A Deadly Answer for Nature vs. Nurture

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A Deadly Answer for Nature vs. Nurture Bruce Reimer’s story is a story of nature verses nurture gone horribly wrong. On May 4th, 2004, he decided to take his own life because of the unbearable torment he felt his life was. Underlying his suicide is the theory that nature not nurture determines a person’s gender expression. In 1966, Janet Reimer took her 8-month-old identical twins to a local doctor in Winnipeg, Canada, for circumcision. When the doctor performed the procedure on Bruce, an accident resulted in the loss of most of the baby’s penis. The Reimers took their maimed son to several doctors until they ended up consulting medical psychologist Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. Money told the parents that do to Bruce’s young age he could be raised as a girl successfully since a person’s gender was decided by their environment and not by their DNA. Bruce was an ideal candidate for an experiment to prove this claim since he had an identical twin brother to use as a control. Before then, gender reassignment surgery had never been performed on a child who had normal genitalia. The Reimers agreed and Bruce’s testicles were removed and he started 12 years of social and hormonal treatment to become a girl named "Brenda." Colapinto’s book As Nature Made Him claimed that Professor Money included in a report the statement “The child's behaviour is so clearly that of an active little girl and so different from the boyish ways of her twin brother,”(2000). In his book, Colapinto also claimed because of Money’s research feminists declared human beings to be "psychosexually neutral" at birth and campaigned to change everything from children’s stories to the curricula of schools in order to change the gender identity being taught to children. Money’s research supported their

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