My email inbox has exploded lately with requests from transgender people wanting to find a “good therapist” who will help them detransition—that is, go back.
Transgender people who want to go back understand that consulting the gender specialists who helped them get into the transgender mess doesn’t work. Like the cult leaders in Jonestown in the 1970s, gender therapists push clients to “drink the Kool-Aid” of hormones and surgery and gender activists punish those who want to leave. I know this because it happened to me.
Four troubling stories of reckless treatment, regret, and suicide attempts landed in my inbox in just the last few weeks. The first three are brief. The fourth provides an in-depth look at how a young woman of just 18 can get pushed into harmful changes that will affect her entire life.
1. A Tale of Blessedly Averted Suicide
This person started the transgender process at age 15. He writes:
Walt, please help. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to live my life. I’m 32. I’ve lived my entire adult life ‘as a woman. My parents, especially my mother, pushed me through this process, starting at age 15. It has taken me many, many years to reveal the lie to myself, and my life depended on that lie. That lie is repeated by nearly everyone I have ever known and trusted, and that lie is forced on me, because they need to believe it even more than I did. This past Monday, the 17th, I attempted suicide for the first time in my life. I didn’t expect to fail…I purchased several fentanyl patches in the highest strength and applied them with a heat pack to make sure they released enough to kill me. I gave away all my things and my money and my pet cat and said goodbye to my dearest friend. After wearing the patches for a few hours I began to realize they had been stored improperly—when the dealer sent them to me, although they were still covered by a plastic film, they had been removed from their airtight envelopes for shipping, and storing them for so long must have destroyed their potency. After lying in bed for a day and a half I realized with embarrassment I was not about to die.
Teenagers do not have the capacity to make decisions of this importance, and adults should not be telling them the “lie.” It’s a lie that children need a gender change. It’s a lie that someone can change his or her sex. It’s child abuse to withhold life-saving psychological treatment for teens with depression.
It’s no surprise that the person to whom the lie was told would attempt suicide after transitioning. The same thing happened to me. Like this person, it took me many years to reveal the lie to myself, and when I did, the realization of what I had done to myself led me to also attempt suicide. Thankfully, we both failed.
2. Only Two Years After Surgery, He Regrets It
Another person recently wrote me:
Please help me! I’m male to female and had sex change surgery two years ago.
Call me. I’m in Canada.
Only two years after surgery, and this person is screaming for help. People from three weeks to 30 years after surgery have seen my website and contacted me for help to get their life back.
3. Young Woman Struggles with Feelings of Being a Boy
This 20-year-old wrote to me from Italy about her desire to be a boy, yet she is aware that her childhood problems could be a contributing factor to this desire. She fears that gender specialists will push cross-sex hormones and surgery on her and not help with her childhood trauma.
I’m a 20 year old girl who knows that she’s a girl. In these days I’m depressed and suicidal, because I don’t know what to think or do. I don’t want to go to specialist because I’m afraid he tells me I must undergo a surgery…what do you think/ suggest me?
Maybe are there other problems of my childhood to solve that can lead to solve this problem?
Please, help me, for my goodness and of my mum that doesn’t know anything…. I love her from the bottom of my heart. I want to live in my body happily.
I know you can feel my pain dear Walt. I hope to meet you one day.
Thanking you in advance.
4. An 18-year-old Woman Regrets Transition by Age 20
Sydney, a bright and engaging woman on the verge of her 21st birthday, has a heart-rending story of going from female to male and back again that she asked me to share. She’s one of the lucky ones—still young enough to have a “do-over” without having wasted many years like so many of us. I was pleased to hear her say that I had played a part in her journey.
She started our conversation with this email:
Hey Walt!
I just so happened to stumble upon your website! I think it is so amazing what you are doing. I myself was searching for positive detransitioning articles when I found your website. I transitioned from female to male as soon as I turned 19… it has been the biggest regret of my life. I try not to be discouraged because I did choose to detransition back. But I currently am very discouraged because I’m afraid I will no longer be a presentable looking female or how I was before.
For about a year, Sydney injected herself with male hormones prescribed by a physician, no questions asked. She stopped last August, but still gets mistaken for a male. She says, “I can’t even go in the women’s restroom without getting pulled out.”
Sydney grew up in the U.S. South, splitting her time between divorced parents, and had little exposure to trans people. The first time she says she saw a transgender male was on Instagram after she left home at 18. The imagery of a fit, muscular, attractive bearded transgender male lit up feelings of jealousy. She wanted to be trans because “my family was very discouraged and very enraged that I was a lesbian. I guess you could say I was a self-hating gay. I felt guilty for being that way.”
Sydney rashly married a woman she had known only for six months and thought being transgender would make their relationship more socially acceptable than being a lesbian couple. Sydney’s self-hatred, she says, was her way to act out something unresolved deep within her—a painful experience from childhood.
Like Sydney, some who identify as trans are “acting out” as an unconscious way to self-medicate, escape, and disconnect from the pain of unresolved early life trauma. People often blame themselves for the harm they endured, which can manifest as self-mutilation, such as cutting and gender change.
The tragedy is that gender therapists are more than willing to skip over the deeper issues and quickly encourage the person toward cross-sex hormones and surgery. The regrettable outcomes only emerge after the transition is done, with detransitioning and suicides.
I see this pattern over and over in the stories of people who contact me wanting help with detransitioning. It happened to me, too. I told my therapist I was sexually abused, but he ignored it as irrelevant. It wasn’t irrelevant at all—abuse is linked with gender distress.
Getting on Hormones Remains Far Too Easy
Sydney cut off her beautiful long, blonde hair and found a gender therapist. She told the therapist she wanted to start hormones on her 19th birthday, which was only a couple of weeks away at the time, and the therapist did not seem to mind. She gave Sydney a paper with warnings and information on the use of cross-sex hormones. Sydney shared that she had fears about transitioning, as well as some second thoughts. The therapist advised Sydney to take some time and make a list of pros and cons to help her decide.
To her credit, Sydney spoke up, confiding in the therapist about her childhood trauma, thinking she would want to explore those issues prior to any hormone therapy or transitioning. But no, the therapist provided no diagnoses or talk therapy, only a referral to an endocrinologist to get her started on male hormones. The ease of the process shocked Sydney.
Sydney was employed and knew her company couldn’t legally say or do anything about her transition because of the employment laws. Even so, some brave souls personally advised her to wait and take some time. Sydney says “I wished I would have,” and now regrets not listening to them.
Sydney said everyone else was encouraging her to transition to male, with comments like “Since you’re pretty you’ll make a hot guy.” Physical beauty is a strange litmus test for undergoing something so seismically life changing. The harm prevention protocol for prescribing cross-sex hormones—powerful drugs with serious side effects—is nonexistent. As Sydney’s experience (and many others) show, all who want hormones get them.
Sydney’s endocrinologist, in a brief exchange, told Sydney she could go pick up the male hormones. When Sydney asked how to administer the shot or if he would do it, he told her to watch videos on YouTube and do it herself. It didn’t turn out well.
“After months on hormones, my parents begged me to quit, telling me I was killing myself, which I felt like I was. I had gained 50 pounds, I was prediabetic, my blood was starting to thicken which was going to cause clots,” says Sydney. Sydney, formerly a healthy, beautiful girl, was a transgender male with major health problems merely one year later.
Thankfully, a Concerned Family Member Intervened
About that time, Sydney’s grandfather contacted me for advice and information. Full of love for his granddaughter and deeply concerned for her health, he did not want her life to end this way. I suggested he order my book “Paper Genders,” which gives insight into the twisted ideology of transgenderism and its pedophile founders.
As Sydney tells it: “My grandfather who I love more than anything and anyone in this world asked me to quit and to read ‘Paper Genders.’ So I stopped hormones immediately, cold turkey, left my wife of two years who was very toxic, and at my grandfather’s invitation, went to stay with him and my grandmother.”
Now I want to make it clear: I never recommend well-meaning family members give this book to a trans family member because its frankness usually only makes the person angry. In this case, predictably, Sydney was angry, but her grandfather’s risk-taking paid off. Sydney says she would read a little bit and put it down, then read a little more and put it down.
Stopping the hormones abruptly brought more health problems. Sydney quickly lost the 50 pounds gained previously, but for the wrong reason: extreme nausea and pain, which put her in the hospital. She felt she was dying. But thankfully, after a time, medical treatment and a loving home with her grandparents settled things down.
Sydney contacted me because she wanted her story told to help others like her:
So at first it [detransition] was a little difficult but I have found my ways to deal with everything. I am currently trying to get back to myself as I was before. It is just a journey on the way.
My goal is to save people the pain of going through it [transition] and helping them get through the ‘now’ trouble instead of encouraging a temporary fix that will only depress them more later once they wake up.
Sydney was fortunate to have a grandfather who would not stand idly by and witness the destruction of his granddaughter.
These four examples in my inbox over the past couple of weeks demonstrate reckless treatment, withholding of psychological counseling, subsequent regret, and suicide attempts for people with gender dysphoria. The cries for help keep coming in.
Like Sydney, my goal is to save people the pain of going through an unnecessary gender change and to give the survivors hope and resources. That’s why I wrote the book “Trans Life Survivors,” which features research, examples, and resources for therapists, families and trans-identified people.
If I could get people to take away one thought, it would be this: People with gender dysphoria desperately need psychological counseling first—before any medical intervention—to prevent pain, suffering, and wasted years. You have much to gain and nothing to lose from stopping to think before you leap.
