The story of a former transgender - Walt Heyer
My grandmother made me a purple dress at age four. Eight years as Laura Jensen taught me this: we’re grooming kids into a lie. I never changed sex—I just recovered from childhood confusion.
Overview
Walt Heyer describes how childhood affirmation by his grandmother led him to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria in his thirties, undergo surgery, and live as Laura Jensen for eight years before studying psychology, pursuing psychotherapy, and detransitioning over twenty-five years ago. He now runs Transgender Regret, where he counsels people who regret transition, and argues that transgender identities are imposed on children by adults through indoctrination and grooming rather than being innate.
Full Video Summary
Walt Heyer recounts that his cross-gender feelings began at age four in 1944, when his grandmother, a seamstress, affirmed and groomed him by making him a purple chiffon dress. He says this childhood affirmation created lasting discomfort with his male body and eventually made it psychologically difficult to maintain the gender he believes God assigned him. After wrestling with these feelings through his teens and twenties, he married and had two children. In his thirties, a gender specialist diagnosed him with gender dysphoria and told him the cure was affirmation, cross-sex hormones, and gender reassignment surgery. He followed this protocol, became Laura Jensen, and lived as a transgender woman for eight years in San Francisco. During that period he studied psychology and, through psychotherapy, came to see his condition as a developmental disorder rooted in childhood rather than an innate identity. He detransitioned more than twenty-five years ago and now runs a counselling ministry called Transgender Regret. Heyer argues that children are not born knowing they are transgender, calling the idea nonsense and pure insanity. He believes adults introduce and impose transgender identities through affirmation and indoctrination, which he describes as a grooming process. He criticizes school programs that present gender as a spectrum to be discovered, asserting that they teach children “who they really aren’t,” and he calls such efforts child abuse. He also condemns drag-queen story hours and similar initiatives as sick behaviors that expand an adult agenda. He says he now works with detransitioners who contact him through his website, often after years of regret, saying their transition was the biggest mistake of their lives and asking how to restore the lives that were taken from them. He claims that many were never the gender they assumed, that detransition is valid because they never truly changed sex, and that people from three months to thirty years later seek his help. He cites a statistic that seventy to ninety-four percent of gender-questioning children will grow out of it by adulthood if not put on hormones or socially affirmed, and he warns that affirming a child in a cross-gender identity furthers an ideological agenda rather than providing genuine help. He adds that nothing exists beyond male and female, and that high suicide-attempt rates among young people reflect the harm of teaching them to be someone they are not.