Sunday, October 24, 2010

 In 1965, Janet Reimer gave birth to twin sons Bruce and Brian Reimer. Six months later, the boys went to the hospital to be circumcised and during the circumcision  Bruce’s penis was burned beyond repair. When his parents discovered this, they decided to call  a psychologist, John Money, who was close to perfecting gender reassignment and believed that gender identity was brought on by nurture not nature. they were convinced that Bruce would be better off as Brenda. they raised him as a girl with his twin bother. As time went on, Brenda and Brian would sometimes see Doctor Money apparently Doctor Money made them do inappropriate things and no one ever did anything about it.As Brenda got older, she was ridiculed and made fun of at school, because she was taller and more masculine than all of the other girls.she was still seeing Doctor Money as her psychologist he had told the public the experiment on Brenda was a success.The Reimer’s told Brenda the truth about his gender. Brenda decided that she wanted to live life as a boy and changed her name to David. Not only was David’s life affected by this, but it eventually caused his both sons to commit suicide. The main theory that was studied was nature verses nurture. Doctor Money wanted to show that a person’s nature, not nurture, determined a person’s gender. in doing this he did a lot of wrong by not telling Bruce about his gender and not telling his parents what was really going on. Doctor Money took advantage of the family because he knew that they were in a vulnerable state. The main theory studied in this film was social-cultural behavior. Money believed that if Bruce were to be raised as a girl and do things that girls wanted to do, then he would turn out as a girl. He most likely believed this because, for the most part, as people we do what society thinks is appropriate for our gender to do.Doctor Money was wrong to do as he did to the Rimer family.  No family deserves to be treated as David and his family were. Money's experiment was unethical and showed that you cannot raise a boy to be a girl because there are difference between them in many ways. through this story it is shown that boys can not be taught to be girls