The spiritual father of trans movement Dr John Money, his twisted experiment in the 1960s – and the tragic deaths of the twin boys whose lives were ruined: How his harrowing true story is a cautionary tale for our times

On May 4, 2004, David Reimer drove to a supermarket car park and, still sitting in the car, pulled out a shotgun and killed himself.

At 38, he ended a life that had been so full of pain and anguish that some who knew him were only surprised he had battled on for so long.

From when he was only a few months old until into his teenage years, David had been subjected to a perverse, cruel and disastrously misguided experiment by a celebrated sex psychologist who was determined to show the world that he could transform a boy into a girl.

The academic concerned — John Money — is often hailed as the spiritual father of today’s trans movement. His research underpins the central claim we hear so often nowadays: that while biological sex may be innate, ‘gender identity’ — a term that Money helped to popularise, along with coining the term ‘sexual orientation’ — is ‘socially constructed’.

From this stems the great modern progressive dogma: that sex is irrelevant and what truly matters is which gender a person ‘feels’ they are.

However, trans-rights warriors barely mention Money’s name now. And no wonder. For despite his lasting influence on the movement, his research was built on a lie — and his twisted experiment destroyed the life not only of David Reimer, but of his twin brother, too.

Brian Reimer — who like David said he was sexually abused as a youngster by Money — went on to take a fatal drug overdose that may have been intentional.

The appalling story began in 1965 when the identical Reimer twins — Brian and Bruce — were born to a working-class Canadian couple, Janet and Ron Reimer, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The boys were perfectly healthy but after seven months, both were having trouble urinating. On medical advice, their parents took them to hospital to be circumcised.

The following morning, the doctors rang with horrifying news. Instead of a scalpel, an electric cauterising pen had been used for the procedure — and in Bruce’s case, the equipment had drastically malfunctioned. A surge in the current had entirely burnt off his penis and surgeons wouldn’t be able to reconstruct it.

Mr and Mrs Reimer, young parents from a religious background, were bluntly informed by a psychiatrist that their son would be ‘unable to consummate marriage or have normal heterosexual relations; he will have to recognise that he is incomplete, physically defective’.

Naturally, they were distraught. But then, a year later in spring 1967, they saw John Money being interviewed on television.

A native New Zealander, the trailblazing doctor was then working at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, one of America’s most celebrated medical schools, where he had established the first U.S. clinic that performed sex-reassignment surgeries.