Following a botched circumcision at 7 months, David Reimer — born “Bruce” Reimer — underwent two sex reassignment surgeries. At 22 months, “Bruce” became “Brenda” because doctors thought he would be more likely to succeed as a woman than as a man with a disfigured penis. At 15 years old, “Brenda” became David when he learned his female identity had been cultivated by psychologists, hormones, and dresses. David took his own life at age 38.
Doctors and psychologists cut David Reimer to fit narrow definitions of both masculinity and femininity. Our society upholds these opposing categories as transcendent truths, and uses the manifest oppositions in behavior, attributes, and roles to obscure our universal personhood.
In her essay “Undoing Gender,” Judith Butler says both the psychologists and surgeons in the Reimer case implemented means that contradicted their ideas about gender. The psychologists believed in gender malleability, but they imposed femininity on “Brenda” so violently that she almost committed suicide at the age of 13. The surgeons, returning “Brenda” to David — to an inner, natural truth about his gender — had to use unnatural methods to do so. Everyone was so concerned about cutting him to fit that they forgot to approach Bruce/Brenda/David with compassion for a whole person.
Gender is the crossroads between nature and nurture. It is also the way society has trained us to categorize one another: Accept the people who express gender normally, and reject those who don’t. When David was “Brenda,” psychologists forced him to rehearse the “feminine” sexual positions that embodied passiveness and sexual submissiveness. When David returned to manhood, our culture recommended that he exert self-confidence and sexual aggression for others to accept him as a man. Everyone forgot his wholeness as a person because they only saw the incompleteness in his gender.
In 1 Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul attributes wholeness in the church body to the unique gifts every member possesses. We can use this definition of wholeness in our discussion of personhood. “If the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? … But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. … If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
Following the botched circumcision, doctors used logic similar to that of the ear: “Because David does not have a functioning penis, he won’t want to belong to manhood.” People misunderstood David his whole life because they prioritized the alignment of his behaviors, hormones, and genitalia to manhood or womanhood, instead of prioritizing his whole and perfect personhood as greater than his gender.
In Galatians 3, Paul claims that all believers are children of Christ, who inherit the promises of Abraham through their faith alone: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” If we uphold masculinity and femininity as transcendent truths, and equate them with our born sex, we obscure the real truth about gender and its stereotypes. These categories don’t contain lasting truths because we are all one in Christ.
No matter how rooted they may seem to be in biology, when we uphold society’s specific attributes for masculinity and femininity as archetypes to follow, we cut away the unique attributes and behaviors that make each person complete. A person’s sex, hormones, and environment can affect his or her expression of gender. But cutting away parts of this expression so that it perfectly matches his or her biological sex in the name of societal norms alienates that person from understanding him- or herself as a perfect child of God.