Diane Jones

At 8 months old, a doctor burned David Reimer's penis off with an electric needle during a routine circumcision. At 22 months, surgeons removed his testicles and his parents renamed him Brenda. Then the psychologist running the experiment started making him and his identical twin brother strip and It was 1966 in Winnipeg, Canada. His mother remembers the doctor walking in and saying, "The penis is burnt." A couple of days later she saw her baby, and it looked "like a piece of heavy string, burnt right up to the crotch." The parents had seen Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins on TV, telling the world that any boy could be raised as a girl. For Money a pair of identical twins was the perfect experiment, one raised as a boy and the other as a girl, and through the 1970s he published the case as a success under the name "John/Joan." According to the twins and the author John Colapinto, at their yearly visits Money had them rehearse sex positions on each other, David on all fours and Brian behind him, and photographed them naked. At school David was called "cavewoman" and thrown out of the bathrooms, and as a teenager he told his parents he would kill himself if they took him back to Money. At 14 they finally told him the truth. He said it was a relief, because he'd thought he was going crazy. He went back to being David, had the breasts the hormones gave him removed, spent years in surgery, married and raised his wife's three kids. In the video below, David on 60 Minutes in 2000, and his mother on the day the doctor came out. Two years after that interview Brian died of an overdose. Two years after that, in May 2004, David took his own life at 38. Money died in 2006 and never publicly admitted he was wrong. His parents did everything the most famous expert in the field told them to. Are they victims too, or should they have seen it?