Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

If you read much about the secular research into gender and gender identity, you may be familiar with the story of Bruce Reimer. Wendy McElroy wrote an article last year, which updates the situation. As some background: in the mistaken notion that equality means sameness, the 1960s and 70s saw the development of numerous theories and a lot of research attempting to show that sex differences did not extend much, if at all, beyond the procreative functions at least they admitted that much. McElroy relates that caught up in this theorizing and experimentation was a little boy named Bruce who, in 1966 at eight months old, was the victim of a botched circumcision which left him without a penis.

Enter Dr. John Money, a medical psychologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. Money had recently proposed a theory that the sex differences that are normally attributed to men and women, beyond obvious anatomical differences, were purely social constructs. Since Bruce was a twin, this case was of extreme interest to him because Bruce’s twin brother provided him with a control subject.

Money had a lot of ideas. He convinced Bruce’s parents to complete the removal of Bruce’s genitals, treat him with hormones, change his name which became Brenda, and eventually he recommended that Brenda be surgically altered to be given a vagina. Money’s extreme makeover of Bruce-Brenda was an astounding success . . . according to Money’s publications on the experiment anyway. Unfortunately, for Bruce-Brenda the reality was not so rosy.

McElroy reports: Behind the scenes, Reimer’s mother told Money that Brenda ripped off dresses, rejected dolls, insisted on standing up to urinate, and asked to shave like her father. These things did not make it into Money’s documentation of the effort. Brenda’s parents eventually ended the charade. The now teenager, took the name David and began to live as a boy. David describes what it was like growing up: It was 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.

McElroy reports that in 1997 two scientists writing in the Journal Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, exposed Money’s fraudulence. Milton Diamond, a biologist, and Keith Sigmundson, a psychiatrist, concluded that Money’s experiment was a failure and his reporting a fraud. Johns Hopkins Children Center subsequently released two studies which found that gender identity was dictated by prenatal exposure to male hormones in normal babies born with XY chromosomes. This finding held even with babies born without a penis. McElroy concludes: Although Money’s research has been widely discredited, the belief that sexual identity is socially constructed still deeply impacts our culture. A good first step toward reversing the damage this belief can inflict is to reclaim a word usage that has been virtually abandoned. We should use the word sex and reject the word gender when discussing sexual identity.

Indeed, more and more research shows that sex differences are much deeper than environment, biochemistry, physiology or even chromosomal and genetic makeup. It is a complex union of all of these things. However, research can only go so far. Science does not have the tools to investigate the soul. John Paul the Great, in his theology of the body catecheses, indicates that sex is an integral part of the soul. He shows that we cannot change our sex without annihilating our identities. Male and female He created them (Gen 1:27) and these are the only two ways of being human. Our sex is part of who we are and we cannot change that.

The tragic ramifications of the rejection of the true depth of sex for personal identity, in David Reimer’s case, appear to have been fatal. On 4 May 2004, David Reimer, after numerous attempts beginning in his teenage years, finally took his own life at the age of 38. See Death By Theory”.