A doctor told a 22-month-old boy’s parents to raise him as a girl after a medical accident. 14 years later, he found out the truth — and it destroyed him

A surgical accident in infancy and a researcher’s experiment turned David Reimer‘s story into a cautionary tale that reshaped medical ethics forever.

In 1965, in Winnipeg, Canada, twin boys Bruce and Brian Reimer were born healthy to Janet and Ron Reimer. But at seven months old, a circumcision procedure using an electrocautery needle went disastrously wrong. It burned Bruce’s penis, leaving his parents desperate for guidance. So, they turned to Dr. John Money in 1967, a prominent psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Money advised the parents to raise Bruce as a girl, and they complied. Bruce was then put through a sex reassignment surgery at 22 months of age, and was renamed Brenda. The parents began to dress and socialize Brenda as a female, and it became an experiment for Dr. Money.

The experiment that cost David Reimer 14 years

The experiment was supposed to prove his theory that nurture could override nature. For years, he cited Brenda’s case as a clinical success, even as the reality unraveled in opposition. Since the beginning, Bruce resisted becoming Brenda. He tore off dresses, refused dolls, and gravitated toward his twin brother’s toys.

Bizarrely, the twins were also forced into “childhood sexual rehearsal play” by Money, where they were forced to act out sexual acts to reinforce their sexuality. Brenda was already troubled by Money’s experiment when she began going to school. There, schoolmates mocked her, calling her “cavewoman” and making her identity issues worse.

David was told the truth only after he became suicidal

Reimer reportedly began experiencing suicidal depression at 13, and refused to see Money again. He, however, continued to publish glowing reports about the “Reimer twin experiment,” influencing decades of medical practice in sex reassignment of infants. When Brenda turned 14, the truth finally came out. Her father, drowning in guilt, told her everything about the accident and the surgeries.

Though taken aback, Brenda immediately chose to live as a male and renamed himself David Reimer. He soon began testosterone treatment and underwent surgery to reverse the reassignment. David eventually married a woman, Jane Fontaine, in 1990 and adopted her three children. But his past never stopped haunting him.

David Reimer’s death and legacy

In the late 1990s, he bravely went public, sharing his story through journalist John Colapinto in Rolling Stone and later in Colapinto’s book “As Nature Made Him.” He was determined to stop doctors from making similar irreversible decisions for infants without consent.

But tragedy returned to him when his twin brother, Brian, died by overdose in 2002. Two years later, he lost his job, lost $65,000 in investments, and had separated from his wife. David was deeply troubled by everything happening all at once, and on May 4, 2004, he died by suicide at 38.

But even today, his story remains one of medical science’s most painful lessons. It serves as a reminder that identity cannot be assigned by a theory or scalpel. His case is proof that even learned experts can be disastrously wrong about what makes us who we are.