David Reimer is a name you’ve probably heard of if you paid any attention to TV in the past few decades. He was one of the first people whose gender struggle became a hot topic worldwide, and his life’s story is as tragic as it is interesting.
1. Bruce Reimer
David’s birth name was Bruce Reimer. He was born in 1965 in Winnipeg, Canada alongside his twin brother Brian. They were born perfectly healthy, but after a few months, David’s parents, Janet and Ron Reimer, started noticing that the boys were having trouble urinating properly.
2. An Unconventional Surgery
After a few medical checkups, the twins were diagnosed with phimosis. The most common way to treat this condition is by performing a circumcision, and the parents were referred to Dr. Jean-Marie Huot to perform the surgery.
3. Unconventional Surgery
Thousands of circumcisions are performed in Canada every year, most without any issues. However, Dr. Huot used a rather unconventional technique to perform the surgery – Electrocautery. Using an Electrocauter device, Dr. Huot would attempt to safely burn the foreskin off of David and his brother’s privates, starting with David.
4. Disaster Strikes
Even though Electrocautery was chosen by Dr. Huot as a “safer” alternative to conventional circumcision, disaster struck David during his procedure. Instead of just removing the foreskin, the device accidentally severely burned his entire private area, leaving it permanently disfigured. After this, the surgeons chose to not perform the procedure on Brian, whose phimosis cleared up on its own.
5. Traveling To The States
There was no fix for the damage done to David’s privates. Willing to do anything for their son to live a normal life, David’s parents traveled to Baltimore to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the best hospitals in the world. There, they met with an unconventional doctor to solve their son’s unconventional problem.
6. The Doctor With The Solution
Dr. John Money was working at John Hopkins as a psychologist at the time. He had rather interesting views on gender, especially for the time. He believed that humans were inherently born without gender, and that anyone could be raised as any gender so long as they are told to believe that way.
7. The Only Way
Once the Reimers met with Dr. Money, he was adamant that the only way for David to live a normal life would be to raise him as a girl with surgically constructed female anatomy. He claimed that David wouldn’t even realize that he was ever male in the first place and that the child would grow up to be a regular adult woman.
8. The Surgery
After some persuasion by Dr. Money, the Reimers decided to go through with the surgery. At just 22 months old, David became one of the youngest people in the world to go through a gender reassignment surgery. His male genitals were completely removed and replaced with constructed female-presenting ones.
9. Meet Brenda Reimer
After the surgery, David, born Bruce, was now known as “Brenda” and was being raised as a girl by his family. The surgery was considered a “success” by Dr. Money who continued to see Brenda in the following years to assess her growth.
10. Lab Rat
Even though Dr. Money claimed that this surgery was to improve Brenda’s quality of life, in reality, he only saw Brenda as his own science experiment. He was desperate to prove his theory of gender being a social construct to be true, and Brenda was the perfect way to prove it to the scientific community.
11. Strange Experiments
During his yearly checkups, Dr. Money would make Brenda go through all sorts of strange experiments that would supposedly reaffirm the surgery’s success. Some of these experiments were somewhat innocent, such as making sure Brenda had the same interests as other girls. But others were outright abusive.
12. The Control Brother
Brenda’s twin brother Brian was made to be the “control” subject of the experiment. Dr. Money would often include him in his research, and he made the two brothers do some truly disturbing things. On more than a few occasions, Dr. Money told the siblings to rehearse lewd acts with each other, which were also filmed on his camera.
13. The Lies Come To An End
Dr. Reiner always presented his Brenda experiment as a success to the scientific community. But in reality, Brenda and Brian were always terrified whenever they had to go see the doctor. As Brenda started to grow up, she began female puberty. The plan was to have her on male puberty blockers and hormone therapy for the rest of her life, but enough was enough. At the age of 13, Brenda told her parents that she no longer wanted to be a girl.
14. David Is Born
After “Brenda’s” revelations, the Reimers stopped visiting Dr. Money and Brenda eventually changed her name to David and started living as a boy. David had always wanted to be a boy, he was always interested in the same things as other boys, but as a child, he was too scared to go against the wishes of his parents or his doctors.
15. Struggles Of A New Life
For the second time in his life, David had to completely transition into a new gender. He had to get his pseudo-breasts surgically removed and he also had to get male privates constructed specifically for him several times. He began inserting painful testosterone injections – which he would need for the rest of his life – every day, and it all took a serious toll on his physical and mental health.
16. David’s Life As An Adult
Despite all the trauma brought to him through his upbringing, David would try his best to live a normal life after adopting his latest identity. He worked odd jobs here and there and picked up many hobbies. He eventually got married and adopted multiple children with his wife, although he still struggled with intimacy.
17. Exposing The Scam
In 1997, David told his story to renowned scientist Milton Diamond. This would be the first time he would be exposed as the subject behind Dr. Money’s study, and he quickly rose to global prominence from there. His story made headlines across the world, and Dr. Money’s reputation was thrown in the dust. He made appearances on The Rolling Stones and even Opera. For the first time in his life, David felt heard.
18. Tragedy Strikes David
While David’s story made strides across the world, he was still struggling with everything he had gone through in his life. Alongside him, David’s brother, Brian, had been quietly struggling too. He was also a subject of Dr. Money’s studies and had been put through trauma. He struggled with depression almost all his life and suffered from childhood neglect. Brian became addicted to antidepressants in his adult life, eventually overdosing on them and passing away in 2002. This had a severe impact on David, who would start to go down the same path.
19. The Story Of David Ends
After the death of his brother, David fell into a deep depression. David somehow felt responsible for his brother’s death, and at the same time, he was seriously struggling financially. It all reached a breaking point for David when, in 2004, his wife told him that they needed to separate. Not wanting the be abandoned by the last person he cared about in the world, David ultimately decided to take a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was 38 years old.
The story of David both started and ended with a tragedy. It remains one of the most gruesome stories of gender struggle the world has heard of, and even though his story didn’t have a happy ending, it exposed a lot of people and opened up a lot of eyes to medical neglect.