I Know What Happens To The Kids in ‘Transhood’, Because It Happened To Me

A new HBO Max documentary, “Transhood,” follows for five years the lives of four Kansas City, Mo. children who believe they are the opposite sex.

I identified as a “transgender woman” for eight years. Today, watching this documentary, I marvel at how the events of my childhood groomed me into believing that identifying as the opposite sex was the solution to my gender confusion. My heart goes out to these children who also are being groomed into a transgender life.

A Purple Dress Took My Boyhood Away

I can trace the onset of my gender confusion and wanting to be a female to the psychological, emotional, and sexual damage that occurred before I was ten. Starting when I was four years old, my dad would drop me off at my maternal grandparents’ house after work on Friday so he and my mom could take off for weekends of camping and fishing.

My grandparents lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles in a little shack behind an automobile junkyard. Grandpa was often out for hours at a time, towing cars. Grandma, a seamstress, stayed at home fashioning dresses for customers.

This is where my crossdressing and gender confusion started. I remember sitting on the porch, watching grandma cut and stitch pieces of purple chiffon cloth into a beautiful full-length evening dress for me, her four-year-old grandson. She helped me stand on a small stool for fittings and hemming. As she worked, she smiled and remarked how cute I looked.

The secret crossdressing “game” with grandma went on for about two years and ended abruptly when my mom and dad learned about it. Both were in shock. They threw the dress away and made sure that I never visited grandma’s alone again. But when my teen uncle found out about it, he teased me and made fun of me in front of my playmates, then escalated to sexual molestation.

Over time, I became increasing uncomfortable with myself as a boy, to the point of disliking myself as Walt and adopting a secret female name at age 13. My thoughts constantly revolved around how I could become a female.

Self-destructive thoughts and actions took over. Starting in my teens, I drank alcohol excessively. From there, the damage mounted: out-of-control drinking, copious amounts of female hormones to look like a woman, divorce and loss of family, loss of career, and drug abuse, culminating with “gender affirming” surgery at age 42.

I lived as a woman for the next eight years. At first I was happy, but when the giddy effect wore off, staring me in the face was the reality that I was an alcoholic who hadn’t dealt with pain inflicted on me in childhood. I crashed, entered alcohol rehab, and started therapy.

Adults Groom Children Into Transgenderism

It has taken me years to adequately assess the full range of consequences inflicted by grandma’s “gender grooming.” Benjamin Franklin’s proverb, “Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late,” sums up my feelings now at 80 years of age when I reflect on how I, a reasonable man, became a willing participant in body-mutilating surgeries because a so-called “gender specialist” said that was the treatment I needed.