- Near the end of episode eight, I said
that I would go more deeply into what I've learned so far
about the challenges medical researchers
and doctors face as they worked
to develop knowledge about we complex humans.
To me, the story of David Reimer, the boy who was raised
as a girl, looks like a terribly misguided
medical experiment.
His penis was destroyed
by a different doctor in a medical accident
during circumcision,
and his distraught parents
who feared the discrimination David
and his family would receive
as a result searched for an answer.
They found Dr.
Muy and he convinced them to raise him as a girl.
Dr. Money suggested that solution
because he had a theory that gender identity was fluid
until 18 to 24 months of age.
He further believed that David would believe he was a girl
and the society around him would treat him as a girl
only if the parents were consistent.
In following his advice,
he had some evidence from his interviews
of people born intersex
and transgender people that was suggestive of this theory,
but it was still a theory in the early stages of
investigation, I believe,
and not with enough evidence to act on it.
He also, like many other doctors at the time, told parents
of children born intersex to have operations on their bodies
and childhood to make them conform
to the male female classifications of his day.
This was in line with his belief that
how a child is treated from birth has a strong correlation
with the gender identity they see
for themselves into adulthood.
His years long experiment on David was a dismal failure.
Yet as far as I can find, he not only failed
to acknowledge the failure,
but insisted it was a success up to the end of his life.
As I said in previous episodes,
all this was done under the widespread cultural beliefs
that being a male or female, cisgender
and heterosexual human was normal,
and that being born intersex, homosexual,
or transgender was abnormal
and should be fixed in some way or hidden.
I don't fault doctor money just for being wrong.
In his belief that gender identity is mostly fluid
for the first 18 to 24 months of a baby's life,
human life is complex,
and over the last hundred years in particular,
we humans have held many inaccurate theories about
how our bodies develop and how they work.
The challenge is how to react when we begin to get evidence
that our theories are partly
or mostly wrong, especially when applied
to a specific situation.
Let's look at how Dr.
Money proceeded in David Reimer's case.
He periodically checked in with the parents
who tried their best to implement the program,
but it wasn't going exactly the way Dr.
Money predicted.
As John Lopinto says on pages 58 through 59
of the Kindle edition of his book, the Boy Who was raised
as a girl, Janet noticed David,
whom they were calling Brenda sometimes being tomboyish
and sometimes trying to please her by acting more like
what we're seeing by the culture as a girl.
At other times, David would be tidier
and try to help a bit in the kitchen as it was.
Mother described it and
to quote Op Pinto in her letters to Dr.
Money describing Brenda's progress, Janet made sure
to emphasize those more girly moments so
that the psychologist would know that Janet
and Ron were doing everything they could
to implement his plans.
She also informed money
of her daughter's masculine leanings,
but the psychologist assured her that this was mere tomboy.
In other words, David's parents wanted the doctor
to believe they were following his advice,
but also sent him some contrary information.
But even when she reported ways
that David was not acting like a stereotypical girl,
money just wrote it off.
After all, what does it mean for a girl to be tomboyish?
Wikipedia gives this definition.
Tomboy is a term used for girls
or young women with masculine traits.
It can include wearing androgynous or unfeminine clothing
and engaging in physical sports or other activities
and behaviors usually associated with boys or men.
Now, words like androgynous and unfeminine
and ideas about what are feminine clothes
and feminine sports versus behaviors associated with boys
or men have shifted over the last 200 years
as have beliefs about the proper role of women in society,
even with the best of intentions.
Dr. Money who saw David in person infrequently
was making a decision to encourage David's parents
to continue following his advice in part on the basis
of decidedly fuzzy and unscientific ideas in this case.
In addition, there is evidence in his book about David
Reimer's life where John Cola Pinto gives numerous examples
of David and his brother resisting Dr.
Money when he met with them in person.
On pages 84 to 85, he tells a story of Dr.
Money asking David
and his brother about the differences
between boys and girls.
In this case, he had shown them pictures of naked children
and adults because he believed that this was a way
to solidify gender identity in children.
His theory told him
that talking about their genitals was a
way to accomplish this.
The incident Lopinto relates
happened when they were seven years old when Dr.
Money asked David what the difference was
between boys and girls.
David was evasive, says Kto,
talking about things like clothing and toys, but Dr.
Money kept asking questions, trying to elicit answers,
having to do with their sex organs.
His persistence led David to blurt out that girls are flat
between their legs,
but that also blurred out, but we're twins.
When Dr. Money asked David what he bet,
he listed things like being left-handed
and the similarity in their voices in their eyes.
Then Kop Pinto reports too ashamed to speak directly
of her genitals.
She, by which he means David, left it up to money
to settle the mystery of how two such completely similar
children could also be different in their anatomic sex.
But money failed or declined to catch Brenda's meaning
and instead returned to a different schedule of inquiry,
the list of prepared questions about toys, school,
and fighting that he worked through at each visit.
In other words, Dr.
Money repeatedly passed over concrete evidence
that his experiments might not be working,
and instead of approaching David from a curiosity point
of view, continued
to push him into becoming the girl he thought
David needed to be.
In addition to this, Dr.
Money was dishonest with David's parents.
They didn't know he was showing the boys pictures
of naked adults
or the way he would sometimes yell at them when they didn't
give him the answers he wanted.
I find it hard to believe they would've gone along
with him showing their children such pictures that he did
so without their knowledge was evidence in my mind
that he was in acting an experiment
that he knew David's parents would not have agreed to
had they known the full truth about what he meant to do.
That was dishonest of him to say the least.
After reading John Kop Pinto's book, it is hard for me
to excuse how Dr.
Money reacted when the evidence in front of his eyes hinted
that he was making a mistake he plowed on
as though he were right rather than reevaluating the
situation as he should have.
Making a clear statement like this feels easy,
but I think it is important to be thoughtful as well.
When you see something you don't fully understand,
it is time to get curious.
Dr. Money's theories that gender identity was highly
flexible in the first two years of life.
Were not the only ones at existence at the time.
There were other researchers who thought the role
of nature in developing gender identity was stronger.
One of them was Dr. Milton Diamond,
who deeply disagreed with Dr.
Money's hypothesis.
Although the debate between doctors money
and Diamond has been presented
as a stark nature versus nurtured debate,
it was actually more nuanced than
that if you read all the articles they both wrote.
But at some point, Dr.
Money seems to have gotten attached to his theory
and oversimplify even his own research.
I have begun reading a new book titled The Man Who Invented
Gender Engaging the Ideas of John Money written
by Terry Goldie.
On page eight, Goldie sums up the influence Dr.
Money had in his field in this way, quote,
he became the expert on sexuality,
whether in the popular press in such publications as Time
or Playboy or in the courts in 1977,
the Johns Hopkins newsletter proclaimed that when Dr.
Money Speaks, the whole world listens.
How did Dr. Money become so influential?
How did he get so attached to his theories?
Was this mostly a question of his personal history
and psychological makeup?
What role, if any,
did the cultural stereotypes about sexuality
and gender identity in the 1950s and 1960s play in this?
In the next episode, I will look at Terry Goldie's book,
but also John Money's man and woman, boy
and Girl, which he wrote along with one
of his research assistants.
I do not expect to come up
with some definitive explanation for how Dr.
Money's mistake with David Reimer happened,
but I think it is important
to know more about the man than just how he has been defined
by this mistake.
Context matters in situation like this if we are to come
to a more nuanced understanding of
how things like this happened.
In the meantime, please remember that you can follow links
to books and articles I referenced at separate sections
of my website, emily p newberry.substack.com.
You can also find it by searching for sacred Gyre Substack.