To be nice about it, Walt Heyer is a man in a great deal of pain. He’s been through a lot, and he bears the scars of some unfortunate choices. Anyone reading his books should recognize this, and weigh his arguments accordingly.
Heyer wants to raise some serious questions and issues related to the whole process of transition and gender reassignment as it is carried out today. Unfortunately, raising serious questions by making bold accusations of professional misconduct and “activist conspiracy” doesn’t exactly make for a compelling argument.
For example, the book starts off by borrowing heavily from a relatively recent study that talked about the high rates of suicide ideation and attempts within the transsexual / transgender community.
Heyer’s own interpretation of this seems to be that the suicide rate is a consequence of dissatisfaction with the results of treatment that went down the transition and surgery path.
The gender change activists would argue the suicides are a direct result of bullying, a popular scapegoat these days. The advocates also say the lack of transgender acceptance and the difficulty of being gender variant in a society of heterosexuals lead to suicides, but as the last transgender support site disclosed, transgenders harm themselves either by cutting or self-mutilation which points to deep unresolved psychological issues.
The actual study makes no such inference at all, and in fact is much more clear on the probable causes of suicide ideation and attempts among transgender people than Mr. Heyer’s conjecture:
Actual Study:
http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_report_on_health.pdf
Those who were bullied, harassed, assaulted, or expelled because they were transgender or gender non-conforming in school also reported significantly elevated levels of suicide attempts (51% compared with 41% of our sample as a whole). Most notably, suicide attempt rates rise dramatically when teachers were the reported perpetrators: 59% for those harassed or bullied by teachers, 76% among those who were physically assaulted by teachers and 69% among those who were sexually assaulted by teachers. These numbers speak to the urgency of ending violence and harassment of transgender students by both their peers and their teachers.
Education and income both correlate with suicide rates, with those earning $10,000 annually or less at extremely high risk (54%), while those making more than $100,000 are at comparatively lower risk (26%), while still astronomically higher than the general population. Those who have not completed college attempted suicide at higher rates (48% among those with no high school degree, 49% for those with a high school degree only, and 48% for those with some college education) while those have completed college (33%) or graduate school (31%) have sig- nificantly lower rates.
Those who had survived violence perpetrated against them because they were transgender or gender non-conform- ing were at very high risk; 61% of physical assault survivors reported a suicide attempt, while sexual assault survi- vors reported an attempt rate of 65%.It is disappointing to note that although Mr. Heyer has spent some time pulling his information from a couple of reasonably good community websites (Laura’s Playground, and other Transgender community websites mostly), but does not seem to have been willing to find the actual report itself and reflect upon its contents.
Perhaps somewhat unique is Heyer doesn’t spend his entire time trying to accuse transsexuals of being deluded people. Instead, he seems to reserve much of his ire for the “treatment community”, and engages in a wholesale attack upon the mental health practitioners, surgeons and doctors who provide treatment to transsexuals.
He attempts to discredit some key people in the early days of clinical research into transsexuals by tying them to Alfred Kinsey, and using a rather sloppy 'guilt by association' argument, tries to imply that these people were all pedophiles or supporters of pedophilia and therefore should not be trusted at all.
The pedophile connection is very difficult to ignore with Dr. Alfred Kinsey followed by Dr. Harry Benjamin, then Dr. John Money, the co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. All three men, it appears, did not advocate for any other therapies, only for the freedom to switch genders. They set out to redefine how men and women were made and for them it was not in the womb. ...As the Kinsey Institute has pointed out in its refutation of the attacks on Kinsey, he was not a pedophile. Since it appears that he derives his idea that Kinsey was a pedophile from Dr. Judith Reisman, I'll point out what happened when she tried to sue the Kinsey Institute after they refuted her claims that Kinsey was some kind of sexual predator. Further, "guilt by association" arguments don't exactly make for terribly convincing reading. They tend to lead me to suspect that someone was desperately reaching for it.
Heyer also draws upon Dr. Paul McHugh's arguments related to transsexuals as expressed in McHugh's First Things opinion piece a number of years ago. The problems with Dr. Paul McHugh's claims are addressed on this blog in an article called "Debunking Dr. Paul McHugh".
Overall, the arguments that Heyer makes in his book come across more as an expression of rage and frustration rather than a coherent call for meaningful changes in the diagnosis and treatment of transsexuals.
I respect that Mr. Heyer has been deeply traumatized by his experiences, and that this book, along with Trading My Sorrows is a sincere effort on Heyer’s part to give voice to what he has experienced and how it affected him. However, much of what Heyer has said in his book, as I will discuss in more detail later, is almost pure allegation lacking any meaningful grounding in objective evidence.
His accusations against the treatment professionals are profound and troublesome, as he does little to provide concrete evidence to back up his claims. Inference and innuendo are his primary tools of attack, with a healthy dose of borrowing from the standard religious right-wing book of accusations against Alfred Kinsey.
Although he claims to be an advocate for “better” treatment paradigms, Mr. Heyer fails utterly to even begin the process of exploring what form those treatments might take, a flaw in his overall approach that leaves one wondering just what it is that he has in mind for transsexuals beyond squelching the current treatment paradigms.
It is very much my opinion that while Heyer may have set out to raise some significant questions and issues related to the treatment of transsexuality, he ended up seeking an externalized justification for his own actions over the course of his life. Instead of taking responsibility for his own actions and the outcomes thereof, his book reflects an attempt to make someone else responsible for what he has experienced.
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