He Used To Be Trans—Here’s What He Wants Everyone To Know

Well, thank you, Ryan, for putting this panel together. It's a topic that everybody brings a different perspective to, and if you haven't come to the conclusion yet, this is very complicated, and it has many different layers, and I'm not sure that we're going to be able to get to all of them, but we definitely need to open up a discussion about it. I lived eight years as a female named Laura Jensen after undergoing gender reassignment surgery in April of 1983. I started as a four-year-old kid in 1944. So I'm bringing to this conversation today 74 years of firsthand experience in some way, either living it or trying to deal with it or trying to recover from it, and it's important, I think, to understand that everything that we've heard today is damaging to children, and I was damaged by this, and I have some very strong points of view. So I hope that you don't take exception to them. They come out of pain. They come out of real-life experience. I'm not trying to be hurtful to anybody, but I think that I have a website called sexchangeregret.com, and we get letters from either the parents or the transgenders themselves asking for help after they've lived the life like I did for 5, 6, 15, 18, 20, all the way up to 30 years, and they're saying, Walt, can you help me detransition? This was the biggest mistake of my life. I've met with people personally. We've had the honor and pleasure of working with people who are now detransitioning. Just recently, a schoolteacher, a pharmacist, and a good friend, Jamie Shoup. I think it's important for us to realize that there is actually nothing good about affirming a young boy 4 years old like my grandma did me. The moment you affirm a child like my grandma did, putting me in a purple chiffon dress and telling me how cute I was, how wonderful I looked, is at the very same moment that you're affirming that young person, you're telling them there's something wrong with them, that you're not right. That is child abuse. We need to begin calling it what it is. It's not affirming a child. It's causing them to be depressed and anxious about who they are. Then we go on to inject hormone blockers into them and begin altering their body. Can we begin to understand today from these discussions how destructive this is to the psyche? It's no wonder they end up with separation anxiety and bipolar disorder, dissociative disorders, schizophrenia, and many other disorders that they want you to ignore. They want to block any child from having access to psychotherapy. The only reason that I'm able to speak to you today is because after 46 years of dealing with this issue, I was able to detransition in 1990 after I had extensive psychotherapy, the very same psychotherapy that they're trying to prevent people from having. Why? Because they don't want them to detransition. Because somebody like me puts a real bad mark on the idea that it's all good, because it isn't. I've recently written a book, Trans Life Survivors, that has the stories in it. It's painful to get these emails from people whose lives have been totally torn apart. Men like myself who was married, had two children, had a career. I was an executive for American Honda Motor Company. One of those therapists who was an advocate for gender change surgery told me that what happened to you as a child wearing that purple dress, the only way to solve that is to have cross-gender hormones and undergo reassignment surgery. That's the solution. Well, I trusted his expertise because Dr. Walker had actually written the original international standards of care for treatment of gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria. I'm here because he was wrong. I'm here because those standards of care have morphed into what they're using today. They haven't changed much. Yeah, they've gone through revision after revision, but the basic idea is that when somebody comes in, they can self-diagnose their gender dysphoria. We are manufacturing transgender kids. We are manufacturing their depression, their anxiety, and it's turned into a huge industry that people are profiting from after kids' lives are completely torn apart. The most vulnerable people in our society and adults are tearing their lives apart. It's really beyond my understanding why we're even having this discussion because it shouldn't be happening. I don't believe any doctor who injects a young person with hormone blockers should have a license to do so. I would prefer that they not have that ability. And I hope that people begin to realize this and begin to speak up about it. There is absolutely nothing good about affirming somebody in a cross-gender identity because it destroys their life. We won't see the consequences of what they're doing today until 10 or 15 years later, and there'll be somebody else speaking up like I am, saying, it was horrible what they did to me. They never should have done it. The people are suffering. We're not trying to minimize their suffering. But why do we abuse them with hormone blockers and cut their bodies apart as a way to affect treatment? It's insane, actually. It doesn't make any sense. If we're just to pause and take a sober breath, it's insanity. When will we finally grasp this? Christina Olson, a research psychologist at Washington University, and I wrote the article, it was published in Public Discourse in 2017, June. She said, we do not know who the transgender kids are. One way or the other, we don't know who they are. Do you get that? We don't know who they are. That should sink in. They cannot actually identify who trans kids are except by them saying so. There is no test. There's no proof. A parent can actually cause a kid to be gender dysphoric by affirming them. The APA, which an article is going to come out in the Daily Signal in the next couple of days that I just finished last night, the APA, in their handbook in 2014, says kids are not born transgender. And yet, we're treating them with medical treatment as if they were and trying to alter them. They're not born that way. I want to say it again. We're manufacturing transgender kids. None of us should be a party to altering a kid's mind, his psyche, and sending them down the path where they're going to sit up here and say how their life was tore apart. And I'm the fortunate one. I got sober. I'm 33 years sober. I drank heavily and used cocaine as a way to try to mask the pain from having undergone the surgery as a way to cope with what grandma did in a purple dress. It confused me that when I was a little boy, 4, 5, and 6 years old, I began to want to be affirmed. I began to enjoy being affirmed. I became addicted to the affirmation and the attention. I mean, if a kid wants to steal all of the attention out of the room, all they have to do is say, I am a transgender. They can suck the life out of a room in a heartbeat. And the focus is right on them. And they can get anything they want, can't they? Nobody calls them out. Nobody says, how did you come to this conclusion? But we know how they came to the conclusion. Schools are giving them books. They're indoctrinating them. Parents are encouraging them. Online, they're in chat rooms suggesting groups of kids become transgender. It's a fad. Yes, there are people who are autogynophilia, but there's also people who are deeply troubled. Over 50% of the people that I've worked with, hundreds of people that I've worked with over the last 10 years, were sexually abused. Boys who are abused at a young age come to the conclusion that the only way they can prevent themselves from being sexually abused again is to cut off their genitalia and become females. In their mind, that is their defense mechanism for sexual abuse. Girls who are sexually abused want to be men as a way to fend off any intruder or sexual abuser because they will no longer be attractive for sexual abuse. Whether it's men or women, vast majority of them were abused as children. Many of them I sit with and talk with privately are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s before they're ever able for the first time to disclose they were sexually abused. It's too painful. I was sexually abused at 9 years old multiple times by my uncle. When I told my parents I was sexually abused, they said, oh, Uncle Fred wouldn't do that. Wrong. They said I was a liar. So now, I had worn a purple dress as a 4-year-old, I'd been sexually abused, and now I'm a liar. You know, it's not a real good way to start off life when you're not only 9 years old yet. We've got to start helping the young people. And when people ask for help from me, I have one simple thing I always ask them. Tell me what caused you to not want to be who you are. 100% of the time, they can tell me. They can tell me. I'm feeling the pain right now of them sharing with me some of these stories because even I weep. They're ugly. They're horrible. They're so deep, nobody wants to talk about it. But we better start talking about it. We're ruining an entire generation of young people. And it's serious business. I'm not pulling any punches anymore. And you shouldn't either. Thank you.