Hannah Grossman and Ashley Carnahan – Fox News July 2023

‘I was expecting it to help me help my mental health, and it didn’t do anything. I just wasted so much time and all I did really was become a medical patient for life’

A young male, who formerly identified as a transwoman, who was castrated and became a “patient for life” as part of “gender-affirming care,” wants to warn others not to follow in his footsteps. He discussed his story of resilience and learning to accept himself for who he is for the first time with Fox News Digital.

Kobe, whose name is being withheld for privacy reasons, had “checked every box for what they call a trans adolescent.” He was always “effeminate” and loved pink and playing with Barbies. If he was never exposed to gender ideology, he says he’d probably “would have just stayed a feminine boy. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I felt unlovable as an effeminate man in society and everything. A feminine boy, actually. I was never a man, I’m trying to reclaim my manhood now and everything. It’s hard. I have breasts, I have the hip development of a woman because I started the estrogen young. I have no gonads. You know, it’s hard. My skull never really masculinized.”

Kobe, in retrospect, looks back at the medical interventions as a subconscious use of “self-harm.” During his early teenage years, he was struggling with internalized homophobia. “I mean, I saw it as a way out of my homosexuality if that makes any sense.”

However, he didn’t realize these truths until he got his surgery.

“I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is so great. I’m locked in my transition… But then everything started to crack and I couldn’t ignore the complications,” Kobe said. “I couldn’t ignore that I mutilated myself pretty much with the permission of a psychiatrist. It’s insane now, looking back. It’s just self-harm, you know.”

Kobe first encountered the idea of switching genders on YouTube.

“And I said, ‘Oh, you can do this.’ You know, I don’t have to be a gay guy. I don’t have to be an embarrassment. And all this horrible stuff that I thought about my homosexuality, and it was like a light bulb. It was like, this is a way out,” he said. “I thought it was.”

Kobe told his parents that he was transgender at age 11. At 13, Kobe said that older trans people online instructed him, as well as other kids, to “play the suicide card” in order to get chemical interventions.

“I started using, like, ‘the suicide tactics,’ because that’s what they are. That’s what they tell us all to do… I don’t want to use the word groom, but we are like taught. I guess the older transpeople teach us to say that stuff to get the health care and everything. And I mean, there were times when I thought I was genuinely suicidal over gender dysphoria, but it was I think it was all just stuff that was in my head. I don’t think I would have ever been suicidal about being biologically male if I had never been exposed to that stuff.”

Kobe was started on puberty blockers around 13, estrogen at 16 and later had castration surgery at 19.

“I was expecting it to help me help my mental health, and it didn’t do anything. I just wasted so much time and all I did really was become a medical patient for life,” he said.

Kobe said his growth is “permanently stunted” because of puberty blockers, and has chronic pain in his spine as well.

“I need to get checked for osteoporosis because I do have a pretty severe back pain just going up the spinal cord,” he shared.

Puberty blockers have been linked to issues with bone mineral density.

The blockers not only suppressed Kobe’s development but according to him “suppresses your life,” “your drive to do anything” and “your happiness.”

“I lost a lot of sexual function. I lost a lot of sensation down there,” Kobe added about the hormone treatments. “The mental stuff was really bad, but also like joint pain. It was just something near all the time. I was like, aching and hurting.”

Regarding cross-sex hormones – estrogen – Kobe said it impacted his cognition. He becomes foggy in the middle of conversations. Even now that he has been off of it for a few months, he still feels those effects. During the interview, he apologized for losing his train of thought numerous times – attributing it to the estrogen he used to take.

“It was constant brain fog. I was psychotic at some point. A lot of men that I know who went through this hormone replacement therapy, it’s the exact same thing for them. Estrogen just makes them snap.”

Kobe also developed an eating disorder after taking the hormonal drugs because of the issues it caused on his metabolism.

“The way that your metabolism sinks when you go on drugs, it’s insane. I had such a hard time maintaining the weight and everything. It led me toward some really dangerous eating disorder behaviors and everything, which I also don’t think I would have ever gotten into if it wasn’t for the trans stuff. And not being able to keep the weight off with the blockers and stuff like that.”

He describes how his treating practitioners glamorized the idea of having surgery.

“The plan was always estrogen and then SRS (sex-reassignment surgery,)” he said. SRS inverts male genitalia to create a neo-vagina, which must be dilated for the rest of a patient’s life.

The letter approving the surgery said hormone replacement therapy was successful for him, and that Kobe was happier and mentally stable.

“None of it was true. I wasn’t mentally stable. I hated myself. I wanted to die, and I just was constantly trying to become something that wasn’t. And it was awful. It was dissociating, it was terrible. But… and I’m sorry that – the estrogen – I lost my train of thought…”

The surgery was scheduled but had to be canceled because of an insurance issue. So Kobe opted for an orchiectomy procedure – the removal of the testes – as a “middle ground.” At the time, he viewed testosterone as a “poison” for his body.

“That’s how deluded my head was, that testosterone is poison, and it’s damaging and everything,” he said.

Continues …