Walt Who?

Recently, I came across someone who seems to have become the latest darling of the anti-transsexual crowd.  His name is Walt Heyer.  Mr. Heyer appears to be one of those unfortunate enough to have attempted gender transition, only to discover that it was the wrong path for them.  Unfortunately, Mr. Heyer has decided that blame for his misfortune lies at the feet of the treatment community, and now he has set out to discredit the treatment community.

In the last few years, he has published a couple of books that I will be discussing in some detail on this blog:  Trading My Sorrows, an autobiography of his transition and detransition, and Paper Genders which is his first attack on the treatment community that deals with Transgender people.

I'm going to spend more time on Paper Genders in a subsequent series of posts, as the nature of the book requires a substantially more in-depth treatment to adequately address.

However, I am profoundly concerned with Mr. Heyer putting himself forward as a spokesman for the treatment of transsexual people.  There are a few problems with his story that lead me to suspect that while he may be transgender to some degree, he attempted transition in one of the most dangerous ways that is possible.

Consider the following from his book Trading My Sorrows:

Alcoholics can be baffling and incomprehensible in their way of thinking.  I formulated a simple plan for living my life after surgery.  I would live as two people, living simultaneous lives.  The male, Walt, would continue to work as a male after the surgery, using a male identity.  Off-work time would be reserved for the female persona known as Andrea West.  This way I thought both the female and the male could each reign supreme, and my conflict would be resolved.  This seemed very logical and workable.  I thought that I would finally be at peace.

It’s hard to describe how the desire for surgery takes over, especially when combined with abuse of alcohol.  It took on the appearance of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like a bulldozer pushing me relentlessly and single-mindedly toward surgery, while destroying every obstacle in its way.  Lying, cheating, and manipulating were my tools of the trade.  I became expert at persuading everyone that surgery was the treatment I needed.  In my compulsion to have surgery, I plowed right through and over everyone and everything that stood in my way.  Too bad hindsight always comes too late for us to see how truly stupid our process is.

In preparation for the surgery, I underwent a series of plastic surgeries, such as breast implants, buttocks implants, a nose job and removal of my facial hair through the painful process of electrolysis.  People at work were starting to look at me funny.  They knew something was changing with me, but they were mostly silent.  I anyone asked, I made up something in my usual cover-up behaviour

Okay, so, by Heyer's own admission he was struggling with alcoholism, was clearly not living full-time in role prior to surgery, and more distressingly had no apparent plans to live full time as a woman post-surgery either.  Even more important, we find Heyer admitting to engaging in deceit to get to surgery in the first place. 

To my understanding and experiences of the subject of transition, this is a recipe for disaster.  Not only does the candidate have significant comorbid conditions which are arguably likely to impair their judgement (in particular alcoholism), but it's also quite debatable just how honest the individual is being with themselves. 

A key aspect of a successful transition requires the person undertaking the transition to be brutally honest with themselves throughout the process.  Further, it is vitally important that the patient be very frank with their psychotherapist about what they experience, especially when it comes to living in the chosen gender role.  If, as Heyer says, his "tools of the trade" became Lying, cheating and manipulating, it is hard to believe that he was being completely honest with himself or the treatment professionals he was working with.

Heyer made a couple of feints at getting Gender Surgery, and for one of them he relays the following story:

Depending on whom you talked to, I was going on a “business trip” as I told my family, or taking a “vacation” as I told my employer.  Lying came so easily to me now.  There’s a saying:  “How can you tell if an alcoholic is lying?  His lips are moving.”  My true destination was Trinidad, Colorado.  My true purpose was surgery.  I shared the details with you earlier:  how I panicked and walked the streets of town, torn apart by the conflict raging in my head, and finally I backed out, and returned home to tell my wife what I had almost done.

So, not only did Mr. Heyer lie through his teeth to his employer at this stage, but he also lied to his family.  This does not sound to me like someone who is setting the groundwork for a supportive environment as they move into a new gender role.  If you are lying to everybody around you, how honest are you being with yourself?  More distressingly, Mr. Heyer freely admits to experiencing significant concerns about having the surgery done.  This is another sign of someone who is neither ready for Gender Reassignment Surgery or for that matter even living full time as a woman. 

In mid-October, six months after my surgery, my boss Tom and I met for one of our regular evening meals together.  Somehow I managed to get  the words out:  that I had undergone gender reassignment surgery and my new name was Laura Jensen.  As he gasped for air, I thought I may need to call 911 to revive him.  He was more than stunned.  He asked me to clarify what I had said.  I told him again.  "I have no idea how to handle this," he said.  "I'll need to take this to the president."  That seemed reasonable.  Having an employee undergo this kind of radical surgery was hardly an everyday occurrence.

About noon the following day, Tom asked me to go home until they could work out the details.  I could understand that.  They needed to work out the details of how they would handle it with the other employees.  Maybe they would move me into an inconspicuous office, away from intense scrutiny.

So, when Mr. Heyer finally did screw up the courage to undergo surgery, he still wasn't living full time as a woman.  Nor did he set the stage at his workplace prior to undergoing surgery.  This was the early 1980s, and at the time most formal gender treatment programs would have been exceptionally strict about the idea of a one to two year "Real Life Test" (RLT).  How he managed to side step this requirement is a bit of a mystery to me, but I don't have his clinical history at my fingertips, so I'll take it as a given that he found a way to do so.

It wasn't a birthday party.  They had their ducks lined up.  In return for six months' severance pay, I was to go away quietly.  I wasn't ever to tread on Honda property again or discuss my termination with anyone.  If I resisted or fought them, they would justify their decision to "lay me off" by saying that my position had been eliminated.  They had a document they wanted me to sign.  They assured me that fighting the termination would not be in my best interests, and promised that they would make my life miserable if I didn't go quietly. ...

Dropping the idea of GRS on your boss after the fact is not a tactic that is going to win you any friends in the workplace.  A successful transition includes workplace transition, as that is a place that we spend a significant chunk of our lives.  I don't find it particularly surprising that Heyer found himself in deep trouble work wise after that.  Not only had he dropped a significant bomb on his boss's desk, but his boss would also find himself feeling that his employee had been lying to him for an extended period of time. 

I picked a lady who specialized in dissociative disorder and met with her in her elegantly decorated office on the top floor of a plush Beverly Hills office building for many weeks in order for her to evaluate me.  When her evaluation was complete, she called me to come in.  Sitting there in her office, she began to tell me I indeed had a dissociative disorder and for the first time, I wanted to know what it meant.  She said it was the latest name for multiple personality disorder.

In her view, the combination of the discipline by my mom and dad, the cross-dressing in the purple dress by Grandma, and the molestations by Uncle Fred, all together, were the ingredients for the development of the dissociative disorder, or multiple personality disorder, that I had been suffering from and dealing with all my life. ...

Tragic as this is, we have to recognize that Mr. Heyer admits earlier on that he was not being wholly honest with himself and those around him.  It is entirely likely that his interactions with the therapists who ultimately gave the recommendation for surgery in the first place that his deceptiveness was sufficient to hide the symptoms of his conditions from his therapist(s).

Mr. Heyer seems to have failed a key aspect of transition - namely that of being honest with yourself and your treatment team.  The results of that dishonesty, while tragic, cannot be attributed solely to the treatment team.  Mr. Heyer needs to take responsibility for his own role in the tragedy of his attempt at transition.