While the Trump administration and many state legislatures are showing it is possible to ban transgender child mutilation procedures, the top contributing factors to children adopting a transgender identity haven’t gone away. Those include family breakdown, psychological abuse, and leftist-controlled mass media. Government can affect these factors, but not quickly.
This means the transgender social contagion will last some time, especially in culturally leftist locales. How can compassionate friends help these sufferers among us?
Embracing God’s Design, a magazine-like, easy-to-read new book by Dr. Jennifer Bauwens and Walt Heyer, gives some evidence-based ideas. The book details where transgenderism comes from historically, psychologically, and politically, and how to respond in a way that expresses genuine love for those who suffer from it. It is a how-to manual for parents, teachers, pastors, churchgoers, and anyone else who interacts with a sexually confused person — which at this point is most Americans.
Bauwens is a trauma therapist, clinical social worker, and policy researcher. A Federalist contributor for more than a decade now, Heyer is a pioneer in courageously reconstructing a fruitful life after overcoming gender dysphoria. Truly inspirational Americans, Heyer and his wife of 28 years, Kaycee, have been a lifeline to many others through the websites waltheyer.com and sexchangeregret.com.
“Over the years,” Walt writes, “I have received numerous emails from individuals expressing regret as soon as a mere few weeks post-surgery to several decades later, acknowledging it was a misguided endeavor.”
As he details in the book, Heyer’s grandmother began cross-dressing him when he was 4 years old in the 1940s. His teenage uncle molested him. Childhood traumas like these, Heyer and Bauwens write, are almost invariably involved in a person’s descent into gender confusion. That means the coarser our society gets, the more it creates the conditions for people to express their distress about that dysfunction in ways that include LGBT identities.
This should be a powerful incentive for compassionate lawmakers to work hard to reduce social dysfunction, including through better marriage laws, improvements to family courts, restrictions on psychosis-inducing substances such as marijuana and other harmful substances, restricting pornography, and improving the education and economic ecosystems so people can support families. Transgenderism isn’t merely an individual’s problem. It is the result of a completely screwed up society.
“Studies have continuously shown that individuals who identify as transgender tend to have experienced more traumatic events before they chose to identify as transgender than those who have always identified with their biological sex,” Heyer and Bauwens point out.
Heyer and Bauwens point out that the prevalence of gender ideology itself inflicts further trauma on those who interact with it closely: “Whether or not a person experienced a trauma that predated their exposure to so-called gender-affirming care, interacting with gender ideology can produce trauma for the family, for the social network, and certainly for the individual who has been directly impacted.”
Indeed, the violence of the daily news can have traumatic and disintegrating effects on those continuously exposed to it without enough mental and spiritual support to process those ideas and images properly. As this book’s authors point out, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a key resource for mental health professionals, notes that exposure to information about traumatic events such as child sex trafficking can provoke a trauma response. So it’s no surprise, then, that there’s also a documented correlation between high social media use and adopting an LGBT identity.
“It is important to note that researchers and clinicians have found a link between sexual abuse and deliberate self-harm,” the authors write pointedly. “For this reason, it is vital to understand the role that self-mutilation has, particularly among trauma survivors.”
Focusing on potential underlying traumas is precisely what the LGBT industry refuses to do. Some reasons for that are obvious. For one thing, resolving traumas that lead to bizarre presentations such as cross-dressing and self-mutilation deprives the medical industry of continued funds.
For another, if trauma is linked to LGBT identification, and resolving the underlying trauma can sometimes dissolve that identity, that’s evidence that everyone who identifies as queer was not “born that way.” Among other things, that dissolves the legal, logical, and moral basis on which this massive social experiment has secured protected-class status.
The book treats many other topics that are ignored and viciously suppressed to protect feminist gender theory, including the reality that some males who identify as transgender do so out of a sexual fetish called autogynephilia.
“In my work through sexchangeregret.com over the past 15 years, I have seen a consistent pattern of sexual arousal disorders among married biological males who identify as transgender women,” Heyer writes. “These issues often start in childhood and, when left untreated, can escalate into a desire to change the body through cross-sex hormones and surgery.” Often, a person who suffers from such a disorder can trace the origin back to “some adverse experience, such as early sexualization, sexual abuse, or exposure to pornography.”
Because of dark realities such as this, Embracing God’s Design advises parents to be “vigilant” to protect their children. It recommends proactive approaches that include screening all of young children’s entertainment and discussing entertainment actively with older children, being choosy about friends, limiting and monitoring all screen time, and keeping close tabs on what children do in school.
The book also gives advice about how churches can help people struggling with a transgender identity, including helping connect them to appropriate medical, legal, and psychological resources. Despite treating a dark topic, the book is positive, surely because it comes from a Christian perspective that trusts in God’s love and forgiveness for every sin, no matter how destructive, long-lasting, shameful, or horrifying.
“Through my research and clinical work,” Bauwens writes, “I have personally seen that people can heal from their traumas and painful experiences. Not only can they heal, but they also have the potential to grow from their wounds.”
Embracing God’s Design is well-designed for contemporary audiences who are used to short bits of content and who require simple and clear ideas (see sample pages below). Its tone for what can be a dark topic is positive, warm, and loving. It would make a great selection for a book club, parent group, Bible study, youth group, or for parents to read and discuss with their older teens. I’m saving my copy for just that.
