened me when I read of his passing away last month. He was 38.

Some of you, I know, will know who I am talking about, Reimer being a case study that has been (and unfortunately) studied and circulated among the psych and medical circle for many years and again when he came public with his story in 2000. For those of you who haven’t heard of David Reimer, he was the boy who got surgically reassigned as a female after a botched circumcision (using an unconventional method of circumcision) in the late 1960s left him with such a severely burned penis that it was surgically irreparable.

Left with a baby boy with testicles but no penis, his parents didn’t know what to do. They eventually happened to come across Dr John Money’s theories on sex and gender that it was nurture and not nature that determined a child’s gender, and that boys – when intercepted early enough – could be raised as girls, decided to investigate the option of raising David (or Bruce as he was originally named) as a girl. After considering the options, they decided it was better to raise Bruce as a girl and so, a few months before his second birthday, Bruce had his testicles removed and they took him home as a girl, and renamed him as Brenda.

Originally pronouncing the gender reassignment a success by Dr Money in an article published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour and known in the medical circle as the Joan/John case, the experiment starting coming undone when Bruce hit puberty and he found out about the truth of the botched circumcision. He attempted suicide three times, with the third attempt leaving him in a coma. But he eventually recovered, cut his hair, ditched his female clothing, renamed himself as David and aimed to live as normally as possible as a man, later marrying a woman. He eventually went public with his story in the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto, and in it, revealed his story of a childhood filled with confusion, misery and humiliation.

I couldn’t but help ponder about the tragedy of it all. I am saddened by his death – and of his twin brother’s death two years earlier as well. And I can only say a prayer for David as I type this – a man who lived, in my opinion, an extremely courageous life in circumstances that I cannot even begin to envisage myself in.