(LifeSiteNews) — The former president of homosexual pressure group GLAAD has admitted the LGBT movement went too far in its embrace of gender “transitioning” confused and troubled minors, in a podcast series exploring the tensions between the “gay rights” and gender-fluidity movements.
Herndon Graddick served as president of GLAAD (formerly known as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) for just one year, stepping down in 2014. During his tenure, he was credited with broadening the organization’s scope beyond homosexuality, and in his words at the time, “Advancing the need for our community to fully support the rights of our transgender brothers and sisters.”
On Tuesday, writer Ben Appel, who had worked as a News and Rapid Response intern for the organization in 2017, covered the newly-released 3-part podcast series Strange Bedfellows: When LGB met T, which had interviewed Graddick and others.
Episode 3 of the series featured Graddick confessing: “I think we need to correct what’s wrong first. And so that’s a big thing. I mean, particularly the medicalization of children […] Teenagers and kids should not be given the power to make these life-altering decisions that medicalization causes.”
“I just think that we should completely stop doing anything that might harm children, even if it [means admitting] that we got something really wrong, and my understanding is that we have,” Graddick continued. “I think that there’s been a lot of fear about discussing things openly for fear of being called transphobic, and I think that we’re at a place that we can really have those conversations without that fear. And certainly transphobia has nothing to do with my motivation to say this, but more like, you know, let’s just get our side of the street totally clean.”
“On YouTube, there’s a clip from 2013 of Graddick introducing trans-identified boys Jazz Jennings and Coy Mathis – ages twelve and six at the time – on stage at GLAAD’s annual awards gala,” Appel notes. “No word on where Coy Mathis is today, but we know how things turned out for Jazz. He had his puberty blocked at 11 and started cross-sex hormones at 14. At 17, he underwent bottom surgery [penectomy and/or orchiectomy], which was unsuccessful and required at least two surgical revisions. He now battles severe mental health issues and obesity.”
“If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’ve been speaking out against the medicalization of gender-nonconforming youth since at least April 2022, when Newsweek published my op-ed, ‘The New Homophobia,’” he continues. “Since then, I’ve been – and there’s really no other way to say this – afraid of GLAAD, which wields considerable financial, political, and cultural power.” As a result, Appel said, “Graddick’s remarks on the podcast, as well as the messages of support I’ve now received from two former GLAAD employees, come as a huge relief.”
The tragedy echoes the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself in 2019 after trying to live as a man for three years.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
Yet GLAAD’s current leadership shows no signs of Graddick’ self-reflection. Its website is full of references to promotion of the full range of the “LGBTQ” agenda, such as the “Here We Are” project, a “national storytelling campaign” to “build a country where transgender people can be their authentic selves and express their identity openly and free from fear.”
