ramblings, or how to stream your thoughts → May 5th
I don’t know how many people are going to think about it today. I don’t know how many people even know.
Most people, if you mention John/Joan just stare at you. A few, those who are well read or studied psychology, will miss the connection with the date.
And the very few, they know why this is a date to be saddened.
It’ll have been 5 years since David Reimer killed himself. For those who do not know, he was the temporarily female child in the John/Joan case. Yes, temporarily. I know, that detail always got left out, and I’ve heard psychology courses are still teaching Dr. Money’s theory as if it were working-as-intended.
NEWSFLASH: Dr. Money was wrong!
I never met the guy, personally, so calling him a jackass and a pompos fool would be a bit presumptuous. But, I am. And he was. His insistance that everything was fine led to countless numbers of intersexed children being assigned genders. David changed his name back when he was 14 I think. That would have been ’79. Hey, guess who else was born around that year. Gee, I wonder, Money, if you had been man enough to retract your false data and publish an errata and further study, what would have happened to kids like me? We might, just maybe, have been given the chance we should should have had.
Instead, we here at the labs will raise a stein, shotglass, mug, or the entire bottle of 151, to David. For being.