Who would have thought that convincing thousands of vulnerable children that they can change their gender via an expensive, irreversible, and experimental process might have consequences? Hopefully, anyone with common sense.
Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply among the activist groups and mainstream institutions that have forced gender ideology onto the public over the past several years. And now, the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.
In a lengthy piece for the New York Times this month, columnist Pamela Paul admitted the radicalism of gender ideology is hurting America’s youth. She recounted conversations with several detransitioners, those who identified as a gender different than their sex only to accept their biological reality later on, who had been convinced that the only solution to the mental and physical discomfort they felt was an immediate transition. And yet, almost all would now agree that their transition, which they will never be able to undo fully, made things worse.
One detransitioner, Grace Powell, a 23-year-old woman, said she started to feel awkward in her body when she was 12 or 13 and came to believe that her discomfort was the result of having been “born in the wrong body.” She began to transition physically in high school, Paul wrote, because “the narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.” By the time she graduated high school, she was on testosterone and had undergone a double mastectomy.
And not once throughout the entire process had a single one of Powell’s doctors, therapists, mentors, or friends “ask[ed] her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression,” Paul wrote. “At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.”
Another detransitioner, Kasey Emerick, also a 23-year-old woman, had both of her breasts removed at age 17. “I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay. … Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” she told Paul. She decided to detransition after realizing she had “lived a lie for over five years.”
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Paul Garcia-Ryan, a 32-year-old male, started his transition when he was 15 after a medical professional agreed with his belief that he must be a girl born into the wrong body. He began medically altering his body in college, eventually having surgery on his genitals. Severe complications from the procedure led him to detransition. “You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”
None of these adults can reverse or take back what’s been done to their bodies, nor can they erase the years of mental anguish they suffered as a result of being deliberately lied to about who and what they are. The truth that they’ve since come to discover is that they are human beings governed by unchanging biological realities, as we all are. The sooner our institutions rediscover that fact, the better.
Kaylee McGhee White is the editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
