You've probably heard of Bruce Jenner.
Now referred to as Caitlyn Jenner, the high-profile Olympic athlete with a famously dramatic family had a very high-profile transition from male to female - including mutilple surgical alterations, a cover on
Vanity Fair magazine and the now-canceled docu-series "I am Cait."
You probably haven't heard of Bruce Reimer.
Bruce and his twin brother Brian were born in Canada in the 1960s. At the age of seven months, the otherwise healthy boys were circumcised. But the doctors used a new method of circumcision, involving an electric cauterizing needle, on Bruce. An accident occurred, completely burning off the little boy's penis.
Brian's operation was canceled, but his parents were devastated.
The Reimers decided to take Bruce to Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins they had seen on T.V.
Dr. Money
had a theory that aside from reproductive and urinary functions,
gender was a social construct. Until the Reimer twins, he had largely worked with intersex cases - children born with ambiguous genitalia or abnormal sex chromosomes.
But the Reimer twins - otherwise healthy and biologically normative -
were the perfect experiment on which to test his theory of gender fluidity. Brian would be raised as a boy, and Bruce would from now on be called Brenda, and raised as a girl.
Comment: American College of Pediatrics: Transgenderism of children is child abuse