Bruce Reimer Case Study

A healthy set of identical twin boys, Bruce and Brian Reimer were born in August of 1965 to Janet and Ron Reimer in Canada. At the age of eight months old, the twins were recommended to undergo a circumcision because they had a hard time urinating due to the condition phimosis. Unfortunately, during the procedure, the apparatus malfunctioned and it damaged Bruce’s penis. His parents then contacted Dr. John Money who was a medical psychologist at Johns Hopkins. He advised the Reimers to raise Bruce Reimer as a girl. Dr. Money convinced the parents that Bruce will be able to live a happy life as a girl because growing without a penis would be devastating. Bruce was named Brenda after the sex reassignment surgery at the age of 21 months old in 1967. Bruce was castrated and a vagina was constructed. The parents accepted their daughter and devotedly raised her as a girl named Brenda with help of the estrogen supplements to feminize the body and grow breast. The parents were ordered not to tell Brenda the truth of her gender.

The David Reimer experiment was set up to test if nature (biology) verse nurture (environment) determines the gender of a child. Dr. Money continued to monitor and study the twins. Brian was the perfectly controlled subject while Brenda was the variable. Dr. Money continued to monitor and record the development of the

twins while one twin is raised as a boy and the other as a girl. This would support his theory that a child’s gender is not biological but it depends on the environment the child was raised in. He theorized that a child’s gender is neutral until the age of 2 years old. Therefore, his reasoning to advise the Reimers to consent to the sex reassignment and raise their son as their daughter, the child is neutral and does not know the difference between the sexes and gender because he believed that child’s nurture will establish if the child feels male or female. This case contributed greatly towards the development field because it proved that gender is assigned is nature and not nurture. A boy can’t be a girl if the body and mind believe it’s a boy. John/Joan case open discussion about the human’s gender identity and it initiated the influence of today’s society. Dr. Money was trying to prove those males are not superior to females.
The experiment did not accomplish what it was intended and set up to achieve. During Brenda’s childhood, she always felt different and as she was starting to become a teenager, her behavior was much more corresponding as male that a ladylike female. Brenda was into fighting, playing the traditional male games/sport, and she didn’t fit in with the “girls” at school. In order to prove his theory, Dr. Money forced the twins to examine each other genitals, exposed them to graphic sexual pictures, and had them stimulated sex acts because he was trying to show Brenda that her body is different from her brother and thus, she was a female. After years of feeling crazy, Brenda finally was told the truth at the age of 14. She immediately started living as a male named David which he adapted to quickly. He eventually underwent a surgeries to reconstruct his penis, removed the breast that resulted from the estrogen treatment, and he started treatment for testosterone to alter his body into a masculine built. Could Dr. Money or anyone simply assign the sex of a child at birth or is gender pre-determined before we are born?
Dr. Money’s results were unsuccessful, although he reported that it went without failure and that his theory was correct. He was trying to prove that with social conditioning, that gender can be self-regulating from sex. He even ignored the reports from Mrs. Reimer. Brenda could not override her feeling that she was a male. Dr. Money claimed that Brenda was tidy and preferred traditional female house chores, but could it have been because society expected girls to be a certain way that it influenced Brenda before she started to understand what her body was telling her? After transforming back to a male, David got married and adopted his wife’s three children. After learning about the truth, it left traumatic emotional and psychological feelings. The twin Brian committed suicide and two years later, David also committed suicide.
This experiment was this first of its kind. Dr. Money only studied intersex child prior to the John/Joan. Intersex child are born with both male and female reproductive or sexual anatomy. For example, a child has male genital but a female reproductive organ in their body. But the twins were fully male babies. He had no precedent to make a right choice and to know what to expect in the future. Many years after, Dr. Money failed attempt to prove his theory by reporting false data and a one single case is not enough to accept that his theory is correct; Reiner and Gearhart conducted a study to prove otherwise. The study was based on subjects of genetically male children who were born without penises or their penis was castrated after birth. The study showed that children with male hormones, the majority of the subject are living as male. According to the article “Gender Identity: Nature vs. Nurture, it stated that Reiner and Gearhart confirmed that the amount of exposure to male hormones and androgens in utero almost exclusively decides whether the child identifies as masculine or feminine. Therefore, Bruce being born with male hormones determined his male gender.
The John/Joan case contributed toward the developmental field because we have a better understanding that nature mostly plays a role in determining an individual’s gender role.

A child is not born with a blank slate that his or her parents can socially construct their gender. The gender is what we feel inside which is independent from the sex anatomy of our body. A natural born male body consists of different hormone levels than a natural born female. If there is unusual exposure of these hormones, then it can affect how an individual feel on the inside from what they look like on the outside. Dr. Money’s theory was

unsuccessful.