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.’

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

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.

Soren began identifying as transgender at 11 years old. She started hormone replacement therapy at 17, and by 19, underwent surgery to remove her healthy breasts.

Now 21, Soren looks back on her medical transition with regret. Her traumatic medical complications opened her eyes to the ills of “gender-affirming care,” which she said enabled her to believe hormones and surgery could provide her with the sense of self she craved growing up. Detransitioned and now working to heal her complex emotions through mindfulness, Soren has become a vocal advocate against the “enabling” she sees happening within the gender medical industry.

Read the full article at Independent Women’s Forum

56 minutes

Damaged: The Transing of America’s Kids tells the story of the lives of transgender people who wish they could go back.

An amazing film. Even though it’s behind a paywall at Daily Caller, start a trial subscription for $1 and SEE IT.

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’

Also available in PDF: Download

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.