1967, Baltimore, USA. Less than two-year-old David Reimer has been wheeled into the operating room for an operation that will remove both testicles in the first step towards making him a girl.
This may be the youngest case of gender-reversal surgery in the world, but it was not done by the client’s will. David lost his penis in a medical accident, and his parents hoped to minimize the impact of the accident while he was still young, allowing him to live a normal life. Meanwhile, John Money, a sex expert at Johns Hopkins University, desperately needs an example to prove his claim: Gender is shaped, not biologically based . David also has an identical twin brother, Brian, who, in Mooney’s view, were a godsend to help him with this unprecedented experiment.
Money and David’s parents hit it off and each got what they wanted. They planned to have David’s testicles removed, concealing the fact that he was born a boy , and raised him as a girl.
Everyone will have a happy ending, at least that’s how it seemed at the time.
girl created the day after tomorrow
When David and Brian were 8 months old, doctors discovered that the two children were overly circumcised and advised their parents to have them circumcised.
This would have been a normal minor operation, but this time the doctors decided to use an electric knife, which was still a new technology at the time. I don’t know if it was the doctor’s mistake or the machine malfunctioned, and the electric current in the electrocautery increased sharply, completely burning David’s penis. Bryan’s surgery was originally in line behind David and was called off immediately.
The accident dealt a huge blow to the young Reimer couple. It wasn’t until a few months later that they saw John Mooney on a TV show.
The 1960s was the period when the affirmative action movement in the United States was in full swing. At that time, there was an important debate in the field of gender studies: whether gender depends on the innate biological basis or the acquired social environment . Mooney is a strong proponent of social determinism (acquired theory), arguing that a child who has undergone gender-reversal surgery from an early age and is treated as another gender by the surrounding social environment can adapt perfectly to the new gender .
John Mooney｜The Boy Who Was Turned Into a Girl
Money’s views became a lifesaver for the Rymers, who felt that Money “looked smart and charming.” They wrote to Moni and got a quick response. Money strongly suggested that they let David have his testicles removed and raise him as a girl. At the time, penile reconstruction surgery had not yet developed, and Mooney believed that vaginal reconstruction was more successful than penis reconstruction. Moni told the parents that they could use a synthetic vagina and estrogen supplements to give David the appearance of a woman, and that surgery was their only hope for their child to be able to bond with the opposite sex and lead a normal life in the future. .
The Rymers agreed.
And Money’s concern for the brothers is not for charity. In his view, the identical twin brothers are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. David and Brian have the same genes and the same family environment. They are the best control group. Mooney believes that, in comparison with Brian, the control group, David will convincingly demonstrate that sex is not genetically related, it is determined by the day after tomorrow .
“The most successful sex reassignment surgery in history”
After the surgery, David changed his face and changed his name to Brenda. At Money’s request, the Rymers took the twins for his assessments on a regular basis, taking contrasting photos of them at each stage of their growth. In 1975, Mooney published a case report, declaring that the transformation was a success : Brian was mischievous, liked to play with cars and toy guns, and was an ordinary little boy; while Brenda wore a skirt and played with dolls, and became a real little girl .
Young Brian (left) and Brenda (right)｜Dailymail
Money concluded that Brenda’s success as a girl “provides convincing evidence that in a normal child, gender identity is open at birth, in contrast to children born with hypoplastic sex organs, and The same is true of children with prenatal over- or under-exposure of androgens, and the opening of gender identities persists for at least one year after birth .”
The study caused a stir. Money has been featured in Time and The New York Times. Young Brenda gave countless interviews, was repeatedly asked what it was like to be a girl, what she longed for, what future she imagined, whether it included plans to marry a man… This case was even written in Many gender studies books and textbooks have been cited as evidence in support of the social determinism of gender .
However, there is no “sequel” to this high-profile case report. Money’s follow-up observation lasted only 9 years. It stands to reason that when the two children enter puberty, it is a good time to continue to prove Money’s “success”.
What really happened after David hit puberty? Maybe David’s story would have ended had it not been for Money’s “opponent” to step in to reveal the truth.
new name story
While Mooney’s experiment “was a big success,” Milton Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii, was watching. Diamond, a biologist-turned-biologist who espouses the biological determinism (congenitalism) of sex, is a long-time rival to Money. In the 1990s, when David’s case came to him, he realized that Money had concealed the truth of the story.
Contrary to Money’s publicly published paper, David did not come to terms with his new identity . From the age of two, he began to show a distaste for femininity: he always ripped his skirts, grabbed those “boy toys” with Brian, and preferred to urinate standing. After school, he was rejected and bullied by other girls because of his masculine appearance and weird behavior.
Brenda as a Child｜OWN/YouTube
The Mooneys demand that the Rymers keep the child’s secret that David was a boy, and do everything in their power to try to convince him to accept the identity of a woman. Money recruited transgender men and women to preach to Brenda the benefits of being a girl. In order for David to go on with the vaginal construction, Mooney showed him nude photos of adults, even a picture of a woman giving birth. Mooney assured him that if he had vaginal surgery, he might be able to have children in the future.
All this did not help, but pushed the family into the abyss of pain. David’s mother tried to commit suicide out of guilt, and his father started drinking; Brian felt neglected at home, suffered from depression, and began to abuse drugs. David himself increasingly resisted Money’s regular check-ups and attempted suicide at the age of 13.
A team of doctors and counsellors at the local hospital decided to intervene, and eventually succeeded in persuading the parents to reveal the truth about David. He immediately embraced his masculine identity, changing his name from Brenda back to David.
“Suddenly everything I felt made sense. I wasn’t a freak. I wasn’t crazy,” David later recalled.
David embarks on another long journey. He stopped taking estrogen drugs and switched to male hormone therapy; he also had breasts that had begun to grow and underwent penis reconstruction surgery. New anxieties follow. David began to worry about whether he could get married and become a “normal” man in the future. In his twenties, he attempted suicide twice.
After talking to Diamond, David learned that his experience had been used as a model for some kind of gender-switching operation to treat babies with sexual developmental abnormalities and genital damage. He was outraged and decided to reveal the truth to the world. As a result, Diamond published an assessment report on David in March 1997, which once again caused shock in the academic circles. David himself appeared in a series of documentaries and gave an in-depth interview with New York Times reporter John Colapinto, who wrote his story as ” As Nature Made ” Him ).
David Reimer in a TV interview in 2000｜OWN/YouTube
David’s self-report also brought charges against Moni’s academic integrity and even ethics. He recalls that when he was young, he was often asked to undress and display sexual organs to medical staff who were following up or watching the case; Moni also asked him and his twin brother to imitate sex movements. By today’s standards, such conduct is a serious violation of children’s rights.
How we imagine gender
This “reversal” has reclaimed a city for biological determinism, but it has not completely refuted social constructionism.
According to Diamond and Colapinto, David had a tendency to exhibit typically male behavior from an early age, suggesting that there must be something genetic about gender.
But, noted gender researcher Judith Butler: “There is another reading of this story that neither affirms nor denies social construction, nor does it affirm nor deny biological nature.”
In Butler’s view, gender includes not only how we perceive ourselves, but also how we present ourselves to others, which is the performativity of gender . She delves into the case in depth in Undoing Gender . She pointed out that although David’s parents and Mooney’s team instilled him with a lot of knowledge and ideas about the female body and women’s social norms, they overlooked a key point, which is David’s own perceptions and feelings about gender. According to David’s self-report in an interview, Butler commented: “David knows that there is a certain (gender) norm that he should conform to, but he has never been able to conform to this norm.”
From childhood to adulthood, David’s every move has been placed in the evaluation of gender norms. As Butler points out: “Do parents rush to take their son to a gender identity clinic when they see their son spinning or their daughter to a truck?” An ordinary little girl might not like dolls in favor of trucks, or she might Broader shoulders and stronger build than others, but in young David, it all became evidence that she was not a “standard girl”. When the truth was revealed, those behaviors that did not conform to the norm suddenly had a reasonable explanation, but David had to face an irreparable physical disability.
If you like to play with cars, isn’t it a “standard girl”? ｜Unsplash
David briefly lived the life of an ordinary man as an adult, who went to work as a cleaner at a slaughterhouse and married a woman with three children who didn’t care about his physical disability. But he still can’t shake the shadows left by his early experiences.
At the age of 38, after a series of failed investments, a broken marriage, and the suicide of his brother, David left this world. “I was shocked, but not surprised,” the journalist Corrapinto wrote of the news.
David switched genders twice in his life and had four names: Bruce when he was born, Brenda when he lost his testicles, Joan in medical literature, and David when he was publicly known to the world. Although gender is only one facet of a person, in the eyes of parents and doctors, he started out as a crippled boy, then a disobedient girl, and finally a substandard man.
In all his life, no one has ever regarded him as a complete person.
references
[1] Butler J. Undoing gender[M]. routledge, 2004.
[2] Diamond M, Sigmundson H K. Sex reassignment at birth: Long-term review and clinical implications[J]. Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 1997, 151(3): 298-304. https://jamanetwork. com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/518304
[3] Gaetano, Phil, “David Reimer and John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy: The John/Joan Case”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2017-11-15). ISSN: 1940-5030. https://ift.tt/qVMBY0l .
[4] O’Connell S. Dr. Money and the boy with no penis[J]. Horizon, 2004. https://ift.tt/9NV1xuI
[5] Colapinto J. Gender Gap: What were the real reasons behind David Reimer’s suicide[J]. slate. com, 2004: 06-03. https://ift.tt/gzCiXJ8
[6] https://ift.tt/gXBHh9d
Author: Maya Blue
Edit: Flip
Source of cover image: factrepublic
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