Walt Heyer: Episode Description
On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Walt Heyer who went through gender reassignment surgery at the age of 42. They discuss why Walt decided to transition to living life as a woman, the problem with being ‘transgender’, why transgender doesn’t actually exist, what gender dysphoria is and isn’t, what are the statistics surrounding young people who want to transition, the corrupt medical industry wanting to trans your child, how to help a child suffering with gender dysphoria, why gender affirming care is dangerous, why we need to embrace God’s design, how Walt got his life back, what was Walt’s encounter with God like, and why Walt fights so hard to reveal the truth. Plus so much more!
Episode Summary
- Why Walt transitioned to living life as a woman at 42
- The problem with being ‘transgender’
- Why transgender doesn’t actually exist
- What Gender Dysphoria is and isn’t
- What the statistics say about young people wanting to transition
- The corrupt medical industry wanting to trans your child
- How to help a child suffering with gender dysphoria
- Why Gender Affirming Care is a dangerous scam
- Why we need to embrace God’s design
- How Walt got his life back
- What was Walt’s encounter with God like
- Why Walt fights so hard to reveal the truth about gender
Walt Heyer: Episode Transcript
Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student well-being, character development and academic improvement.
Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.
Brendan Corr
Good morning everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast where we get to meet people who have lived lives of significance and been able to incorporate their faith into that experience. This morning, we’re having quite an amazing conversation with Walt Heyer. Walt has got an extraordinary story that tells the account of his own experience and exploration of identity, and of personality and of faith. And we really look forward to hearing a little of what his experiences have been as he’s lived quite a few decades now. Welcome to The Inspiration Project.
Walt Heyer
Yeah, I mean, my little journey started 80 years ago.
Brendan Corr
Well, you’ve got a few more runs on the board than most of our listeners, Walt, and it is an honour to talk to somebody who has accrued as much wisdom because of lived life experiences as you evidently have. So 80 years plus of walking the Earth and here you are engaged in a podcast. You’re obviously somebody that keeps current and keeps involved in the fullness of life as it is available to you.
Walt Heyer
Oh, absolutely. I’m a Senior Fellow with the Family Research Council in DC. I mean, I testify on the Hill. I work with individuals who are struggling. I work with families. We got a book coming out in October. My wife and I have another book probably coming out in November or December, and I’m working on a movie called, Who Am I? So it’s important to keep putting the information out and for those people who have the desire to grab onto the truth, then we can provide them kind of a safety net to not go through this nonsense with hormones and surgery because it doesn’t really help them.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. I’m interested that you’re introducing the notions of truth in those comments, Walt, and as I’ve been engaging in your story and learning a bit about what our conversation might focus around today, it seemed to me that part of the contest that is the bigger picture that you’re involved in, is this fight for truth, and that’s one of the things that we might unpack as we spend some time together today. But you mentioned that you are an activist in lots of ways, both at an individual level, getting alongside people who you mentioned or you described as were struggling. And that you are advocating politically in the system that is the US, up on the Hill for those of us, that’s the centre of US politics, right, on the Hill? How would you describe the cause that you feel you’re called to advocate, defend, fight for, promote?
Walt Heyer
Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, the cause is really to educate every single person who hears my voice to the truth that so far, at no time, in all of world history has anyone ever changed their gender. So what that means is then there are no transgenders. You can identify as a transgender. You just can’t be a transgender. You can identify as having transitioned, but you really don’t transition from one gender to the other. And in my experience for the last 17 years, working with individuals on a personal basis and my own story, I found out that I haven’t found anybody that has gender dysphoria. They have dysphoria, but the dysphoria is not really about gender. And so, when we begin to work with individuals and get them to understand that something, this is my favourite line. My job is to help people identify what happened that caused them to not like who they are. That’s the bottom line.
Brendan Corr
I’ve heard you use that phrase in some other conversations that I’ve listened to with you being involved and engaged with other people, Walt, and we do want to dig in and learn from your very immediate experience of contrasting what is psychological reality for an individual. What is a projected appeal to truth from a class or a category of people versus objective material, actual reality? I think about the work you are doing and reflecting on the help you’re bringing people. It seems that those are three things that come into tension. But I think it’d be really helpful for people that might be listening to this, to understand the immediacy of your convictions, that you were speaking from a place of unusual information, having experienced the very psychological states that we’re talking about, being classified with the intersectionality that is now commonplace and found your way through that. Or maybe it’s better to say being led through that by something beyond yourself.
Walt Heyer
That’s right. Yeah.
Brendan Corr
Which is where we want to go. So with recognising that we have an audience of mixed ages and backgrounds, could you perhaps unpack some of your story for our listeners so they understand where you’re coming from?
Walt Heyer
Sure. In 1944, I’ll be 84 in a couple of months. So in 1944, I was approaching four years old and my grandmother who was babysitting me made me a purple chiffon dress and dressed me up in that dress. So I don’t think my grandmother in 1944 knew the terms. She just thought this was cute and harmless and nothing would happen. But what the audience that’s listening to us right now needs to understand that when you dress up a boy in a dress that’s made specifically for him and tell him how cute he is and how wonderful he is, and not affirm him as who he really is because you’re saying no, there’s, So what happened to me was when she made me the purple dress, immediately I thought, “There must be something wrong with me.” Well, there really wasn’t anything wrong with me, I can say 80 years later. Something was wrong with my grandma who thought it was a good idea to put me in a purple dress. Now why is that… What happens when you put a young child, and we see this all over the world, grandmas, parents, all these people dressing up their kids. Here’s the real crux of it. The second you take a child, whether it’s a boy or girl, and you cross dress them and start to introduce them to a different identity, you devalue who they are. You’re devaluing who they’re… That’s a critical thing. So number one, devalue. Then if you extend that and start taking the kid to school cross-dressing and then introduce them to some kind of hormone therapy, then you begin the process of changing the individual’s ability to function as who he is, devalue. You’re starting to destroy the function, right? Because the hormones begin to change their ability to bear sperm or have a baby. So this is harmful. And then when you cut off body parts, then you’ve done the third and most critical thing is that you’ve destroyed who they are. And so you devalue, dehumanise and destroy. The dehumanisation part of it is the function. You change their function. We have kids running around that can never be a father, girls that can’t produce babies. And if you just, you and I just stop and have a polite conversation over a cup of coffee, that’s insane. I don’t care how you measure that. There’s absolutely no basis for changing the function of any child. And I say that because people who are listening to this and think that I’m crazy is that we know, and anybody listening can look this up, the brain is not fully developed until the age of 24 to 30. So I mean, I’m not inventing anything. This is clinical stuff. I put this in my book that I published. It’s called Paper Genders, which I published in 2011. And people keep blowing through these stop signs and they’re crashing because they just can’t get past understanding that people don’t change. And so, a boy doesn’t become a girl. A girl doesn’t become a boy just because they say they are, because they take hormones. And there’s a term, it’s called intermorphology, and you can look that up. That really is the whole interconstruction of who you are. There isn’t, has never in world history has hormones and surgery ever been effective in changing your intermorphology. So what we have is people masquerading in a different gender because they look like, and they’re very effective because cosmetic surgery, the hormones, they all look very real. They’re just not real. Just because you look real doesn’t make you real. So I think that’s at the bottom line. If we can stop that right there. I had no idea in 1944 what I was going to get into and I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 1981 by the man who drafted the WPATH Standards of Care. I didn’t have a quack therapist. This guy, Dr. Paul Walker, was the chairperson who drafted the standards of care that are all over the world and you can see…
Brendan Corr
The world leaders.
Walt Heyer
Yeah, so you can look at me and see, diagnosing me with gender dysphoria, he was wrong. And I have literally had thousands and thousands of people write to my website sexchangeregret.com, who have had a similar experience that I have. And so, I think I always said, when the spigot gets turned off and people stop writing to me and saying, “I regret doing this,” then I will stop.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I appreciate that what we’ve been living through as a Western Civilization for the last 50, 60 years has been a massive social experiment. Those actions that have been taken that have not been tested and their impact and their efficacy had not had a chance even to have scientific rigour imposed upon their place. And yet, there is such conviction out there in modern society that it’s right and proper and just and moral and kind to have done the things that have been done in the name of progress.
Walt Heyer
Yeah, but I think it’s also instructive for you and I to understand, if you can get your head around this. This is a $4.4 billion business, $4.4 billion business. So you’re talking about people taking down their income because they’re harming children. To me, you should put… All the gender clinics should have Frankenstein on the front of these. They’re Frankenstein clinics. They’re not gender clinics. They don’t change anybody’s gender. They destroy lives. It’s a life destroying clinic and we have parents walking their kids in there. And so I’ve had a boy whose parents gave him hormone blockers at 15. They helped him get surgery at 18 because it’s legal. He contacted me at 19, and this is where I got this. He said, I feel like a Frankenstein monster. ” Can I get my life back?” I didn’t make that up. That’s exactly what happened. And I find what’s most interesting is that over 95% of the people who write to me, are not homosexual. This is not a homosexual play. This is not about men dressing up as women to have sex with other men. This is about people who have been harmed. There’s a term, I don’t know if you’ve heard it, it’s called adverse childhood experience and adverse… Okay, this is critical. It’s going to be in my new book, coming out in November, co-written by a trauma therapist, adverse childhood experience. When children have, and I did. When my grandma cross-dressed me and when you, as parents or uncles, aunts, cross-dressing your, you are traumatising your child. You are causing them to have an adverse childhood experience. Now what they know is that that experience, because this has been researched way back in the ’80s, if you experience an adverse childhood situation where that’s sexual abuse, your family’s broken, you’re cross-dressed, dad was an alcoholic, mom’s in mental hospital, there’s quite a number of things that fall into that category. Then what happens is that your brain, at the level of where your identity is being formed, is harmed. And so the only, and they know that, believe me, the gender clinics know that. That’s why they wanted to do this to kids so that they could alter the brain at the level of where their identities are, not because they have gender dysphoria. I haven’t even found one kid with gender dysphoria. That is probably the biggest fake false thing that’s ever come about. And the only reason they use the terminology, gender dysphoria, is because they’ve set it up so that the only way that you can get hormones and have opportunity for surgery is if somebody diagnoses you with gender dysphoria, not because you have gender dysphoria. So I think those are critical. So…
Brendan Corr
Can I just ask you? I am struck by the strength of your convictions, that your own experience was misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and the reality of that that you can speak to, and yet you are so strongly convinced that that is an absolutist position, that your misdiagnosis, your misunderstood experience is the same for… What gives you the confidence that it was not right for you, but it is right for somebody else? Do you mind?
Walt Heyer
Yeah. No, I’m thrilled to answer that. That’s a great question and it’s because I have worked directly, just like I am with you, with thousands of people who regret it. I’ve got well over 10,000 emails that have come to my inbox. I’ve been doing this probably longer than anybody on a one-on-one basis, sexchangeregret.com. People write to me and then what I do is pretty simple stuff. I start with them and I ask them, “What caused you to not like who you are?” And let’s work on what that is because it’s not gender dysphoria. Let me do this real quick example. Probably eight, nine months ago, I’m sitting in my easy chair with my computer on my lap and bing, I got an email and it’s a 73-year-old man. And he writes, he says, “I’m transgender. I transitioned and I have gender dysphoria. I have a gender therapist and I’ve been going to my gender therapist for years and it started when I was 13. But I looked at your website and I see you make some very provocative statements and I just wonder what you would say to me.” This guy’s 73. So I knew, okay, well he was interested, right? So I said, “Well, what I want to know is you said that the onset of this started when you were 13.” So I said, “I don’t care about anything about hormone surgery, nothing. I want you to describe in great detail what was going on in your life when you were 13 years old.” You see, that’s where the adverse childhood experience always starts. Wherever they say the onset is, that’s where you need to go. So he wrote back and he said, “Well, my mom was a raging alcoholic and about three times a week, she would get a butcher knife and chase my dad around the house trying to murder him.” Okay. I am here to tell you and everybody listening, that is not gender dysphoria. That is not gender dysphoria, but they will diagnose that as gender dysphoria. That is where I go absolutely bonkers. So I told him, I said, “You know, I’m not a therapist, but I have a lot of experience with adverse childhood experiences and trauma. I want you to go back to your therapist, your gender therapist, and tell your gender therapist you talked to Walt Heyer, give her my name, give her my email, whatever you want. I have no problem. And tell her that you need a trauma therapist, not a gender therapist.” And so the therapist said, “Well, that’s very curious because I’m also a trauma therapist besides being a gender therapist.” Now, she’s been taking hundreds of dollars from this guy for years, but never approached the trauma, right? This is so common.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. So you’re arguing, Walt, that those issues of insecurity or self-loathing that directs somebody to want to assume a different identity than what they find themselves with, is a symptom rather than a cause. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Walt Heyer
Precisely. You nailed it, right against that is exactly right. It’s not a diagnosis, it’s a symptom. And that’s where you need to go find out what happened that caused the symptom. So here’s the kicker with this. She said, “I’ll test you on the ACEs scale.” And there’s a scale of about 10 or 12 things, and she tested him. He was seven out of 10, and she said, well, I’m going to do EMDR therapy. Now, I’m not an advocate for EMDR therapy. I’ve heard people say it’s good. People say it’s bad. I don’t push it either way. So she gave him a two-hour EMDR therapy session and he wrote to me two days later after that and he said it was the most difficult, most painful therapy session he’s ever had. He said he hated every minute of it. But he said in his email back to me, “Walt, I am free from transgenderism.” Never looked back. One session, 73, struggled for 60 years because nobody asked him about what happened. So the first thing I do is I go right for what happened. I want to know what happened and if they resist me, I keep digging until they tell me. That is the key.
Brendan Corr
I can understand that and I accept the account of that. Do you mind me, and I hope this is not intruding too much into your personal psychology or experience world, but you’ve lived this. You lived many years believing for yourself that you suffered gender dysphoria and that you were, by nature transgender, to the degree…
Walt Heyer
No, that’s wrong. I never thought that at all. Well, here’s the thing. I went to the guy who’s a therapist who told me I had gender dysphoria.
Brendan Corr
Right, right.
Walt Heyer
I didn’t know I had gender. So…
Brendan Corr
You don’t think it’s something that wells up inside of people naturally? You think there are some social influences that fit into an alternate identity?
Walt Heyer
Yeah. The internet is loaded. Social contagion, their friends at school, the people they hang out with. You’ll see that they’re in groups and then you see this happen with adverse childhood experiences and pornography plays a part in that. But the three key factors are adverse childhood experience, the internet, which is a powerful tool, indoctrinate people. And then the social contagion, what’s been written about for years, for probably seven or eight years and we keep… There are good psychologists and universities writing about this stuff that nobody pays any attention to. And I’m not a doctor and I understand why people don’t pay any attention to me because I’m old, I have big ears and I have grey hair. I understand that. But the fact of the matter is, there’s a way to save your child from going through hormones and surgery if you just find out what happened that caused them to not like who they are. And that’s the question.
Brendan Corr
Again, I’m not a doctor either, Walt, and don’t claim to be expert in this, but what attracts me to the statements that you are making is the priority that it gives to your perceived self-identity. That there is a you and whether you like that you or whether circumstances happen that make you question that, it’s speaking to the notion of there is a psyche that is to be valued and treasured and protected. And developed. And if it’s not done well, it then makes that personality vulnerable to exploitation, trauma, misdirection.
Walt Heyer
Yeah, and you used a good word there because we can swing right back. There’s a thing where some people have tremendous resilience and so they can look at this stuff and it doesn’t bother them. There’s other people that are vulnerable because of things that happen to them and they fall prey to this. And so if we can stop… This is probably one of the hardest things to explain. We have people who were harmed or who were on the internet or worked with some social contagion group that wanted an identity. We can agree on that. They want an identity. Here’s one that’s available. And so, the fact of the matter is, I know that they maybe have PTSD, they might have body dysmorphia, bipolar 1 disorder, schizophrenia. I find all these things as part of it. But when I began to explore these underlying comorbid disorders, that’s the term for it, the comorbidities, then they began to tell me, “Wow, Walt, I see what you mean.” I mean, if they spend enough time, just like this guy was telling you, 73 years old. I mean, in a week, in a few emails, 60 years of nonsense. And I asked him if I could write an article and he said, “No, I’m so ashamed of what happened. I could never tell anybody.” I mean these lives were being destroyed. So it’s critical for us to understand that it’s not about gender dysphoria. We know that if we can have an impact on that person and get them to understand that they didn’t have gender dysphoria, that something else happened, such as adverse childhood experiences or they were indoctrinated on the internet, we have the opportunity to help that person. And I’ve done that with a girl at 10 years old in Kentucky who is now 15 years old. She’s a writer. She plays in a band. She’s a beautiful girl. They were trying to quote her in school. They even put her in a psych hospital. I told the mom, get her out of that hospital, get her home and don’t send her back. We’ll work with her. And she was traumatised by trans kids in school who were bullying her. She wasn’t bullying the trans kid, they were bullying her. And so, it took a year of working with that young person who is now 15 and super healthy. So I think we need to sort of take a different view of what this is. I know I was on the cover of a magazine in one of the magazines in the newspaper in Australia. I don’t know how many years ago it was. I was on the front cover, Sunday paper. And we were identified as the in-betweeners, that was the term they used, the in-betweeners, because I’d come back. I’m wearing men’s clothing. So, I’ve been doing this for so long and it seems so wretchedly difficult to get people to wake up and understand that you’ve just been slapped with a whole bunch of garbage because there’s a lot of people making big money off of this.
Brendan Corr
I was going to ask you, why do you think there is this staunch resistance or this absolute commitment to indulging these, what we understand to be misunderstood motivations for the sufferers of the trauma that people who are having this done to them? What’s the motivation for society or for the medical profession to… Is it displaced kindness?
Walt Heyer
Here’s your answer. You can put this in bold on the headline, $4.4 billion. That’s your answer. Nothing else. They don’t care about the kids. If they cared… I have been doing this for free. I have never charged anybody in 17 years. I don’t even ask them to buy a book. I don’t ask them to make donations. I don’t care if I make money. I want to save lives. Now, if that doesn’t appeal to people, I’m sorry, but thank the good Lord, I have been able to do that on a few occasions, maybe a lot. And I’ve prevented people from committing suicide because they were diagnosed incorrectly. So this is not very difficult. It’s just that you’ve got this… I remember a few years back in your country, they gave a gender clinic $6 million to start transitioning kids. I’m going, “What for?” I mean, why is the government getting in there and destroying lives? The government is advocating to destroy kids’ lives. Whoa. And now you’ve got so many things coming out of Europe now, and many of them have been coming out for years, and now they’re starting to cut back and say it’s nonsense. And so, I can tell you that one of the original people back in 1979, Dr. Charles L. Ihlenfeld. Get my book, Paper Genders, great book. Dr. Charles L. Ihlenfeld was a homosexual advocate for gender surgery, and he worked with 500 men and he was an endocrinologist. So he gave him hormones and then he had time working with them. He’s been there six years at the Harry Benjamin Clinic in New York. And he came out and told therapists, exactly the same thing I’m saying today. There is too much unhappiness and too many are harmed and too many suicides. And you know what they did to him? They sent him out. He’s gone because he spoke the truth. And that was in 1979.
Brendan Corr
Back before cancel culture was the thing. Well, I hear what you’re saying and clearly you have the most firsthand experience in the fact that whatever the motivation for taking this action is, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t bring satisfaction, the resolution to identity to the people who are led through this experience. And I wanted to ask you a little bit, you clearly were in an unhappy state yourself-
Walt Heyer
Yes.
Brendan Corr
… because of your trauma, which was then directed by your therapists to this notion of transgenderism and the need to affirm your identified or your preferred gender identity. Can you unpack for us, how you felt continually dissatisfied? Why did that not bring the answers? What was your state of mind when you were living as a woman, believing this was the solution? What was going on for you?
Walt Heyer
That’s a great question. I love that question because here is the answer. Write this down, put it on the front page because hormones and surgery have never, ever been effective at resolving childhood trauma. That’s the answer. See, everybody’s trying to make this complicated. There’s nothing in any medical book that says, “Oh, if you suffered trauma, take hormones and cut off your genitals and you’ll be fine.” I don’t know why, and I hate to use the word, but how come we’re so stupid? I mean, I hate to use that terminology, but we should have a million people in every country at the top level of government, standing on the steps saying, “Stop destroying our children because it doesn’t change their gender.” This is one of those things to me that the Lord’s going to take me home. And I do believe that somewhere down the line, maybe 10 years, 15 years from now, somebody’s going to go, “Man, that old fart was right.” And they should have listened and saved some lives. I mean so, I’m going to keep doing this as long as I have a breath to do it.
Brendan Corr
It makes perfect sense what you’re arguing. If the assumption that you propose is true, that the manifestation of gender identity confusion or identity confusion is symptomatic of personal trauma, the only way to fix that has to be to deal with the trauma. Any, however extreme the issue of escapism, it’s not going to fix the source of the problem unless you deal with the source.
Walt Heyer
Yeah. if it’s trauma, deal with the trauma. If it’s internet indoctrination, deal with the internet indoctrination. If it’s a social contagion, deal with the social, if it’s… Some people have autism, that’s one that’s a tough one. And I think it needs to be repeated. This is a symptom. Gender dysphoria is a symptom of something else. That’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve written about that for years. Look at that and then go down and find out what caused this to happen. If somebody’s an adult and they’re suffering from autogynephilia, I don’t know if you know what that is, but probably a lot of men who are married, who are heterosexual, dress up in women’s clothing and they become sexually aroused by looking at themselves in the mirror. It’s a sexual fetish disorder. It’s not even gender dysphoria, but they will diagnose them with gender dysphoria. And so there’s all these… We could do a seminar for a whole day and break down, whether it’s a transvestic fetish disorder, whether it’s cross-dressing, whether it’s PTSD. I mean, we can go through that, but the bottom line is, if we can get it up here in our head, nobody has gender dysphoria and something happened, and we need to find out what happened. And when I spend time with people, thankfully, they will, many times, not every time, but many times will reveal what happened and then we can deal with that issue.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic, Walt, and God bless you for being courageous enough to hold this painfully acquired insight through your personal experience. Clearly, the argument that you’re presenting, debunking transgenderism, gender dysphoria, is not based on morality. It’s not rooted in a creed or statement of doctrine. For you, it is an objective recognition of truth and reality. But you also do speak of being a person that has come to faith. How did that happen? In the midst of your personal story of trying this answer, finding it didn’t work, realising the dramatic changes that you had imposed or had imposed on you, didn’t bring the freedom or the consolation, what role did coming to faith have in giving an answer for you?
Walt Heyer
Yeah. Well, I was a drug addict and an alcoholic. And I’ve got 38 years of clean and sober living, which does a lot to give you clear thinking. And so…Yeah. So in 1990, I was talking to a therapist who was working with me on my fourth step, for those people who know about Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step, and the fourth step is when you get in and sit down and you start talking about all your resentments and you start going through them and not holding onto anything. And so we spent probably two and a half or three hours in the session where I’m going, I forgive everybody. I forgive everybody that I take full responsibility for what happened. I don’t say why God did this to me. I fully believe that the Lord can redeem and restore my life. And so when I was done with that session, the guy doing the session said, “Let’s pray.” And I really, tell you the truth, I was so tired and going through everything that I didn’t want to pray. I was exhausted because two and a half hours of just going through my junk, I mean, it’s like taking everything out of the closet and all the garbage, right? And so I relented. And he started praying. And I know this guy prays forever and that’s fine. I’m not knocking people to do that. I was just not prepared for it that day. And so he was praying, and I got my head down. He’s across from me. And after a while, I didn’t hear him anymore. His voice stopped. And what happened was, I was either looking up or the vision of the Lord Jesus Christ was above me, coming down with his hands reaching out, and I looked in front of me where the Lord was coming and there was a little baby there. And I looked at that baby and I said, “The Lord is coming for me as a baby, not as a 50-year-old.” He’s coming to redeem and restore my life from the time I was born to give me a new life in Christ. He picked that baby up, held it in his arms, and he looked at me. He says, “You are now safe with me forever,” in a prayer I didn’t want to have. He disappeared. I was redeemed and restored. That was 1990. I’m still talking because the Lord gave me this job. My daughter who was just earth shaken about me going through this 41 years ago, I saw her a few days ago at her house, and she’s going through pictures and I should have been there. She’s with her mom. I’m not there because I’m out doing, right? And I sort of turned to her and I apologised. I said, “You know, I’m sorry that I was not there for you.” And she turned to me and said, “Dad, you were chosen by God to do what you’re doing. You don’t owe an apology.”
Brendan Corr
That’s an extraordinarily powerful account of your own encounter with God, Walt and what a gift God gave to your daughter, to be able to be a minister of forgiveness and reconciliation, more than that, more of ennobling from a place of brokenness and chaos, to have that sense of purpose come through your own daughter.
Walt Heyer
Yeah, and she’s watched me on television and she wrote me an email the last time earlier… Last month, I did a TV show and she wrote, “Dad, that was really painful, but man, you’re a pro,” which is kind of nice.
Brendan Corr
In that space, well, you’ve lived decades now as a disciple, as a follower, a person who knows the Lord. I’m sure that God has inspired your own reflections to give insight to the experiences of the past. How do you think Jesus responds to this issue of transgenderism?
Walt Heyer
Oh, God made man and woman, and we have gender clinics destroying their body, destroying what he made. The foundation of the church, the central foundation, cornerstone, is one man, one woman, family, and kids. We have a group of people out there, maybe they’re Marxists, maybe they’re communists, I don’t know. They know better than I. But I cannot get my head around why anybody would want to destroy the biblical foundation of the church, but that’s what they’re doing.
Brendan Corr
So what I’m hearing in that space is that Jesus would, in a similar way as he went into the temples and overturned the tables because of the system of corruption and the system of manipulation, with the clinics, the gender therapy clinic. But for the individuals who’ve experienced the trauma and have been caught up in this incorrect humanising or dehumanising, as you say, the compassion that Jesus would show to them, that he knows their trauma. He knows more than they do, what led them to be unhappy with themselves as you describe it.
Walt Heyer
Yeah. See, all the gender clinics, if the Lord really had a say, would be trauma centres. They’d be trauma centres. They would be. I mean, or an addiction centre because we know people get addicted to pornography, and I’ve run into people who are alcoholics like I was. I mean, there’s all kinds of coping mechanisms, but come on guys, nobody has gender dysphoria. That is just a symptom of something else, and they’re using gender dysphoria to keep their $4.4 billion industry going. And governments are in the business right now of destroying families, destroying the church, and destroying children. It sickens me and I’m going to keep speaking until I see some good changes.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. As I’m talking with you, Walt, I have a renewed appreciation, not appreciation, not the right word. I have a heightened awareness of what Jesus meant when he said, “I’ve come that you might have life and you might have life in its fullness.” And the notions, the Christian notion that we are a unity. We are created, body, soul, spirit, and the impact of our physical experiences does change the way we think and the way we think does change the way we behave and our relationships do change how we understand ourselves. And that the message of the gospel is that God wants that to be full and rich and vibrant and free from trauma and the reconciliation of each known intimately by God the Father. And pulled into existence just as your daughter affirmed to you with a purpose that uniquely, that individual has been called into being to fulfil.
Walt Heyer
That’s exactly right.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. You’re doing a lot of work to support people, Walt. Some of that is political, some of it is psychological and relational, and some of it is to do with matters of faith. Where do you see God prioritising your ministry? Is it calling out the system? Is it one-on-one counselling to people who are in need?
Walt Heyer
Well, I’m partnering with Lucas Miles in Granger, Indiana with his church. And I’m expanding Sex Change Regret through Lucas Miles, and we’re going to go nationwide with Sex Change Regret. And so, I think… We need an army of people. I’ve been doing this myself. I don’t have an office, I don’t have a desk, I don’t have a staff. I’ve been doing this with a computer that’s sitting in front of me. But Lucas has got a team of people. He is a powerful guy and he’s going to bring this to a whole next level. So, that’s something I couldn’t do. I don’t have the financial resources to do that and so Lucas can get that going. And so I’m expecting that, and Lucas is bright, and so he’s going to take Sex Change Regret to the whole new level, probably starting October, November. Now, we’ve been working on launching this for about a year. He’s a bright guy. And I’ll tell you, our book, that I’m a Senior Fellow at FRC in DC, the policy people, and the book, Embracing God’s Design, speaks to everything that I’m talking about. It’ll probably be out late October, but it talks… My co-writer’s a trauma therapist. And so you’ve got the street guy and Jennifer Bauwens, PhD, trauma therapist and a street guy coming together to write this powerful biblical, biblical book about what we need to be doing. And then my wife and I are doing another book. It’s called, Beyond Gender is Jesus.
Brendan Corr
That’s nice. So you still got a lot of work that the Lord has put your hand towards. Just in closing, Walt and I appreciate so much the frankness and the openness that you’ve been able to share with us. The depth of your reflections have been so valuable. One of our listeners, one of our young people, a teenager, just finished school and they are confused about who they might be and how they might be showing up in the world. Do you have any counsel for anybody that might be in that way?
Walt Heyer
Yeah, I think it’s important again, to get back… I’ve worked with 10-year-old kids, 12, 15-year-old kids. And what I do is, I actually get one of the parents to, that I start to work with the parent and I tell them, sit down with the child, without any distractions, somewhere quiet. Just the two of you. Don’t get dad and a lot of people and don’t intimidate the person. And I ask them that very question, why don’t you like who you are? Why are you doing this? And so every time I have this instruction that I give to the parent because I don’t do this with the child. The parent does this with their own child. The child gives it up and says, “You know, Mom, I really don’t want to be… I don’t really want to be… I just, my friends are doing it. I just moved to this neighbourhood. I don’t have any friends. I can connect into this group.” A lot of times this is this social contagion thing, and it’s not about dysphoria. Kids love to be in a group. It used to be the goth days here in the United States. And so kids, even when I was growing up, kids love to have some kind of thing that they do that their parents don’t do, but it’s always unhealthy. And so, I think when parents start walking with their children, walking next to them and going out with them, Dad is playing ball and not letting them… Don’t let them have a computer in their bedroom by themselves. That’s dangerous. And it should be out in a common space. If you look for a parent, look at the search history on their computer, and you will be shocked at what they’re looking at. You will probably pull the computer because this stuff is terrible. So I think it’s just a matter of us adults becoming parents and challenging these notions that we know are false. And everybody’s got the… The left people who are pushing this, they want you to affirm. Whatever they say on the left, don’t do it. Don’t affirm them, I don’t use pronouns. I have talked to you for an hour and I’ve never used a pronoun. Why do I need a pronoun? This is insane. So I think we just need to kind of start wrapping our heads around some factual data and understanding that we’ve been laid to waste by governments and the US government with, Obama started this in our country, and it goes on with the people who are in power today.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. I really like what you’re saying, Walt. And what I hear is, you show care for the trauma that the individual must be giving voice to, even in a masked, masqueraded way. And yet you’ve got the courage of your convictions. It’s not about so gently and gently that you can’t contradict or you can’t direct or you can’t correct something that is not right. And it so in our age of, we’re standing by our convictions. This is true and I care for you, but I care enough to hold you to the truth.
Walt Heyer
Yep. I love you enough to tell you the truth. And I can tell you the people who spoke the truth to me when I was messed up, I love them. It was the people who did all the nonsense, I have no respect for them. The people who got up in my soup and jumped on me, including my daughter at one time. So I think it’s important for us to say, “You’re not a transgender. You can certainly identify as one. You can identify as having transitioned, but you really can’t.” And this is what I always say. You probably don’t have gender dysphoria, but if we’re going to have a discussion about this, we need to find out what it is. I think they have dysphoria, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not about gender.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I think that’s so good. I’ve picked that up through our conversation. Walt, you’ve got resources that you’ve contributed to or have currently available. If any one of our listeners wanted to dig deeper into your story or into some of your thinking, can you introduce them to some of the things that you’d recommend they access?
Walt Heyer
Yeah, absolutely. Trans Life Survivors, which is 30 stories that are the emails that I received from 30 people. So you don’t have to listen to me talk. I took their emails, I changed their name and their location, but you can see what they’re saying. And I could have done 200, but I did 30 because I thought that would impact enough. Paper Genders. It’s a great book. Gender, Lies and Suicide. If you just read those three books, I think you’ll have an awakening.
Brendan Corr
And your website, Walt?
Walt Heyer
sexchangeregret.com and waltheyer.com.
Brendan Corr
waltheyer.com. Well, again, let me thank you so much for the courage that you’ve shown over decades to share a story of intimacy and of needing to have errors addressed. Not an easy thing to lay your life out like you do, Walt. And I think His revelation to you of His love and goodness and for His impact, you to do the work that He’s called you to do. We’re grateful and God bless you.
Walt Heyer
Thank you very much. Thank you Jay too. Appreciate you all.
