Transsexualism Destroys Children's Lives
<< My life was ripped apart
by a trusted adult who enjoyed dressing me as a girl. >>
The reprieve provided by surgery and life as
a woman was only temporary. Hidden deep underneath the make-up and female
clothing was the little boy hurt by childhood trauma, and he was making himself
known.
It was a pivotal scene. A mom was brushing a
boy’s long hair, the boy slowly turned his head to look at her. In a tentative
voice, he asked, “Would you love me if I were a boy?” The mom was raising her
boy to become a trans-girl.
In that split second, I was transported back
to my childhood. I remembered my grandmother standing over me, guiding me,
dressing me in a purple chiffon dress. The boy in that glowing documentary
about parents raising transsexual children dared to voice a question I always
wanted to ask. Why didn’t she love me the way I was?
I am haunted by that boy and his question.
What will the trans-children of 2015 be like sixty years from now? Documentaries
and news stories only give us a snapshot in time. They are edited to
romanticize and normalize the notion of changing sex and to convince us that
enlightened parents should help their children realize their alleged "dreams" of being
the opposite sex.
I want to tell you my story. I want you to
have the opportunity to see the life of a trans-child, not in a polished
television propaganda piece, but across more than seven agonizing decades of life, with all of its
confusion, pain, and redemption.
The Trans-Child
It wasn’t my mother but my grandmother who
clothed me in a purple chiffon dress she made for me. That dress set in motion
a life filled with sex dysphoria, sexual abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, and
finally, an unnecessary sex reassignment surgery. My life was ripped apart
by a trusted adult who enjoyed dressing me as a girl.
My mom and dad didn’t have any idea that when
they dropped their son off for a weekend at Grandma’s that she was dressing
their boy in girls’ clothes. Grandma told me it was our little secret. My
grandmother withheld affirmations of me as a boy, but she lavished delighted
praise upon me when I was dressed as a girl. Feelings of euphoria swept over me
with her praise, followed later by depression and insecurity about being a boy.
Her actions planted the idea in me that I was born in the wrong body. She
nourished and encouraged the idea, and over time it took on a life of its own.
I became so accustomed to wearing the purple
dress at Grandma’s house that, without telling her, I took it home so I could
secretly wear it there too. I hid it in the back of a drawer in my dresser.
When my mom found it, an explosion of yelling and screaming erupted between my mom
and dad. My father was terrified his boy was not developing into a man, so he
ramped up his discipline. I felt singled out because, in my view, my older
brother didn’t receive the same heavy-handed punishment as I did. The
unfairness hurt more than anything else.
Thankfully, my parents decided I would never
be allowed to go to Grandma’s house again without them. They couldn’t know I
was scared of seeing Grandma because I had exposed her secret.
Uncle Fred’s Influence
My worst nightmare was realized when my dad’s
much younger adopted brother, Uncle Fred, discovered the secret of the dress
and began teasing me. He pulled down my pants, taunting and laughing at me. At
only nine years of age, I couldn’t fight back, so I turned to eating as a way
to cope with the anxiety. Fred’s teasing caused a meal of six tuna-fish
sandwiches and a quart of milk to become my way of suppressing the pain.
One day Uncle Fred took me in his car on a
dirt road up the hill from my house and tried to take off all my clothes.
Terrified of what might happen, I escaped, ran home, and told my mom. She
looked at me accusingly and said, “You’re a liar. Fred would never do that.”
When my dad got home, she told him what I said, and he went to talk to Fred.
But Fred shrugged it off as a tall tale, and my dad believed him instead of me.
I could see no use in telling people about what Fred was doing, so I kept
silent from that point on about his continuing abuse.
I went to school dressed as a boy, but in my
head that purple dress lived on. I could see myself in it, standing in front of
the mirror at my grandma’s house. I was small, but I participated and excelled
in football, track, and other sports. My way to cope with my sex confusion
was to work hard at whatever I did. I mowed lawns, delivered newspapers, and
pumped gasoline. After high school graduation, I worked in an automotive shop,
then took classes in drafting to qualify for a job in aerospace. After a short
time, I earned a spot on the Apollo space mission project as associate design
engineer. Ever eager for the next challenge, I switched to an entry-level
position in the automobile industry and quickly rocketed up the corporate
ladder at a major American car company. I even got married. I had it all—a
promising career with unlimited potential and a great family.
But I also had a secret. After thirty-six
years, I was still unable to overcome the persistent feeling I was really a
woman. The seeds sown by Grandma developed deep roots. Unbeknownst to my wife,
I began to act on my desire to be a woman. I was cross-dressing in public and
enjoying it. I even started taking female hormones to feminize my appearance.
Who knew Grandma’s wish in the mid-1940s for a granddaughter would lead to
this?
Adding alcohol was like putting gasoline on a
fire; drinking heightened the desire. My wife, feeling betrayed by the secrets
I had been keeping from her and fed up by my out-of-control drunken binges,
filed for divorce.
Life as a Woman
I sought out a prominent sex psychologist
for evaluation, and he quickly assured me that I obviously suffered from sex dysphoria. A sex change, he told me, was the cure. Feeling that I had
nothing to lose and thrilled that I could finally attain my lifelong dream, I
underwent a surgical change at the age of forty-two. My new identity as Laura
Jensen, female, was legally affirmed on my birth record, Social Security card,
and driver’s license. I was now a woman in everyone’s eyes.
The sex conflict seemed to fade away, and
I was generally happy for a while.
It’s hard for me to describe what happened
next. The reprieve provided by surgery and life as a woman was only temporary.
Hidden deep underneath the make-up and female clothing was the little boy
carrying the hurts from traumatic childhood events, and he was making himself
known. Being a female turned out to be only a cover-up, not healing.
I knew I wasn’t a real woman, no matter what
my identification documents said. I had taken extreme steps to resolve my
sex conflict, but changing sex hadn’t worked. It was obviously a
masquerade. I felt I had been lied to. How in the world had I reached this
point? How did I become a fake woman? I went to another sex psychologist,
and she assured me that I would be fine; I just needed to give my new identity
as Laura more time. I had a past, a battered and broken life that living as
Laura did nothing to dismiss or resolve. Feeling lost and depressed, I drank
heavily and considered suicide.
At the three-year mark of my make-believe life as Laura, my
excessive drinking brought me to a new low. At my lowest point, instead of
committing suicide I sought help at an alcohol recovery meeting. My sponsor, a
lifeline of support and accountability, mentored me in how to live life free
from alcohol.
Sobriety was the first of several turning
points in my transsexual life.
As Laura, I entered a two-year university
program to study the psychology of substance and alcohol abuse. I achieved
higher grades than my classmates, many of whom had PhDs. Still, I struggled
with my sexual identity. It was all so puzzling. What was the point of changing
sex if not to resolve the conflict? After eight years of living as a woman,
I had no lasting peace. My sex confusion only seemed to worsen.
During an internship in a psychiatric
hospital, I worked alongside a medical doctor on a lock-down unit. After some
observation, he took me aside and told me I showed signs of having a
dissociative disorder. Was he right? Had he found the key that would unlock a
childhood lost? Rather than going to sex-change ideologue-psychologists like
the one who had approved me for surgery, I sought the opinions of several
“regular” psychologists and psychiatrists who did not see all sex disorders
as transsexual. They agreed: I fit the criteria for dissociative disorder.
It was maddening. Now it was apparent that I
had developed a dissociative disorder in childhood to escape the trauma of the
repeated cross-dressing by my grandmother and the sexual abuse by my uncle.
That should have been diagnosed and treated with psychotherapy. Instead, the
sex specialist never considered my difficult childhood or even my alcoholism
and saw only transsexual identity. It was a quick jump to prescribe hormones
and irreversible surgery. Years later, when I confronted that psychologist, he
admitted that he should not have approved me for surgery.
Becoming Whole
Coming back to wholeness as a man after
undergoing unnecessary and painful sex surgery and living life legally and socially as a
woman for years wasn’t going to be easy. I had to admit to myself that going to
a sex specialist when I first had issues had been a big mistake. I had to
live with the reality that body parts were gone. My full genitalia could never be
restored—a sad consequence of using surgery to treat a psychological illness. Intensive
psychotherapy would be required to resolve the dissociative disorder that
started as a child.
But I had a firm foundation on which to begin
my journey to restoration. I was living a life free from drugs and alcohol, and
I was ready to become the man I was intended to be.
At age fifty-six, I experienced something
beyond my wildest dreams. I fell in love, married, and began to fully
re-experience life as a man. It took over fifty years, but I was finally able
to unwind all the damage that purple chiffon dress had done. Today, I’m
seventy-four years old and married to my wife of eighteen years, with
twenty-nine years of sober living.
Changing sex is a short-term gain with
long-term pain. Its consequences include early mortality, regret, mental illness,
and suicide. Instead of encouraging them to undergo unnecessary and destructive
surgery, let’s affirm and love our young people just the way they are.
Walt Heyer is an author and public speaker
with a passion to help others who regret sex change. Through his website, SexChangeRegret.com,
and his blog, WaltHeyer.com,
Heyer raises public awareness about the incidence of regret and the tragic
consequences suffered as a result. Heyer’s story can be read in novel form in Kid
Dakota and The Secret at Grandma’s House and in his
autobiography, A
Transgender’s Faith. Heyer’s other books include Paper Genders and Gender, Lies and
Suicide.
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REMEMBER
The truth has never stood in the way of ideological fanatics, any more than reality has ever stood in the way of delusional psychotics.
The truth has never stood in the way of ideological fanatics, any more than reality has ever stood in the way of delusional psychotics.
