SEX CHANGE REGRET

Michael Brown


While some might find the story laughable, I
personally find it tragic: Don Ennis, an
experienced TV news producer was fired
from his job, allegedly for performance-
related issues, after reappearing as Dawn
Stacey Ennis, marking his third gender
change since last year.
With little sympathy, one website reported,
“A television producer who has changed his
gender three times has now more time on his
hands to know who she or he is.”
Worse still, the New York Daily News,
apparently forgetting that Ennis had lived
almost all of his life as a male, announced,
“Dawn Ennis was canned weeks after her
latest transition from her male persona, Don
Ennis.”
What? It was not Don Ennis who was the
“male persona”; it was Dawn Ennis who was
the “female persona.” And Don is a he, not a
she. In fact, before his wife left him when he
became Dawn the first time around, they had
been married for 17 years and had three
kids.
It would appear that Ennis is quite troubled
and in need of serious help, but even to
suggest such a thing is to be branded
transphobic and hateful.
To all who pull the “transphobia” card, I urge
you to reconsider your rhetoric. Sometimes
compassion causes us to ask the hard
questions rather than simply to affirm
someone in their gender confusion.
Let’s not forget that in May, 2013, when Don
suddenly appeared at work in a black dress
as Dawn, he claimed to have “an unusual
hormone imbalance.”
And he wrote: “Please understand this is not
a game of dress-up, or make-believe, it is my
affirmation of who I now am and what I must
do to be happy, in response to a soul-
crushing secret that my wife and I have been
dealing with for more than seven years,
mostly in secret.”
Three months later, when he reverted back to
Don, “He said that he had amnesia, claiming
his wife dressed him in a wig and created a
fake ID card bearing the name ‘Dawn.’
“‘I am now totally, completely, unabashedly
male in my mind, despite my physical
attributes,’ he said in an email to colleagues.
“Ennis said that while his memories of the
past 14 years had returned, his female
identity did not.”
And now he has reverted to Dawn.
Is it transphobic to say that this man needs
help?
There was also the tragic story of sports
columnist Mike Penner, who became
Christine Daniels, only to revert back to Mike
Penner, before taking his own life.
You can be assured that any coworker who
did not welcome him as Christine would have
been lectured or even disciplined, and yet
questioning his new identity, with love and
sensitivity, might have been the most
compassionate thing to do.
Yet to do so would be to swim against the tide
of political correctness. And it would be a
dangerous swim at that. Just yesterday (June
18th), “the White House announced Obama
will sign an executive order that would
prohibit federal contractors from
discriminating on the basis of sexual
orientation or gender identity.”
Back in 2012, Brad (aka Ria) Cooper, was set
to be Britain’s youngest sex-change patient at
the tender age of 18. An October 28, 2012
headline in the Mirror read: “‘I was a boy..
then a girl.. now I want to be a boy again’:
Agony of teen who is Britain's youngest sex-
swap patient.”
The article, which still insisted on identifying
Brad as Ria, noted that, “Her decision, which
comes after two suicide attempts, calls into
question whether she was too young to be
allowed to swap sexes in the first place.”
Yet it appears that we have learned nothing
from stories like this, stories which I cite not
to demean or mock those who identify as
transgender, nor to suggest that these
experiences are the norm. Instead I cite them
to urge us to seriously reconsider the
direction in which we are heading as a
society.
In recent days, in Canada, a 12-year old girl
has received a new birth certificate
identifying her as a boy, based entirely on
her self-perceptions, while here in the States,
millions have watched a viral video in which
a family shares how they have embraced
their daughter’s identity as a boy, despite the
child being just 6 years old.
When Dr. Keith Ablow expressed a dissenting
view regarding this little one, he was roundly
condemned for his comments and labelled “a
serial misinformer on LGBT issues.”
Is there really no possibility that this girl
actually is a girl and that she could be helped
to embrace her female identity with proper
treatment? Is this really a transphobic
position?
Earlier this week, Dr. Paul McHugh, formerly
chair of the Johns Hopkins psychiatric
department and a longtime opponent of sex-
change surgery, penned an Op Ed piece for
the Wall Street Journal, arguing that “policy
makers and the media are doing no favors
either to the public or the transgendered” by
not treating transgender “confusions ... as a
mental disorder that deserves understanding,
treatment and prevention.”
He cited a 2011 study from Sweden that
followed the lives of 324 “sex-reassigned”
persons over a 30-year period (from
1973-2003), noting that “beginning about 10
years after having the surgery, the
transgendered began to experience
increasing mental difficulties. Most
shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost
20-fold above the comparable
nontransgender population.”
This confirmed a similar study McHugh had
commissioned decades earlier at Johns
Hopkins, and for opposing sex-change
surgery, he is vilified to this day.
Is it possible that something other than
transphobia is driving him?
Walt Heyer has lived through this himself,
undergoing years of hormone treatments and
then sex-change surgery to become a woman,
only to realize over a period of years that he
was, in fact, a man and that there were other
issues he needed to address in his life.
To help others, he has launched the
SexChangeRegret.com website, featuring
articles like, “The insanity of hormone
blockers for kids,” and “1,500 Sex Changers
Request Surgical Reversals” (this was in one
center in Belgrade alone), and “Regret Is Real
—and Transgenders Are Going Back.”
And he too is vilified for his courageous and
compassionate stance.
Is it too much to ask that we stop and
reconsider our ways before embracing such
radical societal change?
Is it only transphobia and ignorance that
drives such a request?