Doctors have been sued out of medicine for a lot less than what was done to Nathaniel, a teen boy who’ll never be the same again. Having undergone “sex-change surgery” a year ago — including, of course, his genitalia’s removal — he now calls it a “Frankenstein” transition that has “ruined” his life.
Nathaniel is a 19-year-old whose story was told Sunday, with his permission, by author, public speaker, and proprietor of website SexChangeRegret.com Walt Heyer.
The young man, whose last name was withheld, relates that he was bullied by other boys in grade school because he had some characteristically female passions such an affinity for “girl games.” Then, when “he was a bit older,” Heyer writes at the Daily Signal, “he discovered internet pornography, heard about transgenderism, and as he says, ‘convinced myself that’s what I was.’”
After mustering the courage to reveal this to his mother the summer following eighth grade, she scheduled an appointment for him with “a doctor at an informed-consent clinic,” as Heyer says he put it.
The medical visits started just after Nathaniel turned 15 — and sparked a downward spiral. “‘From then on,’ he says, ‘I slowly detached from everything until I was just staying home, playing video games, and going on the internet all day,’” Heyer relates. “‘I stopped reading, drawing, riding my bicycle. I surrounded myself in an echo chamber that supported and validated my poor decisions, because the others were also, unfortunately, stuck in that pit, too.’”
“A month after his 18th birthday, Nathaniel had what’s euphemistically called ‘bottom surgery,’” Heyer continued. “For a male like Nathaniel, that means refashioning the male genitalia into a pseudo-vagina. He suffered some complications that required a second surgery a few months later, and he had facial surgery to further feminize his appearance.” The result?
“Now that I’m all healed from the surgeries, I regret them,” Nathaniel laments nine months later. “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.”
“I feel as though I have ruined my life,” he sadly confesses.
Sadder still is that Nathaniel is hardly alone. “Transgender ideology is destroying lives,” writes PJ Media. “In 2016, two women spoke about how they were permanently scarred by taking male hormones and having ‘top surgery’ — the removal of their breasts,” the site continues, providing an example.
I myself have provided a great number of such examples over the years, a good one being the case of Australian Patrick Mitchell. In 2015, at age 12, Mitchell insisted he was a girl and wanted to “transition”; his mother and other authority figures pandered to him, but after two years of female-hormone treatments he changed his mind. Of course, if the adults had tried early on to change his mind and not his body, both would be in better shape today.
Another example is Heyer himself. He once “identified” as female, but now says that the “reckless gender medical practitioners have blood on their hands.” By “turning a blind eye to the scientific and ethical aspects of their chosen profession,” he elaborates, “they are directly responsible for poor outcomes, regret, detransitioning, suicides, and families torn to shreds by unnecessary surgeries.”
This is no exaggeration. After many years of studying and writing about this issue, just as striking to me as the “transgender” agenda itself is that we don’t hear about malpractice suits filed against its physician enablers. It seems like an open-and-shut case, too.
Consider an example I use to illustrate the point: If you tell a cardiologist you’re concerned you may have heart disease, he’ll perform medical tests confirming the problem’s existence before prescribing any interventions, let alone invasive ones. Imagine, though, you tell him you’re certain based on your feelings that you’re a heart attack waiting to happen. Now imagine he asks, “Have the feelings been strong and persistent? Have they lasted for more than six months? Yes? Alright, then I’ll cut open your chest and perform a bypass!”
This would be gross malpractice. Any doctor thus proceeding and operating on a healthy heart would be sued into oblivion. Of course, nothing this preposterous would ever happen in cardiology.
Yet this is, incredibly, precisely the basis on which physicians make the “transgender” diagnosis: feelings. Really.
It’s called a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” made based only on the presence of strong and persistent feelings of “cross-gender identification” that have lasted more than six months. There’s no blood test for gender dysphoria, no genetic test, no brain scan, no physiological marker at all indicating that at issue is anything but a psychological problem.
Nonetheless, a pediatrician Heyer quotes has “observed that children and adolescents are put on the path to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and ‘sex reassignment surgery’ at gender clinics” while receiving “no psychological counseling” — all on this basis. Relying on a psychological phenomenon, feelings, and with no proof of an underlying biological one, bodies are broken with an irreversible biological “fix.” If this isn’t classic and egregious malpractice, what is?
Buttressing the case, note that there’s “no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend,” the left-wing Guardian reported in 2004.
Is this surprising? “The unpopular truth, which Nathaniel unfortunately learned the hard way at a young age, is a man is not a woman and can’t ever become a woman, even with surgically refashioned genitals and feminizing facial surgery,” Heyer explains. Or as Australian Alan Finch, another former “transsexual,” put it, “You fundamentally can’t change sex…. Transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists.”
“Transgender” is not a legitimate medical status, but an ideological one. Yet this truth won’t stop our time’s Lysenkoists from performing our age’s version of lobotomies. What will is being sued into irrelevancy.
These medical “professionals” are ruining lives — the least they should endure are ruined careers.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
