Gender vs. Sex: the Failure of David Reimer as Brenda

One of the biggest debates in gender discussion is that of gender vs. sex.  While sex is considered biological, gender is now thought of as socially constructed through societal institutions (school, work, religions, etc).  This connects to my paper in questioning the whole idea of whether 'woman in the kitchen' is a construction-- is it a very deeply engrained one or an activity that could be considered biological?  So, 2 nights ago I found a really interesting case study on how gender construction failed.  This has to do with the nurture vs. nature approach.  I'll sum up the story here, but  you can read more on Wikipedia, and if you don't trust that, Slate has a good article on it too.

Basically, a biologically born boy was given a botched circumcision, burning his penis off.  His parents were advised to get the boy surgery to construct a pseudo-vagina, and have the boy raised as a girl--Brenda.  The boy was also given a lot of estrogen to develop as a female.  No one told Brenda that she was actually a boy, then at 14, the parents finally told her the truth. Brenda chose to become David, and he went through years of surgery to seem biologically male again.  Depression, anger problems, and multiple suicide attempts led to his suicide in 2004.

I do think that the failure of this case of gender reassignment has a lot to do with how poorly David was treated, but perhaps gender is biological too- as David had said that he felt oddly masculine during his years as Brenda.  Conversely, a few years ago 20/20 did a report on children that chose to identify with the gender opposite from their own, and they were shown growing up healthily (although I have not yet read about follow up assessments). Additionally, many transvestites are happy living with opposite gender identities as well.

David as a male adult