Three hundred emails and more than 50 phone calls in just eight weeks: either I had been targeted by a spam factory, or someone desperately needed my help.
It was a cry for help, from a young man who is too much like me. I fell for one of the biggest medical frauds in history in April 1983 when I agreed to what they call sex change surgery.
This young man was in his mid-20s and, in the spring of 2021, concluded that he had one great hope in life: to be a husband and father with a family of his own. For him lets call him Adrian that conclusion was not easily reached. Sexually abused as a child, diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and assailed with relentless post-traumatic stress disorder, his life has been hard.
His mother recently passed; his father rejected him after his forays into drugs, homelessness, and gender-confused behaviors; his older brother died only months ago. Adrians life had been in deep despair for some time.
Then came an unexpected answer: doctors and therapists told him his mental chaos was driven by gender dysphoria. Swiftly following that diagnosis, the doctors and therapists affirmed his social transition to female and prescribed feminizing hormones. His rebirth into a trans identity was praised and celebrated by new circles of friends.
But changing behavior and dosing hormones didnt help. There was a next step, and he took it. Making no effort to address his multiple, serious psychiatric disorders, one of Americas largest health-care providers sent him to the surgeons who, after a brief consultation, assured him that excising his healthy organs and fabricating female-appearing genitalia would resolve his mental distress.
That was March 2021. A scant five months later, he reached out to me, extremely upset, and wanting to restore what had been inalterably taken from him. All I want is to be a husband and a father, he said, I want to detransition.
His hundreds of emails and phone calls were one extended plea to restore his male reality. It resonated painfully with my own experience of suffering regrettable, unnecessary surgery. Yet having successfully gone back to life as a male allowed me to provide comfort and encouragement to Adrian that his life, too, can get better, although detransitioning is neither easy nor quick.
When I agreed to so-called sex change surgery in 1983, I had suffered 25 years of psychological distress, confused about my gender identity. Twenty-five years and no escape, until I sought out the advice of top experts in the novel field of gender identity, a surgeon and a gender therapist. They assured me that realigning my male body to confirm my female feelings would heal my broken psyche.
This promise of a medical miracle was incredibly encouraging. But its reality played out differently: it took me eight years living as Laura to rediscover the truth. Sex is who I really am; gender is simply a feeling. No hormones, no surgery, and no feeling will ever be strong enough to undo the truth of being irrevocably male or female, which is established at conception.
The promise of being a true woman was a lie; the promise of improved mental health was fiction. The day I returned to understanding that I was a man began a long journey back to objective reality.
Psychosis and despair dogged me for much of that time. The physical toll and complications of the sex change surgery wore at me. Yet I would not relent in restoring reality as best I could. With the grace of a good woman who became my wife and a God who would not leave my side, today I am a sound and healthy male.
I wish that my story and suffering were unique. But they are not, and for many years my role has shifted to helping others detransition from a misperceived gender identity and to restore a life grounded in their male or female reality.
These surgeries amount to fraud in so many ways. Medical doctors and surgeons have never objectively proven the effectiveness of any gender-affirming technique in relieving the mental stress termed gender dysphoria of a trans-identifying person.
For Adrian, the future it offered was a fraud. Nothing was said about his impending, permanent sterility, or the true burdens and impacts of having to take cross-sex hormones for the rest of his life. No effort was made to deal with the mental health issues detected and diagnosed by the providers own staff before clearing him for surgery.
If this sounds like malpractice to you, it sounds like it to me, too. Thankfully, Adrian is now working with an attorney to gain justice. But Adrian hopes for more than that that exposing the dangerous, ineffective treatments to the public eye and legal liability will protect the next Adrian, or the next Laura, from making the mistake of a lifetime.
That mistake was believing the doctors tale that counterfeit womanhood would be a real solution. And counterfeit it is. Adrians breast implants are purely cosmetic; they will never serve the motherly function of breastfeeding. His bottom surgery is no more a gateway to a womb and new life than a cul-de-sac is a freeway on-ramp. Where once was a man with the great hope of fathering and raising a child, surgeons left a faux woman lacking any capacity to procreate.
Adrian and I are scarcely alone in having erred so deeply, been misled so wildly, and working so hard to restore our true selves after suffering devastating gender affirmation surgery. When I wrote Trans Life Survivors, I had to sift through hundreds of similar, agonizing stories to focus on a manageable number of 30 detransitioners stories.
Thousands of sex change regretters like Adrian are not counted in the medical literature. No regret database exists where regretters officially can make their complaints known to researchers or even to their own medical providers.
Medical researchers say regret is rare, based on junk science. They fail to disclose that up to 90 percent of trans-identifying people included in research studies have been lost to follow-up, according to the book Principles of Transgender Medicine and Surgery. Any conclusion about the percentage who regret is based on the 10 percent or so that could be found: hardly a meaningful number.
Consider this: my wife and I have spoken directly to, exchanged emails with, and sat directly across from thousands of sex-change regretters. Adrian is just one among the thousands I have had the pleasure of knowing personally. Not one has ever been included in any systematic, rigorous research.
Why do so many sex change regretters contact me? Its because I was among the first to speak out through my website sexchangeregret.com and ask others for their stories. More than 2 million visitors in the last seven years have come to the website to read the stories of sex-change regret.
We thought we were following the science to find healing, not knowing that gender identity ideology is unhinged from sound, controlled, reliable research. Now we know better. With Adrian and others courageously seeking not just personal healing but reform through the legal system, there is hope that these wayward, dangerous transgender treatments will soon fall away into a dark corner of history.
If you, like Adrian and myself, regret your so-called transition, feel you were misled by the idea, and want to detransition, or even file a medical malpractice case against a medical provider or therapist, drop me a note at sexchangeregret@yahoo.com and we will do all we can to help you get your life back. Just remember you do indeed count with me.
Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.
Originally posted here:
He Wanted A Family. Trans-Crazed Doctors Left Him Hopeless And Sterile - The Federalist
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