This commentary is by Val Werner, a Quechee resident and a transgender advocate.
Recently, the organization Parents’ Rights in Education held an event with famous anti-transgender speaker Walt Heyer in Vergennes. Because PRIE has published a recording of the talk online, it is easy to point out some of Heyer’s most blatant falsehoods.
1. In attempting to show that doctors who practice gender-affirming care are concerned about young people transitioning, Heyer quotes Erica Anderson, who he claims is a “surgeon” and “(World Professional Association for Transgender Health) member” who practices “gender medicine.” However, Erica Anderson is not a surgeon. She is not even a medical doctor. She is also not a “WPATH member.” (She resigned several years ago.) She is a clinical psychologist who advocates for “gender exploratory therapy,” an approach that fundamentally seeks to decrease medical transition in youth.
2. Heyer claims that “the studies are showing 50% of people who go through (gender-affirming) surgical procedures suffer complications.” I don’t know what studies Heyer is referring to, but a 2018 study by Lane et al. of gender-affirming procedures performed on insured patients between 2009 and 2015 found only a 5.8% rate of complications across all gender-affirming surgeries.
3. Responding to Heyer’s reference to a Swedish study that reports a “19 times higher suicide rate up to 10 years after having hormones and surgery” is complicated, but journalist Zinnia Jones has addressed this thoroughly, as opponents of medical transition have leaned heavily on this study for years. Jones also points out that a more recent Dutch study shows a dramatically lower suicide rate over the entire transgender population post-transition than does the Swedish study.
4. Heyer references the TransYouth Project, an ongoing 20-year longitudinal study being conducted at Princeton University. However, Heyer appears to misunderstand the purpose of a longitudinal study. Because this study is planned to last 20 years, Heyer falsely attributes to researcher Kristina Olson the idea that “it will be at least 20 years before we have information as to who will benefit, if anyone, from hormones and surgery” and falsely quotes her as saying, “we’ll be able to hopefully answer which children should or should not transition.”
The website for the TransYouth Project states unambiguously that “we can’t help families make decisions about what is right for them.” Also, to Heyer’s claim that “it will be at least 20 years” before we see findings from the TransYouth Project, a peer-reviewed article was published in 2018 called “Early Findings From the TransYouth Project.”
5. Heyer claims that if you visit the subreddit “r/detrans,” you will find “about 50,000 regretters.” In fact, what you will find is about 48,300 people subscribed to the subreddit, meaning they’re interested enough in the topic of detransition that they want to see posts about it on their Reddit feed. This does not mean every single one of them has detransitioned.
And it’s also important to note that not every person who detransitions would like to be referred to as a “regretter.” Some people who have detransitioned see their initial transition as a neutral or positive part of their past, even if it didn’t turn out to be right for them in the long run.
This is by no means all of the demonstrably false information in Heyer’s talk, but I need to stay under 800 words, and (like Heyer) I’m not a medical doctor, so I’ve only shared the ones that are easiest for me to respond to.
In the interest of helping concerned parents who may have found their way to the YouTube recording of Heyer’s talk, I left a comment addressing some of this misinformation on the video itself. When I checked back later that day, the comment had vanished.
