US — . On May 23, 2021, 60 Minutes aired a report “Transgender Healthcare”, which focused on individuals who feel they were rushed into transition and now regret it (known as ‘detransitioners’) . A young man, Garrett, was prescribed cross-sex hormones after his second appointment, had his testicles removed three months after starting on female hormones, and later got breast implants.
I didn’t get enough pushback on transitioning. I went for two appointments and after the second one, I had my letter to go get on cross-sex hormones. I had never really been suicidal before until I had my breast augmentation. And about a week afterward, I wanted to actually kill myself. I had a plan and I was gonna do it but I just kept thinking about my family to stop myself.
Grace Lidinsky-Smith became seriously depressed in her early twenties and developed gender dysphoria, but thought she had found the solution to her problems after learning about transgender communities online. She found a clinic and was given testosterone injections within months, and had a double masectomy four months later. Shortly after her masectomy, however, she began to feel like a part of her was missing. She stopped taking the hormones and complained to the clinic.
I started to have a really disturbing sense that like a part of my body was missing, almost a ghost limb feeling about being like, there’s something that should be there. And the feeling really surprised me but it was really hard to deny… I can’t believe that I transitioned and de-transitioned, including hormones and surgery, in the course of, like, less than one year. It’s completely crazy.
The four detransitioners profiled all said they’d learned about becoming trans via the Internet.
3:39 'Everyone is afraid to speak up'.
— mike connor (@mikeconnor504) May 24, 2021
Following the 60 Minutes report, CBS aired a bonus segment called 60 Minutes Overtime, which included an interview with Alphonso David, a lawyer and the president of the Human Rights Campaign. David expressed concern about suicidal young people who might be further victimized and marginalized by a “story taken out of context”. However, Lesley Stahl, the CBS journalist who led the Transgender Healthcare story, noted that she felt the detransitioners’ stories were worth telling. She said she could not remember any other 60 Minutes story she had worked where comments and criticisms began surfacing from advocates before the piece aired.
I think we spoke to more people on this story than any other story I can remember reporting on in my whole time at 60 Minutes. We wanted to be thorough. We wanted to be fair. And we wanted to understand every aspect of this story. And it was really focused on health care. That was the primary idea for the story. Health care.
A young person was given an orchiectomy three months into transitioning. 13-17 year olds are being given mastectomies. The numbers of detransitioners are in the thousands and that's on all of you because you all attack anyone who questions or even discusses this.
— catsies (@catsiesXX) May 24, 2021
Me too. It's a really tough situation and I'm happy at least a couple of us were on there- we deserve the whole 60 minutes but it's true that it's a start. Good work on the interview 💕
— Athena (@mothergender) May 25, 2021
Important Note: Suicide is preventable. In the United States, those looking for support can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which “provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across the United States.” (1-800-273-8255)
Read more from other sources
CBS News
State bills would curtail health care for transgender youth
Last month, Arkansas passed a law prohibiting doctors from treating transgender youth with puberty blockers, testosterone or estrogen, and surgery to assist their transitions.
CBS NewsInside the 60 Minutes report on transgender health care issues
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl reported on the health care challenges facing the transgender community, amid a spate of legislation being introduced in states across the country that would limit care for transgender youth.
Daily Mail
Lesley Stahl defends CBS 60 Minutes episode about transgender people rushing into treatment then regretting it: Young man was castrated after taking female hormones for just THREE MONTHS
CBS is standing by a recent episode of 60 Minutes which highlighted the stories of transgender teens who say they were rushed to transition and now regret it – amid complaints from furious LGBTQ activists who say it shouldn’t have aired.
A friend of my son just had “bottom surgery.” She-now-he looked forward to feeling euphoric at finally being “fully male.” Instead, she has sunk into a deep depression and I worry for her life. She has been told by medical professionals that it’s perfectly normal to experience this after the final surgery. If it’s perfectly normal, something is very wrong with how gender dysphoria is being treated.
Even trans data is showing that the rate of suicide attempts and successful suicides RISE following ‘transition’. That is why media conveniently focuses only on rate of suicide ideation (suicidal thoughts are self-reported in surveys to decrease after ‘transition’), because the actual suicide attempts and suicides would be too inconvenient.
This link discusses data from a trans-friendly study:
https://www.womenarehuman.com/seeking-the-truth-about-teen-suicides-and-puberty-blockers/
This suicide data is from a peer-reviewed journal:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885
So-called “bottom surgeries” for FtM/TIF have an astonishingly high rate of complications. Frequently these are severe and cause long lasting adverse health outcomes.
Even if your son’s friend has been fortunate in this regard, I concur with the points Diana has made above. Many trans men report feelings of body dysmorphia and severe depression leading to suicide attempt AFTER trans surgeries. It is shaping up to be a huge scandal.
Major, major major scandal. Electroshock ‘therapy’, gay conversion therapy, recovered memory syndrome, and oxycontin all rolled into one. But there’s money in it. The credible numbers I read, for just the surgery: market expected to go from 500K and change to 1.5 Billion by 2025. That doesn’t even count the lifelong hormone (powerful psychotropic drug s) dependency. Seriously. How is it not just completely obvious what’s going on here. I don’t live in the US but did the Stahl piece include th e money angle?
It’s not unusual for people to get a positive placebo effect after transition, but all the information I was instructed about before 2000 said this feeling of improved happiness/confidence did not last. And that’s when you had people with actual body dysmorphia. What’s happening now with adult men doesn’t seem to be the same thing- prior to 2000 trans people wanted to blend in. This group wants to stand out. As for girls, JKR is right- if you see a five thousand percent increase in patients with a condition- there were hardly any teen females with this condition prior to 2000- it should be studied as to why. That’s just good science. To me, the biggest problem I see is that children who couldn’t consent to getting their ears pierced or getting a tattoo are all the sudden allowed to decide major surgery. And notice the medical establishment is focusing much more on girls than boys. And let’s add, bottom surgery is often riddled with complications. I don’t want to be unkind to trans people but I’m not sure that giving a teen everything they demand is kind.
I tend to think that it was because they did not have much of a choice, as the behavior was not socially accepted, and often had consequences. Now that it is less stigmatized and even celebrated and embraced, more are able to be open. Some people think that the ones before were being the ‘true trans’, whereas I think freedom exposes the truth. If the same conditions – including rewards like power and praise – were in place at that time, I believe it would have resulted in the same pattern of behaviors.
Its funny how the gender lobby emphasises trans people are the most oppressed & hated group etc while simultaneously claiming that their recent growth in numbers is a result of social acceptance having occurred. These are contradictory claims.
I don’t think there is anything such as “true trans” in that I think that among adults body dysphoria/dysmorphia is a psychological symptom- and that it is the same for people who are convinced they are the wrong gender/sex, anorexics who think they are fat, or people who think they were meant to be an amputee. Even if the anorexic loses weight, she is happy only temporarily and then “needs” to lose more. And underlying problems must be addressed. No therapy – including transition- was seen as particularly helpful for people with gender dysphoria. Ever.
What I think is that now the majority of older men claiming they are “trans” are not feeling any dysphoria- they are just exploiting a psych illness to play dress up and get access to women’s rights and spaces.
Perhaps you are correct that losing stigma has made people with body dysphoria less depressed and emboldened, Diana. I don’t know.
In either case, I don’t see that the refrain “gender and sex are separate” can really be true for women. Our bodies define our life so much. If someone could present me with scientific evidence that gender dysphoria in adults had a biological cause, I would stop thinking it was a psych illness. But I wouldn’t say oh, then they’re the “person/gender they say they are.” I would just think they had a biological problem instead of a psychological one.
People who hold obviously false beliefs are absolutely common within the field of psychology. To a lesser extent everyone holds mildly self-deceiving views to flatter ourselves (or the opposite beat ourselves up too much about not being good enough).
I certainly accept there is a small minority of people who experience something akin to “true” dysphoria but I suspect their experience is not something “gender” specific but simply body dysmorphic disorder which is a condition well supported by evidentiary medicine. Gender theories have just handed them a convenient explanation that seems to anodynely expain their problems. These are psychological disorders, they cannot be fixed by surgery or forced-role-play. There are so many people in the world who have a body they don’t want, e.g. disabled people – they do not demand everyone must obey their whims.
Yes, the naive tolerance and sympathy society decided to give to the aparently-true-sufferers has unleashed pandora’s box of dysfunction and emboldened abusers who previously hid under rocks. Progressive values have given the latter a convenient shield from scrutiny that lets them hide under the cry “bigot” or “phobe”.
The gender/sex dichotomy is largely the product of postmodern academic sophistry. Relieved from evidentiary boundaries the humanities intellectuals turned down a sophist path since Foucault. You could almost call him a saboteur of Western civilization.
I’ve never understood how someone (especially, dare I say?: an otherwise healthy, pre-adolescent child) IS somehow, suddenly in today’s society, full of this nefarious-leaning inherent “obsession” with already equating their body and PERSONALITY to having to learn a “sexualized role playing game”; where, adults will have deemed it a “dysphoria” (if they DON’T) and go through all this outright, science fiction/bizarro-world lunacy over it(?).
Why would someone ever even invent the (ludicrously schizophrenic) notion of suggesting(?): they were “born in the wrong body”….IF ONLY *YOU* ARE “YOU”! The only way(s), just by logically trying to make sense out of observing human nature, one would think they’d come to such a possible extreme “solution” like the trans ideology (I’m convinced), would HAVE to be:
In the scenario of young male children:
(either)
Male-on-male abuse covered up by the family (essentially: the “dysphoria” being reason to want to “buy a new identity”).
or
Heavy-handed religious intolerance which would automatically assume a GNC child was gay and, the family/culture (in their eyes) would see it as a “shameful episode” they’d want a “medical cure” for (as is the case in places such as: Iran and Pakistan; but also, not so far removed from a similar attitude , strangely?, involving: Western Evangelicalism having a surprising neo-liberal view toward it as well).
In the scenario of older men foisting this BS (the proverbial “mid-life crisis”-decrying types):
MISOGYNY FUELLED BY PORN ADDICTION = ATTEMPTED “NORMALIZING” OF FETISHIZATION AND ABUSE OF WOMEN (AS SEXUAL PARTNERS) THROUGH POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND ECONOMICS (NOTHING this demographic promotes of itself across the Internet could make a rational person believe there was remotely any other kind of motivating factor behind their actions….NOTHING). This subset (at its core) is really not an adjunct of a peer group with same-sex-attracted sympathies, but it wants to exploit the legal standing of 50+ years of gay rights.
In the scenario of girls/young women indoctrinated by it:
(the simplest reason, yet: due to the medical nature of the “treatment” being far more substantial and life-altering for them, often the cruellest)
They feel it’s an “option” to try to avoid being subjugated to EVERYTHING BAD MEN DON’T WANT TO CHANGE ABOUT THEMSELVES (rather, than: society being forced to clean its own act up and admit what’s gone wrong with it).
The gender industry loves to parrot the term “fascism” like a manifesto talking point, while they can’t seem to define “gender” without it sounding like a 1957 tv show script. Madness.