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The boy who was raised a girl

Discussion in 'Current Events, World News, & LGBT News' started by LostandFound, Nov 23, 2010.

  1. LostandFound

    LostandFound Guest

    Interesting. A child and twin accidentally loses his penis at birth and is brought up a girl.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11814300

    If you read the whole article it goes on to say that the whole experiment ended up being a disaster and he eventually kills himself.
     
  2. Shevanel

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    I watched a documentary on this, and was actually going to make a thread a few weeks ago, but didn't. It's quite interesting, but quite sad. You should also note that his twin brother also killed himself before David Reimer killed himself. That Doctor effectively fucked up that family with his experiment.
     
  3. EveDanger

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    Ah, how could you do that to somebody?! Gender identity is already a pain in the ass, let alone somebody messing things up intentionally.
     
  4. Shevanel

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    [YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HRuig46Y8w[/YOUTUBE]
    This is the first part of the documentary.
     
  5. crystaltriforce

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    that can't be legal
     
  6. Helen

    Helen Guest

    Well, what that shortened article doesn't mention is that both twin boys had trouble urinating when they were babies, so following advice their parents took them to a hospital for circumcision. They tried an alternative method for the operation involving electricity, and there was a power surge, burning off Bruce's penis. That was why the sex change eventually occurred.

    I think it's an incredibly sad story, but I also think it was just the worst luck in the world; I can envision something like that working in the right circumstances.
     
  7. Shevanel

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    Aye, but the doctor also reportedly wasn't too great of a person.
     
  8. Numfarh

    Numfarh Guest

    I strongly disagree. I can't see how forcing a gender on someone ever works. Kids grow up with the wrong body parts and are constantly told that they are really 'boys' or 'girls', but we still end up with trans gendered people. Gender identity doesn't seem to be a nurture thing.

    I don't see why there is any need to choose the gender of your kid especially if something traumatic like that occurred. It's insane. Instead, I think honesty is the best policy and they should have let their child discover their gender on their own.

    But I mean... I think it should be that way with all children no matter what the state of their genitalia.
     
  9. Helen

    Helen Guest

    I do agree with you in principle. In an ideal world, I would really love for it to work that way. But I can only imagine what it would have been like for that child growing up as a boy but without the thing that stereotypically "makes him a boy". Would other children really have understood that and been decent about it? I'd like to hope that they would, but I fear that he would have just lived in misery with the knowledge that there was, and always would be something physically irreparable on his body.

    I honestly don't know how boys would treat situations like this compared to girls, but here's a massively less extreme example from my own life about some form of body anomaly: I remember being the first in the class to grow breasts (about 9/10 years old) and all the other girls being unimaginably awful about it, laughing and saying it was disgusting, teasing me whenever I had to run in PE, all sorts. If children react adversely to something like THAT, how on earth would they have treated this poor boy if they'd known? As I said, I'd like to hope I just got a particularly nasty bunch of classmates, and that most children are more understanding than that.

    Also, I do really feel for his parents. The way I saw it, they just wanted to give him a happy life, and although their decision may have been ultimately wrong for him in the end, they felt like they were doing the right thing at the time

    EDIT: Actually, upon rereading that article, I hadn't seen that he was also ridiculed as a female adolescent. Perhaps my second paragraph isn't quite as much of a good example as it once was :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: But I still feel that a difference that extreme would have been very hard for him to live with.
     
  10. Lady Gaga

    Lady Gaga Guest

    SVU did an episode based on this. It was really good. Just saying..
     
  11. Numfarh

    Numfarh Guest

    Well, most little kids wouldn't know what was in his pants. Unless they got into playing doctor or something like that.

    And this didn't have to be as bad as the doctors made it. First off, circumcision is a nasty horrible thing to do to a child. From my knowledge of the practice, it is very rarely medically reasonable and I don't doubt that the doctors didn't examine other avenues before chopping off the foreskin. But wait, they didn't even try a routine technique and opted for some crazy electrical thing. That could be subjected to power surges no less! Talk about malpractice.

    And so let's say that all of that was unavoidable. For some reason, there was no way around everything that happened. There was NO reason to castrate the boy. None whatsoever besides the silly notion that having a penis makes you male. A penis does not make you male at least when it comes to gender. And that's the important part in many cases. Gender identity, not the biological sex. And hell, the biological sex of this kid WAS male! XY and all that.

    Just... so much wrong with every thing that happened. I'm moderately repulsed that they never thought to look for a second opinion or if they did, the second doctor didn't say, 'Er... Hey. Mutilating your child more sounds like a bad plan.'

    If we want that ideal world, it's time we stop allowing children to bully each other over silly things like gender or body issues. And that includes being honest and open with your children even if they don't fit society's mold of what a true man or woman or whatever happens to be. If I happen to reproduce, I don't plan on bringing up the child's gender to anyone until the kid has indicated some sort of want to be a girl or boy or whatever.

    /rant.
     
    #11 Numfarh, Nov 23, 2010
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 23, 2010
  12. Lady Gaga

    Lady Gaga Guest

    South Park gives a perfect example on how every kid thinks.

    Butters went to kick a girl in the balls. It didn't hurt them as much as it would a boy. This confused them because they didn't know where they kept their balls.
     
  13. EveDanger

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    Forcing people to be something they aren't and telling them that there's nothing they can do about it is just wrong on so many levels. It's one of the big reasons for heavy suicide rates of among young trans people.
     
  14. Lady Gaga

    Lady Gaga Guest

    I agree that this is completely immoral.

    But at least some good for the general LGBT population came out of this. With this, multiple laws were passed protecting rights of LGBT people. Especially T people.
     
  15. Pseudojim

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    I've seen a documentary on this, and read about it a few places... I get the impression that the doctor was very, very unscrupulous. He was undercautious with an untested and fundamentally flawed hypothesis, but he was so driven by it that he let it ruin the lives of a whole family.
     
  16. Beachboi92

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    so from what i just heard the guy say was despite being raised a girl with his genitalia also being a girls he didn't like it and wanted to be a boy......