How Money Ruined Lives

The Evil Dr. John Money

I took a psychology class in ancient times that forced us to read a book called Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, by John Money. He was a respected psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, and he argued, not very convincingly, that gender roles were artificial and superimposed on people by outside forces. Boys like trucks because they were told to like trucks; girls played with dolls because they were told to play with dolls. Men liked sports and were more aggressive, because that’s how we told them to act. Women liked to wear make-up because society told them to wear make-up. You get the picture.

What underlay this wacky premise was the idea that people were all the same and you could just paste a “male” or “female” identity on anyone. Now anybody who has ever been around even toddlers knows that little boys are inherently different than little girls. And it doesn’t matter how much you try to train them, little boys are going to be rough and rowdy, and little girls are going to want to wear princess dresses and sparkles. Boys take things apart, girls like to chatter with their friends. Little boys take a rough-and-tumble approach to play. Girls are more socialable and like to play dress-up and pretend.

But Dr. Money said, no, people grew into whatever gender roles they were taught.

How It Started

Money’s great case came with the Reimer twins in Canada. One of the twin boys was taken to a hospital for a circumcision because of a urinary problem; the baby was just eight months old. The operation was so badly botched it destroyed Bruce Reimer’s penis. It was a sad accident with no immediate remedy.

The parents contacted Dr. Money, who was an expert on intersex children. Intersex is a catchall medical term that refers to people who are born with ambiguous sex. This is a rare and heterogeneous condition. Some intersex kids may have reproductive organs that are not clearly male or female or they may have a bit of both; they may have mixed up hormones or they may be one sex in their chromosomes but have body parts for the other sex. The Reimer boy was not intersex, but the parents consulted Money anyway, since their little boy no longer had the sexual organ appropriate for his chromosomes.

Dr. Money did not believe gender was absolute or fixed in any way, so Dr. Money pitched his great idea. Raise the little boy as a girl. Give him a girl’s name, put barettes in his hair, and treat him as a girl. Teach him to be a girl and instruct him in the ways of little girls. Put him in dresses, buy him a doll, and let him grow up as a female.

That’s how the boy born Bruce Reimer became Brenda Reimer. In fact, Bruce/Brenda Reimer did not know he had been born a boy until he was 15, and let’s just say he did not take it well when he found out he’d been misled.

For Dr. Money, the Money twins represented a great experiment. Like Dr. Mengele who preceded him, Money had a special interest in twins since you could experiment on one and use the other as the control. Brian was physically intact and being raised as a boy, while Bruce was being raised as Brenda. Dr. Money could study them as they grew up. Money was hoping—and expecting—that Brenda would become a perfect girl, while Brian would grow up as the boy he was born to be.

How It Went

At first, Dr. Money considered his experiment wildly successful. Baby Brenda was being raised as a girl and, in the early years, there was some degree of outward conformity to the gender role. What was not obvious (at least to Dr. Money) was that the child was uneasy and never felt comfortable with a feminine identity. In fact, he would later write that he never ever identified as female, although he was raised strictly as a girl. When he finally did learn the truth, he rushed to try to reclaim his male identity. It was at this point that Bruce/Brenda Reimer took the name of David Reimer.

How did Brenda Reimer (soon to be David Reimer) not know he was male? First, his parents never said a word. Second, Dr. Money had arranged for him to be surgically altered to be more like a girl and he had no recollection of the surgery. No one explained the drug cocktails he was taking; he thought they were normal or perhaps just vitamins. The Reimer parents said nothing about her early accident during his circumcision. In other words, Brenda was gaslit.

The official transition began when the twins were about two. Brenda got regular estrogen treatments and annual visits to Money’s clinic. Money, always a prolific writer, started calling this the case of John and Joan. In a book Money wrote in 1975 called Sexual Signatures, the doctor conceded that Brenda (called Joan in his book) was a tomboy and had a lot of energy and stubbornness, just like her twin brother. But he did note proudly that she wore hair ribbons, as if this were a medical triumph.

Brenda/David remembers things quite differently. In a visit to the Oprah talk show, he said he never fit in as a girl and always wanted to play boys’ games, which his parents told him were unacceptable and completely inappropriate. He liked climbing trees, building forts, even sometimes scuffling with other boys. His parents did their best to keep him playing house and hopscotch.

Mrs. Reimer, the mother, remembers the first time she tried to dress little Brenda in a dress. The child tore it off and violently objected. When Brenda was given a sewing machine for Christmas, she didn’t ever use it to sew clothing; instead, she found some tools and took it apart to see how it worked. Mrs. Reimer later admitted she always knew there was a problem with Brenda’s identity as a girl, but she suppressed her doubts because of how committed she had become to raising the child as a girl. Brenda literally complained that she felt more like a boy than a girl, but the adults around her lied to her; they told her it was just a phase and it would pass.

It is no surprise, the Reimer family fell apart. Mr. Reimer became an alcoholic. Mrs. Reimer attempted suicide. Brian (the intact twin) became a substance abuser and died of an overdose in 2004.

The boy made to live as Brenda tried to restore what was robbed from him. He broke away from his family. He rejected the evil Dr. Money. Valiantly, he tried to restore his biologic sex through surgery, testosterone therapy, and a double mastectomy. But soon it was all too much; he collapsed into depression and attempted suicide.

David’s Rebirth

David survived those difficult early years. He even had a few years of near normalcy. He became David in his teens. Later, he married a woman and helped raise her three children. He pursued hobbies like fishing and camping. He also connected with a Dr. Milton Diamond, who helped him to debunk Dr. Money’s crazy theories and this absolutely grotesque experiment.

Dr. Money kept assiduous notes on this case, but he missed the fact that “Brenda” now David experienced gender dysphoria. Dr. Money was so hell-bent on his experiment that he reported Brenda Reimer was growing up whole and healthy and happy as a girl and proclaimed there were no adverse effects. Well, to be fair, he is not the first scientist to lie about his results.

Dr. Money was looking to find evidence to support gender transitions in very young kids, even babies. He specialized in intersex infants, and his approach to such children was that parents were to pick a sex and force the infant to be that sex using surgery, drug therapy, and cultural conditoning. Sexual transition was appropriate in Money’s mind, even for preschoolers.

Once he found out the truth, David Reimer hated Dr. Money. In fact, at one point, he threatened to kill himself if he ever had to see the foul doctor again. When interviewed by Rolling Stone, David Reimer (a.k.a. Bruce and Brenda) said that Dr. Money tortured him and was abusive. David recalled that as kids, the two twins would sometimes come to Dr. Money’s office and the doctor would order them to simulate sexual activity with each other. The doctor said this would be helpful so that Brenda, could learn how to respond sexually as a female. Never mind that the kids were siblings and adolescents and that this sort of thing is pervy. A little sexual theater was just what the doctor ordered. The twins hated this, but the parents permitted it, and Dr. Money watched.

But once the truth was out, everything collapsed. The Reimer parents blamed Dr. Money for the fact that their kids devolved into depression, mental illness, drug addiction, and suicidal ideation. However, some who have reviewed the case notes say that the Reimer parents were at least somewhat complicit, because they did not honestly report the full extent of what was going on to Dr. Money. In other words, the parents were only following orders.

The Evil Dr. Money

Insiders say that Dr. Money realized his experiment was a gruesome and shameful failure, but, of course, he never admitted that publicly. Dr. Money blamed the anti-feminist movement and right-wing media whenever anyone criticized him. He projected himself as a bold and righteous crusader for brave new sexuality.

Dr. Money’s original area of medical interest was intersex children. The Intersex Society of North America spoke against him and advocated not for sexual surgeries and gender reassigments in intersex people, but rather for holistic, patient-centered care. The Intersex Society of North America said that Dr. Money was mainly focused on concealing intersexuality, rather than helping such patients and their families navigate this very rare and complicated condition.

Money’s approach was simple: intersexuality was undesirable and people should be swiftly transitioned to male or female, since transition was no big deal. In fact, transitioning infants and toddlers was ideal. By contrast, the Intersex Society of North America has stated that intersexuality is more about stigma than gender, and argued that it should be considered fine and acceptable to be intersex; intersex people should not be transitioned unless they wanted to transition. Transitioning babies was not acceptable, because no intersex person should be transitoned surgically or pharmacologically without the full knowledge of what is involved and why it is being done. In other words, the Intersex Society demanded informed consent from the patient, which is a pillar of modern medical ethics and something Dr. Money circumvented.

How It Ended

Sadly, David Reimer never found solid footing in life. As an adult, he worked odd jobs mostly, including at a slaughterhouse. In 1990, he married a woman with three children from a previous marriage. In 1997, he was approached by an academic sexologist named Milton Diamond who urged him to go public with his story in order to persuade physicians that transitioning infants was a disastrous idea. The story first appeared in 1997 in Rolling Stone magazine and later got picked up by The New York Times and was made into a book. In the book, author John Colapinto revealed that even when David Reimer was living at home, wearing dresses, and going by the name Brenda Reimer, he never identified as female. His parents knew this, they just concealed it. I guess they were more interested in serving Money than their own child.

Tragedy quite predictably dogged David Reimer. He never restored a good relationship with his parents, whom he blamed for his medical tale of horror. It is stated he did forgive his mother, but he never recovered from what his parents did to him. He had a visceral hatred for Dr. Money and the medical establishment at large. He watched his twin brother devolve into the vortex of addiction and die of an overdose. Then he suffered a significant financial loss in a bad investment. One sad day in May 2004, his wife told him she wanted a separation. Two days later, Bruce-Brenda-David Reimer shot himself in the head in a parking lot of a grocery store.

He was 38 years old.

Dr. Money has never commented on the suicide of his patient. Dr. Money did not survive the twins by much; he died of Parkinson’s disease in 2006. Some say that he was “embarrassed” by the failure of the Reimer twins’ experiment, although he never voiced regret or even acknowledged that what he did was not, um, helpful.

But that’s not the end of the grotesque Dr. Money. In his work, he coined two new sick terms, of which he was very proud: chronophilia and nepiophilia. These terms refer to sexual attraction by adults to toddlers and infants, respectively. Dr. Money, a bisexual man who was only briefly married and never had children, considered that pedophilia was “harmless.” He differentiated between what he called “sadistic” pedophilia (perhaps bad) and “affectional” pedophilia (not pathological at all). His interest in intersex infants may have been more an interest in babies than intersexuality.

The man was a monster.

Despite the horrors he inflicted on the Reimer twins, Dr. Money’s work was considered groundbreaking by liberal lunatics and helped open the door to greater acceptance and even normalization of sexual reassignment surgeries with little regard to how incredibly complicated these procedures can be psychologically. Money’s work also bolstered the notion that informed consent was not necessary for sexual surgeries associated with gender reassignment and that performing them on very small children and not telling them about the surgery was a reasonable approach. He helped advance the concept that gender is just a flimsy social concept and anybody can be any gender any time. His work is sometimes used to indicate that even small and otherwise healthy children are appropriate candidates for irreversible sexual surgeries. His ridiculous books got on the roster of liberal anti-science universities everywhere. Fortunately, the book is out of print today.

In this story, no one wins. But the hero is David Reimer—he just didn’t make it out alive.