Playing God With Other People’s Children

By Eliza Mondegreen

Last week, I picked up John Colapinto’s 2000 book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which runs along three tracks: there’s David Reimer the case, David Reimer and the theories he’s been made to serve, and finally David Reimer the boy upon whose one and only life and body everything else is written.

David Reimer entered medical history after a botched circumcision that left him without a penis. As identical twins, David and his brother were irresistible research subjects for John Money, a New Zealand sexologist who saw a chance to test his powers. Could John Money turn David, who he saw as a deficient little boy, into a girl with a secret that not even little ‘Brenda’ Reimer herself would be able to guess?

The long and painful saga boils down to a simple answer: No. Colapinto tracks the invention and application of the concept of gender identity, first to children with rare disorders of sexual development, then to developmentally normal children like David. Doctors like John Money treated children’s bodies and lives as laboratories, attempting to control for variables like doubts and questions by enlisting parents and other trusted adults to lie to children about who they are. As these experiments unfolded, they deviated painfully from theory.

David spoke of a childhood marked by confusion, violation, and pain. David had no way to make sense of his misfittedness, scarred genitals, and disturbing experiences in Money’s lab—until his parents finally revealed his medical history when he was 14 years old. His family’s annual pilgrimages to Johns Hopkins stopped only when he threatened to run away from home. Meanwhile, while the real David struggled, Money invented a happy little girl. When the fiction could not be sustained any longer, Money pretended to have lost touch with the family altogether, blaming media scrutiny for their disappearance from medical history.

David Reimer as an adult

When Colapinto’s book went to print 22 years ago, the tide seemed to be turning against medical experiments like the one that consumed David’s life. Activists with disorders and differences of sexual development were speaking out and finally starting to be heard:

“The first thing we want to have happen is that when [doctors] make their recommendation to parents, they tell them it’s experimental and there’s no evidence that it works and that there’s plenty of people who’ve had it done to them who are mad as hell.”

-Cheryl Chase, Intersex Society of North America

And critics within the field were gaining ground. One of the more responsible physicians featured in Colapinto’s account is Dr. William Reiner, who opposed Money’s approach “in which a sexual identity is imposed on a child through unshakable fiat of physicians, and any doubts or confusions the child may express about the assignment are denied by the caregivers.” In contrast, Reiner argues that medical providers “have to learn to listen to the children themselves… They’re the ones who are going to tell us what is the right thing to do”—a sentiment he echoed in a 2005 interview with the New York Times: “When you hear someone declare with such clarity that they know themselves far better than the experts, it is life changing.”

But today these impassioned arguments against medically unnecessary interventions have been turned upside-down, deployed to argue for experimental medical interventions instead and applied to a wider population of children and young people than ever before. Medical providers then and now talk about following their young patients’ lead. This is one thing in the context of attempting to avoid unnecessary medical interventions and quite another today, when “listening” to young patients is more likely to accelerate interventions than forestall them.

In the 1970s, John Money had to recruit patients one by one, keeping an eye out for medical oddities like David. Now the culture recruits kids into medical experiments around sex and gender. In fact, we’re casting a wider net than ever—targeting not just children with disorders of sexual development or children who’ve suffered terrible accidents but developmentally normal, physically healthy children who’ve been indoctrinated into a fantastical set of beliefs about sex and gender.

The parallels with gender ‘medicine’ today are chilling. There’s the same drive to satisfy adult curiosity about identity development and to test the powers of endocrinologists, surgeons, and psychosocial interventions that include a prohibition on naming uncomfortable realities, no matter how much this confuses and harms children. There are sunk costs and terrible silences and broken families and academic theories permanently inscribed on tender flesh.

Near the end of the book, David reflected on the way he’d been viewed by the theorists and medical providers who took his body and his psyche and his family apart to test out their theories:

“You know, if I had lost my arms and my legs and wound up in a wheelchair where you’re moving everything with a little rod in your mouth — would that make me less of a person? It just seems that they implied that you’re nothing if your penis is gone. The second you lose that, you’re nothing, and they’ve got to do surgery and hormones to turn you into something. Like you’re a zero. It’s like your whole personality, everything about you is all directed–all pinpointed–toward what’s between the legs. And to me, that’s ignorant. I don’t have the kind of education that these scientists and doctors and psychologists have, but to me it’s very ignorant. If a woman lost her breasts, do you turn her into a guy? To make her feel ‘whole and complete’?”

-David Reimer

Colapinto’s story has a hopeful ending. But it doesn’t hold. The copy of As Nature Made Him that I checked out from the library has a makeshift memorial taped to the back cover:

The back cover of As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto

Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student studying gender identity. You can find her on Twitter at @elizamondegreen and read more of her writings on gender at elizamondegreen.substack.com