By Riittakerttu Kaltiala

October 30, 2023

Article from The Free Press

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, 58, is a Finnish-born and trained adolescent psychiatrist, the chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Finland’s Tampere University Hospital. She treats patients, teaches medical students, and conducts research in her field—publishing more than 230 scientific articles. 

In 2011, Dr. Kaltiala was assigned a new responsibility. She was to oversee the establishment of a gender identity service for minors, making her among the first physicians in the world to head a clinic devoted to the treatment of gender-distressed young people. Since then, she has personally participated in the assessments of more than 500 such adolescents.

Earlier this year, The Free Press ran a whistleblower account by Jamie Reed, a former case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She recounted her growing alarm at the effects of treatments that sought to transition minors to the opposite sex, and her escalating conviction that patients were being harmed by their treatment.

Although a recent New York Times investigation largely corroborated Reed’s account, many activists and members of the media continue to dismiss Reed’s claims because she is not a physician. 

Dr. Kaltiala is. And her concerns are likely to get more attention in the U.S. now that a young woman who medically transitioned as a teenager has just sued the doctors who supervised her treatment, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics. According to the suit, the AAP, in advocating for youth transition, has made “outright fraudulent statements” about evidence for “the radical new treatment model, and the known dangers and potential side effects of the medical interventions it advocates.” 

Here, Dr. Kaltiala tells her own story, describing her increasing worries about the treatment she approved for vulnerable patients, and her decision to speak out. 

Read the article at The Free Press:

‘Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It.’

Another detransitioner who attempted a gender transition at age 17 is suing the doctors who operated on her, accusing them of ignoring her plethora of mental health conditions and pushing her down a destructive path.

Soren Aldaco, who is now 21 years old, filed her lawsuit Friday in the Tarrant County District Court of Texas. She alleges that her doctors behaved more like “ideologues” than medical professionals and that they did not properly take her autism, depression, anxiety, and other comorbidities into account when they evaluated her for an attempted gender transition.

“Despite these telltale signs demanding caution and therapeutic resolution,” the suit emphasizes, Aldaco’s physicians “deliberately and recklessly propelled” her “down a path of permanent physical disfigurement and worsening psychological distress.”

Read the rest of the article at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/24/nipples-literally-peeling-texas-detransitioner-sues-doctors-1-million-botched-surgery/

K. Yang, also known as ‘The Deprogrammer,’ tells Glenn that those best equipped to help others escape cults are the ones who lived inside them themselves. While in her early 20’s, K. Yang worked for an LGBT nonprofit center funded by the New York State Department of Health. ‘We were indoctrinating public school children with gender identity and transgender ideology,’ she says. So now, with immense inside knowledge, Yang knows exactly how to help parents ‘de-program’ their children who may have become ‘brainwashed’ by online, educational, or social media sources that are teaching them lies. And with family members who escaped China and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Yang knows just how vital it is to equip children with the ability to think for THEMSELVES.

Go to the article.

Quote from the interview:

I was thinking that what I was doing, was a good thing. It was the right thing. I thought my beliefs were correct. And they were morally superior.

I — and now I know, that I was wrong. And part of how I know I was wrong. Is because I really started investigating the money behind what was pushing this movement.

Fox News Digital interviewed Walt Heyer and released this clip:

If the video isn’t playing, here’s a link directly to the video: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6324157121112

Read full article:

Detransitioner slams clinics, media for politicizing ‘gender affirming care’: ‘They do everything for profit’

This April marks 40 years since my therapist told me a “sex change” was the only answer to my persistent mental difficulties. Unfortunately, I followed his advice, obtained cross-sex hormones, and underwent surgery. As I learned through my painful experience, “gender-affirming treatment” (GAT), also known as “gender-affirming care,” is medical fraud and malpractice.

A person’s sex cannot be changed. I know. I lived and identified as a woman for eight years. Hormones and surgery didn’t change my sex. I was a man before surgery, and I remained a man after surgery, illustrating the truth of God’s perfect design — two separate and distinct sexes, male and female, innate and unchangeable.

Every step I took to identify as a female did not make me a female but devaluated me as a man, father, and husband. Each step dehumanized my male body and identity. So-called gender-affirming treatment destroyed my life and relationships, as well as those of my family.

The same thing is happening to people today, except at younger ages. I know. I get their emails.

In the decades following my surgery, instead of the “gender” industry dying out, it has run rampant — devaluing, dehumanizing, and destroying thousands of lives. When I fell for the scam, the patients were exclusively adult men. Today, the industry targets vulnerable adolescents of both sexes influenced by the emotional and physical throes of puberty, who can’t be expected to grasp the long-term consequences, such as infertility, bone density loss, and heart problems.

Parents are told their child will die by suicide if the child is denied medicalization, but it’s a myth. The Child and Parental Rights Campaign gathered the scientific evidence: “[T]here is no long-term evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or ‘transition’ surgeries prevent suicide. On the contrary, the best long-term research shows that individuals who do go through medical transition kill themselves at a rate 19 times greater than the general population.”  

A Path to Sterilization

GAT includes many destructive and devaluing procedures. With social transition, a person adopts a new name and pronouns that erase his original identity. Puberty blockers — drugs with severe, well-known side-effects that stop normal growth and maturation — are administered.

Those are followed by cross-sex hormones — powerful drugs with destructive, known medical side-effects that impose a cross-sex appearance. The final step is surgeries — invasive, destructive procedures to remove healthy breasts and wombs in girls and healthy genitalia in boys.

It’s a path to sterilization. Sperm and eggs don’t mature without going through puberty. When puberty blockers are followed by cross-sex hormones, the teen is permanently sterilized. Some refer to this as chemical castration. Furthermore, to state the obvious, surgically removing testicles or wombs ends any possibility of having biological children.

Affirming a child in the opposite sex is emotional and psychological child abuse. Experimenting on healthy children with powerful drugs and sterilizing surgery is the epitome of medical malpractice and horribly barbaric.

‘Regret Is Rare’

After living eight years identifying as a woman, I still experienced extreme emotional distress and made the decision to detransition, i.e., to go back to living and presenting as the man I am. When I told my gender therapist and sex change surgeon, they assured me I was the only one they had ever heard of who went back.

Curious how I could be the only case in which “sex change” failed to fix gender issues, I launched a website, SexChangeRegret.com, to reach out to others. It turns out my experience wasn’t rare. Over the last ten years, I have heard from hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like me who found that GAT wasn’t the answer.

Research tells a similar story. Regrettable outcomes made the headlines almost 20 years ago. In July 2004, The Guardian reported the results of a review of 100 medical studies in an article tellingly headlined “Sex Changes are Not Effective, Say Researchers.” The article summarized the findings: “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation.”

A 2011 long-term follow-up study in Sweden concurs. People who underwent GAT were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.

Undeterred by the lack of evidence of benefits, enthusiastic “gender experts” in Europe and the United States expanded the dangerous practice to children and adolescents. Pediatric gender clinics sprang up, ignoring evidence that showed most children, if not affirmed as the opposite sex, reconciled their sex with biological reality by the time they reached adulthood. Instead, clinics promoted and offered only GAT.

Finally, in 2022, pediatric gender clinics in Sweden, Finland, and the UK objectively reviewed the evidence. They found the risks outweighed the potential benefits and officially ended the practice of GAT for minors, replacing it with good psychosocial care. Recently, Norway did the same.

Why the U.S. Continues as Others Stop

But in the United States, it’s a different story. The legacy medical establishment pushes radical, risky medicalization, sterilization, and removal of healthy body parts as the only effective treatment for youth — no counseling, no diagnosis and treatment of co-existing disorders, little discussion of the risks and harms, no waiting, no alternatives.

Hospitals apparently salivate over the money to be made by gender clinics, as seen in the video from Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, in which a doctor describes the surgeries as a “huge money maker” for the hospital.

Recently, a selfless whistleblower from Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital blew the cover off the lack of established protocols and frequency of harm, saying, “what is happening to them [children] is morally and medically appalling.”

Children and their parents need protection from this medical quackery, and they need it now. That’s why lawmakers in several states are pursuing legislation to protect children from harmful medicalization. Arkansas, Arizona, Alabama, Florida, and Texas enacted protections, and several other states are in process: Missouri, Utah, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.

The state of Florida commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of the benefits and harms of GAT for minors in 2022. The scientifically stringent review exposed a lack of quality evidence showing any benefit, and ample proof of harm. The analysis prompted the Florida medical boards to act and limit the widespread use of hormonal and surgical interventions for youth.

Encouraging Me to Cross-Dress Was Child Abuse

As a child, I was encouraged and affirmed by my grandmother to cross-dress in women’s clothing. She made me a purple chiffon evening dress when I was four years old. It was our secret, she said. Her repeated affirming and loving response to me in the dress proved devastating. It implanted the damaging idea that something must be wrong with me as a boy.

Think of the parallels to today. The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.

Teachers groom children as early as kindergarten or first grade to think that “there are many genders” and they can choose one. When children seem upset or perplexed about whether they are a girl or a boy, school counselors and teachers stand ready to inappropriately diagnose them as trans and encourage them to take the next step: “Choose a new name and wardrobe for use at school. We’ll keep it a secret from your parents.” Unbeknownst to parents, many school districts prohibit staff from informing parents.

Protect your children from being corrupted and “transitioned.” Take them out of the public school system.

Trans Kids and Parents

As I discovered in my own life, and in the lives of parents and the detransitioners I have had the pleasure to work with, gender distress is a symptom, not a diagnosis. There are many factors driving youth to identify as trans, such as indoctrination and enabling in public schools, local peer group influence and social contagion, and autism or mental disorders.

Other factors are social media apps such as TikTok, sexually charged transgender gaming, and anime. Lastly, there are adverse childhood experiences, such as sexual abuse, emotional abuse, divorce of parents, exposure to pornography, bullying, and other perceived trauma.

Kids don’t need a “gender” therapist or hormones or to cut off healthy body parts. They need parents to shelter them from school indoctrination and peer group and social media influences. They may need a trauma therapist who can help them unearth and address underlying adverse childhood experiences or mental disorders.

My Adverse Childhood Experiences

I can only speculate as to why I wanted to cross-dress and pretend I was a girl. Certainly, my grandma’s obvious delight in me as a girl in the purple dress, not as the scruffy boy in blue jeans, damaged my male identity. Another leading contender was my relationship with my mother.

I never felt my mom, a young 20-year-old at my birth, ever wanted me, loved me, or accepted me. The feeling was confirmed years later, after I detransitioned, when she shared an alarming story with a friend of mine.

Without any shame or remorse, she revealed how she would grab my wrists and yank me up off the floor with one arm and hit my dangling body with a frying pan with the other. I have no memory of this. I must have been very young to be suspended with one hand.

I never hated my mom. I was always trying to win her approval and get her to love me. The sad truth is, at no time in my mom’s lifetime did she ever talk about how much she loved me. Shortly before she died, she revealed to me and my wife that when I was a toddler, she almost killed me by shaking me very hard.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to guess that a four-year-old boy would prefer being loved and appreciated at grandma’s wearing the purple dress than being yanked up by one arm and hit with a frying pan by an angry mom. My grandma’s affirming me as a girl started my overwhelming desire to change into a female, a longing reinforced by subsequent physical and sexual mistreatment.

The psychological and emotional abuse perpetrated on me as a child was so devaluing and so dehumanizing, I was convinced as an adult by doctors that the only way to heal was to load up on female hormones and let surgeons slice up my body and declare I was now a female. That was 40 years ago. Today, “gender-affirming care” for children is lucrative medical abuse that devalues, destroys, and dehumanizes boys and girls.

Sweden and other countries examined the evidence and ended it. Florida reviewed the high-quality evidence and as a result, Florida medical associations stopped it. The U.K. court reviewed evidence provided by the Tavistock clinic and called it experimental and not suitable for children.

Children need love, real care, and good psychosocial counseling, not a change of identity.

Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.

Read full story at https://washingtonstand.com/commentary/under-the-radar-the-detransitioner-movement-is-surging

…thousands of young women and men who once identified as the opposite sex — many of whom attempted a “gender transition” by ingested drugs and undergoing elaborate surgical procedures to impersonate the opposite sex — are now rejecting the transgender identity and are once again embracing their natural sex.

As reported by The Post Millennial, new studies are showing that the rate of individuals who detransition away from a trans identity is occurring at paces that far exceed what the legacy media is reporting. At the Re/Detrans Canada event held at York University in Ontario last month, researchers presented a number of studies that showed detransition rates ranging from 2% to almost 30%. Three other studies from England show rates between 6.9% and 9.8%. Another yet to be published study of 774 young Canadians and Americans revealed that 16% had halted gender transition treatments, citing “health concerns, change in identity, and cost.”

These rates contrast sharply with the “less than 1%” rate that is constantly trotted out by transgender activists and the media. As noted by The Post Millennial, other cultural indicators also point to a swelling detransitioner movement. Reddit, an online discussion forum that in early 2022 was the 9th-most-visited website in the world, has a “Detrans” chatroom (or “Subreddit”) which currently has over 40,000 members.

Online accounts and testimonies of young women and men who have detransitioned from pursuing a gender transition opposite from their biological sex have exploded in the last five years, and distinct similarities are emerging from among many of these testimonies. While the causes for gender dysphoria are often complex and multifaceted, cultural and institutional influences beholden to a pro-transgender ideology have become primary contributors to the confusion over biological sex that is occurring among thousands of adolescents.

Here is a sampling of 20 testimonies from among the hundreds of detransitioners who have publicly shared their stories. The power that social media has to shape the minds of young people who have experienced abuse and are looking for affirmation is readily apparent in these accounts, along with the potent influence that medical and psychiatric professionals have in pushing their young patients down a path of gender transition drugs and surgical procedures that often create irreversible physiological harm.

Continued at The Washington Stand — Read full story at https://washingtonstand.com/commentary/under-the-radar-the-detransitioner-movement-is-surging

Prisha Mosley is a 24-year-old woman out of Big Rapids, Michigan, who fell victim to being swept up into the radical transgender ideology when she was only 15 years old. Harboring a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD), Mosley was guided by medical professionals who seemingly ignored the symptoms associated with BPD and was instead put on a path consisting of hormones and surgery that she now immensely regrets.

In an emotional testimony Mosley uploaded online earlier in October, she tells the camera, “I ruined my life,” shortly before providing the context behind that statement with, “I decided that I didn’t want to be a woman before I had ever even experienced what being a woman was like – because I was a child.”

Watch her video on Rumble

Detransitioning woman left ‘heartbroken’ after irreversible surgery: ‘I was manipulated’

See Prisha’s appearance on FoxNews December 9, 2022

https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6316918709112&w=466&h=263

“One of the issues I have is the lack of identity,” Mosley explained. “And on top of not having a lot of friends and having issues at home, when I found the trans community and found a new identity and was affirmed… that’s what caused me to transition.”

On “America Reports” Friday, Mosley attributed her mental health condition and manipulation from therapists and doctors for her decision to transition at such a young age. She said her parents were also manipulated into supporting the gender change.

“I was manipulated not only by my trans peers, but by my gender specialist, the person who gave me my letter of recommendation in surgery. It was all sold as like a wonderful thing,” she said. 

Watch or read the rest of the story at FoxNews

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This article is reprinted from https://washingtonstand.com/news/a-medical-atrocity-pediatric-surgeon-joins-growing-movement-against-trans-surgeries-on-minors

A prominent pediatric neurosurgeon has publicly spoken out against performing gender transition procedures on minors in a recent Federalist podcast, adding to the growing number of doctors around the country voicing strong objections to the controversial practice as well as a strong majority of voters heading into next week’s midterm elections.

Dr. Michael Egnor, a pediatric neurosurgeon and professor at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York, decried the practice of removing healthy organs from and dispensing cross-sex hormones and puberty blocking drugs to minors who are confused about their sex.

Egnor further reflected on how the medical establishment historically accepted ethically reprehensible behavior for numerous years before eventually backtracking. “Eugenics was taught in practically all medical schools for many years, the Tuskegee study was presented annually at national medical meetings and nothing was said about it for 30 or 40 years,” he observed.

He went on to note that “the American Medical Association has endorsed this stuff. The American Academy of Pediatrics has endorsed this stuff. The American Psychological Association has endorsed this stuff. I really have come to feel over the past year or two that we are in a very dark episode of medical ethics and medical history.”

Still, Egnor encouraged more doctors and the public to speak out about the issue and hopes that more parents will “realize that the medical advice they’re getting regarding these treatments is malpractice” and “basically criminal.”

Egnor joins a growing movement of medical professionals across the political spectrum who have raised concerns about the impact transgender treatments have on minors. In 2021, Dr. Marci Bowers and Dr. Erica Anderson, both heads of prominent transgender special interest groups who are both transgender themselves, voiced their alarm over a rise in rapid-onset gender dysphoria among adolescents and how it may lead to minors making life-altering decisions they will later regret.

Others like Dr. Michael Laidlaw, Quentin Van Meter, Paul W. Hruz, Andre Van Mol, and William J. Malone have publicly made the case against gender transition procedures in recent years, with renowned psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh laying the groundwork against the use of transition surgeries in 2015.

Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, the director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council who formerly worked as a clinician providing trauma-focused treatment to children, welcomed the news of Egnor’s stand.

“When I look back even a year ago and I think about my colleagues both in the academic, research, and clinical fields, I hadn’t heard of anyone [speaking out against transgender ideology],” she told The Washington Stand. “I think this is really good news that you have someone, especially from New York state which is very liberal, coming out and basically taking a stand for kids.”

Bauwens went on to assert that there is a significant level of fear within the medical community to not speak out against the accepted views of the medical establishment regarding transgenderism.

“There is suppression on many conservative issues in the academic and clinical fields,” she explained. “I think there is fear of losing your license, losing your ability to practice or to even be hired in an academic institution, but this is a great example of courage. Thank God we have people who are willing to put their careers on the line.”

Bauwens expressed hope that prominent organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics will eventually move away from supporting gender transition procedures for minors.

“I think that when the uprising begins to affect elections, when it begins to affect commerce around the issue, then I think we’ll see the pendulum swing the other way, but I think this is just another crack in the dam,” she told TWS. “If we just watch history, truth eventually wins out. We have to hold on to the hope and the knowledge that truth will prevail. And thank God this is another crack. I do think we are going to see this break, I really do. Look at how much public opinion has changed, even since the pandemic.”

With the midterm elections five days away, a Trafalgar poll taken last week found that almost three quarters of likely voters say they are “unlikely to vote for candidates that support” performing gender transition procedures on minors, including the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and carrying out the removal of healthy organs.

“I really do believe the more that public opinion moves in the right direction, the more I think we’re going to see doctors and psychologists with the courage to stand up and come against this,” Bauwens remarked.

Article reprinted from https://nypost.com/2022/08/24/woman-sues-psychiatrist-for-approving-gender-transition/

[SexChangeRegret.com note: Stories such as this one are tragic. Teenagers are too young to make life-long decisions such as having gender affirming procedures, taking hormones alters a person’s thinking and judgment, and taking testosterone doesn’t turn a woman into a man. Psychiatric issues need to be addressed before cutting off healthy body parts.]

An Australian woman who transitioned to male, before realizing it was a mistake, is suing a psychiatrist after he approved her female-to-male hormone treatment following a single meeting — and later signed off on two surgeries to remove her breasts and uterus.

Jay Langadinos, now 31, was just 19 when she first met Dr. Patrick Toohey, a veteran Sydney psychiatrist, in May 2010.

The teen was referred to him by her endocrinologist to determine if she was suitable for a gender transition.

Jay Langadinos, who no longer considers herself a male, claims Dr. Patrick Toohey signed off on her gender transition surgeries without much consideration.

The specialist wrote that Langadinos was very young and needed “a throughout psychiatric work-up before embarking on hormone treatment,” according to a statement of claim filed in the New South Wales Supreme Court and cited by the Sydney Morning Herald.

After his first meeting with the teen, Toohey concluded that Langadinos suffered from gender dysphoria and was fit for testosterone therapy, the document states.

The next time Langadinos had an appointment with Toohey in February 2012, she told him she was eager to undergo “top” surgery to have her breasts surgically removed as part of her transition.

Toohey approved the double mastectomy for his patient, who underwent the procedure in April of that year, according to the court filing.

A month later, Langadinos met with Toohey for the third and final time to discuss having her uterus removed.

According to the lawsuit, Toohey wrote that he could find no “psychiatrist contraindication to proceeding with hysterectomy as part of gender transition,” clearing the way for Langadinos, then 22, to undergo surgery in November.

Now, nearly a decade later, Langadinos — who no longer identifies as male — is suing Toohey for professional negligence, claiming that he green-lit her hormone therapy even after she told him she suffered from social phobia.

She also alleges that he was negligent in not recommending she get a second opinion ahead of her hysterectomy.

The court filing states that Toohey strongly recommended that Langadinos seek social and family therapy, but she did not heed that recommendation. Despite that, he went ahead and signed off on her two surgeries.

Langadinos says that in 2016 — four years after her hysterectomy — she was receiving psychiatric treatment from another doctor when she “came to the realization that she should not have undergone the hormone therapy or the first and second surgeries.”

In 2020, Langadinos consulted an endocrinologist about stopping her testosterone treatment.

In the documents, Langadinos argues that Toohey should have realized she might be autistic and referred her for further treatment.

She also contends that her social phobia should have been treated before she was ever prescribed hormone therapy.

Langadinos says in her statement of claim that the hormones and surgeries left her suffering from injuries, disabilities and complications, including early menopause, anxiety and depression, impaired psychological functioning and diminished capacity for employment.

In an interview with the Australian news outlets the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, the 31-year-old said: “Knowing that I can’t have children is absolutely devastating.”

Langadinos explained that growing up, she felt she was somehow “defective” because she realized she was attracted to girls. At 17, she went online and read about gender dysphoria.

“I thought, ‘That’s what I have.’ I decided that I must be transgender because of my discomfort that I had in my body,” she said.

Langadinos said as she became progressively unhappy, she decided that the source of her distress was that she was not a man, “so the answer was to change my body even more.”

During her and Toohey’s initial meeting, the psychiatrist reported that she had been distressed when made to dress as a girl in elementary school, had a “tomboy” manner, was socially isolated and left school at age 11.

In a letter to an andrology fellow, Toohey allegedly said that when he first saw Langadinos, he had noted “a past history of significant social phobia and depression which may have been beyond gender dysphoria,” according to the filing.

Article reprinted from https://nypost.com/2022/08/24/woman-sues-psychiatrist-for-approving-gender-transition/