WASHINGTON
“I realized I am a guinea pig,” Forrest Smith said of his transition from male to female at age 19. After five years, Smith de-transitioned. He spoke about his personal journey at a briefing on Capitol Hill on March 12, Detrans Awareness Day, first observed in 2021 to promote awareness of individuals who realized they were wrong to try to change their genders.
Now 29, Smith recognized his place as a member of the first generation of kids who grew up with unfettered access to the internet, where he discovered erotic cartoons. The online experience “shaped my sexuality” and “steered me toward fetish pornography,” he said.
Smith started cross dressing, dropped out of college and was living on the streets when he began to pursue transitioning from male to female.
At an event sponsored by Genspect, which advocates for “a non-medicalized approach to gender-related distress,” as well as the Heritage Foundation and Ethics and Public Policy Center, Smith noted that he once thought his parents’ failure to see him as a trans girl was a form of “abuse.”
After five years that included the surgical removal of his testicles and top surgery (breast augmentation), Smith realized that he had taken the wrong path. He de-transitioned, but he’ll never get back the body he had before treatment.
Smith can never father children and now describes himself as “an amputee.”
Chloe Cole, now 20, transitioned at 15. She spoke of having mental health challenges, as well as autism. After she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, Cole took cross-sex puberty blockers and had a double mastectomy.
“If it weren’t for me using social media as an adolescent, I don’t think I ever would have transitioned, let alone believed I was a boy,” Cole told the panel.
In this brave new online world, teens who express interest in switching genders can find themselves sucked into “The Pipeline” — as detransitioners call it — that quickly pushes teens with doubts about their sexuality into the transitioning machine, despite the lack of research you’d expect for irrevocable treatments.
Left-wing partisans like to say they believe in — all bow — The Science. Yet, former Texas Democratic lawmaker Shawn Thierry, now a Republican, observed, “Suddenly they threw all that science out the window.”
Where do I stand? I have sympathy for anyone who feels trapped in the wrong body and I support adults’ right to choose elective surgery. But first, there should be more disclosure, debate and frank discussions about what can go wrong when nipples or genitalia are removed.
Last year British pediatrician Hilary Cass looked at gender identity services for children and young people and found that UK treatments were built on “shaky foundations.”
In America, transition surgeries that sterilize children and young adults with mental health issues have been approved by the medical establishment without rigorous examination.
“I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood,” Cass told The BMJ.
Panelist and plastic surgeon Patrick Lappert sees the medical establishment’s approval of transgender treatments, including surgeries, as one of the many reasons Americans trust doctors less than they used to.
This isn’t science. It isn’t medicine. It’s human experimentation.
Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.
