A new film about psychologist John Money and David Reimer is headed toward theaters, and if you are transgender, you should probably learn this story before somebody on social media decides to explain it to you.
Because they will.
A Boy Named Brenda, currently set for a limited release in 2027, tells the disturbing story of David Reimer, a Canadian boy whose penis was severely damaged during a botched circumcision when he was an infant. His parents eventually sought help from John Money, a prominent psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins University. Money recommended something extraordinary: raise David as a girl.
The official trailer describes Money as attempting to prove that gender was primarily a product of environment and upbringing, and the film appears poised to focus heavily on the catastrophic consequences of what followed.
It is a story worth telling. It is also a story that is almost guaranteed to become ammunition in America’s ongoing political war over transgender people.
That means we need to understand what actually happened, what John Money actually believed and, perhaps most importantly, what the David Reimer case does not prove.
Because David Reimer wasn’t transgender. And the experiment performed on him bears remarkably little resemblance to modern gender-affirming care.
What Happened to David Reimer?
David Reimer was born in Canada in 1965 as one of two identical twin boys. During infancy, a medical procedure intended to address a problem involving his penis went catastrophically wrong, leaving it severely damaged.
His frightened parents eventually encountered John Money, who had become an influential researcher in human sexual development.
Money believed that gender development was highly malleable during early childhood. He advised David’s parents that their child could be surgically reassigned and successfully raised as a girl.
At approximately 22 months old, David underwent surgery to remove his testes. His parents renamed him Brenda and began raising him as their daughter. He was later given estrogen as part of the effort to feminize his body.
There was one enormous problem.
David didn’t identify as a girl.
Despite being told he was one, dressed as one and medically altered to develop as one, David consistently resisted the female identity imposed upon him.
Money nevertheless presented what became known in scientific literature as the “John/Joan” case as evidence supporting his theories. The existence of David’s identical twin brother made the case particularly significant because Money believed it offered something approaching a natural experiment: genetically identical children raised as different sexes.
Except the supposed success wasn’t what it appeared to be.
In 1997, sexologist Milton Diamond and psychiatrist H. Keith Sigmundson published a long-term follow-up documenting that the reassignment had failed. David had rejected the female identity and, after learning the truth about his history as a teenager, began living as male. He later received testosterone and underwent surgeries intended to masculinize his body.
The case became one of the most infamous episodes in the history of sexology. It should be.
We Don’t Need to Defend John Money
This is where transgender advocates can make a serious mistake.
When someone brings up John Money, there can be an instinct to immediately become defensive because his name has become so deeply embedded in anti-trans rhetoric.
Don’t, there is plenty to criticize.
David Reimer underwent irreversible medical interventions before he could possibly consent to them. His identity was deliberately concealed from him. His resistance to the identity being imposed upon him was not adequately respected. Money continued portraying the case as successful despite evidence that the reality was considerably more complicated.
David and his brother also later described deeply troubling experiences during their sessions with Money. There is no reason transgender people need to sanitize this history, and neither should modern medicine.
Medical history is filled with treatments, theories, and ethical standards that were subsequently challenged or abandoned. Recognizing those failures is how medicine is supposed to improve.
But acknowledging John Money’s failures doesn’t require accepting every claim subsequently attached to them.
No, John Money Did Not Invent Gender Identity
Expect to hear this one repeatedly as the film approaches release.
“John Money invented gender identity.”
The historical record is more complicated.
Money unquestionably played an influential role in the development of modern terminology surrounding gender. He introduced “gender role” into scientific literature in 1955 and became enormously influential in research involving sex and gender.
But he did not coin the term “gender identity.”
A historical examination published in Archives of Sexual Behavior traces the first use of “gender identity” to psychiatrists Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson around 1963. The author specifically examined the frequently repeated claim that Money coined both “gender role” and “gender identity” and concluded that the latter attribution is incorrect.
More importantly, the concept that someone could experience a profound disconnect between their physical sex characteristics and their internal sense of themselves didn’t suddenly materialize because one psychologist invented some terminology.
People we would today recognize as transgender existed long before John Money was born. Language evolves because humans need words to describe experiences that already exist.
Money contributed to that vocabulary. He didn’t manufacture the people the vocabulary eventually described.
David Reimer Wasn’t a Transgender Child
This distinction may be the most important one. David wasn’t a child telling adults that his gender was different from the sex he had been assigned.
Adults decided his gender for him; think about that difference.
David was born male, and, following a catastrophic medical accident, adults concluded that he should live as a girl. His body was surgically altered. Female puberty was medically induced. His history was concealed from him. When his own understanding of himself conflicted with what adults had decided, his objections did not initially change the plan.
Modern gender-affirming care is based on a fundamentally different premise: listening to the person experiencing gender incongruence.
That doesn’t mean every question surrounding pediatric gender medicine has been scientifically settled. Researchers continue debating diagnostic criteria, appropriate ages, long-term outcomes, psychological assessment, and the strength of evidence supporting different interventions.
Those debates should happen.
But describing the Reimer experiment as though it were simply an early version of contemporary transgender healthcare erases the central feature of the case.
David wasn’t asking doctors to help his body align with his identity. Doctors were attempting to make his identity align with the body and social role they had selected for him. Those are not interchangeable situations.
The Irony Nobody Talks About
There is another way of looking at the Reimer case that complicates its usefulness as an argument against transgender identity.
Money believed that upbringing could play an enormous role in determining gender. David’s experience stubbornly refused to cooperate.
His parents raised him as a girl, doctors altered his body, he was given a girl’s name, he was treated socially as female, and he received feminizing hormones.
And ultimately, none of those things successfully convinced David that he was a girl.
Whatever combination of biology, development, psychology, and environment ultimately produces someone’s gender identity, David’s story demonstrated something extraordinarily important:
Simply telling someone what gender they are doesn’t necessarily make them experience themselves that way.
That should sound familiar to transgender people.
Many of us spend years being told precisely what gender we are supposed to be. Our birth certificates say it, our parents say it, our schools say it, our clothing says it, and our childhood photographs say it.
And still something inside them says otherwise.
That doesn’t mean David Reimer’s experience “proves” transgender identities are innate. One individual case cannot establish something that scientifically complicated.
But it certainly doesn’t establish that our identities were invented by John Money either.
If anything, Reimer’s life should make us considerably more cautious about believing that adults can simply engineer another person’s gender identity.
There Are Legitimate Lessons Here
The tragedy of David Reimer deserves more than becoming ammunition in today’s culture wars. There are profound lessons about medical ethics buried inside his story.
Children deserve protection from unnecessary irreversible procedures. Patients deserve accurate information. Researchers have an obligation to report outcomes honestly, including outcomes that undermine their own theories.
Doctors should be extraordinarily cautious about assuming they understand someone’s identity better than the person experiencing it.
And medical authority should never become a substitute for informed consent. Those aren’t anti-trans principles.
They’re principles transgender and intersex advocates have spent decades fighting for.
The Reimer case became particularly important in debates surrounding surgeries performed on intersex infants who were too young to participate in decisions about their bodies. Diamond and Sigmundson’s 1997 report challenged practices based partly on assumptions about how easily gender could be assigned during infancy. Later ethical recommendations associated with Diamond’s work argued against cosmetic genital surgery without the patient’s consent.
That history deserves attention too.
Get Ready, Because John Money Is Coming to Your Timeline
When A Boy Named Brenda arrives in 2027, most people encountering this story won’t have spent hours reading decades-old medical literature.
They’ll see clips, they’ll see memes.
They’ll see someone confidently announcing that John Money invented gender identity, experimented on a little boy and therefore transgender people are the product of a failed psychological experiment.
That’s a much easier story to fit into a 60-second TikTok. It just isn’t particularly good history. The better response isn’t pretending John Money never existed or insisting that everything associated with his research was misunderstood.
Tell the whole story, tell people what happened to David Reimer. Tell them what Money got wrong.
Tell them about the serious ethical problems involved. Tell them that Money coined “gender role” but didn’t invent the human experience we now call gender identity.
And then ask the question that tends to disappear from these conversations: What did David himself actually tell us?
- He told us that adults could change his name.
- They could change his clothes.
- They could alter his anatomy.
- They could change his hormones.
- They could raise him according to an entirely different social expectation.
But they couldn’t simply order him to become someone he wasn’t.
David Reimer deserves to be remembered as a human being, not a political prop. And perhaps the most respectful thing we can do with his story is learn the lesson sitting right in front of us.
When someone tells you who they are, maybe we should start by listening.
