Both the New York Times and the Guardian are carrying word that David Reimer has died this week, having killed himself last Tuesday. If news has taken a while to reach the obit page - and if you’re wondering just who David Reimer is - it’s because he’s more famous under another name. Writes the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman and Gary Younge,
In fact, to anyone taking an interest in the development of psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, Reimer’s life story would have long been infamous, but also pseudonymous. Going by the name “John”, and subsequently “Joan”, David Reimer had been an unwitting guinea-pig - along with his identical twin brother Brian - in a medical experiment at first celebrated, then notorious. Masterminded by a prominent Baltimore physician, John Money, it was an attempt to settle, once and for all, the fraught nature-versus-nurture debate: to prove that gender was so fluid that by a mere change in childrearing practice, plus a little surgery, a boy could be turned into a girl, while his twin developed as a male.
The situation was only partly a social psychology experiment; a circumcision accident had made David’s penis severely damaged and nonfunctional. To the parents, the transsexual operations seemed like the best way of assuring a functioning gender identity. Thus David was raised as Brenda.
I actually remember - vividly - reading about this case in an early late-70s vintage sociology textbook. To my impressionable young mind - and as a gay teenager eager to understand the patterns of sex/gender identities around me, so obviously different from mine - the argument of the case and that textbook was convincing: that gender was fully a social construct, that biology might matter as cues for the social interpellation greeting people since infancy. Studying Althusser-infused queer theory in college only provided another extension for sociological gender constructivism.
Well, it turns out that the experiment didn’t prove the triumph of nurture over nature after all. Things went wrong as Brenda grew up and the therapy bills mounted. I’ll let you read the Guardian piece for the rest, but it ends with David finding out his chromosomal sex, and his having operations to reverse previous ones. Add this to other “nurture” evidence that increasingly seems suspect - Robert Wright, for instance, mentions the challenges to Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach’s seminal constructionist anthropology, Patterns of Sexual Behaviour in his book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal.
Mind you, the failures of some of the evidenciary works of constructivist social science don’t “prove” that nature is the determinant of how we experience our gender. Constructivist social science, after all, still suggests why biological males (or biological females) in different cultures might experience their gender identity in radically different ways. Further, it avoids universalizing from a particular and dominant sexual orientation. And within the academy, strict constuctivism has long been under the attack across the disciplines; smart thinkers have already been trying to make the most sense of evidence which shows that neither “tabula rasa” nor “chromosomes cause social behavior” are adequate as explanatory assumptions.
But the Reimer death, full of pathos as it is in a week of downright tragedy, does provide an occasion to rethink and reflect on the orthodoxy that once held around social scientific understanding of gender.
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