Excerpt:

• The unnamed man has said doctors did not warn him about the drastic outcome of gender reassignment surgery which has left him infertile and incontinent 
• On Twitter, the man said that he had been effectively ‘castrated’ by the surgery 

By SUE REID FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 17:00 EDT, 23 June 2022

A young British man who had his genitals removed during gender reassignment surgery is suing the NHS over the operation in a historic legal action. He complains that doctors did not warn him of the drastic outcome of the body-altering surgery which has left him infertile, incontinent and feeling like a ‘sexual eunuch’. He said on Twitter yesterday: ‘The minute I woke up from surgery, I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life.’

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  This man’s transparency is remarkable and it’s a hard story to read: trouble urinating, no sex drive, no help from the doctors after the surgery. This terrible experience is consistent with the people who write Walt for help, saying they wish they had never gone through the surgery. Read the entire article at The Daily Mail.

Changing genders is a myth and trans folklorists who promote it are harming people, especially children vulnerable to believing fairy tales can come true.

By: Walt Heyer, February 03, 2022
The Federalist

Reprinted from https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/03/3-myths-from-trans-folklorists-that-allow-men-like-lia-thomas-to-hurt-themselves-and-others/

University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, a man, has smashed records and shocked sensibilities. Thomas’s performance illustrates the effects and absurdity of denying differences between the sexes, especially men’s obvious bodily advantages in sports.

Thomas presumably fulfilled the NCAA’s policy requiring trans athletes to suppress testosterone levels for a designated time before competing on the woman’s team. In January, the NCAA tweaked the rules to place sport-specific limits on testosterone levels. The policy still falls short by ignoring the unchanging enhanced muscle strength and endurance amassed during male puberty.

Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce), an elite Olympian athlete, weighed in on the Thomas controversy, saying him competing as a woman isn’t fair to women athletes. Jenner says his physical advantages are still apparent many years after transition.

“In Lia Thomas’s case, I don’t care about her testosterone levels now for the last year or two,” Jenner said. “Honestly, I care about her testosterone levels for the first 16, 17 years of her life. That’s what we are fighting against here.”

As a man who formerly identified as a woman, I now clearly see — with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight and reflection — a similar flaw in my thinking that led me astray. Like the people setting NCAA policies, I neglected to consider that it was categorically impossible to biologically change my internal male morphology: my skeletal structure, body mass, muscle strength, and myriad other sexually determined attributes.

This flawed and foolish thinking results in real-life consequences. Changing sexes is a myth and trans folklorists who promote it are harming people, especially children vulnerable to believing fairy tales can come true. Here are some of these trans myths at play in the Thomas story.

Myth 1: Sex and Gender Are Separate and Assigned

The entire folklore of transgenderism rests on the artificial construct that gender is separate from biological sex, and that sex doesn’t matter, gender identity does. It’s a house of cards built on the flimsiest of foundations, a feeling. Feelings can, and do, change.

Who we are cannot be separated from our bodily reality. We live our lives in our bodies. Our identities are rooted in our bodies. The whole body is organized around either being male or female, a sexual binary. Who we are is not based on a feeling but rooted in physical reality.

Sex does not come from an ideological vending machine filled with multiple choices. Starting at conception, sex is absolute, innate, and immutable: male or female.

During intercourse, approximately 250 million sperm cells start the journey from the testes of the man to the fallopian tube of the woman, where one lucky sperm cell joins the egg in the hours or days following sexual intercourse. The sperm and the egg each contain mitochondria and DNA. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, the nuclei from each fuse together, and a baby is conceived. The baby’s sex revealed in the DNA is fixed for life.

Now we’re told sex is “assigned at birth.” This phrase popped up out of nowhere and now has infiltrated everywhere. No one has ever had his or her sex assigned at birth. It’s fixed nine months before birth, at conception.

The truth since the dawn of time is that a look at the baby’s genitalia reveals his or her sex. With today’s ultrasound technology, parents can know the sex of the baby during pregnancy. Sex is innate and unchangeable, not assigned by a doctor after the baby exits the womb.

The deceitful language creates the foundation for an even bigger lie: Because sex is “assigned” at birth, it can be “reassigned” later.

Myth 2: Hormones and Surgery Can Change Men into Women and Women into Men

Transitioning is a myth. It’s not possible. Sex is unchangeable. That is not a transphobic smear; it’s biological fact.

No amount of female hormones forced into a man’s bloodstream can transition him biologically into a woman, or vice versa. Sure, each can identify as the other if they want, but they do not magically become the other sex. Thomas did not magically change bodies, replacing male with female, by suppressing testosterone and ingesting estrogen.

The same goes for surgery. Surgeons may use their operating prowess to fashion a convincing replica of a man or a woman, but their efforts are feckless to change anyone’s biological sex. I have thought for years that lawyers should be having a field day jumping all over the medical fraud that has been perpetrated by surgeons who claim they have changed a person’s sex. That’s an outlandish lie of biblical proportions.

Trans folklore requires us to ignore the ample, obvious evidence of physiological and structural differences between males and females, suppress any intellectual rational discussion, and swallow whole the lie that cross-sex hormones and surgery can flip sex. Reality goes out the window and we enter a world of Orwellian dystopia, where language gets distorted and free speech is dumped in the trash. Skeptics are bullied. Good people are canceled, and careers are ended by the slightest infraction in speech or thought.

Lawmakers, medical societies, and school boards disregard these biological facts and therefore make nonsense policies. Opportunistic males cloaked in cross-sex identities are permitted to invade women’s spaces and sports, threatening women’s safety and undoing the level playing field women have fought so hard to attain.

The truth is: God makes male and female; surgeons and hormone dispensaries don’t.

Myth 3: And They Lived Happily Ever After…

The media paint a rosy picture of a transgender person’s life after the so-called “change of gender.” Life will be rainbows and lollipops, they convey; everyone lives happily ever after. The trope they disseminate implies no one has ever regretted it. This myth leads gender-distressed individuals to think, “Why not go for it? What do I have to lose?”

The truth is, they have a lot to lose. I’ve heard countless heartbreaking stories from people who lost years of their lives trying to erase who they are in a futile attempt to become someone they can never be. People need to hear the truth. Regret is not rare. My book, “Trans Life Survivors,” features the experiences of 30 such survivors, told in their own words. I could have included hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Regret can hit months, years, or decades after surgery. The survivors come to realize that a surgically fabricated and hormonally induced persona didn’t cure what ailed them, and they want help to go back to living in authentic biological reality.

Gender discomfort exists, but like any pain, its purpose is to alert you of something wrong.
It used to be that a counselor’s job was to methodically pinpoint the probable cause and work through it. That’s no longer the case. People who want to reclaim their lives tell me therapists diagnosed them with gender dysphoria after one or two visits, then encouraged them to transition socially, take cross-sex hormones, and undergo surgery. Parents report similar sessions with their children’s therapists. The therapist considers nothing else.

Yet gender distress is a symptom of other difficulties: adverse childhood experiences, or psychiatric or psychological issues such as panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, dissociative disorders, and substance abuse. None of these benefit from cross-sex hormones and surgery.

For me, the desire to escape my male existence was the result of years of cross-dressing at the hands of my grandmother starting at age four, after which I was molested by my uncle. Deep psychological pain caused me to want to be female.

My transgenderism was a hiding place until I received proper psychotherapy, then set my sights on God. Slowly but steadily, God’s love healed the pain of childhood experiences and redeemed my life, and the desire went away. I no longer needed a hiding place.

Today, due to the successful efforts of transgender folklorists, successful talk therapy like I received is against the law in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Affirmation is the only treatment allowed for patients who utter the magic phrase “gender distress.”

It especially crushes my heart to see children and teens ensnared in this ideology. The American College of Pediatricians, one of the few medical associations not given over to woke indoctrination, has spoken to the experimental nature of transgender intervention for children and the many ways it impairs their mental and physical health.

Panicked parents contact me. One mother succeeded through loving intervention to divert her 10-year-old daughter from going down the transgender path. Other parents want to reach their older teenagers who are blind to the difficulties awaiting them with hormones and surgery. I hear from those teens after transition, in their later teens or early 20s when reality has dashed their dreams of living happily ever after.

Women bemoan their permanently lowered voices and scarred chests. Men mourn the loss of potency and prospects for future romance. From my experience and the testimonies of the thousands who have written me, I know these myths harm innocent people and that the path to freedom starts with acknowledging the truth.

No therapist, no doctor, and no surgeon has been effective in biologically changing anyone’s sex, full stop. Sex is not assigned at birth and cannot be reassigned later. Regret is real. Harm is done, no matter what trans folklorists claim.

Therein lies the hope for people who want to go back: you never really changed.

Reprinted from https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/03/3-myths-from-trans-folklorists-that-allow-men-like-lia-thomas-to-hurt-themselves-and-others/

Sinéad Watson is a healthcare advocate for youth experiencing gender dysphoria and an advisor for the Gender Dysphoria Alliance. She describes herself on the site as “detrans” and “detransitioned” and someone who desires to work toward “balanced, evidence-based care for gender questioning youth.”

Watson’s thread is an open letter that she penned to Stanford aimed at one of the premier medical doctors in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, Dr. Jack Turban, a chief fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and is well known for his research on transgender youth.

Full transcript from her Twitter post:

I am writing to you on behalf of a group of detransitioned women regarding your fellow Dr Jack Turban. We are deeply concerned with Dr Turban’s disparagement of psychiatric intervention and exploratory psychotherapy, his singular endorsement of affirmative therapies for people with gender dysphoria, and his dismissive and derogatory treatment of those of us who detransitioned due to transition regret.

We are but a few of many that have been the victims of this type of cavalier attitude. We all suffered from gender dysphoria at one point (and some still do), and were led to believe that our best chance of treating our dysphoria was to medically transition. As it turned out, this was not the case. As a result, we now have to live with bodies and voices that have been irreversibly changed (in some cases damaged) by hormones and surgeries, when what we needed was a compassionate and thoughtful exploration of our gender distress through talk therapy. Some of us will now never be able to have children and many of us live with great distress and regret every day.

Not only did physicians like Dr Turban fail us by sending us down a singular path of transition, they are now letting us down once again by disparaging our experiences and even our existence, when they should be providing us with support to help us heal from our unnecessary medical transitions. The fact that Dr Turban is a psychiatrist at Stanford and uses his credentials to promote his reckless approach is especially troubling, as he has been granted a large and influential media platform. As we see more and more distressed young people following in our footsteps of a rushed medical gender transition, in a few years, we fear that the consequences of Dr Turban’s activism will be catastrophic and visible to all.

Dr Turban does not hide his disregard for the role of psychotherapy in treating gender distress, and his singular belief in medical and surgical approaches to treating gender dysphoria, whatever its cause may be. Appearing on the GenderGP Podcast episode ‘Exploring Detransition with Dr Jack Turban’ (2021), hosted by Dr Helen Webberley, a UK physician criminally-convicted for running an illegal clinic, Dr Turban says:

“There’s no psychiatric intervention for gender dysphoria. There are medical interventions for gender dysphoria, if you will. And it’s not the rule like right, how the psychiatrist’s going to treat gender dysphoria, they’re not like they’re not going to make that go away. The only way that it’s ever been proposed that psychiatry can do that was through conversion therapy, which obviously doesn’t work:”

As you will read later in this letter, many detransitioners report that they strongly wish they had received exploratory psychotherapy rather than affirmation, thus Dr Turban’s insinuation that this would be tantamount to conversion therapy is highly disturbing. Dr Turban describes detransition, in the GenderGP podcast, as having “become this really awful word. I feel like 90% of the time when you read it, it’s really being weaponized.” The claim that discussing detransition is problematic due to the topic being “weaponized” has been used to shame, bully and silence detransitioners who try to tell our stories. This bullying of a vulnerable group is unacceptable, and we find it incredibly worrying that Dr Turban would participate in the accusation that detransition is “being weaponized,” furthering the bullying of detransitioned individuals.

This is not only a matter of rhetoric. Dr Turban goes on to say, in the podcast,

“When you say detransition people usually think that means like transition regret. It brings up this idea that somebody transitioned, then realize like, oh my god, that was a huge mistake. I’m actually cisgender, I regret every domain of gender affirmation I’ve ever had. And as I’m sure you know, that’s not the reality of the situation.”

Dr Turban is, again, completely dismissing those of us who have experienced transition regret. As detransitioned woman, we are deeply hurt that Dr Turban would find it appropriate to suggest that our pain and distress is not a reality. We do, in fact, regret every domain of gender affirmation we ever had and the irreversible changes that medical transition did to us that we must now live with for the rest of our lives. It is, therefore, highly unprofessional and deeply offensive to see comments like this from a fellow at Stanford.

At the same time as Dr Turban dismisses our existence, he also claims to represent us in research, but his bias is clear: the goal is to minimize detransition because it contradicts Dr. Turban’s professional aspirations to promote transgender medical and surgical interventions. In the GenderGP podcast he also says

“We have a paper that hopefully is coming out soon, where we took the data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey. So this was a survey of over 27,000 transgender adults in the United States. And we found that of those who had transitioned in some way, don’t quote me on that exact number, but it’s something like 13% of them said that at some point in their life they had detransitioned. And when we looked at why they did that the vast majority of them like close to 90% I think had detransitioned due to some external factor.”

We bring to your attention that the 2015 USTS survey that Dr Turban repeatedly uses for his research is an online convenience survey that was promoted by transition advocacy sites. We believe in and support transgender rights and trans people, but respectfully submit that this survey, subtitled “Injustice at Every Turn” which is full of biased questions that promote a political agenda, serves as a poor base for respectable research. Dr Turban previously attempted to use this survey to claim that psychotherapy leads to suicide; his problematic analysis and conclusions were thoroughly outlined in a rebuttal by Roberto D’Angelo et al. in ‘One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) to which Dr.Turban never replied, even through he had the chance to do so. Instead, Dr Turban attacked the researchers on Twitter. Dr Turban also used the same survey to attempt to show that puberty blockers saved lives. Another rebuttal showed just how flawed that piece of research was. See ‘Puberty Blockers and Suicidality in Adolescents Suffering from Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) by Michael Biggs.

Dr Turban failed to respond to that critique in the scientific area, but did go on media circuit to promote his deeply flawed conclusions. Most recently, Dr Turban misused this problematic sample to discredit detransition experiences in his research, ‘Factors Leading to “Detransition” Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis’ (2021). Dr. Turban did not seem at all troubled by the fact that 100% of the respondents were transgender-identified and did not identify as detransitioners. This is an expert from his study:

“These [detransition due to internal factors] experiences did not necessarily reflect regret regarding past gender affirmation, and were presumably temporary, as all of these respondents subsequently identified as TGD, an eligibility requirement for study participation.”

Dr. Turban’s conclusions were that detransition is largely a temporary phenomenon, happens in response to external pressures, and does not really represent a problem for those who detransitioned. These conclusions are highly flawed and ignore those of us who have detransitioned due to transition regret, and who were excluded from the survey for no longer being transgender-identified. In comparison, recent detransition research conducted within the actual detransition community – (‘Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey’ (2021) by Elie Vandenbussche) found very different results: that most of us detransition due to the internal realization that transition was not what we needed, that transition did not help and- can actually make things worse for us, and that we found other non-invasive ways to alleviate our dysphoria. Further, the research showed that detransitioners expressed the need to find alternative treatments to deal with their gender dysphoria, but reported that it was nearly impossible to talk about it within LGBT+ spaces and in the medical sphere. Vandenbussche found that most detransitioners currently are in dire need of psychological support on matters such as gender dysphoria, co-morbid conditions, feelings of regret, social/physical changes and internalized homophobic or sexist prejudices. The research confirmed that detransitionres experience prejudice when working with medical and mental health systems, which Dr. Turban’s vocal activism directly emboldens and reinforces.

We feel it important to add that in May 2021, the Karolinska Hospital in Sweden issued a new policy statement regarding the treatment of gender-dysphoric minors. This policy has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under the age of 18. Finland also revised its treatment guidelines in June 2020, prioritizing psychological interventions and support over medical interventions. Major changes are also underway in the UK as the NHS has convened a Cass Review to examine the practice of transition for young people and the evidence that underlies it. Thus, it seems evident that there is a growing concern over the proliferation of medical interventions that have a low certainty of benefits, while carrying a significant potential for severe medical harm.

It is worrying that Dr Turban does not seem to demonstrate the professional curiosity to rethink his endorsement of medical transition for minors and his dismay at psychotherapy and its role in the care of gender dysphoric individuals of all ages. We are also very concerned by Dr Turban’s activism to suppress the debate on the proper care for gender dysphoria in the public arena. On May 25, 2021, Dr Turban tweeted the following:

“When I spoke with @60Minutesabout their “detransition” story and asked where they found the people to profile – they refused to tell me and became defensive. We still don’t know if they searched for people on TERF forums, and transparency would be appreciated.”

We bring to your attention that TERF (acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”) is a pejorative term, and that Dr Turban’s use of it to smear and dismiss the experiences of the detransitioners who appeared on 60 Minutes is incredibly hurtful. That a fellow at Stanford would criticise 60 Minutes for having a brief segment featuring detransitioners has many of us very concerned that, should one of his patients experience transition regret and subsequently decide to detransition, Dr Turban would be unfit to help them due to his hostility towards the subject. Therefore we are concerned with how Dr Turban may practice as a clinician, specifically how he may treat a transgender person struggling with regret or a detransitioner seeking to discuss their regret or reverse their transition. His comments on the GenderGP podcast, his flawed use of the USTS, and his hostility towards any discussion of transition regret are all highly problematic and in need of addressing.

We ask Stanford to speak out for more thoughtful approaches because as it stands now, Stanford appears to be silently endorsing Dr Turban’s harmful claims that exploratory psychotherapy is tantamount to conversion therapy and that hormones and surgeries are the only appropriate treatment for people with gender dysphoria. Detransitioners and transition regret exist.

END