What Should Be Done With Adults Who Push Transitioning on Young People?

            For this Constitution Monday, I chose to write on a topic for which I do not know the constitutional basis. Actually, there may not be a constitutional basis for it, but there is definitely an ethical basis for it. I am referring to the practice in the United States and possible the world to push young men and young women into transitioning to the other sex.

            A close relative of mine considers all teenagers to be “crazy” – her term – including herself as an adolescent. She was describing the effects of the hormones raging through teenage bodies as they develop from childhood to adulthood. Most of the young people engaged in this evolution do not understand what is happening to their body or who they really are. They are all vulnerable to being lured into unhealthy decisions.

            One case in point is a young man known as Abel Garcia. He did not feel “masculine enough” as a teenager, so he assumed that he was female. In his early teens he happened on a YouTube video about transitioning, which planted a seed in his mind. He did not act on his feelings until after he graduated from high school. 

            Garcia sought help from a therapist, who told him in his first session that he was transgender. However, the therapist did not give him any reason for her diagnosis. He stayed with the therapist for five months and eventually moved out of the home of his parents. Shortly thereafter, he changed his name and sex on legal documents and began hormone treatments.

            A year later, the therapist gave Garcia a letter from his insurance company giving permission for “top surgery” (a term used for breast implants for boys or young men) and “bottom surgery” (penile inversion). Garcia had not requested permission for “bottom surgery” because he wanted to transition more slowly. He did, however, receive breast implants in 2018.

            Garcia claims that his doctors did not discuss any of the potential side effects of the surgery and hormone treatments. After his surgery, he experienced “numbness in his chest, genital atrophy, and a tremor on the left side of his body.” In addition, doctors did not mention how cross-sex hormones and surgeries would affect his fertility.

            In addition to having the surgery and hormone treatment, Garcia joined a LGBT support group in California. At first, the group showered him with affection. However, all affection vanished when he had a “falling out with a member of the group.” He “hit rock bottom.”

            Garcia also realized that he “was always going to be a man … a man who mutilated his body” to become a woman, only to recognize that he was “just a caricature of a woman.” Three to four months after the surgery to receive breast implants, he “admitted defeat and tried … to reverse everything.” He went to the same therapist who told him that he had not made a mistake but was still healing from surgery.

            Another therapist told him to not rush into reversal of everything because he did not know the damages that reversal would cause. He realized that there were no therapists who would risk being “accused of so-called conversion therapy” – banned in California.

            Garcia found help for detransitioning with Walt Heyer who also had tried living as a woman and went back to being a man. The same surgeon reluctantly agreed to remove the breast implants. Garcia recently had more surgery to “remove excess breast tissue and skin,” and now considers his detransition to be complete. “Medical professionals don’t really know what they’re doing, and the world is more cruel than I expected.”

            It is wrong for adults to push transitioning on the rising generation when they are so confused by the natural changes in their bodies. It is ethically wrong for therapists and medical professionals to change the body of a young person hormonally and physically without giving them full information as to the effects on all parts of their lives.