07-04-2021 (date of first publication in Dutch on this site)
The following text is a short summary of the article Bravo to the Truth: What’s Wrong with Transgender Ideology – Public Discourse (thepublicdiscourse.com) written by Walt Heyer. Walt Heyer is a man who lived as a woman for 8 years, but who eventually came back to identify as a man. He has his own website. Walt Heyer Ministries | Rethinking Transgenderism .
The prevailing norm to be a “real” trans woman or trans man nowadays is simply that one wants to identify oneself as belonging to the opposite sex, different from the biological sex. When people feel that their biological sex does not match their “gender feeling”, it is described as gender dysphoria. There are no tests that can show that someone is truly transgender. There are also no legally established standards for this. Being transgender is purely based on feelings. The diagnosis is made on the basis of the “self-identification” of the person concerned. In fact, anyone can now claim to be a trans man or woman. The sex change itself, on the other hand, is a very radical process with hormone treatment and sex surgery. However, feelings can change, even if they can sometimes be very strong. Therefore, feelings do not provide a good basis for a diagnosis that leads to irreversible treatments.
Sometimes a comparison is made with so-called intersexuality. However, that is something else. Intersexuality can be determined biologically, being transgender cannot. People who identify themselves as transgender usually have a typically male or female anatomy.
In the case of a sex change, one looks for a professional therapist and after a number of sessions the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is made. However, when a therapist is found through contacts in the transgender community, that therapist will not be so neutral and will be more likely to recommend sex reassignment. The evaluation should also consider possible links with sexual problems such as abuse and addiction, and mental problems such as narcissism, autism and bipolar disorder.
There are guidelines for guiding people with gender dysphoria. Currently, however, these are almost mainly aimed at confirming the declared transgender identity and one is not obliged to observe them.
People sometimes regret their sex change later on and the number of suicide attempts is high, both before and after the sex change. However, those who return to the innate sex after a sex change, as in the case of Walt Heyer, are labeled by transgender activists as an unreal transgender. They are perceived as a threat to the transgender movement, which is mainly looking for confirmation of transgender identity.
Ed.: On the date of publication of this article, it became known that the U.S. state of Arkansas prohibits all operations and treatments of underage transgender residents. Similar legislation is being considered in at least twenty other states. This seems to indicate a growing alertness to the problematic aspects of this now established and common practice. In a document dated 10-06-2019, the Congregation for Catholic Education has clearly spoken out against the idea that a person can determine his gender. In fact, this is also the case biologically, because transgender women, for example, cannot menstruate or become pregnant and transgender men do not produce sperm cells. Notwithstanding any therapeutic good intentions and “neo theological” acquittals, this remains a self-mutilation and a denial of the god-willed order of creation, in which human reproduction through the two sexes plays an essential role. The mental disconnections thus created have far-reaching consequences (social, family, religious, psychological…), which the coming generations will increasingly have to deal with.