Gender Dysphoria

On May 4, 2004, 38-year-old David Reimer drove into a supermarket car park.

At 10:30 at night, the police came to the door. And I think I was screaming, no, no, no!

As he sat in his car, he put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Then they asked us to sit down. And they said they had some bad news, that David was dead. And I just cried.

David's death was a shocking close to one of the most extraordinary sagas in modern science. Born a boy, he'd been turned into a girl called Brenda. But when she was 14, she changed herself back into a man, and later married and raised a family. David's suicide was more than just a human tragedy. It was also a devastating blow to the reputation of the psychologist whose groundbreaking research on David had influenced a whole generation of scientists.

And I always thought, I would never be lucky enough to have twins. I wasn't the lucky kind.

Janet gave birth to two twin boys, Bruce and Brian. All went well, until the boys went for a routine circumcision operation when they were seven months old. On the 27th of April, 1966, Bruce was operated on, before his brother, Brian.

When we first heard that there had been an accident, we thought, well, what kind of accident could there be? But we went to the hospital, not suspecting a thing. They wouldn't tell us anything over the telephone. And then the doctor said, there has been a slight accident. The penis has been burnt off from circumcision. And I could not comprehend what he was talking about, because, you see, I thought they were going to use a knife. I didn't know there was electricity involved.

The electrical equipment had malfunctioned and burnt off baby Bruce's entire penis.

-Up next, Dr. John Money, a psychologist--

Then several months later, the Reimer family saw something on television that made them feel hopeful for the first time since the accident. Dr. John Money, originally from New Zealand, was a pioneer in the astonishing new field of sex-change surgery.

We just happened to be watching TV. And Dr. Money was on there. And he was very charismatic. He seemed highly intelligent, and very confident of what he was saying.

Dr. money had brought a transsexual with him. A man who had been changed into a woman.

-As a matter of fact, you've never been anything--

The transsexual certainly made an impact, because she was a very feminine seeming woman. And I thought, here is our answer. Here is our salvation. Here is our hope.

-We can recognize the problem of sexual--

Janet wrote to Dr. Money after the show ended. He replied promptly.

-It's still extremely difficult to raise any research for--

When they met, Dr. Money suggested that the Reimer's could turn their baby son into a baby girl. Janet Reimer had taken her son to the prestigious Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where John Money ran a world famous unit. There, Money's team explained to her how to turn her little boy, Bruce, into a little girl. Make him think and act, for the rest of his life, like a female. Bringing up Brenda was not always easy.

I could see that Brenda wasn't happy as a girl, no matter what I tried to do for her, no matter how I tried to instruct her. She was very rebellious. She was very masculine. And I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her. Called her Cave Woman. She was a very lonely, lonely girl.

Brenda was behaving in a distinctly masculine manner.

I had doubts all the time, because it was just so obvious to everyone, not just to me, that she was masculine.

I had a sewing machine, toy sewing machine. And I had Barbie dolls, clothing, but my brother was very generous. There was the odd day when he let me borrow his toys. We would play together, because he knew how unhappy I was, so he'd let me play with his toys.

I didn't like dressing like a girl. I didn't behaving like a girl. I didn't like acting like a girl. I only wore dresses on occasion. And I never played with girl stuff. I'd usually get stuck with dolls, or something like that, for my birthday or Christmas. And they sat in a corner collecting dust. I played with my brother's things. I wasn't too happy about sharing. It was share with my brother, or I don't have anything.

For almost 14 years, David had lived as Brenda. And for most of this time, he had been unhappy.

During the early years, I thought we had made the right choice. That it would work out. Dr. Money kept saying, it would work out. And I thought, well, he should know.

But by the time Brenda had become a teenager, her life had become so difficult she had become a virtual recluse.

And I was so pitifully lonely. And I tried to put makeup on, but I looked like Bozo the Clown. If you ever can imagine, a guy trying to put makeup on himself. After a while trying, I just gave up. I said, well, what's the sense of trying. No matter how much I put out in effort, it's never going to work.

There's no way of knowing whether you're a boy or girl because nobody tells you. You don't wake up one morning and say, oh, I'm a boy, today. You know. It's in you. It's in your genetics. It's in your brain. Nobody has to tell you who you are.