Vulnerable, disturbed individuals of all ages [are] hastily ushered into procedures that are nothing short of medical malpractice. Justice demands a reckoning in the form of penalties and strictures, for their sakes and for the sakes of others like them who may yet be saved from this Hippocratic Oath-breaking.
There are many memorable moments in Matt Walsh’s provocative new documentary What is a Woman? But perhaps the most chilling is when Walsh sits down with Scott (Kellie) Newgent, a biological woman who underwent sex-change surgery at age forty-two. Today, Newgent is fiercely outspoken about her transition regret. Her voice trembles with rage as she tells Walsh about her tireless uphill battle against a propaganda campaign that is sweeping away a generation of troubled youth. “We have five children’s hospitals in the United States,” she says, and then she pauses to pull up her sleeve, “promoting that.” “That” is a hideously long scar where her left arm was flayed to create a phalloplasty. Newgent suffers from regular vaginal infections, which she predicts will lead to a premature death.
One such hospital provided a double mastectomy to Chloe Cole, a young woman who was fast-tracked through a sex transition from ages thirteen to fifteen. By age sixteen, less than a year after the surgery, she realized she had made a terrible mistake. Today, she joins a courageous band of other “detransitioners” who hope to save other young people from the same fate. The New York Post recently profiled her together with Helena Kerschner, who first began her own transition as an adult. To obtain testosterone, all Kerschner had to do was book an appointment at Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, in Scotland, Sinéad Watson tells a similar story of adult transition, after a string of mental health crises that her gender clinic showed no curiosity in exploring before hormone treatment.
Detransitioning men’s stories have received less attention, but they are no less harrowing. One of them recently went viral on Twitter. Ritchie Herron began his transition as an adult, but like Newgent, Kerschner, and Watson, he was vulnerable and criminally under-informed. “No one told me any of what I’m going to tell you now,” he begins his Twitter thread. He then details the excruciating, irreversible damage caused by his own “bottom surgery.” Today, he is suing the NHS for damages.
Understandably, the discourse around gender transition tends to focus on cases like Chloe Cole—minor boys and girls who are socially brainwashed into making catastrophic, self-harming decisions. A new bill co-sponsored by congressmen Tom Cotton and Jim Banks specifically targets surgeons who offer sex-change operations to underage teens. It promises to attract wide bipartisan support not just from conservatives, but from liberals and libertarians who draw a line at trans “medical” experimentation on children.