Written by Wanda Skowronska
Walt Heyer, who used to be transgender, states in his book Paper Genders, that it is damaging and destructive to engage in sex change.[i] He should know – he lived through the experience himself as ‘Laura Jensen’ before finding his way to Christ’s healing power after years of confusion.
Heyer, American by birth, recounts in his book how when his grandmother babysat him alone, she would dress him in female clothing that she made especially for him. Heyer was abused by both his grandparents who were often intoxicated and clearly disturbed. As he grew older, Heyer fantasised about becoming a girl, thinking this would remove his sadness and confused memories. As a teenager he read the story of gender change operations and thought that he too could change genders.
His internal battleground lasted years. Heyer actually excelled at football and track. He liked cars and was attracted to women. He grew older and got married and had children and became an aerospace design engineer. However, he continued to feel there was something wrong with him. His internal confusions and pain never went away, and he used alcohol to numb the pain, and this led to drugs. His marriage fell apart and his two children became utterly confused when they saw their father take on hormone therapy and a gender change operation – adopting the name Laura Jensen.
After some time, Laura/Walt realized that the ‘gender change’ did not bring the expected happiness. Once out of the drinking fog, he began to think about his past life. He realised that he used the expression as a child that he was ‘a girl trapped in a man’s body’ to hide the feelings of hurt and pain from his abusive childhood. He did not want to be the boy who was so hurt. He wanted another identity and took all the wrong directions trying to find it. He realised that the transgender life was like living in a temporary zip code not located near the reality of his real address in this world.
Walt decided to take action himself, to go on the rocky road to recovery. He read some psychological studies and realised he had never properly been able to deal with his childhood abuse – and in his case abuse was the key. He sought psychotherapy and realized that he had features of what is known now as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) where you disassociate from overwhelming pain by ‘becoming’ someone else (this used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder). Some victims of abuse take this path and Heyer came to understand why he had taken it. With the support of Christian friends, he came out of it.
Then, Heyer went on another journey, to help others who have suffered as he did. He was horrified at the suppression of unpleasant facts about transgender ‘procedures’. He quoted a report, in The Guardian (UK) from July 2004, that included a review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transgenders by the University of Birmingham research intelligence facility. They found “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.” [ii] That is, the operation did not solve the unhappiness.
Such outcomes have also arisen in the findings of a former transgender activist turned dissident, American Paul McHugh. Formerly chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital, McHugh had worked on the original sex-change project set up there in the 1965, that is – before he rethought it all. He alarmed many in a 2014 article on long-term research on the consequences of sex-change:
Most shockingly, their [i.e., the transgenders’] suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population. This disturbing result has, as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.[iii]
It was McHugh who shut down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1979 after its findings (since re-opened in 2017), explaining at the time that most of the people who had undergone this type of surgery ‘had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled.’[iv]
Another recent article by Kirakosian et al., (2023) studied 29,988 patients receiving care at a community health center in Northeastern US between 2015 and 2018. It reported that relative to non transgenders, transgender men and women all had significantly higher odds of current suicidal ideation, controlling for age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and insurance status.[v]
Such negative findings and his personal experience motivated Walt Heyer to reach out to prospective transgenders, urging them to take every precaution prior to surgery to avoid regret. Heyer speaks of personally knowing of:
…… two recent cases where gender surgery was approved for young women, both of whom had been sexually abused by a family member. In one case, the patient’s mother told the therapist about the abuse her daughter endured. The therapist’s response was, “If she wants switch genders, she can have surgery. She’s 21.” The therapist did not see the sexual abuse as an issue and approved the surgery.[vi]
He also says:
Gender surgeons today testify that gender change has a very high rate of success by failing to include the suicides, regret, medical problems and those who return to their birth gender. Researchers and doctors will hide facts, twist the results and hide failures from their peers and the public in order to protect their practice and prestige. Meanwhile, the lives of patients are irreparably damaged.[vii]
Heyer goes on to make a horrifying comparison. The radical surgeries involved in sex change surgery can be compared to the predilection for lobotomies a few decades ago. Dr. Walter Freeman performed so many lobotomies on patients with complex mental issues that he was nicknamed the “ice pick doctor.”[viii] Complaints and investigations caused this medical practice which often totally changed an individual – to stop.
With sex change operations, we have a group insisting on treatment, ignoring the terrible statistics on the harm, that IS being reported by researchers. It does not do justice to a transgendered person, for psychologists to ignore what has happened in the past, to ignore the possibility of abuse which will remain uncovered unless someone asks.
Submitting testimony against the Massachusetts Transgender Rights and Hate Crimes Bill H502, Heyer said that there is ‘Nothing normal about wanting to become a different gender. There’s something desperately wrong … the advocates are trying to remove any required psychological treatment’.[ix] Sex-change regret is growing and Heyer runs a website with stories of those who have regretted their ‘sex change’ attempts.[x] He says that compassionate psychological treatment is needed for transgenders, listening to what is happening within the person. He adds there is a ‘darker side’ to the transgender story which has left a destructive trail of vulnerable souls who have been harmed by the ‘ideas’ of transgender activists. He raises a poignant plea to all who have ears to hear, to point out the other side of the transgender agenda wherever possible to young people who are most at risk. He says:
The truth is: it is impossible to actually change someone’s gender. Why, then, start the child off on a life filled with lies? When doctors and parents cannot bring themselves to tell the truth, the child’s world becomes one of imagination, fantasy and elaborate masquerades, none of which is emotionally healthy for the child.[xi]
From harrowing personal experience, Heyer says that gender change ‘success stories’ exclude suicides, regret, disappointment, medical problems and those who eventually abandon their surgical gender and return to living as their birth genders. Like the lobotomy patients of the past, it appears that gender change patients are considered throwaway lives by the promoters of the procedure and are intimidated into silence if they ever realize the treatment didn’t work for them.
Pope Francis has given us an image of our times – the world is like a field hospital. The millions who have been terrorised in physical and ideological wars are declared ‘non- persons’, and whether killed before birth or later, they inhabit every part of the globe. The personal stories of those who found their way out of the transgender deceptions – like that of Walt Heyer – need our support to communicate this to others. The direct voice of suffering can open doors to reflection and to the grand mercy and hope offered by God to all.
Endnotes
[i] Walt Heyer, Paper Genders: Pulling the Mask off the Transgender Phenomenon (USA: Make Waves publishing, 2011). Henceforth: Walt Heyer, PG.
[ii] David Batty, The Guardian, ‘Sex changes are not effective, say researchers’. Sat 31 Jul 2004. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth
[iii] Paul McHugh, ‘Transgender surgery isn’t the solution’, The Wall Street Journal, 2014, June 12. wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120.
[iv] Paul R. McHugh, ‘Surgical Sex: Why we Stopped Doing Sex Change Operations’, First Things, November 2004. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/11/surgical-sex
[v] Kirakosian N, et al., ‘Suicidal Ideation Disparities Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Compared to Cisgender Community Health Patients’, Journal of General Internal Medicine, May: 38(6), 2023.
[vi] Walt Heyer, PG, chapter 1.
[vii] Walt Heyer, PG. (Kindle Location 1242-1246).
[viii] Walt Heyer, PG. (Kindle Location 972). Make Waves Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[ix] See: http://www.massresistance.org/docs/govt11/tranny_bill/testimony/walt_heyer.html
[x] Another of Heyer’s websites is: http://www.sexchangeregret.com/
[xi] Walt Heyer, PG, Chapter 2.
