For The Repose of the Soul Of David Reimer

I was really sorry to hear about this. David Reimer has died. I read about David a while back. He had an amazing and disturbing story (which I’ll get to in a minute). He leaves behind a wife and two adopted children.

The children are adopted because of something that happened to him very early in life. He was the victim of a botched circumcision, following which

His parents consulted the famous sex researcher John Money, who had maintained that “Nature is a political strategy of those committed to maintaining the status quo of sex differences.” He advised them to let the doctors [give the child a sex change operation], and they raised him as a girl without telling him what happened. I [secular humanist author Steven Pinker] learned about the case as an undergraduate in the 1970s, when it was offered as proof that babies are born neuter and acquire gender from the way they are raised. A New York Times article from the era reported that Brenda (nee Bruce) “has been sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” The facts were suppressed until 1997, when it was revealed that from a young age Brenda felt she was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and gender role. She ripped off frilly dresses, rejected dolls in favor of guns, preferred to play with boys. . . . At fourteen she was so miserable that she decided either to live her life as a male or to end it, and her father finally told her the truth. She underwent a new set of operations, assumed a male identity [and the name David], and today is happily married to a woman [The Blank Slate, 349].

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of his story. He committed suicide after a failed investment cost him a great deal of money (warning: the obituary contains an explicit description of what happened to him earlier in life).

What a tragedy.

He was the victim of a horrible accident that was then immeasurably compounded by a criminally irresponsible sexuality “expert,” forced to lead a life contrary to the nature he genuinely had been given by God, and used as an instrument for advancing an absurd agenda to rationalize the sins of some and add confusion and error to the lives and belief systems of others.

That’s over now. Let’s pray for his soul.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin