an Ethical Awareness Day: DAVID REIMER DAY.
Jessie offers:
"David Reimer has been on my mind as long as I have known of him. His life has much to teach all of us in this time, and I am grateful to cultivate company in commemorating his life and the life of his brother Brian with my students. Following a botched circumcision, David Reimer was raised "as a girl" for the next twelve years of his life, alongside his identical twin brother (who was raised "as a boy"), at the advice of scientific so-called experts. David Reimer took back his male identity as a teen. He took own life on May 4, 2004, two years after his own twin brother did the same. I learned about the case of this "boy who was raised as a girl" when I was in college in 1986—then, the superficial evidence of the case study, the notion of identity as conforming to sexist cultural prescriptions of behavior, the happily ever after success-story of 'nurture over nature', and the mysterious laboratory that perpetrated the incomplete report of his life story.
Having discussed 'the Twins Case' in college and high school classrooms for the past several years, I was moved when my most recent high school class initiated the commemoration of David Reimer Day, scheduled upon the forty second anniversary of the botched circumcision on April 27, 1967."