Gender vs. Sex? How Two Brothers Died Making Them Separate Terms
The Infamous Theory of Dr. John Money that Led Two Brothers to Commit Suicide
Renowned psychologist Dr. John Money died on July 7, 2006, at the age of 84, in Maryland, slipping away peacefully from complications of Parkinson’s Disease. Some reports indicate he may also have had dementia, which often goes hand in hand with Parkinson’s.
If the latter is true, Dr. Money, in those final moments before death completely wiped away his mind, may not have recalled the unspeakable horrors he inflicted on his victims—some would call them patients—whose lives were destroyed by his perverse experiments in gender reassignment that became the foundation for today’s obsession with gender and the false belief that it is changeable and fluid in nature.
His most famous victims were the Reimer twins, an infamous case in which he desperately wanted to prove his theory that nurture was the master of nature. This case had devastating and deadly consequences for the Reimer twins, their parents, and extended families. But prior to destroying this family, Dr. Money was already adept at manipulating people in pursuit of fame and validation for his flawed mad-scientist theories.
Dr. Richard Green, a friend of Dr. Money, a UK-based psychologist who adored Dr. Money and embraced his depraved gender theories, described him this way: “John was a libertine. He was an enthusiast of group sex. (Our) meetings were highlighted by evening orgies organized by John and attended by some of sexology’s luminaries. He was a gifted participant.”
Dr. Green further gushes, “In Baltimore, John’s home was a museum, crammed with exotic sculptures and paintings. Bigger than life wooden figures, with colossal genitalia, crowded the visitor. When my small son, Adam, and I stayed over one night, Adam was bug eyed. He told me years later that he was terrified.”
It should be noted that most children were terrified and repulsed by Dr. Money.
When Dr. Money died, his pal Dr. Green was despondent. “Sexology needs another freedom fighter,” wrote Green. “The gap between the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian Crazies has narrowed.”
Dr. Money’s obituaries, from The New York Times to most mainstream news outlets, praised him glowingly. “He was a pioneer in studies of sexual identity,” raved NBC when he died. “He developed that entire field of study,” Dr. Gregory K. Lehne, a Money protégé, was quoted in his obituary as saying. “Without him, that whole field of study might not have existed.”
If only.
None of his obituaries included the following disturbing comments from Dr. Money:
“Gender refers to all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.”
So there you have it—the beginning of the divergence between the formerly linked words “sex” and “gender.” Dr. Money is the granddaddy, so to speak, of the gender obsession that we’re living through right now. If you ask almost any senior citizen the difference between sex and gender, they’ll tell you there’s no difference. But if you ask a young person the same question, they’ll tell you immediately that gender is how you identify, sex is biological—although many deny that there is such a thing as biological sex anymore, another perversion to be laid at the doorstep of Dr. Money.
Also missing from Dr. Money’s many glowing obituaries is his belief in chronophilia (sexual attraction to individuals of any age difference) in 1986.
Here’s the key takeaway from his writings on chronophilia: “If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s,” wrote Dr. Money, “if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.”
This grotesque endorsement of adult sexual abuse of children leads us to Money’s involvement with the Reimer family.
It began in 1965 when David Reimer, born Bruce, and his brother Brian were born in Winnipeg, Canada, to parents Ron and Janice Reimer. At the age of eight months, the twin boys were taken to the hospital for routine circumcisions, one of which went horribly wrong. Baby Bruce’s penis was completely destroyed during the procedure. His distraught parents remembered seeing Dr. Money on TV spewing his theories on nature vs. nurture and that gender can be assigned and reassigned. So out of desperation, the parents called Dr. Money and asked him if he could help.
Dr. Money, for his part, could hardly contain his glee. What he needed to prove his theory incontrovertibly was a set of twins, one of which he could raise as a boy and one as a girl. Dr. Money would go on to write a book outlining his theory and the success he claimed to achieve with the Reimer twins in 1969’s “Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment,” an attempt to mainstream the idea of gender as flexible and bring more acceptance to the practices of chemical and surgical castration.
Later he would write a book called “Gay, Straight and In-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation.” In it, Dr. Money coins the phrase “bodymind” — which focuses on the historical, cultural, and physiological influences that determine sexual orientation. Even today, after all we know about Dr. Money and his abuses, this book, published in 1990, gets glowing reviews on Amazon. “A scholastic masterpiece,” praises the New Mexico Psychiatric Medical Association. “The best and most up-to-date review of the neurobiology of sexual orientation in print. This book should be required reading for all psychiatrists.” Perhaps the most gag-inducing review comes from the previously prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, which opined, “The author addresses important scientific and social questions, and it is clear that he has devoted many years of thoughtful attention to them.”
Dr. Money’s destruction of the Reimers was already complete when he wrote the latter book. But those horrors were years away in 1965 when the Reimer parents were desperately trying to find a way to help their baby son whose penis had been destroyed during a circumcision. Dr. Money convinced the naive parents to go along with his scheme to experiment on the twins, although he told them he was saving them, not using them for Frankenstein-style research. Bruce would be the guinea pig, and brother Brian would be the control.
Bruce underwent surgery that completely removed any remaining remnants of his penis and testicles. He was raised as Brenda by his parents. But before Bruce was turned back over to the hapless parents, Dr. Money gave them a stern warning: Don’t ever let Bruce know he was born a boy, or the sex change would fail.
Bruce, now Brenda, looked like a little girl. She was given dolls to play with and wore dresses. “I tried to interest Brenda in feminine pursuits,” recalls mother Janice, “like baking cookies and playing with dolls.” But, observed Janice, “it was so obvious to everyone, not just me, that she was so masculine.”
“I had Barbie dolls,” recalls Bruce, who later changed his name to David. “My brother was generous and would let me play with his toys, and he knew how happy that made me.”
Meanwhile, the twins would visit Dr. Money at least once a year, when he would question them and assess the progress of his experiment. Despite presenting it as wildly successful in private, he recorded his concerns. “There’s not much chance of talking this girl into a change of mind,” he stated. Paradoxically, he focused on the biological to convince Brenda that she’s a girl. “What do boys have between their legs?” he asked little Brenda. “I don’t know,” Brenda replied. “A boy has a penis for peeing through, like a little sausage,” he told Brenda. “What do girls have? It’s flat. They’re both different.” He then showed Brenda explicit, nude photos of adult women giving birth, traumatizing Brenda.
“I thought he was perverted,” said Bruce years later. “I thought he was a sick man. My parents didn’t know a lot that was going on. If they’d have known, it would never have happened.”
At one point, Dr. Money tried to convince Brenda to have surgery to alter her rudimentary vulva to appear more normal and suggest the construction of a vagina, but Brenda resisted. “We can make it look like it’s supposed to look,” Dr. Money pressured her.
What happened next was a descent into madness, even for Dr. Money, and a tragedy for the boys. Money made the twins strip naked, took photos of them, and forced them to examine each other’s genitals.
Brenda grew up troubled and lonely, with almost no friends. The boys didn’t like her, and neither did the girls, her mother recalls; she didn’t fit in anywhere. “Compared with most families, mine is a loser,” Brenda wrote in a middle school essay. “My feeling about my life is that it’s rotten. To me, the future looks bad.”
Around 13, Dr. Money introduced Brenda to a transsexual to convince her to accept her gender. Brenda was beginning to look and act more masculine, rejecting female clothing. At this meeting, Brenda fled from the transsexual, refusing to talk with the man masquerading as a woman. Brenda told her parents she would kill herself if she ever had to see Dr. Money again.
Finally, confronted by a suicidal 13-year-old son they had raised as a girl, the parents told both the boys the truth. “My dad took me out for an ice cream cone,” recalls Bruce. “Usually that means it’s bad news. I don’t remember 90 percent of what he told me … (afterward) I thought to myself, I’m not crazy, I’m not turning insane.”
His mother told his brother Brian the same day. He reacted violently, with extreme anger. But for Bruce, it was the first time he felt happy. He renamed himself David. Eventually, he decided to undergo painful reconstructive surgery to have a penis created. “I got to thinking, what would it be like to be a father? I could be a good husband,” he recalled. But physically, he could not reproduce. That’s when Jane Fontane, who already had three children, stepped into the picture. “We hit it off right away,” recalled a happy David. “Like two peas in a pod.”
Meanwhile, the mad doctor had been publishing glowing reports, false reports, about how successful his experiment was, proving, he crowed, that you can raise a boy to become a girl. The mad doctor was also a liar, falsifying his data to establish an unprovable theory.
When the twins learned about it they were “appalled, disgusted and angry,” said David. They decided to go public about their ordeal at the hands of Dr. Money, accusing him of taking numerous nude photos of them during their “treatment” sessions and forcing them to engage in sexual play at age seven. According to Brian, the twins were forced to act out sexual acts, with David playing the female role. Dr. Money made David get down on all fours, and Brian was forced to “come up behind (him) and place his crotch against (his) buttocks.” Dr. Money also forced David to lie on his back with his legs spread open with his brother on top. Pictures were taken of these macabre abuse sessions and are currently the property of the Kinsey Institute. Yes, that Kinsey, the other perverse “sexologist.”
The twins’ parents participated in the public outing of Dr. Money to prevent him from harming other children, they said, but in the end the medical and psychological communities would lionize him as a pioneer of gender theory … and the twins would be dead, unable to defend themselves.
Brian, who had been struggling emotionally for years, ever since learning that his sister Brenda was his twin brother, descended into schizophrenia. He committed suicide at the age of 36 with an overdose of antidepressants. Two years later, depressed after his wife told him she wanted a separation, David shot himself in the head with a sawed-off shotgun. The date was May 4, 2004. Just two years later, Dr. Money would be dead himself.
Before his suicide, David Reimer would state prophetically: “People might say the Dave Reimer case could’ve been successful. I’m living proof (that it wasn’t), because I’ve lived through it. Who else are you going to listen to? Is it going to take someone shooting themselves in the head for people to listen?”
If Dr. Money had only injured the Reimer family, had he only driven David and Brian to their deaths by suicide, had he only sexually abused one set of twins in his entire life, that would be horrific enough. But what Dr. Money managed to do was create a false dichotomy between gender and sex where none exists, a myth that flourishes today. Gender, according to Dr. Money and modern psychologists, is how you perceive yourself. Sex is your biology. Even “Psychology Today”—that industry vanguard has totally bought into the wordplay. In a 2021 article, the esteemed publication pushed back against any attempt to reconnect the meanings of the two words.
“Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene hung a sign outside her Capitol office door that said, ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. Trust the Science!’” the article begins. “From a scientific standpoint, Rep. Taylor Greene’s statement is patently wrong. It perpetuates a common error by conflating gender with sex. According to the American Psychological Association, sex is rooted in biology. A person’s sex is determined using observable biological criteria such as sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive organs and external genitalia. Gender is related to but distinctly different from sex; it is rooted in culture, not biology. The APA (2012) defines gender as ‘the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex.’”
In essence, this theory merely changes the words used to describe transgenderism (formerly known as transsexualism, but today it’s important to shove the word “gender” in there) and biological sex by creating two words from one. The danger this creates is that it convinces the slow-witted masses that you can change your gender by merely speaking it … something like the way God spoke the universe into existence. And as if that wasn’t enough, these so-called gender experts now recognize more than 81 genders and gender identities, and that was just this week. All of the 81, it should be noted, are disembodied from biological sex.
Psychology Today might want to ask the Reimer twins what they think of this twisted theory—but alas, that’s not possible. Because the Reimers are dead, victims of Dr. Money and his dark gender ideology.
Martin Mawyer is president of the Christian Action Network, which he founded in 1990. Located in Lynchburg, VA, CAN was formed as a non-profit educational organization to protect America’s religious and moral heritage. He is the author of several books, including You Are Chosen: Prepare to Triumph in a Fallen World.