The Other: Regret After Transitioning

Walter Heyer was a 36-year-old man who seemingly had it all. He skyrocketed up the corporate ladder and had a beautiful wife and a great family.

Behind closed doors, terrors from a traumatic childhood and a persistent feeling that he had been born in the wrong body continued to plague him. All of the effort he had put into “feeling” like a man over the years could not silence that voice.

Heyer says that he had grown restless and unhappy and was ready to live life as a woman, which he believed was his true identity. He first experimented with cross dressing and soon after, started taking cross sex hormones to feminize his appearance.

After discovering his double life, his wife divorced him. Heyer felt free to fully embrace what he believed to be his true identity. He sought an evaluation from a prominent gender psychologist who assured him that he was suffering from gender dysphoria and life as a woman would free him.

Heyer underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of 42. His new identity as Laura Jensen was affirmed on all of his legal documents. The gender conflict he grappled with for most of his life seemingly disappeared.

“At first I was giddy for the fresh start, but hormones and sex change genital surgery couldn’t solve the underlying issues driving my gender dysphoria,” writes Heyer.

During his eight years as Laura Jensen, Heyer says his life spiraled out of control. The repreive that surgery and life as a woman provided was only temporary. He was still left with the devastating wounds of a childhood marked by physical and physcological abuse.

For Hayer, living as a woman had not healed him of his gender identity conflict. He realized that he had a battered and broken past, and living as Laura did nothing to dismiss that truth. This realization drove him to excessive drinking and other addictive behaviors.

A study published by PubMe.gov with 83 individuals requesting sex reassignemnt surgery showed that 62.7% of them had at least one psychiatric comorbidity, which is the silmultaneous presence of two chronic conditions in a patient.

Heyer says sobreity was the first of many turning points in his transgender life. He then pursued a counseling degree as Laura at the Unviersity of California-Santa Cruz. There, he says, his carefully crafted life as a female began to crack. He was confronted with his childhood trauma, this time without the aide of alcohol to escape.

With the help of experts in the field, Heyer sought healing on a psychological level. With guidance, he revisited the emotional trauma of his youth.

After seeking the opinions of physchiatrists and psychologists who did not believe that all gender dysphoria is transgender, they all agreed that he fit the critria for dissociative disorder

“Underlying issues often drive the desire to escape one’s life into another, and they need to be addressed before taking the radical step into transition,” writes Heyer.