Man Regrets Transgender Surgery and Life as Women, Says Media ‘Misled’ Him

A man who formerly lived as a transgender woman and who had sex-reassignment surgery is speaking up about how he regrets the changes he made.

Many other people like him exist, he says, but their voices are not given a platform.

“Had I not been misled by media stories of sex change ‘success’ and by medical practitioners who said transitioning was the answer to my problems, I wouldn’t have suffered as I have,” Walt Heyer writes in a column on USA Today’s website. “Genetics can’t be changed. Feelings, however, can and do change. Underlying issues often drive the desire to escape one’s life into another, and they need to be addressed before taking the radical step of transition.”

Heyer, who heads SexChangeRegret.com, says he met and married a woman in his early 20s. They had two children, but he eventually began identifying as a woman himself. Those feelings, he says, were sparked by a grandmother who dressed him like a girl when he was four years old. An uncle sexually abused him, too. A medical professional him that his “childhood events were not related” to his “current gender distress.” 

He started taking female hormones at age 42. He had breast implants and genital reconfiguration surgery. He and his wife split.

“My childhood dream was realized, and my life as a woman began,” he writes. 

He changed his birth…