David Reimer

This article deals with the patient, for the mathematician see David Reimer (mathematician)

David Reimer (born August 22, 1965 in Winnipeg as Bruce Reimer , † May 4, 2004 ibid) was a Canadian citizen who was born as a boy but raised as a girl after his penis was irreparably injured in an unsuccessful circumcision in early childhood so he had to be amputated. It went down in scientific history as the John / Joan case.

Life

David, who was named Bruce after birth, and Brian Reimer were born identical twins . At the age of six months both of them were diagnosed with a narrowing of the foreskin , and almost two months later, on April 27, 1966, an operation was performed on David. The circumcision by electrocautery , however, failed and his penis was irreparably injured. His parents therefore decided, on the advice of sexologist John Money , to have sex-changing surgery and to raise the boy as a girl. At the age of 22 months, David's remaining testicles were removed ( castration ) and rudimentary labia were formed from the skin of his scrotum . David was called Brenda from then on. In addition, David was treated with female hormones from around the age of 12 .

Money saw this as an opportunity, by comparing it with David's identical twin brother, Brian, to find evidence of the thesis discussed in sexology, according to which education in the early years alone or essentially plays a role in the development of a sexual and gender-specific identity . David was described by Money as a "normal, happy girl" after this assignment; Family and friends, however, described him as a deeply unhappy child with major social problems. In 1980 he learned that he was born a boy. From then on, he insisted on living as a boy again and called himself David from then on. Reimer underwent contrary treatment with breast removal, testosterone injections, and phalloplasty . On September 22, 1990, he married Jane Fontaine and adopted their three children.

David Reimer committed on 4 May 2004, at the age of 38 years, suicide . His mother told the New York Times that David seemed to have lost his life after he and his wife broke up and lost his job. He had also not got over the death of his twin brother Brian two years earlier, who died on July 1, 2002 of drug poisoning. It is not clear whether the overdose was taken accidentally or with suicidal intent. David's mother said she believed that her son would still be alive if he had not been the victim of the “catastrophic experiment” that caused him so much suffering.

Reception and processing

As part of its “gender reassignment” concept, Money assigned an unknown number of other children with malformed sexual organs a gender based on the optimal gender policy . To this end, as head of psychology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he had set up a specialized clinic, which was closed by his successor in 1979. Some of the former patients found themselves in self-help groups. Money was based on the basic assumption that a person does not have any gender-specific behavior from birth. The biological sex (sex) has nothing to do with the social sex (gender) . Although his gender assignment failed in the Reimer case, he and many of his followers stuck to the basic thesis and cited or cited this case as evidence that the gender of a person only manifests in later childhood development and can be changed at will beforehand. Critics of gender mainstreaming often claim that gender mainstreaming is also based on Money's theses.

Alice Schwarzer used the "striking case" in 1975 in her book The Little Difference as evidence of her theses of equality feminism - that gender identity is "not a biological identity, but a psychological one". She described Money as one of the “few exceptions that do not manipulate, but do justice to the educational mandate of research”.

The biologist Milton Diamond - who had criticized Money's theses on gender development as early as 1965 - published an article together with the psychiatrist Keith Sigmundson in 1997 in the Archives of Adolescent and Pediatric Medicine , in which they found the experiment on Reimer to have failed. He fought against the forced role as a girl from the start. The publication sparked debates in medical circles about the continued widespread practice of gender reassignment.

As a result, Reimer met with the journalist John Colapinto , to whom he told his life story. Colapinto published an article for Rolling Stone in December 1997 (in which Reimer was referred to by the pseudonym John / Joan). Building on this, Colapinto published the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (German title "The boy who grew up as a girl") in 2000 , in which he used Reimer's real names and the methods Moneys and the concept of "Gender reassignment" criticized.

The Hamburg sex researcher Gunter Schmidt claimed in a magazine article about Colapinto's book that it was leading “an ideological crusade for a tempting naive gender order: man is man, woman is woman, as nature dictates.” According to Schmidt, the individual case has no gender-theoretical evidential value. As a counterexample, he cited a similar case: Another child who had lost its penis during circumcision was assigned a new sex at the age of seven months. According to Schmidt, the now 26-year-old is “a woman. She has a job that is more considered male and is bisexual. ”In conclusion, Schmidt speculated about the alternative if Reimer“ had grown up as a penisless boy next to his undamaged brother ”. According to Schmidt, he might have wanted to become a girl during puberty.

The BBC documented the case and broadcast it for the first time on December 7, 2000 under the title The Boy who Was Turned into a Girl. The updated version of Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis from 2004 was broadcast in German under the title BBC Exklusiv: David Reimer - the girl boy in April 2005.

A detailed examination can be found in a book by Judith Butler published in 2004 . Butler tries to explain her concept of performativity using concrete examples, including Reimer's fate. Butler sees Money's approach as violent and compulsive, but also sees an influence on Diamond in the sense of his gender theory.

In 2018, the sociologist Dennis Krämer published an article that critically examines Reimer's treatment from a scientific-historical perspective. Taking into account gender-theoretical and post-structuralist approaches, Krämer outlines three historical stages of development in the discursive practices of heteronormative gender reassignment: banishment, localization, and fitting in. Reimer's case therefore belongs to a third level of treatment practices: Based on the scientific hegemony of interactionist-constructivist approaches, in the second half of the 20th century "problems" of gender were no longer resolved through banishment or education within the two-gender system, but rather in that the bodies concerned were surgically and hormonally fitted into them. The logic behind the optimal gender policy explained that undisturbed everyday interactions with a physiologically “inconspicuous” sex body are necessary for the development of a stable gender identity. This guiding principle would legitimize operative and hormonal interventions on the early childhood body.

literature

• John Colapinto: The Boy Who Grew Up As A Girl. Walter-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-530-42154-5 .
• Dennis Krämer: David Reimer's double sex reassignment. An attempt at a historical location. In: Gerald Blaschke-Nacak, Ursula Stenger, Jörg Zirfas (Hrsg.): Pedagogical anthropology of children. History, culture and theory. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim 2018, ISBN 978-3-7799-3775-3 , pp. 112-135.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.slate.com/id/2101678/
2. ↑ David Reimer, 38, Subject of the John / Joan Case , New York Times, May 12, 2004
3. ↑ Volker Zastrow : Gender Mainstreaming - The Small Difference, FAZ, No. 208, 2006, p. 8.
4. ↑ Heide Oestreich : Beware of castrating lesbians. TAZ on January 10, 2007, p. 13.
5. ↑ Alice Schwarzer : The small difference and its big consequences. Women about themselves; Beginning of a liberation . 1st edition. S. Fischer , Frankfurt a. M. 1975, ISBN 3-10-076301-7 , pp. 192 f .
6. ↑ Milton Diamond, H. Keith Sigmundson: Sex Reassignment at Birth. A Long Term Review and Clinical Implications. In: Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine Volume 151 (1997), No. 3, pp. 289-304.
7. ↑ John Colapinto: The True Story of John / Joan . In: Rolling Stone . December 11, 1997, p. 54-97 .
8. ^ Gunter Schmidt : Tragedy as a villain piece . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 2000, pp. 252 ( Online - Oct. 2, 2000 ).
9. ↑ Dr Money and the Boy with No Penis. Programs transcript. BBC, accessed November 18, 2013 . 
10. ↑ Judith Butler The Power of Gender Norms and the Limits of the Human. (on the original title: Undoing Gender , 2004) Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-58505-4 .
11. ↑ Dennis Krämer: The double sex reassignment of David Reimers. An attempt at a historical location . In: Gerald Blaschke-Nacak, Ursula Stenger, Jörg Zirfas (Hrsg.): Pedagogical anthropology of children. History, culture and theory . Beltz Juventa, Weinheim 2018, ISBN 978-3-7799-3775-3 , p. 112-135 .