Transphobic media continue to use Walt Heyer as source

Heya everybody,

I can spend only little time today on updates, but did want to quickly put a post on with regards to the exposure Walt Heyer got in the media (see here, here, here and here), following the public outing of Caitlyn Jenner as transgender.

Walt Heyer has been discussed several times on this blog; he is a person who was falsely disagnosed as transsexual, underwent sex reasignment surgery, only to revert back to his former, natal sex as a male.

Again, this post can only be short, and I don’t want to link back to my previous Walt Heyer articles, I just want to make the following very basic points:

• If you have a successful medical intervention that produces a 95 % success rate, you will naturally have 5 % of people whose lifes have not been improved by the treatment. This should be obvious to anybody.

• If you then start presenting people to the public who have not been helped by the procedure, without mentioning that the particular case is a rare event, you are doing a disservice to the public and you are lying.

• If a treatment fails to improve your quality of life because you have been falsely diagnosed and therefore received the wrong treatment, then that’s tragic. This means we have to work harder on improving the success rates of medical diagnoses.

• However, if this leads you to the conclusion that the condition you have been falsely diagnosed with doesn’t exist or that the treatment you received in error is not effective for the diagnosis, then you are either very, very stupid or dishonest.

• If you have been wrongly diagnosed with a health condition, and you are subsequently portrayed in the media as a former sufferer of this condition, then somebody is misrepresenting facts or lying outright.

These are the main points, which should be obvious to anybody with an honest and open mind.

Oh, one of the articles says: Heyer cited reviews of more than 100 studies of transgender individuals that found that sex change surgery is not ‘clinically effective.’ Well, I’m not aware this many studies even exist on the topic.

For 83 studies, reviews and articles on the topic, please have a look at the sex reassignment surgery section of my “What helps?” pages, which paint a very different picture of the matter. To me, Walt Heyer is either grossly misprepresented, or he is lying. And this misinformation does cost lifes.