Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

Finally, many affirmative therapists argue, as Dr. Kaufman did to me, that we know gender identity is immutable because of the famous case of David Reimer.24 David Reimer was an identical twin (born “Bruce Reimer”) whose badly botched circumcision at seven months left him without a functioning penis. Under great pressure by Johns Hopkins psychologist John Money, David’s parents renamed him “Brenda” and acquiesced to full sex reassignment surgery to “transform” David into a girl. On the strict advice of John Money, the parents never told Brenda she had been born a boy. For years, many hailed this experiment as a triumph of nurture over nature: unlike his identical twin, Brenda Reimer had actually become a girl. But John Money’s experiment failed miserably, as later follow-up studies and reports showed. David never felt comfortable as a girl, was unalterably boyish for all of his life, aggressive and unhappy. By adolescence he was so troubled and depressed that his parents reluctantly told him the truth. He abruptly renamed himself “David,” underwent masculinizing hormone treatments and surgery and presented himself, once more, as a boy, then a man. David went on to marry a woman. But David, who was never able to fully regain physical functionality as a man or to escape the tortured years he spent treated as a girl, eventually committed suicide in 2004.