"I'm 19 years old, and I already feel like I've ruined my life." That's the heartbreaking story of Nathaniel, who said he was bullied into believing a lie -- that he was someone else. He heard about transgenderism, he wrote in a letter to survivor and activist Walt Heyer, and "convinced myself that's what I was."
When he got up the courage to tell his mom, she took him to a specialized clinic. For three years, he started going for treatments. "From then on," he says in this cautionary tale for the Daily Signal, "I slowly detached from everything until I was just staying home, playing video games, and going on the internet all day. I stopped reading, drawing, riding my bicycle. I surrounded myself in an echo chamber that supported and validated my poor decisions, because the others were also, unfortunately, stuck in that pit, too."
After his 18th birthday, Nathaniel was old enough -- and prepared enough, he thought -- to surgically alter his gender. Because of complications, one procedure turned into two. But nine months later, this once-vibrant teenager hates his life.
"Now that I'm all healed from the surgeries, I regret them. The result of the bottom surgery looks like a Frankenstein hack job at best, and that got me thinking critically about myself. I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn't one. I became (and to an extent, still feel) deeply depressed."
As Walt and so many other victims of this ideology point out, walking down this dark path didn't change anything. It only made things worse. Amazingly, the clinic who "helped" him on his journey won't consider reversing the procedures. "They washed their hands of him. The reckless ideology claims another life."
Lisa, who's written a powerful series of posts on her brother at the FRC Blog, understands how deeply that hurts. So many people, she writes, "are being grossly taken advantage of on their quest for a personal identity. They long for a group to belong to, a meaningful cause to work toward. My brother and his wife (like so many others) believe they have found these things in the LGBTQ community.
"My brother keeps saying this is 'his' story to tell and his alone.
It's not.
It's my story.
It's the story of my family -- a family that's been ripped apart because of one man's choice to embrace his True Self. It's the story of a community in the Midwest where each person was forced to make a decision: either support the transgender madness and win accolades in popular culture or refuse to deny reality and risk being called intolerant and "transphobic." It's the story of a country so lost and confused they can no longer even agree upon the very nature of reality itself.
This is your wake-up call, America."
