I know from experience: Transgender identities devalue, dehumanize and destroy

By Walt Heyer, Op-ed contributor Monday, January 30, 2023

Walt Heyer, a former transsexual who used to struggle with his gender identity, went by the name of Laura for eight years before he says God helped him to be free of his identity issues. | (Photo: Courtesy of Walt Heyer)

If you want to know how transgender identities devalue, dehumanize and destroy people, just ask any of the growing numbers of detransitioners.

“I literally lost organs,” Chloe Cole says, referring to her double mastectomy at the ripe old age of 15.

At 12, Chloe decided she was transgender, and her complicit doctors prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone. A year after the mastectomy, she realized it was all a regrettable mistake.

Nathaniel has a similar story from the male perspective.

At age 15, Nathaniel went on hormone blockers; at 18, he had “gender-affirming” surgery. In other words, his male parts were irrevocably destroyed.

Nathaniel wrote me at 19, saying: “The result of the bottom surgery looks like a Frankenstein hack job at best, and that got me thinking critically about myself. I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn’t one. I became (and to an extent, still feel) deeply depressed.”

From Walt to Laura and back

My own story, too, speaks to the dehumanizing effects of transgender identities.

Starting in my late 30s, I identified as a “transgender female” and sought out estrogen hormones to feminize my male body. My “transition” began in earnest in 1980, when I sought the services of the self-appointed gender specialist Dr. Paul Walker in San Francisco.

Like so many gender therapists do today, Walker approved me for cross-sex hormones during my first counseling session. On the strength of his saying I was a candidate for “gender reassignment” surgery, I divorced my wife and traveled to Trinidad, Colorado, in April 1983. There, Dr. Stanley Biber (who had completed 3,000 surgeries before mine) performed my gender-change surgery.

I had my birth certificate changed to read Laura Jensen, female, a fictitious gender existing only in my mind and on paper that purged Walt Heyer, male, from my legal identity.

I identified as Laura Jensen until 1990, when I started the difficult road back to sanity and detransitioned from the fantasy of Laura to the reality of Walt. (The full story of redemption and restoration unfolds in my book A Transgender’s Faith.)

To restore my birth record to Walt Heyer, male, in California in the 1990s, I had to submit a petition to the California Superior Court. To strengthen my application, I reached out to both Biber and Walker to certify my claim.

The document that Biber and Walker signed and submitted to the Superior Court testified that no gender change took place. They said I was male with “neutered” genitalia and “mixed” outward appearance.

Their document provides proof that “gender change” is a fraud and a scam and the “treatment” of hormone therapy and gender surgery is ineffective to change genders–and doctors know it.

Determined to restore my life

What did I learn from my “transitioning” years, seen with the benefit of 30-plus years of hindsight? I learned a hard lesson.

Every step I took to identify as a female did not make me a female but rather devaluated me as a man, father, and husband. Transitioning dehumanized me by mutilating my male body and rejecting my male identity.

Believing the gender therapist and opting for all the gender-changing protocols wrecked, diminished, and destroyed my life and appearance as Walt.

Realization often dawns in quiet moments of reflection after the effects of the “trans Kool-Aid” wear off. Reality comes into sharp focus. The doctors and surgeons were feckless in changing my gender. They can feminize men and masculinize women in appearance only.

Many of the changes are irreversible. Sadly, some changes ruin the chance of producing children. If men opt for what is euphemistically called “bottom” surgery, they lose the ability to produce sperm. If women undergo hysterectomies, they no longer have a womb to bear children.

Detransition stories abound

Today, thousands of regretters and detransitioners like Chloe, Nathaniel, and me, have learned all too late the detrimental propensity of “transitioning” to devalue, dehumanize, and destroy the lives of those who pursue it.

For more detransition stories in recent documentaries, see “Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion,” “Trans Wreck,” “Transgressive: The Cult of Confusion,” and “The Detransition Diaries: Saving our Sisters.”

The 18th-century writer and philosopher Voltaire described it well in a quote attributed to him: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Believing that men can become women and women can become men is absurd; slicing up men and women for the sake of their identifying as transgender is an atrocity of epic proportions.

Originally published at The Daily Signal.

Walt Heyer is a public speaker and author of the book, Trans Life Survivors. Through his website, SexChangeRegret.com, and his blog, WaltHeyer.com, Heyer raises public awareness about those who regret gender change and the tragic consequences suffered as a result.