For some reason, when I read As Nature Made Him a few months ago, I didn’t look up David Reimer on Wikipedia or anywhere else. If I had, I would have found out that he committed suicide in 2004. I got the news from an anti-circumcision website, where he was reported as a “long-delayed death due to circumcision.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with David Reimer’s story, he was born as Bruce, an identical twin boy. His circumcision was botched and his penis was accidentally removed. This was in the mid-1960s in Winnipeg, and his parents didn’t know what to do - their doctors recommended putting him in a dress and raising him as a girl. Because the babies were twins, Brian and “Brenda” became famous as an example of how gender roles were learned rather than present from birth; psychologist John Money viewed “Brenda” as his greatest achievement. But as we all would find very obvious now, putting a boy in a dress does not make him a girl. After an emotionally troubled childhood, “Brenda” shed her female role at age 15 and became David Reimer.

After years of hiding the truth, he went public, appearing on Oprah and working with John Colapinto on a 1997 Rolling Stone article that became the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised a Girl. He was motivated by sexologist Milton Diamond to speak out to prevent babies from suffering the same fate he had. But unfortunately, too many things were going wrong in David’s life. Despite the anti-circumcision website’s assertion that he died as a result of his circumcision (presumably due to the trauma it caused him throughout his life), he was also suffering the effects of a divorce, a bad relationship with his parents, and the overdose death of his brother Brian in 2002. Colapinto, who knew David well, wrote about the real reasons for his suicide. It was a tragic end to an ultimately unsatisfying life, but hopefully lessons learned from David Reimer’s experience will keep this kind of treatment from happening again.