The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

When David Reimer was eight months old he suffered a botched circumcision which destroyed his penis. Desperate for help, David's parents sought the advice of sexologist Dr. John Money. Money, who believes that children are born psychosexually neutral, convinced David's parents to have their son completely castrated and raised as a female. Because David had an identical twin who was being raised as a boy, it was an ideal test case for the popular feminist idea that it is nurture, not nature, which differentiates between males and females.

David's mother Janet says of her first outing with her the first public outing with her baby 'girl':

"I got some fabric and started sewing dresses. He was trying to rip off the dress and I thought, 'Oh, my God, what have I done?' "

While Money and others trumpeted the alleged "success" of the experiment, David suffered an agonizing childhood, finally learning the truth about himself at age 15. David struggled through the subsequent years, and described his ordeal as being "like brainwashing...I'd give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it's torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind with the psychological warfare in your head." A few weeks ago David committed suicide.

Dr. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii is a longtime critic of Dr. Money's theories. Fox News Columnist Wendy McElroy is the author of Death by Theory? A tragic suicide disproves a feminist theory and is a critic of the idea that gender can be reassigned through social conditioning. Diamond and McElroy joined Glenn on His Side with Glenn Sacks.

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