A few years back, I gave a talk entitled “Thinking Through the Transgender Question” at a local parish. In the audience were several individuals supporting the trans­gender movement. During the question-and-answer session, one of them, a young woman, raised this difficulty:  

“If someone wants to transi­tion, how does that hurt any­body else? If my friend wants to be transgender, how would that harm any of us?” 

Behind this line of argument, first, is the widely held notion that each of us is an isolated unit and our private choices don’t affect oth­ers. Yet the old adage that no man is an island rings perennially true. Grave harms to others, in fact, fol­low in the wake of the radical per­sonal decision to “switch genders.”

I recently spent some time with a husband and wife who had a son struggling with depression and schizophrenia and who was con­vinced he was a woman. They shared with me how their son no longer spoke to any of his siblings or relatives, shutting everyone out of his life. He moved away to link up with the transgender community at his college for support, and his parents summed up his new way of thinking as the detonation of a bomb that had ravaged the whole family.

That kind of devastation has been thoroughly catalogued by those who have gone all the way through the process of transi­tioning, and years or decades later come to regret it. 

Walt Heyer is one such indi­vidual who turned to hormones and surgeries to try to take on the appearance of a woman. Many years later, he “detransitioned,” and started writing and speaking about his experiences. He has summarized the painful effects of his choices on those around him in several of his essays.

“Being transgender required destroying the identity of Walt so my female persona, Laura, would feel unshack­led from Walt’s past, with all of its hurt, shame, and abuse,” he wrote. “It’s a marvelous distraction for a while, but it isn’t a perma­nent solution when the un­derlying issues remain unad­dressed. Gender change is at its heart a self-destructive act. Transgenders not only annihilate their birth identity, they destroy everyone and everything in their wake: family, wife, children, brothers or sis­ters, and career.”

Walt had been married for many years, but after transitioning, he and his wife divorced. Communication with his children ceased. He was fired from his well-paying job as an engi­neer, and became practically destitute. Virtually all the significant relation­ships in his life were damaged, some irretrievably.

In his essay, Walt follows the trail of breadcrumbs in his own life to its logical conclusion.

“It occurred to me after much self-reflection that asking a sur­geon to modify my appearance through a series of cosmetic procedures was simply a socially acceptable means of self-mutila­tion and self-destruction,” he stated. “Taken to the extreme, self-destruction leads to sui­cide.”

Follow-up studies of those who undergo sex-change operations have shown that they experienced highly elevated suicide rates, even many years post-surgery, revealing yet an­other of the grave harms associated with transitioning that brings untold heartache to family and friends, rela­tives and acquaintances.

Beyond wreaking havoc in the life of patients and those around them, other damaging societal conse­quences arise in the wake of transi­tioning. 

In a recent article in Public Dis­course, Dr. Monique Robles, a pediat­ric critical care specialist, stresses how schools and institutions of higher learning are now “enforcing the use of preferred gender pronouns and opening bathrooms and sports teams to students of the opposite biological sex. Educators who refuse to comply are losing their jobs. Par­ents who do not agree with the trans-affirmative approach for their gender dysphoric children are faced with legal conse­quences. In the sports arena, biologi­cal males identifying as transgender are competing in women’s events with an unfair bio­logical advantage. Biological females who claim to be male are allowed the unfair advantage of competing while taking testoster­one, which is consid­ered ‘doping’ in any other circum­stance.”

Coming to the conclusion that “no one gets hurt” whenever some­one transitions is simply naïve, con­tradicted by the facts on the ground and by the tortuous lives of those pursuing this misguided “solution” to their gender confusion. They, along with their families and broader soci­ety, clearly deserve better. 

Instead of propping up a ficti­tious and harmful understanding of human masculinity and femininity, we owe it to those struggling with gender dysphoria to address compassionately their underlying mental health con­cerns. Through evidence-based ther-apies, including appropriate psy­chi-atric and interpersonal outreach and counseling, we hope to bring healing, preserve family unity, and help sustain important, lifelong friend-ships.

That’s what those struggling with their gender dysphoria deserve and all those who love them desire.

Copyright © 2020, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA. All rights reserved.