True to form, Pride Month — a month that appears to take place every month — kicked off June with superb hilarity.
Take the Seattle-based Amazon employees staging a ‘die in’ outside their headquarters to protest the company selling books online they deem ‘anti-trans’; failing that, take to Twitter (if you can bear it) and the account of the US Marines, no less, to remind yourself that even in war, bullets can be loud and proud, too, regardless of whichever enemy is firing back: China must be shaking in their boots.
Indeed, the month of pride was surely off to a typically queer start.
But while empty gesture corporate virtue-signalling can often be laughable, noted brilliantly by The Spectator this week, the origins of the LGBT movement’s modern-day drive, now almost exclusively influenced by Transgenderism, is a lot less funny.
At its core, neither transgenderism or trans-activism would exist if not for the term ‘gender identity’, which, as the NHS website puts it, ‘is a way to describe a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female, or non-binary, which may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.’
Similarly, as the UK’s two most ardent pro-trans lobby’s, Stonewall and Mermaids say,
‘Research shows that allowing trans young people to explore their gender identity, and using their chosen pronouns, can greatly reduce the risk of suicide and mental distress…We also seek to educate and inform wider society on gender identity by helping professionals accommodate and reassure gender-diverse young people.’
It is therefore undeniable that gender identity serves as the gateway to all trans-exploration, but it has now reached such contentious heights, so prevalent is its ‘normalisation’ toward children and teenagers (see here a recent ‘Drag Your Kids to Pride’ event at a gay bar in Dallas, Texas, where young children were encouraged to watch and participate with sexed-up adult Drag Queens), that statewide-lawmakers in the US have begun to rein in its prominence.
Introducing 240 bills this year alone to help stem a relentless tide of non-stop pro-LGBT propaganda in schools and elsewhere, much of the legislation seeks to form better protections, they say, for fairer same-sex sporting events, parental rights, and reducing potential harms caused by irreversible hormone blockers and/or physical surgeries.
Harm, it must be said, a foundation stone of the movement itself.
And so we turn to Winnipeg, Canada, 1965, and a story, twice documented by a BBC Horizon team in 2000 and 2004, that should still serve as a dire warning to the ways in which ‘trans ideology’ is framed and promoted, today.
Parents Janet and Ron Reimer welcome their dream scenario: the birth of identical twin boys, Bruce and Brian.
But at just seven months old their dreams soon turned to nightmares when a botched electrical circumcision (which doctors didn’t disclose to them) to counteract an early phimosis diagnosis, led to Bruce’s penis being burned off beyond repair.
Not knowing where to turn until one year later, Bruce’s parents, via their television set, stumbled upon a chance hope in New Zealand-born psychologist and sexologist, Dr John Money, a then-pioneer in the paediatric studies of ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender neutrality’ at Johns Hopkins Medical Hospital, Baltimore.
Money, whose work centered primarily on patients classed as intersex — people born with ambiguous genitalia or who share simultaneously male and female sexual characteristics — led an up and coming school of thought speculating that ‘while genes are important, as far as its gender is concerned, a baby is essentially neutral for the first two years of life.’
In short, how a child is ‘nurtured’ (or groomed) immediately from birth until just 24 months, would ultimately be the determining factor in whether it grows up to feel masculine or feminine.
Convinced that Dr Money was simply the right man at the right time, Janet and Ron Reimer put all their faith in the psychologist’s soon-to-be obsessive gender experiment, writing to him to help fix their predicament, and later, upon acceptance, allowing him to determine that Bruce would be better placed, despite being born with the genetics of a normal bouncing boy, to be raised as a girl, instead.
“This was an opportunity to apply what was learned about intersex children to a child who was not intersexed at birth but who had a traumatic loss of a major variable contributing to whether you’re a male or a female—the penis.”
Professor Richard Green, former student to John Money
On Monday 3 July, 1967, Bruce Reimer, following a surgical procedure to castrate his testes and replace them with ‘rudimentary’ female genitalia (which was then an easier process than male penile reconstruction), was no more.
Bruce had become ‘Brenda’, and to all intents and purposes, the Reimer’s truly believed their problems had been solved. But they had only just begun.
“It made sense at the time that he became a daughter; maybe it is a matter of nurture over nature, and I thought, if it was simply a matter of nurture, I could nurture my child into being feminine.”
Janet Reimer, The Boy Who Was Turned into a Girl, 2000
Sworn to secrecy and given strict instructions by Money to never reveal the truth to Brenda or else risk the sex change’s success (blackmail, much?), the Reimer’s only had one choice: to coerce ‘her’ into liking her new life as a girl.
Five years later, in 1972, using a seven-year-old Brenda as his ‘proof’, Money believed he had all the evidence he needed to affirm his own ideas, releasing a book titled, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, revealing to the world for the very first time what would later become known as his “theory of gender neutrality”; this would showcase once and for all that where someone’s ‘gender identity’ was concerned, nurture can, in fact, override nature.
However, all was not what it seemed.
Despite claiming an early triumph in his book, Money himself had been sceptical of his theory working properly in practice even before it was published. Brenda, as she appeared to him in many private consultations (without her parents present), was beginning to display undoubted masculine traits, channelling themselves through what Money called ‘maniacal’ aggression.
A year later and Money was becoming desperate. His truth wasn’t aligning with actual reality. So obsessed had he become to prove his theories correct that all sense of medical ethics seemed to disappear.
To help convince her otherwise, Money turned to asking Brenda questions of a ‘sexual nature’ about the differences between male and female genitalia, later using, it was alleged by the twins in adulthood, their own bodies as specimens after forcing them both to undress and ‘rehearse’ specific ‘sexual acts’ and manoeuvres in his office as he took photographs.
“When my folks weren’t around, well then, er, we did what we were told, and if we didn’t then we got yelled at to the point where we thought we were gonna get, er, backhanded. If you were told to take your clothes off, well, eventually we took our clothes off and sat on the couch and had photos of us taken.”
David Reimer, Dr Money and The Boy with No Penis, 2004
Although defenders of Money’s claim that such questions were merely of a ‘clinical’ nature, and are still used today to help explain the concept of ‘sex’ in children’s language, Money’s actions, if true, paint a picture of a man not of compassion, as people thought him, but of one utterly consumed by ego that morals were readily removed.
This is perhaps a lot less surprising considering Money’s concurrent let alone controversial opinions about paedophilia, whereby he actively differentiated between ‘affectional paedophilia’ (child attraction based in ‘love’) and ‘sadistic paedophilia’ (child attraction for purposes of sex).
In essence, Money was one of the first academics of his era who attempted to normalise, or at the very least, desensitise the act of paedophilia.
Humiliated and bullied at school, ridiculed as a ‘cavewoman’, and growing up lonely without friends, Brenda’s life had become a world apart from the one Money continued throughout to hail as a ‘success’ in his medical papers and journals.
Finally, fearing total theoretical failure, Money attempted one last time to persuade a 13-year-old Brenda to undergo a more advanced surgery to construct a female’s genitals, inviting an adult male-to-female transsexual to one last office check-up to relay any of her lingering fears.
“I was scared to death. I figured, you know, I was perfectly fine, my heart was fine, nothing wrong with my kidneys. What do I need surgery for?! And I-I thought, deep down inside, that if I went through with this surgery, that it would change me somehow for the worse.”
David Reimer, Dr Money and The Boy with No Penis, 2004
Brenda refused, and vowed to his parents, on the threat of suicide, that he’d never see Dr Money again. He never did.
Worried for his safety, Janet and Ron Reimer finally broke their long-held secret to tell both Brenda and Brian, that he was, in fact, not a twin sister, but brother.
After forgiving his parents for their initial decision to have him become one of Dr Money’s test subjects as a baby, happiness, for a now-renamed David, at least, ensued, deciding almost immediately to live life from that day forth as a man, eventually making new-found friendships, but also marrying and becoming step-father to the three children of Jane Reimer on a white wedding-day weekend in September, 1990.
For his twin brother Brian, however, upon learning that his relationship with his former sister was mere fraudulence, life spiralled out of control, later evolving into a future diagnosis of schizophrenia.
But while a shred of normality had justly arrived into David’s life, the dark past of Dr John Money never seemed to let go.
Regardless of his experiment’s clear catastrophe, at the same time David seemed to reverse his fortunes, Money continued to assert to the medical masses that the case of ‘Brenda’ Reimer was a groundbreaking gift to the sciences of psychosexuality.
So resounding were Money’s words, and with such weight to his reputation did they hold, that more than 25 years since his self-judged victory lap in his 1972 book, the process of ‘sex reassignment’ at birth for either intersex or single-sex babies [born with slight genital abnormalities], had become the benchmark treatment to nearly all infant surgeries.
For some, like University of Hawaii biologist, Professor Milton Diamond, a prolonged adversary to Dr Money throughout his career, the time had come to expose and propose a different hypothesis, following-up in David’s case, specifically, as evidence of a wholly opposite theory.
Co-authoring a 1997 paper with David’s then-psychiatrist, Dr Keith Sigmundson, the pair went to work denouncing Money’s approach to the issues presented to David at birth, concluding instead that ‘gender identity and sexual orientation are largely inborn, and that while rearing may play a role in helping to shape a person’s sexual identity, nature is by far the stronger of the two forces.’
Fundamentally, the feeling of ‘gender identity’ was much more likely to be influenced by our hardwired genetics and neurology, and something to be left to develop separately from outside influence.
Having never once enjoyed his time ‘living’ as a girl, and appalled by Money’s lies, David was later swayed by Diamond to go public with his story, not least than to help prevent other newborns and young children suffer the same trauma, misery and ruin inflicted on him by the revered psychologist’s theories, which at the time, were still being put into practice as involuntary postnatal sex reassignment operations.
In the same year, an infamous Rolling Stone article by John Colapinto titled, ‘John / Joan’ (David’s real identity was kept secret), detailed the true extent of his own, and his family’s, ordeal, while at the turn of the new Millennium, Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) released the first tell-all public news interview highlighting David’s travails.
“The experiments that he made us do, er, going into sexual positions with no clothes on, taking pictures of us, how degrading for a seven-year-old.
Brian Reimer, CBC’s The Fifth Estate documentary series, 2000
Unable to cope with the pressures of its release and his debilitating mental health, Brian, David’s younger twin, was found dead in his flat on Tuesday 1 July, 2002, due to a drugs overdose.
Proving to be the catalyst of his own premature end, David’s hopeful rebirth began to unravel once more. Finding the grief of his brother’s death one struggle too many, out of work, and in the midst of losing much of his compensation money in a bad investment, David’s marriage turned to separation, leaving him depressed and distraught that he was no longer able to make his wife happy.
Just two years later on Tuesday 4 May, 2004, 38-year-old David Reimer left his parents house with a sawn-off shotgun, drove to a nearby supermarket carpark, and shot himself in the head, eerily fulfilling a once-spoken prophecy to those of us in the present who might risk turning a blind eye to the dangers of all-in scientific method over finite human cost.
“You’re always gonna see people that are gonna say, ‘Well the Dave Reimer case could’ve been successful’…Erm, I’m living proof, and if you’re not gonna take my word as gospel because I have lived through it, who else you gonna listen to? Who else is there? I’ve lived through it. Like, is it gonna take somebody to wind up killing themselves, shooting themselves in the head for people to listen?”
David Reimer, Dr Money and The Boy with No Penis, 2004
As trans-activism stridently moves to target and groom our impressionable young, and as year-on-year referrals to transgenderclinics and surgeons continues to rise across the west, we really should begin to wonder:
How many more David Reimer’s will we have destroyed through sheer experiment before we do, indeed, listen? Or have we, as a society itself, simply morphed into the gravely malicious monster of Dr John Money’s very own making?