JANUARY 12, 2011 2:18AM
In memory of David Reimer
Patrick Hahn

http://open.salon.com/blog/xylocopa/2011/01/11/in_memory_of_david_reimer_1

For an astounding real-life tale of medical cruelty, it's hard to beat the sad sordid story of David Reimer, as related in John Colapinto's biography, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.

Born as Bruce Reimer, he was re-named "Brenda" after a botched circumcision with an electrocautery needle that literally burned off his penis. "Brenda" became the unwitting subject of a megalomaniacal doctor's attempt to prove his crackpot theories of gender identity formation. He was surgically castrated, raised as a girl, and systematically lied to about who he was by everyone around him, including his own mother and father. As a child he ostracized and tormented by his peers, subjected to humiliating interrogations and worse under the guise of "follow-up," and forced to take female hormones. Finally at the age of 14 he demanded to know the truth about who he was and re-asserted his identity as a boy.

When I read introduction that include inflamatory information, irrelevant to the topic in hand, I'm afraid that my cycinisism kicks in.

However tragic this case is, and it is, the facts, the relavant facts are what we need.

So, Money was beaten for breaking a window. Join the club.

There is an astonishing amount of medical arrogance. Many of us have been victim to it, yet are treated as ungrateful fools when we complain.

That there were a huge number of serious social problems with the Reimer family anyway, do raise concerns about the entire matter.

The problems with mdical Drs is the enormous amount of entirely unfettered power they exercise. Their refusal to criticise their peers even in the face of enormous evidence.

All that reporting of this kind does is suggest that cases such as Dr Money are isolated and one off. Nothing has been achieved. Nothing has been learnt. The past will be repeated, because we fail to learn its lessons.