Walt Heyer: No Discussions For You

Apparently Mr. Heyer isn't interested in actually discussing his views.  I took the time to make it over to his blog and responded to his post So Many Different Issues Drive The Transgender To Surgery, and pointed out how wrong he was to infer from a Swedish study that increased rates of mental health issues among transsexuals meant that transition and GRS were an inappropriate treatment.

He deigned to allow the first couple of comments to stay, but after that he has just been deleting them.  As shown below.

Step 1, add new comment:

Step 2:  An hour later note that the commment has been removed:

Roughly translated, like most other anti-trans wingnuts, Walt Heyer cannot, and will not discuss the problems with how they are mangling data when it doesn't suit their particular dogma.

Wherein Walt Heyer Attempts To Invalidate Transsexuals In One Paragraph

I'll give Heyer this much - on the whole, he has tried to stay out of the usual language of invalidation and erasure that is so common among those who claim transsexuals are less than human.  However, somewhere along the way, he must have decided that he couldn't turn down the opportunity and makes the following statement:

It's easy to point out that DNA tells the true story of male or female.  In a court of law, you can convict a man of rape and murder just on the strength of a DNA test alone.  But a DNA test is never permitted to determine male or female sex gender for transsexuals in court?  Why is this?  Because a DNA test would prove with absolute certainty the transgender hormone therapy and surgery had failed to change a male into a female, or a female to a male.  Transgender activists know using DNA would expose the fraud and damage the social acceptability of changing genders.  Therefore, they have successfully prevented DNA from being used as the criteria to identify gender in the courts.

Wow.  Just Wow.  In one paragraph, Heyer has claimed that transsexuals are engaging in deliberate fraud, and on the other hand, the transsexuals out there are so astonishingly powerful politically that they have been able to stop the courts from using a particular piece of evidence to determine sex.

I'd love to know where this all powerful transsexual lobby is.  You'd think that it would be paying more attention to shutting down the malice and discrimination that transsexuals face on a near daily basis.  Further, I'm more than a little mystified how a tiny minority of the population which isn't terribly wealthy could hold that kind of clout.

Ah well.  I'm going to chalk that one up to being the fanciful musings of someone who lacks any coherent evidence to explain things more rationally.

Looking at his other claim about DNA, however, requires a little more careful handling.

First of all, Mr. Heyer is really referring to chromosomes and specifically Sex Chromosomes.  Men have XY chromosomes, and women have XX chromosomes.  Or so the general rule goes.  Sadly, general rules are prone to strange little things called exceptions.  Consider women born with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome  for a moment.  A woman born with CAIS has a Y chromosome, and yet developed in utero a female body.  To all outward appearances, and socialization, these people are women even though they have a Y chromosome. 

No doubt, Mr. Heyer would claim that an exception could be made in such a situation, after all the person had been born female.  (or was declared female at birth, more correctly)  His argument would be that such cases are so rare as to be irrelevant, or some such.  How rarity of a condition fits into dealing with transsexuals is a bit of a mystery to me - it's not like transsexualism constitutes a very large portion of the population to begin with, so making exceptions based on rarity seems a trifle ridiculous.

My underlying point is that there are very real conditions which Mr. Heyer's test would not work for, and these are people who are not transsexual themselves.

However, as other writers have pointed out, there is a great deal of evidence emerging that suggests that transsexuality may well have significant biological factors which influence it.  If you are going to make an exception for one case, why would you not make a reasonable exception in the case of a transsexual?  Especially in the absence of any conclusive evidence that transsexuality doesn't have significant biological factors involved?

However, Heyer seems to have fallen for the standard rightwing dogma that transsexuals are "fraudulent" somehow, simply because changing chromosomes isn't possible (yet!).  Well, unfortunately for him and his "allies" (I'm reluctant to call the likes of Peter LaBarbera an ally to anyone or anything), there are enough exceptions in the real world that trying to argue against transsexuals on this basis is really quite ridiculous. 

Allowing the original birth record gender to be altered has unintended consequences.  It can be misused, perhaps by a terrorist to hide his identity.  Or, some would say it will legitimize same sex marriage.  With an amended birth record in hand (changed from male to female), the new female would be free to enter into a legal marriage with a man.

First of all, the supposition about terrorists is really quite ridiculous.  You don't just walk into a clinic and have GRS one day on a whim.  No surgeon would touch you without supporting documentation from a therapist.  That's a red herring at best.

His comments about legitimizing same-sex marriage are equally ludicrous.  A gay male is a man who loves other men ... as a man ... having GRS would be anathema to such a person as they would no longer have something that they would consider essential to their masculinity. 

Ah ... the joys of listening to arguments that boil down to little more than a poorly considered attempt at erasure.  Sorry, Mr. Heyer, but you just haven't got this one.

Paper Genders: Taking Down The Arguments - Part 1

I've already given an overview of Walt Heyer's book Paper Genders in the Book Review: Paper Genders post.  These posts will delve into the details of the specific arguments and themes that Mr. Heyer relies on in making his case.  The problems in his arguments come in many flavors - some of them simple factual errors, others are more serious issues that need to be addressed.

Book Review: Paper Genders

I recently read through Walt Heyer's book Paper Genders.  What follows is a summary of my impressions of the book itself, and the validity of its arguments with respect to the treatment of transgender people.

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.