Just caught the tail end of a documentary called Face in the Mirror about David Reimer. Has anyone else seen this? I can’t seem to find any more info about it online. Now there’s one on about pumping parties called Lethal Beauty.
helen boyd's journal of gender & trans issues
I just saw the entire show too on MSNBC this morning, and it was amazing. Apparently a famous case with a shocking and disturbing surprise ending. See it all if you can (it is still bothering me and I see a lot of these kinds of shows).
FROM FACEBOOK: Wow, I just saw the MSNBC special “Face in the Mirror”, an apparently famous case about identical Canadian twin brothers born in 1965. It started with a doctor’s error accidentally burning off one twin’s penis because he used an electrical current instead of a knife during circumcision. They ended up rectifying the situation by completely changing him to a girl surgically, who later resisted all efforts to be feminized growing up. He was forced to take female hormones and was brutally taunted by kids, then as a teen when told he was really a boy all along, he went through painful mastectomy and several painful reconstructive surgeries to be male again. Without the already guilt-ridden mother’s knowledge, they were both privately sexually exploited by the doctor who recommended the initial change and “studied their case” over the years. What sucks is that they were showing what appeared to be current interviews with his unaltered brother and then later the victim himself after all the trauma, so you expect it all to end up okay (as is the case when you see live interviews with the narrator, NBC’s Keith Morrison. Although emotionally traumatized, they seemed to happily end up to be two good-looking, healthy men in the interviews who got thru it all.
THEN, the last 5 minutes of the show, you learn the non-altered (always male) twin killed himself from depression in 2002 and the male-female-male brother, who had resented the “normal” one for having issues since he wasn’t the one who had to go thru all the torment, visited his grave out of guilt daily for 2 years, after a long estrangement. THEN, after describing how the altered twin swallowed his dignity and told his story, revealing his identity to help others and to expose his story as not the “success” of being able to change any baby to be the gender you want it to be that the doctors and media had reported for 35 years, killed HIMSELF 2 years later in 2004 to be with his brother — THE END (apparently, this special and interviews were done pre-2002).
Biography: http://www.slate.com/id/2101678/
Let’s not forget that the doctor in charge of this failed “experiment” was Dr John Money.
Can’t believe that anyone, especially a licensed doctor, could be so ignorant as to think male & female brains are the same, and all you have to do is alter their bodies as babies and force them to wear a dress or whatever and expect them to grow up as a well-adjusted members of the opposite sex.