“This is institutionalized child abuse; they’re working on destroying an entire generation of children.” So said Walt Heyer, a former “transgender” person, on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle on Thursday. Heyer, who spent eight years living what he’d now call a counterfeit female persona, was referring to the Biden administration’s recent advocacy of what is incorrectly termed youth “gender transition.”
Heyer had embarked upon this mutilative procedure when he was 17 at a psychiatrist’s urging, but later realized his mistake and embraced the reality of his maleness. He now runs the website SexChangeRegret.com.
“This is institutionalized child abuse; they’re working on destroying an entire generation of children,” Heyer told host Laura Ingraham, addressing the Biden administration’s MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) agenda machinations. “None of these children need hormone blockers; they don’t need to transition. One of the things that nobody ever seems to talk about is this one word called ‘consequences.'”
As to this, Heyer has pointed out that 80 to 92 percent of children suffering opposite-sex confusion will, if left alone, achieve normalcy and embrace their actual sex during adolescence (in other words, they’re just going through a phase).
That is, unless misguided, and perhaps malevolent, adults help cement that phase. Heyer knows whereof he speaks. As he also told Ingraham:
I’m sitting here because I started cross-dressing at the age of four and I can tell you that that caused me emotional, psychological, and eventually it became a sexual child abuse. And so, when parents are having children do this or entertaining the idea of doing it, they’re actually engaging in child abuse. Now we have the government’s actually promoting institutionalized child abuse. It’s destroying children, it’s destroying families, and it’s actually destroying much of society today; this is really insane. And here’s the thing, no one yet, in history, has ever — no doctor, no surgeon, no hormones — has ever been able to effect a change of gender biologically in anyone. It’s not possible.
Heyer isn’t alone in stating this scientific fact. Arguing “that transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists,” as the Guardian wrote in 2004, ex-MUSS individual Alan Finch said, “You fundamentally can’t change sex.” “The surgery doesn’t alter you genetically,” he continued. “It’s genital mutilation.”
As for advocating a biological “fix” for a psychological problem, Finch stated, “The analogy I use about giving surgery to someone desperate to change sex is it’s a bit like offering liposuction to an anorexic.”
Returning to Heyer, he also discussed the MUSS activist claim that “sex change” regret is rare. As he told Ingraham:
Well, my website, SexChangeRegret, I have over 10,000 emails in my inbox in the last 10 years. My website’s gotten well over two million — three million views. I’m working with people every day who write me and say, in anywhere from three weeks all the way up to 40 years after going through these procedures…. “I just realized that they didn’t change my gender. All they did was ruin my life. Can you help me de-transition?” And earlier in this month, they had … a worldwide de-transition day because now de-transitioning is becoming almost equally as popular as transitioning. And the Biden Administration should take a cue from this and stop pushing this stuff on children. [Video here.]
Heyer is doing good work combating the MUSS agenda. But our language is important in this regard, too. Yet most people don’t even think about the terminology they use or who originated it — and why.
For example, a person can’t de-transition because, as Heyer and Finch themselves said, you can’t transition in the first place. You can’t become the opposite sex.
So perhaps better descriptions for masquerading as the opposite sex and then ceasing to do so might be, respectively, “counterfeiting” and “de-counterfeiting.” Regardless, since the side defining the vocabulary of a debate tends to win the debate, controlling language is imperative. And here are three more examples:
- While introducing Heyer, the excellent site CNSNews wrote that he “was born a biological male.” Can you be born a non-biological male? Are there artificial males? Since “male” is by definition a biological designation, “biological male” is redundant. But it does imply (by way of the modifier) that there’s another kind of male, and this aids the MUSS agenda because this is precisely what its advocates contend: that another kind exists — “transmen.” Conservatives may embrace this language not only due to conditioning and the words’ ubiquity but also because they may be afraid, or fancy it uncompassionate, to use terminology that is so thoroughly correct that it’s also thoroughly politically incorrect. (So they compromise on the language and end up compromised.)
- Laura Ingraham said when introducing Heyer that he’d “spent eight years as a woman.” Yet he never did because, once again, sex change is impossible. As Alan Finch said while discussing his own woes, “I’ve never been a woman, just Alan.”
- Virtually everyone today uses “gender” instead of “sex.” This might be irrelevant were the two terms synonymous, as many think. But while “sex” merely references the male-female biological distinction, “gender” is defined by psychologists as your perception of what you are. So insofar as this term substitution subordinates sex to this conception of “gender,” it advances the MUSS agenda claim that identity supersedes biology — that what you feel you are and not what you actually are is what matters.
If we don’t want MUSS activists to, using the misnomer, “transition” kids, we have to avoid helping them transition the language to the point where MUSS no longer appears a mess.
