Left-Wing Documentary Explores Medical Ethics of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
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A new documentary made by self-described “life-long, West Coast, liberal Democrats” catalogs how the push to spread transgender ideology harms people, including children.
Spotlighting interviews with medical experts, psychologists, and people seeking to reverse steps they took to transition, the “Affirmation Generation” film stares into the pain and loss resulting from the child sex-change movement and transgenderism.
The documentary opens with detransitioners speaking about how it felt to long to be the opposite sex.
“One night, I remember having a dream that I was a boy,” says a young woman identified only as Cat. “I felt so happy after waking up from that dream. It felt like I was excited to be alive. And then I got up, went, and looked in the mirror, and just that happiness was, like, crushed.”
But Cat’s story of torment doesn’t end there.
She went on to take cross-sex hormones to try to appear male. Doctors told her that hormone treatment would eliminate her thoughts of suicide, she says in the film.
But male hormones wreaked havoc on her female body, she says.
Although she was only a young woman, Cat developed heart palpitations, nausea, rapid weight gain, and swelling, and it hurt to talk.
“My face looked very puffy, and so did the rest of my body,” she says. “And that made me dysphoric, as well.”
She’s since tried to revert to a female appearance.
Other detransitioners in the film tell of how opposite-sex hormones inflicted bone loss, hormonal mood swings, and more. It’s well-documented that cross-sex hormones can cause heart disease, blood clots, cancer, infertility, genital discomfort, diabetes, and other problems.
Yet, transgender activists bill the effects of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers as reversible.
“So it’s often said that puberty blockers are reversible. But this, I think, is disingenuous on multiple levels,” says Dr. William Malone, an endocrinologist featured in the film. “Puberty blockers cannot be considered a stand-alone intervention.”
For a start, almost all people who go on puberty blockers go on to get cross-sex hormones, he says.
And the body will fight unnatural hormones, experts say, often with disastrous results.
“It’s like putting diesel in the petrol tank,” psychotherapist Stella O’Malley says in the film, quoting one of her detransition patients.
Choices Made Through Mental Illness
The documentary reveals that, for many, the choice to endure sex change happens in a fog of mental illness.
In “Affirmation Generation,” a detransitioner known as Michelle calls her years of trying to be a man “the lost years.”
“I had very little memory of what happened or why I was thinking the way that I did,” she says in the film.
Many of the documentary’s interviewees say they started gender transition under a heavy burden of mental issues.
They list depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, anxiety, trauma, borderline personality disorder, and suicidality. Others had neurological abnormalities, such as autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“I think that being sexually assaulted absolutely contributed to my gender dysphoria getting stronger and [my] wanting to be a woman even less,” Cat says.
When children identify as transgender, doctors often say the stress of dysphoria is the cause for all their mental anguish, the documentary points out.
If mental illness is often connected with transgenderism, it’s no wonder children today are especially vulnerable. Since the pandemic, studies have shown children now have unprecedented levels of anxiety and mental health problems.
Nine percent of children now identify as transgender, according to a 2021 study of 5,000 public school students, the documentary notes.
For the medical industry, these figures can mean massive profits, the documentary notes. Sex-change surgery, cross-sex hormones, lifelong transgender medical treatment, and fertility treatments after hormone-inflicted sterility all cost money.
In 2007, America had two gender-transition clinics, the documentary points out. In 2022, there were more than 300.
Transgender “health care” is “a departure from the standards of care for how we treat any other condition,” family therapist Stephanie Winn says in the film.
No other mental health care procedure takes what a patient says at face value, she says.
What happens to the thousands of people who’ve gone through sex-change procedures remains to be seen.
The “Affirmation Generation” film asserts that statistics show about 30 percent of people who attempt a gender transition later seek to detransition.
LGB or T?
“Affirmation Generation” also argues that the transgender movement isn’t a natural continuation of the lesbian and gay acceptance movement.
“The trans rights movement has co-opted the gay rights movement,” Winn says in the film.
In the 1970s, people who identified as homosexual started saying they were born with these desires, O’Malley says in the film. Then, she adds, the trans movement copied this claim.
“From that, I can only say with an incredible level of strategic thinking, the LGBT movement started talking about ‘I’m born in the wrong body,’” O’Malley says.
The same people who once became lesbian now become transgender, lesbian activist Joey Brite says in the film.
“Our communities were disappearing. They were literally ‘trans-ing the gay away,’” she said.
Cat believes some kids decide they are transgender because society isn’t accepting enough of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.
“I would like to see society move towards being more accepting of LGB and gender-nonconforming people,” Cat says in the film. “Because I feel like what pushes people to medical transition, a lot of times, is trauma that they’ve faced from society not accepting them for who they are.”
