A Project of the American College of Pediatricians

www.biologicalintegrity.org offers a wealth of resources for parents, teens, physicians, schools, and policymakers, including FAQs, latest research and data, fact sheets, videos, a map of current legislation, and ways to connect with doctors and therapists. 

ACPeds Executive Director, Dr. Jill Simons, released the following statement with the launch of the Biological Integrity Initiative:

 “We have been receiving increasing demands to provide clarity and support on the gender dysphoria issue and it is our hope that the Biological Integrity Initiative will be a valuable, practical resource for everyone involved. The term biological integrity denotes living in consistency with one’s natural, biological self – the integrated whole of body and mind. Children and adolescents should be loved, and taught to love themselves, as wholly male or female. Children are always born in the right body.”

ACPeds President Dr. Michael Artigues said:

“The massive push we are seeing for children to become the targets of experimental, life-altering drugs and surgeries is ideological in nature, directly opposed to biological reality, antithetical to good medical practice, and deeply disturbing to doctors who have devoted their lives to ethical, compassionate care for their most vulnerable patients – children.” 

Read Press Release

Go to Biological Integrity website

Here’s a description of who they are from their website:

“Genspect is an international alliance of professionals, trans people, detransitioners, parent groups and others who seek high-quality care for gender-related distress.

Emerging as a leading organisation that offers an alternative to WPATH , Genspect offers a range of education, resources and support for anyone who has been impacted by gender dysphoria.

Uniting 25 different organisations in 23 countries, we don’t just speak for a few: we speak for thousands.”

Go to Genspect.org.

You may find a referral to a therapist at their website. We at sexchangeregret are not recommending the group or its members; we are simply providing another resource to help you find help when you want it. We always recommend that you vet any counselor to see what they believe and how they conduct therapy.

From the GETA website

It has become extremely difficult for clients to find mental health professionals who will facilitate identity exploration while also helping them confront important psychological issues that may be contributing to their distress, including their concerns about gender. 

The Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) exists because we see a great need arising from the current narrow framing of Gender and Gender Identity in the field of mental health and in the culture more broadly. We believe that: 

Individuals who are exploring gender identity or struggling with their biological sex should have access to therapists who will provide thoughtful care and tend to legitimate mental health concerns, without pushing an ideological or political agenda.

Find Therapists

Articles and Resources

• the lack of follow-up — regretters are not counted
• high rate of regret he sees in his post-op patients–26%

Who is Dr. Az Hakeem?

Dr Az Hakeem is a consultant psychiatrist, medical psychotherapist and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is also a qualified Group Analyst who has used this training to develop and facilitate the unique therapeutic practice of mixed group therapy sessions with gender dysphoric patients both pre- and post-transition.

Who is Transgender Trend?

Transgender Trend conducted the interview. They say “We are an organisation of parents, professionals and academics based in the UK who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender”

The entire interview is available at Transgender Trend: https://www.transgendertrend.com/interview-az-hakeem/

The entire interview is great reading. Here’s the relevant part to know today.

Dr. Hakeem says: (emphasis mine)

“As I stated in my publications 26% of my patients are post-operative regretters: this 26% of course does not represent the demographic of Gender Dysphoric patents but was the demographic of the people who had been referred to my service. These people were all non- existent data. No one had followed them up from the gender clinic since they had been given their sex changes. They had been free to live their lives as they had wanted to be without anyone asking later whether they had made a mistake. Many of them were too embarrassed to admit that they regretted their decision having persuaded the Doctors and Psychiatrists and gender clinic to give them what they wanted and felt they needed. Many of them were living in a post-operative role which they now felt to be fraudulent but from which they felt there was no return.

The public are often told that relative regret is extremely low. But this of course is a complete fiction. There are no follow-up studies, no one knows what the regret rate actually is and this low rate results from the lack of any information being collected. The patients I saw did not officially exist in any gender identity clinics’ books.”

Thank you, Dr. Hakeem!

We must stop treating gender dysphoria differently and instead apply trauma therapies to people with any type of dysphoria.

By: Walt Heyer February 17, 2022

Reprinted from https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/17/therapists-treat-dysphoria-as-a-trauma-symptom-until-its-about-sex/

New Zealand passed a law on Tuesday banning talk therapy, often painted as “conversion therapy,” for patients who suffer from dysphoria about their biological sex. The law specifically targets therapy aimed at children, and threatens a hefty prison sentence for those found in violation.

The move follows Monday’s announcement of regulations banning gender-related talk therapy in Israel, which threaten to take away the medical licenses of therapists who buck the ban. Canada also outlawed such counseling effective last month, not only codifying jail time for talk therapists who try to help gender-confused people, but also threatening the freedom of churches and pastors to speak the Bible’s teachings about sexuality.

Talk therapy is standard industry practice for patients with general dysphoria, so why is it being treated as something barbaric when it’s used to help patients confused about their sex?

Dysphoria and ‘Gender Dysphoria’

Things started going off the rails with the introduction of a diagnosis known as “gender dysphoria” in 2013. “Dysphoria” as a free-standing clinical term has existed for a long time. Dysphoria means a profound sense of unease or dissatisfaction: the opposite of euphoria. Dysphoria is not a mental health diagnosis on its own; it’s a symptom of something deeper and much broader than gender dysphoria.

Dysphoria, “a state of generalized unhappiness, restlessness, dissatisfaction, or frustration,” is a symptom associated with a variety of mental conditions, such as stress, anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders. To treat patients experiencing dysphoria, caring therapists and psychiatrists dig deeper for the underlying cause and create an appropriate plan to alleviate it. That’s the hallmark of effective psychological treatment.

But in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association changed all that and declared that if dysphoria is related to gender identity, then look no further, skip psychological evaluation, and proceed directly to taking cross-sex hormones and removing healthy body parts. Their fact sheet advises: “People whose gender at birth is contrary to the one they identify with will be diagnosed with gender dysphoria.”

The stated goal in using the term “gender dysphoria” was to reduce stigma of mental illness for the patients (no longer “disordered”), yet still provide a diagnosis code to satisfy the insurance companies. Consequently, in medical settings today, as soon as a patient mentions gender, most pediatricians, psychiatrists, and psychologists immediately diagnose the person with gender dysphoria and put the individual on a direct path to cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.

Gone are the days of counseling to explore why the person has feelings of distress. Patients who voluntarily seek counseling for negative childhood experiences discover it is almost impossible to find a psychologist who’s willing to help.

What Happened?

Thousands of people who have had feelings of hurt and confusion exploited by the transgender industry and seek restoration, as I did, write to me for help. The first questions I always ask are, “When did you (or your child) first feel (or express) gender discomfort?” “What was happening in your life up to that time?” and “Why do you want to destroy who you are?”

Many people who contact me for help either don’t remember anything happening or minimize it. We exchange a few emails where I gently ask those simple questions and the results are amazing. One hundred percent of the people have been able to pinpoint exactly what happened to trigger the urge to escape into an alternate gender identity. Their childhood events run the gamut of abuse, abandonment, and neglect.

Something always happened.

Adverse Childhood Experiences Happened

Researchers have coined a term for this: “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).” Psychology Today says ACE “refers to a range of negative situations a child may face or witness while growing up.” These experiences include emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional or physical neglect; parental separation or divorce; living in a household in which domestic violence occurs; or living in a household with an alcoholic, substance abuser, or mentally ill person.

ACEs are quite common. Almost two-thirds of the 17,000 people who filled out a confidential survey in the 1990s had experienced one or more ACEs. That startling statistic prompted scientists to begin studying the negative effects on physical, mental, and emotional health.

Adverse childhood experiences should be taken seriously because they can interfere with the normal maturation of a child’s brain and alter the brain at a deep level where the most basic needs originate and a person’s identity is formed. The CDC notes, “Toxic stress from ACEs can change brain development and affect how the body responds to stress. ACEs are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood.”

When a boy says he identifies as a girl because “I have a female brain,” perhaps it’s not because he has a female brain but that his brain development has been affected by adverse childhood experiences. This is very common among those with gender dysphoria.

Among ACEs, child sexual abuse is particularly heinous and traumatic. Most of the people who write me were sexually abused, as I was. But child sexual abuse includes more than physical touch. Noncontact assaults such as exposing children to pornography, like school districts where books with sexually explicit language are added to classroom libraries, are child sexual abuse as well and have widespread effects on innocent children.

The World Health Organization defines child sexual abuse as: “The involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, or for which the child is not developmentally prepared and cannot give consent, or that violate the laws or social taboos of society.”

Thousands of people have written to me and can pinpoint when they first wanted to escape into an alternate identity. The timing often coincides with the ACE. For example, boys who were sexually abused may have an impulse to rid themselves of their genitalia that commenced with the abuse.

This is where the diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” does its harm and keeps people from effective care. Connecting the dots from ACE to gender distress is an elementary exercise for those willing to see. The link is obvious, except to gender specialists.

An entire population of suffering people is being led to slaughter. They are coping the best they can with feelings they can’t understand. They seek help from trained “gender professionals” whose sole purpose is to diagnose gender dysphoria and catapult them into the only permitted course of treatment: cross-sex hormones and surgeries.

Meanwhile, outside the world of gender, ACE psychologists are studying resilience and trauma and suggesting blueprints for healing that rework troubling memories and emotions from the past. They recommend seeking professional mental health care, known as talk therapy, along the way.

Surgery and hormones are never mentioned. That’s because hormones and surgery don’t help; they hurt by heaping on post-traumatic stress disorder.

Real People Suffer From Reckless Diagnosis

One of the people who have contacted me is Richard Anumene, a man in his mid-twenties called Adrian in a recent article. He reached out to me only five months after his 2021 gender “surgery,” distraught to the point of considering suicide.

While under the care of psychiatrists and psychologists for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and relentless PTSD, Richard was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and immediately prescribed cross-sex hormones and feminizing surgeries.

Richard says, “Why did they do this to me? I did not have gender dysphoria.” He still has the mental disorders, but with the added horror of a mutilated body. He sees clearly now that his dysphoria was much broader than gender: it was a symptom of his many mental illnesses. The “gender affirming” surgeries were totally unnecessary.

My story from 1983 is similar. I had suffered years of psychological distress and sought out the advice of top experts in the novel field of gender identity: a surgeon and a gender therapist. They assured me that realigning my male body to confirm my female feelings would heal my broken psyche. It didn’t. My extreme distress continued in my surgically altered body, to the point of considering suicide. Now recovered and restored to male, I offer hope to other sex-change regretters like Richard who want to find their way back.

Road to Healing

Imagine how much tragedy could be avoided if gender therapists treated people for adverse childhood experiences to begin with.

The road to healing from ACEs begins with the powerful step of identifying and accepting what happened. My true healing began as I acknowledged the emotional, physical, and sexual abuses I endured as a young child. Then, as I worked through the powerful emotions with a licensed therapist, my desire to identify as a woman dissipated and disappeared altogether.

In the case of gender, however, trans advocates falsely paint talk therapy as “barbaric” and misname it “conversion therapy.” They successfully lobby state legislatures and whole countries to ban any therapy that doesn’t affirm the alternate identity.

In true bully fashion, they smear people who support therapeutic intervention as “transphobic” and threaten to revoke medical licenses. But truly, the only “conversion therapy” in play is the gender specialists’ barbaric regimen of applying hormonal and surgical measures to “convert” people into alternate gender identities.

The evidence is clear: ACEs can “disrupt a child’s development and impact their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive well-being well into adulthood.” Therapists and clients must have the freedom to look beyond gender distress for underlying issues.

Parents should steer clear of gender clinics, enlist the services of a licensed trauma therapist, and insist on ACE treatment protocols for their children. Trauma therapists should intervene and influence the mental health profession to stop treating gender dysphoria differently and apply trauma therapies to people with any type of dysphoria.

Richard and I, along with the thousands of others who write me, should not be diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The false diagnosis almost hijacked our recoveries permanently. Richard is bringing legal action against the clinic that should have known better. The gender therapists ignored our histories, irreparably harmed our bodies, and must be held accountable.