David Reimer

In the documentary, David  Reimer is born a normal, healthy, baby. But in his circumcisions things go wrong. The damage is too extensive to be repaired so the parents decided to follow Dr. John Moneys advice and raise him as a girl. From then on they referred to her as Brenda and treated her like she was a typical little girl. The only oddity was that every year they had to go see Dr. Money. In the sessions, Dr. Money would asses and see if his experiment was going well or not. When Brenda was six or seven she responded in a way that made Dr. Money think that Bruce had truly become Brenda, so he published his findings in a book. Not long after it became apparent that Dr. Moneys findings were incorrect. Brenda preferred her twin brothers toys and other male oriented activities. Dr. Money could not accept the fact that he was wrong so he began making the children do things to help them realize that they were different. He would have them strip down so that they could see that they were not anatomically similar. He even had a person come in and talk to Brenda who use to be a male but had had surgery to reassign her sexual origin. When Brenda was thirteen she told her parents that if she was made to go back and see Dr. Money, she would kill  herself. That is when her parents realized that they needed to tell their children the truth. Brenda was happy, but her twin, Brian had a different reaction.  He did not know what to think and distanced himself from Brenda. In later years he ended up becoming schizophrenic. Brenda decided to go back to being a male and renamed herself David. From there he started living a relatively normal life, he got married and had children.

The main theory studied in this film is nature versus nurture. Dr. Money believed that Davids male nature could be overcome by the his family treating him as if he had been born a girl. His main method was to instill in the parents the idea that they could absolutely not tell Brenda that she had previously been a he. That way it would ensure that Brenda would grow up believing that she was a girl and society would believe it also.
When it comes to the ethics of this particular case I believe that Dr. Money was way off base. I understand that David Reimers parents were seeking to do what was in their child's best interest, but they only ended up hurting him more. Dr. Money, made Brenda and Brian strip down at a very young age and that is not ethical. He also brought in a person who had had a sex change to pressure Brenda into having further surgery, when it should have been her choice. The biggest breach of ethical standards though was that the parents had no idea that any of this was going on. The children were too young to know that what was going on was wrong, and with the parents in the dark there was no one to oppose Dr. Money.