Transgender ideology is destroying lives, and victims are speaking out. In 2016, two women spoke about how they were permanently scarred by taking male hormones and having “top surgery” — the removal of their breasts. Last month, another woman who once identified as a man went public about setting up a support network for de-transitioners in Britain. This week, de-transitioner Walt Heyer shared the harrowing story of a 19-year-old man who thought he was a woman and described his new “female” anatomy in revealing terms.

Less than a year after receiving “bottom surgery” — removing his male genitals and replacing them with a simulated female version — 19-year-old Nathaniel deeply regrets his decision.

“Now that I’m all healed from the surgeries, I regret them,” he wrote to Heyer. “The result of the bottom surgery looks like a Frankenstein hack job at best, and that got me thinking critically about myself. I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn’t one. I became (and to an extent, still feel) deeply depressed.”

In his letter to Heyer, Nathaniel recalled how the other boys bullied him in elementary school because he was sensitive and preferred playing girl games. When he was older, he discovered internet pornography, heard about transgenderism, and became convinced “that’s what I was.” He started seeing a doctor a week after turning fifteen.

“From then on, I slowly detached from everything until I was just staying home, playing video games, and going on the internet all day. I stopped reading, drawing, riding my bicycle. I surrounded myself in an echo chamber that supported and validated my poor decisions, because the others were also, unfortunately, stuck in that pit, too,” the boy wrote.

A month after he turned 18, he underwent the grotesque surgery. He suffered complications from the “Frankenstein hack job,” and had to have a second surgery a few months later. He also underwent facial surgery to feminize his appearance.

Heyer, who lived as a woman for eight years and also underwent transgender surgery, is in a unique position to help people like Nathaniel.

“The unpopular truth, which Nathaniel unfortunately learned the hard way at a young age, is a man is not a woman and can’t ever become a woman, even with surgically refashioned genitals and feminizing facial surgery,” Heyer wrote. “Nathaniel is a bright young man who never had the benefit of sound, effective counseling, which would have prevented this horrible mistake from happening. He will deal with it for the rest of his life.”

Worse, the medical establishment that pushed Nathaniel into this horrific situation will not help him escape from it. “No one will help this young man to detransition. The so-called ‘informed-consent clinic’ (as if a teenager can give informed consent) washed their hands of him. The reckless ideology claims another life,” Heyer wrote.

“In the ten years or so that I’ve worked with people, 100 percent — every single last one of them — has had some kind of event — traumatic, painful, horrible, some sexual, some physical, some emotional — happen to them, sometime between the ages of 4 and 15, that caused them to not want to be who they are,” Heyer told PJ Media last year. In Heyer’s case, his grandmother dressed him up as a girl when he was four and he also became a victim of sexual abuse at that age.

Charlotte Evans, the British woman setting up a network for de-transitioners, suggested that most transgender people would de-transition when their brains fully mature around age 25, so long as they do no take hormones or undergo surgery.

Last year, a study suggested that there could be as many as 1.13 million U.S. teens who identify as transgender, 2.7 percent of the population. An Australian psychiatrist said that kids are “trying out” transgenderism as a fad.

In a scientific study published in the academic journal PLOS ONE, researcher Lisa Littman investigated “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” Teenagers who had no gender confusion or gender non-conforming behavior as children then suddenly announced to their parents and the world that they were transgender, requesting hormones and surgery. She found that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” could result from a “social or peer contagion” much like anorexia.

Major medical associations have embraced transgender identity and supported the prescription of experimental drugs to “block” puberty. These drugs actually give kids a disease.

Those pushing transgender identity mean well. Gender confusion is real and it can indeed cause real pain. Like in the case of anorexia, however, the solution is not to confirm and celebrate the transgender identity, but to encourage people to embrace their biological sex.

A thin girl who sees herself as fat is not helped by dieting. A man who identifies as an amputee but has two perfectly healthy legs is not helped by getting a leg cut off to confirm his identity. Similarly, a biological man is not helped by having his healthy genitals removed and replaced in a “Frankenstein hack job.”

These people need counseling, community, and confirmation of their biological sex.

Yet those who speak out against transgender activism find themselves harassed, vilified, and censored on social media.

The truth will come out, and Americans should listen to the horrifying stories of brave de-transitioners like Nathaniel, Walt Heyer, and Charlotte Evans. It took real guts for Nathaniel go to public after the surgery he so anticipated turned out to be a “Frankenstein hack job.” Americans should heed his warning, and urge their doctors to reconsider embracing this dangerous ideology.

Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.