Is Being Transgender the Result of Upbringing?
⚠️🤩: forced medical intervention, psychological abuse and suicide.
🤱 “Being transgender is the result of a bad upbringing.” This is used to explain everything: a different name and pronouns, the need for testosterone or other gender-affirming healthcare. Even wanting to cuddle a plush shark can apparently be blamed on “the absence of a father”. The shark, of course, has done nothing wrong 🦈
😑 But can upbringing determine who a person understands themselves to be? Psychologist John Money believed it could. After a medical injury in early childhood, David Reimer underwent surgery without his consent, and his parents were advised to raise him as a girl. For years, Money presented this case as confirmation of his theory. It later emerged that David had not accepted the imposed role.
👉 Below, we explain how this story became “proof” of Money’s theory, and what emerged later.
🏳️⚧️ David was not a trans person, and his story cannot represent trans people. It shows that doctors’ or parents’ certainty about “who a child or person ought to be” does not justify forced intervention or the removal of bodily autonomy. Decisions about a name, a body and medical care must listen to the person themselves and respect their consent.
Contents
“Psychosexual neutrality”
The concept of “psychosexual neutrality at birth”, like the theory of “biological essentialism”, which attributes certain immutable characteristics to sex or gender, had supporters as far back as the middle of the twentieth century. According to this biosocial hypothesis, an infant is born a “blank slate” in terms of understanding their own sex. Unlike the pseudo-psychologists of TikTok, Threads and Instagram, however, this theory also had proponents within academia.
John William Money was a sexologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University who developed this theory from the mid-1950s. He believed that gender identity and gender roles develop exclusively after birth through socialisation and upbringing, as well as through the influence of the linguistic environment.
Of course, no one would have let Money test his hypothesis were it not for an unsuccessful operation to treat a young boy’s difficulty urinating. At that time, the boy’s name was Bruce.
Surgery and upbringing
The twins Bruce and Brian were both born boys with standard XY chromosomes. Brian avoided surgery, but Bruce’s penis was damaged during the procedure. At the time, it was believed that the absence of an anatomically intact penis would inevitably lead a boy to psychosexual catastrophe in adulthood, so creating a functional woman was considered the lesser clinical harm.
And yet it is our opponents who accuse us of forcibly “changing people’s sex”.
In 1967, at the age of 22 months, the boy underwent surgical castration by bilateral orchiectomy, the removal of the testes, and construction of a rudimentary vulva at the Johns Hopkins clinic.
His name was changed to Brenda. His parents were instructed to create an uncompromisingly female upbringing through clothing, hairstyle and toys, and to maintain strict secrecy, never revealing the circumstances of the child’s birth or operations.
Throughout the 1970s, Money presented this case as evidence that nurture takes precedence over biology. In the 1972 book “Man and Woman, Boy and Girl”, co-authored with Anke Ehrhardt, and in subsequent articles, he described Brenda as a well-adjusted girl who loved dolls and dresses, helped her mother with housework and displayed typical female behaviour in marked contrast to her brother Brian’s masculinity.
The case entered university textbooks on paediatrics, clinical psychiatry and sociology as practical confirmation of Money’s concept. Reality, however, was radically different from the textbooks.
The reality beyond the textbooks
From early childhood, the boy resisted imposed female socialisation: tearing off girls’ clothing, rejecting dolls and choosing construction toys, tools, weapons and active physical games. He also tried to urinate standing up.
Between the ages of nine and eleven, the child developed a clear awareness that he was not a girl. He experienced alienation from his own body and chronic gender dysphoria. His atypical movements and broad male build also exposed him to bullying and isolation.
Regular consultations in Baltimore were traumatic too. According to the twins’ own accounts, Money introduced a practice of so-called “sexual rehearsal play”, forcing the children to undress, examine one another’s anatomy in detail and imitate sexual acts.
In particular, Brenda was forced to get on all fours or lie on his back with his legs apart while Brian was required to imitate thrusting movements. The researcher photographed these sessions. When the children refused or resisted, he shouted at them and applied psychological pressure.
David
At twelve, the adolescent was prescribed oestrogen replacement therapy, which intensified his dysphoria. When Money began insisting on a final surgical vaginoplasty, the thirteen-year-old fled the clinic, hid on the roof and told his parents he would take his own life if forced to continue seeing the doctor or undergo another operation.
Eventually, his father told the fourteen-year-old about the injury during circumcision, the castration and Money’s scientific experiment. Hearing this brought relief, and the adolescent adopted the name David.
As an adult, David lived in a male social role, married a woman named Jane and adopted her three children. At the age of 38, David Reimer took his own life.
What this story showed
In March 1997, Diamond and Sigmundson’s paper “Sex Reassignment at Birth: Long-term Review and Clinical Implications” appeared in the journal “Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine”. The authors documented that the patient known as “John/Joan” had never adjusted to a female role, had returned to a male gender in adolescence and had experienced severe trauma. The publication demonstrated the failure of the hypothesis that the external appearance of the genitals is the principal factor in sex identification, and showed that gender cannot be externally “constructed” or “taught”.
The failure of the experiment on David Reimer provided practical support for another theory of brain differentiation: the organisational-activational theory. Brain research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries demonstrated prenatal sexual differentiation of the central nervous system. In other words, gender, and therefore both being cisgender and being transgender, are innate. We will explore how gender identity actually develops in a later article.
Sources
With support from
Published with support from TGEU — Trans Europe and Central Asia.