Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

While Hollywood and the mainstream media are all abuzz about Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner’s announcement that he wants to live as a woman, a man who has “been there done that” says sex change surgery isn’t the answer.

Writing for The Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse, Walt Heyer, a popular writer and speaker who says he “suffered through” sex change therapy and lived as a woman for eight years knows that the surgery fixed nothing.

“It only masked and exacerbated deeper psychological problems” he says, and faults the push for transgender rights for obscuring the dark and troubling history of sex-reassignment surgery.

What most people aren’t aware of is the fact that transgender surgery has long been known to be a failure. It began in university based clinics in the 1950s and continued through the 60’s and 70’s until it became obvious that the surgeries were not successful and were, in fact, harmful. Most universities stopped offering the surgery at this point and the procedures fell into the hands of private surgeons.

“Without any scrutiny or accountability for their results, their practices have grown, leaving shame, regret, and suicide in their wake,” Heyer reports. ‘

People are also not aware that the three men most responsible for the transgender movement – Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Dr. Harry Benjamin, and Dr. John Money were all pedophilia activists.

Alfred Kinsey

Kinsey, the famous biologist and sexologist who believed all sexual acts were legitimate, including pedophilia, bestiality, incest, adultery, etc. added transsexualism to his repertoire when he was presented with the case of an effeminate boy who wanted to become a girl.

Kinsey consulted with an endocrinologist by the name of Harry Benjamin and the two of them decided to pioneer the concept of physically changing a person from one sex to the other rather than just allowing them to play “dress up.” This new gender status became known as transsexualism.

While consulting with other doctors to come up with a way to femininize the boy’s appearance, Benjamin began treating him with female hormones. The boy eventually went to Germany for partial surgery after which time Benjamin lost track of him.

“The third co-founder of today’s transgender movement was psychologist Dr. John Money, a dedicated disciple of Kinsey and a member of a transsexual research team headed by Benjamin,” Heyer reports.

The ambitions Dr. Money entered the field of transgender surgery in 1967 when a Canadian couple asked him to repair a poorly performed circumcision on their son David, who was a twin.

“Without any medical justification, Money launched into an experiment to make a name for himself and advance his theories about gender, no matter what the consequences to the child,” Heyer writes. “Money told the distraught parents that the best way to assure David’s happiness was to surgically change his genitalia from male to female and raise him as a girl. As many parents do, the Reimers followed their doctor’s orders, and David was replaced with Brenda. Money assured the parents that Brenda would adapt to being a girl and that she would never know the difference. He told them that they should keep it a secret, so they did—at least for a while.”

Meanwhile, Money reported on the success of David’s operation to the scientific community to build his reputation as a leading expert in the field of gender change; however, the truth was that by the age of twelve, the boy was severely depressed and refused to see Dr. Money. His desperate parents finally broke their silence and explained the gender reassignment surgery. Two years later, David chose to undo the gender change and live as a boy.

Dr. John Money

In 2000, at the age of thirty-five, David and his twin brother alleged that Dr. Money had sexually abused the boys during their office visits. Three years later, David’s twin brother died from a self-inflicted overdose; David would follow him a short time later when he committed suicide.

“The exposure of Money’s fraudulent research results and tendencies came too late for people suffering from gender issues, too. Using surgery had become well-established by then, and no one cared that one of its founders was discredited,” Heyer reports.

However, the prestigious Johns Hopkins University did care and conducted a study of the outcomes from Dr. Money’s gender clinic.

On August 10, 1979, the university announced its results. “To say this type of surgery cures psychiatric disturbance is incorrect. We now have objective evidence that there is no real difference in the transsexual’s adjustments to life in terms of job, educational attainment, marital adjustment and social stability.”

Dr. Jon Meyer, chairman of the gender clinic later told The New York Times: “My personal feeling is that the surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.”

Johns Hopkins closed the clinic less than six months later.

Other doctors were also coming to the same conclusion, such as Charles Ihlenfeld, an endocrinologist who worked with Benjamin and who shocked his colleague when he announced that 80 percent of people who want to change their gender shouldn’t do it because too many of these cases end in suicide.

But the surgeries continue, thanks to professionals such as Paul Walker, Ph.D., a homosexual and transgender activist who headed a committee consisting of a pedophilia activist, two plastic surgeons, a urologist and a psychiatrist who became the “Harry Benjamin International Standards of Care” in 1979 and breathed new life in the gender surgery movement.

Heyer sought Walker’s help in 1981 when he was suffering to come to terms with his gender and underwent reassignment surgery, living as Laura Jensen for eight years before realizing it was all a mistake.

“For the sake of others who struggle with gender dysphoria, I cannot remain silent,” Heyer writes. “It is intellectually dishonest to ignore the facts that surgery never has been a medically necessary procedure for treating gender dysphoria and that taking cross-gender hormones can be harmful. Modern transgender activists, the descendants of Kinsey, Benjamin, and John Money, keep alive the practice of medically unnecessary gender-change surgery by controlling the flow of published information and by squelching research and personal stories that tell of the regret, unhappiness, and suicide experienced by those who undergo such surgery. Negative outcomes are only acknowledged as a way to blame society for its transphobia.”

Heyer faults Walker for not telling him about the Hopkins study and its deadly conclusions and subjecting him to surgery that he must have known would do nothing to cure his gender confusion

Since them, he has experienced the shame and remorse of transgender clients who undergo these procedures. “Those who regret their decision have few places to turn in a world of pro-transgender activism. For me, it took years to muster the courage to stand up and speak out about the regret.”

Once again, Hollywood is proving how hiding a truth is sometimes the only way to make a bad story look good.

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