Below is an essay on as nature made him from anti essays, your source for research papers, essays, and term paper examples. As nature made him: my opinion colapinto goes far beyond telling the woeful tale of confusion, manipulation and finally acceptance and peace of a surgically deformed person from childhood through adulthood. Although striving to remain objective, one can read the pain the author felt on david’s behalf while writing and reporting this story.

This story has information that is beneficial to science and the study of sexual reassignment. Not only does it show a medical procedure that went terribly wrong and ruined not one life but a whole family. When they were just eight months old, twins bruce and brian reimer where admitted to the hospital to undergo a routine circumcision, wherein most of bruce’s penis was burned off accidentally. Embarrassed, and afraid that their son would be ostracized by his peers when he reached adolescence parents ron and jane reimer began to seek a way to repair the damage. They were given their options they could have an artificial penis constructed for bruce or according to maverick dr. John money, they could remove bruce’s undamaged testicles, and create a rudimentary vagina, give him hormones and raise young bruce as a girl. John money thought that nurture could override nature but that is not the case in this example.

Before this experiment was done which came to be known as the twins case sexual reassignment surgery on infants was not uncommon. In fact it was the answer to a lot of parents’ prayers when their child was either born with an enlarged clitoris or an underdeveloped penis. Instead of growing up with that abnormality they would just switch them and they grow up in a different sex. When a baby is born and that first question arises, is it a girl or boy? and the answer is you really don’t. Ronna pearson sociology 37 70 july 12, 2012 as nature made him the boy who was raised as a girl john colapinto in 1967, after a baby boy one of a set of identical twins suffered a botched circumcision, a radical treatment option was agreed to by his desperate and grieving family. John money, an expert in the field of gender identity and sexual reassignment, the anonymous child was surgically altered to live life as a girl. The case would prove to be precedent setting, becoming proof for the feminist movement that gender gap was purely a result of cultural conditioning.

Initially proclaimed a resounding success, the devastating psychological cost of the procedure has only recently become known. Now living as an adult male, married and with a family of his own, this patient has granted john colapinto unprecedented access to his story. As nature made him is at once a fascinating exploration of the elusive nature of sexual identity and an examination of the ever intensifying struggle between what medical science can do and what doctors should do.

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It is also a story of courage and survival that sheds light on the murkiest areas human sexuality. Amazon.com note to reader: david reimer was born as bruce reimer, twin to brian reimer, on august 22, 1965. After his accident on april 27, 1966 and then his surgical castration on july 3, 1967, bruce was renamed brenda lee reimer. Later after finding out the truth of his birth and life, brenda decided to transition back to male and on his fifteenth birthday in 1980 he renamed himself david, taken from the story of david and goliath in the bible.

For the sake of this paper i will only use the name david, to reflect who he always thought he was to be. John colapinto chronicles the heart rending story of david reimer, born male only to be raised as a female, in his book as nature made him. This true story stands as a testament to how powerful ideologies can influence and direct the scientific process. John money's portrayal of the john/joan case, as it came to be known, contrasted drastically to the actual experience of david, as brenda.

This contradiction between the doctors’ perception of the situation and the suffering of david and his family drives the book to present a compelling story that strikes to the heart of the nature versus nurture debate. At the heart of each experience we can observe how beliefs and theories of childhood development drove the actions of john money, and could be used to describe david's own experience. The nature versus nurture clash in david's story can be analyzed and understood through three prominent theories. First we can examine the influence that sigmund freud had on the prevailing attitudes at the time of david's birth. This aids us in our comprehension of how and why a medical and scientific community would consider an attempt to reassign gender.

1 john money embarked on an enterprise to prove the power of nurturance in the development of gender identity. John money's theory, that gender was learned, resides in the essence of social learning theory. It is important to understand the strong social learning influence in order to discern how doctors, surgeons and even david's parents willingly participated in such an experiment and how they believed it could succeed. John money and his ideas became the goliath in which david encountered numerous times and in various forms. David's own experience resembled many of the ideas being developed at the time by jean piaget. Cognitive development theory helps us to provide some explanation for david's own actions and resistance to his socialization as female.

David's experience, growing up as brenda, illustrates how children are active participants in their own socialization and not just blank slates in which we imprint. Nurture has continued to torture society by presenting cases in which we simply don’t know which rules to apply. Sex change is a very big step to take in a person’s life and it involves the careful consideration of many factors but it is not a simple answer to a complex problem such as hermaphroditism or even blotched circumcisions. These choices can be difficult because we don’t quite understand which factors to consider given that we haven’t determined whether it is nature or nurture that determines a child’s sexual identity. Until we solve this riddle, people shouldn’t try to change a child’s sex before the child can decipher his or her own sexual identity.