Award winning article from 1997 on David Reimer

[WTFSeriously]

Tweet from Helen Joyce links to article here

This was an award winning article when posted back in 1997 and is very long but well worth a read to understand the case of David Reimer and how he was basically abused by John Money along with his twin brother as part of his experiment to prove that gender identity could be imposed on an unknowing child simply by early surgical intervention and socialising the child until further surgery & hormone treatment would be necessary to stop natural puberty undoing all the work put into making the theory he had work.

It's a shocking & heartbreaking read, and although I had been aware of the controversy surrounding David Reimer's experiences at the hands of this abusive man, reading this article is well worth reading because most here will recognise some key issues ( not least the screaming matches that ensued by 'experts' after the follow up study "Archives of Adolescent and Pediatric Medicine. Authors Milton Diamond, a biologist at the University of Hawaii, and Keith Sigmundson, a psychiatrist from Victoria, British Columbia" was published in 1997.

Both brothers killed themselves, Brian, in 2002 following an overdose of anti depressants & then David shot himself in 2004 following the breakdown of his marriage. Reading the article, you realise how devastating that event would have been for someone who was effectively written off as being unloveable and incapable of having a family of his own (by a therapist treating him). He'd twice previously tried to kill himself when John Money was losing his grip on him and trying to force further sex reassignment surgery to 'complete' the transition he advocated for him.

I think there are some serious personality problems in psychology generally. Not all by any means but it seems widespread and that is something I have heard from other health professionals.

Not all along the lines of being power hungry or inclined to abuse, but generally connected to personality and psychological issues of their own. Maybe that is what draws those particular people to that field.

It looks like some of the realisations made in the 90s have been lost. I'm wondering what part in this was played by puberty blockers and how they mask the evidence that something wrong is taking place.

I'm not sure about the puberty blockers, but one thing I have noticed in the last 5 years or so, which seems similar to that period in the 70s, is a lack of appreciation for how much development goes on in kids around sexuality, in all kinds of ways. In most instances this isn't related to kids who are taking puberty blockers and I think it even predates it somewhat.

I'm thinking for example of how common it seems to be now for people to talk about gay kids who are still pre-adolescent, or there sometimes seems to be little awareness that sexuality can be all over the place in the teen years and often doesn't really settle into a strong pattern until the 20s, or indeed that it can change over the life of an individual. Despite the fact that lots of adults have that kind of experience. So you get things like Rainbow clubs in primary schools or drag kids whose parents seem sure they are gay even though that haven't even started puberty.

If you think that way, there's not so much reason to follow the kids too far into adulthood.

Maybe also there has been something of a return to constructivist models around maleness and femaleness in progressive circles.

It just goes to show how bits of information can be cherry picked and fabricated to support the bias of the researcher, while overwhelming evidence to the contrary is omitted. It’s still going on, just look at the information the Tavi failed to make public about their puberty blocker trial.

Just as an interesting aside, there's a fascinating programme on Netflix about a set of triplets separated at birth & monitored by a psychiatrist, along with an unknown number of other twins, which is equally as infuriating & heartbreak to watch. It's called Three identical strangers & has very similar sickening experimentation on innocent children & adoptive parents, minus the sexual & psychological abuse directly from the 'god-complexed' psychiatrist.

Most of the gay men I have known said that they knew they were gay (or, at least, different to the other boys) from before puberty.

I don't recall them saying that they thought they were girls, though.

So sorry fir the diversion but perhaps this is not off topic after all. Maybe the whole situation of abuse of power with regard to gender matters is part of a wider problem in the mental health field.

What comes up again and again in these discussions is that abusers, whatever the form of their abusing, will seek out privileged positions where they are immune from accountability. As LangCleg put it, a sacred caste.

Well, I thought I was a boy for a period before puberty. It's not unheard of in kids.

And yes, it's often expressed as people who are gay say they knew even as kids - Oprah was very big on this idea back in the 90s.

But it's also the case that many teens think they may be gay, or bisexual, and then come to the conclusion they aren't later on. Adolescent sexuality can be something of a loose canon. And children before puberty sometimes have a wholly mistaken impression of what sex is about - this is why we now have young kids coming to the conclusion they must be asexual when really they simply aren't old enough to be anything.

With regard to studies of twins separated at birth puts me in mind of Sir Cyril Burt.

He was an educational psychologist who falsified studies of non existent twins.

He was discredited but not stripped of his knighthood.

Twins separated at birth are quite a rare occurrence and I am suspicious of such studies.

Most kids are asexual. Just it's an unnecessary label for a child. But the age at which young people develop sexual feelings varies hugely. It can be terribly excluding if a young person's peers are already sexual and they are still pre-sexual. The asexual label can be comforting, I suppose. But it's limiting, not helpful.

Yet again, it boils down to accepting people as they are, teaching them to value themselves, rather than forcing them to conform.

Wrath, the Netflix program on the triplets will chill your blood with the absolute disregard for the harm caused to those triplets/twins & their wider families. It also reeks of the sacred caste mentioned, specifically in terms of preventing those now adult children access to the huge amount of records on them, currently in the vaults of some institution with instruction from the psychiatrist not to unseal the paper's til long after those subjected to these cruel experiments have died.

Suffice to say, there's tragedy in there for those affected while the experimenters get to walk away from consequences or responsibility for the harm these experiments caused.

WTFSeriously
The triplets film looks interesting. I will check it out.
The lengths men go to, to force children and others weaker than themselves, to inflict on them, such devasting and permanent damage.

The replication crisis where past scientific studies cannot be replicated for ethical and most probably fraudulent reasons.

Medical and psychology 'disciplines' seem to be the worst affected.

This is the God complex in action.

There is a huge amount of bs in psychology. I think making it isn't a scientific discipline has been a very mixed result, it lends it an aura of empirical evidence that is pretty misleading in many cases.

@Goosefoot
I agree. If I look at the psychological assessment I was subjected to recently, aside from the gaslighting and bullying during the interview with the psychologist, his report was full of supposedly scientific and empirical bullshit. The session before my interview with him consisted of me completing multiple questionnaires. I’ve since worked out that the results from one of them - one used as standard in cases of “forensic psychology” - are what led to some bizarre findings about me in the assessment report. For example, his report said that There is evidence have “histrionic” and “narcissistic” tendencies and am on the clinical scale for OCD! Wtf. I have had a lot of therapy over the years - as it happens, the best of all with a male therapist, who is the kindest and most empathetic practitioner you could clever meet - and never has anyone ever suggested that my issues include OCD, narcissism or a histrionic personality. I’ve since found some critical academic papers that indicate the tool used is intrinsically flawed and regular leads to over-identification of the three specific aspects mentioned in my assessment.

So yes, a great deal of psychological science would appear to be bullshit. And worse yet, the whole surrounding health and social system privileges the practitioners of this bullshit and allows them to keep getting away with it.

Sorry, I think I’ve been a bit “triggered” by this whole thread. I just bought sandwiches for a homeless man in the street and started crying.

Suffice to say, there's tragedy in there for those affected while the experimenters get to walk away from consequences or responsibility for the harm these experiments caused.

There's precedent. 75 years ago a doctor famously got away with cruel and inhumane experimentation on twins. At least his evil was made public.

They get away with it because of the way patient confidentiality is built into the system.

I think a lot of people's emotions are on a bit of a thread these days, GCGayDad. I'd just go with the flow and have a cry.

I think what I found interesting was that Morney seemed so clearly to be reacting to his own up-bringing in the positions he adopted. I know a person who is one of the major psychiatrists working with gender confused kids in my area, he's all about affirmation only. What strikes me is how much this seems to be a reflection of his own feelings and fragility - he is a person who really is very kind and wants to do good, but struggles with any sort of conflict, with watching other people struggle. His background also seems to have included a childhood that was overly rigid and perhaps judgemental and he subsequently has suffered from mental health issues.

I've known a few very mentally healthy people in psychiatry, one used to work in the clinic I did when I was younger, and they seem to be good at their jobs. Very stable kinds of people who aren't needing affirmation from others. But it seems to be fraught to find those people. Maybe the problem is someone like a GP who has their own issues generally isn't interpreting their patient care through them, whereas in mental health care, we are always looking at others mainly through our own experience of being human.

Heartbreaking.

There were a number of children who played innocent victim to the God-complexed medical professionals convinced of their own rightness and focused on their career based agenda rather than the best interests of the child. The boy in the bubble, Genie Wiley, both similarly had their lives taken over in pursuit of interesting research and were later abandoned and left to pick up the damage as best they could. These children were never really people to these professionals, and these cases formed a basis for medical ethics now in place.

The professional in this case is also an example of what happens when someone in need of a good psychologist themselves, and a number of very troubling social, emotional and sexual beliefs, values and behaviours, gets into a position of sufficient influence. And how some fields, when not strongly regulated by robust ethics, standards and safeguarding policies, will always provide the opportunity for children to be abused and exploited, and will inevitably attract adults with an interest in the field that may not be altruistic.

The massive problem we have now is Lang's 'sacred caste': a new attempt to circumvent protections and standards for children in the pursuit of an adult agenda. By adults wholly convinced of their own self righteousness and superiority. Plus ca change.

Very interesting that the male professional with the power was wholly convinced in their own mind that a male infant with a damaged penis had no future, was incapable of maleness. And yet: that they would create a 'girl' with a vaginal cavity but without the sexual experiences of a woman, without the ability for fertility or having a child? No mention at all. Nor that at some point someone would have to explain to this created female that they were never going to menstruate or carry a child, and why that was. The utter dismissal, the unimportance of the female experience is writ large, as it always is. A female just has long hair, breasts, performs femininity adequately and has the required hole for a male to penetrate. Job done.

The conclusions from the article seem strong that sex is what it is and must be accepted as it is; gender is the child's choice to express and should be unhindered by unhelpful stereotypical beliefs and other people's needs to fit children into boxes; nothing should be done in childhood that damages or removes sexual experience or fertility from the future adult; and all decisions about body alteration should be made by the person themselves in adulthood.

Nothing whatsoever to disagree with there.

Just to mention too: modern psychology involves active requirement for therapists to question and reflect on what needs of my own may I be trying to meet in this client and my treatment plan? What stuff of mine is becoming involved?

.. there sometimes seems to be little awareness that sexuality can be all over the place in the teen years

There is peer pressure to reach puberty by a particular school age, any variation from the norm is an uncomfortable experience.
Children falling outside of the usual age markers are acutely aware of this. It makes them a vulnerable group.

Modern life, if only we can just let them be.

Very interesting that the male professional with the power was wholly convinced in their own mind that a male infant with a damaged penis had no future, was incapable of maleness. And yet: that they would create a 'girl' with a vaginal cavity but without the sexual experiences of a woman, without the ability for fertility or having a child? No mention at all.

This 👆 - some problems male children & adults experience stems largely from some males utter rejection of other males on the basis of their own warped view of what being male is or ought to be. While having zero fucking clue about women beyond being support humans for all those they reject.

GCGayDad

There are mad-bastard, psychopaths and sadists in all walks of life. I do think rather more could be done though to keep them out of practicing in regulated professions like clinical psychology, psychiatry and all others where the client/patient is more vulnerable than the average bear.

The stark difference between "profession-facing" vs "patient-facing" personas makes it very hard for people who have been abused in any way by these people to be believed.

Thanks for the link to that article, that was a really interesting but tough read. Those poor children and their families.

The account of rigidly theory-led influential figures practising in the medical establishment then closing ranks to exclude the voices of the people with disorders of sexual development who then rejected the treatment they had been given (the members of ‘ISNA’) has resonance around detransitioned people and the ‘affirmation’ model, as does not being clear when something is experimental or outcome unknown, as does the lack of non-directive emotional professional support for families with children who are distressed around gender:

‘Chase says she understands why the medical establishment has resisted listening to ISNA. As she once wrote: "Our position implies that they have unwittingly at best and through willful denial at worst - spent their careers inflicting a profound harm from which their patients will never fully recover." So she does not expect doctors like Gearhart to change their views unless forced. "I think a context will open up for surgeons who keep doing this to be vulnerable to lawsuits," Chase says. "But it's going to take a while to create that context. Right now, we can't sue, because it's standard practice and parents give permission. The first thing that we want to have happen is that when they recommend this to parents, they tell them it's experimental and there's no evidence that it works and that there's plenty of people who've had it done to them who are mad as hell."

Other large changes will have to take place. Anne Fausto-Sterling, an embryologist at Brown University, endorses Diamond and Sigmundson's recommendation for delaying surgery but says that the medical establishment will have to provide education and emotional support to help parents with the difficult task of raising an infant whose genitals are atypical.

"A different kind of support system has to start getting built," Fausto-Sterling says. "At the moment there is no ongoing counseling done by people skilled in psychosexual development." Currently, she points out, counseling is done neither by experts trained in gender issues or psychology nor by intersexual peer-support counselors - it's handled by surgeons or endocrinologists, who conduct only cursory follow-up exams once a year. "If there was really a wholesale change in this," she continues, "the medical profession would have to do something like what they've done with genetic counseling - which is to develop a specialty of people who would work with these families long-term and help them resolve both emotional and practical questions. The practical questions are very real: 'What do I do when it comes to undressing in gym? How do I intervene with the school system?' There are a lot of things that have to happen to make what I'm arguing or Cheryl's arguing or Mickey's arguing work. There's a different infrastructure that has to get built and put into place. I think it's the responsibility of the medical profession to do it ‘
L

Like we have not learnt from the recent past, even from this connected field of medical and psychological practice. This is very concerning in so many ways. I used to assume that modern medical practice learns from its mistakes and it draws from evidence where there are unknowns or uncertainties. Rather than basing actual irreversible care on wider cultural stereotypes or on simply adopting and following fashions in theories or political positions without conducting proper research. It is shocking.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, an embryologist at Brown University, endorses Diamond and Sigmundson's recommendation for delaying surgery

She appears to be one who will discard what she has earlier promoted if it suits her personally:

twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1230128097376243720

Fausto-Sterling also seems to be the source for the damaging misinformation that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7%.