Daily Caller’s ‘Damaged’ Documentary Highlights The Danger Of Discovery’s ‘Generation Drag’
When a therapist meets with an anorexic teenager, the standard practice isn’t to “affirm” the dysphoria by calling the patient fat and then recommending them for liposuction after a single brief visit. That seems to be the new norm, however, to treat anxious teens who believe they were born in the wrong body, and the consequences are catastrophic.
The Daily Caller debuted a new documentary on the contemporary transgender craze last week that outlines the dangers left out of the Discovery series “Generation Drag” celebrating childhood transition.
The new documentary, “Damaged,” chronicles the stories of several detransitioners who share the life-long horrors they face from having gone through permanent procedures in their adolescence to alleviate their “gender dysphoria.” One woman, Chloe Cole, whose story has also been highlighted by the Independent Women’s Forum last week, lost her ability to breastfeed after undergoing a double mastectomy, or “top surgery.” Cole said she “felt like a monster” after learning in a psychology class about the benefits of organic breastfeeding on childhood development, something she’ll never be able to offer future children. The class, she said, “was the first time that I really thought about being a parent and what that might look like for me.”
Abel Garcia, a man who thought he wanted to live as a woman, suffers from genital atrophy, a condition that’s left Garcia with genitals that are “much much much much smaller, so it makes it really hard to use the restroom.” After years of cross-sex hormones, Garcia told the Caller he struggles with brain fog, chest numbness, and uncertainty over whether he’s infertile.
Cat Cattinson shared how her voice remains forever lower than a typical female.
“Most of the effects from the testosterone for me have faded, thankfully,” Cattinson said. “But there are some lingering ones, such as my voice will never be the same again.”
Cattinson also suffers long-term liver and gallbladder damage in addition to the heart palpitations from on and off chest binding over 15 years.
“I also experienced incontinence, which I didn’t even know was from the testosterone until I talked to other detransitioned women, and they said they had the same thing,” Cattinson told the documentary filmmakers. “Almost none of this was brought up as potential side effects.”
Each of the detransitioners featured in the Daily Caller’s documentary spoke about how easy it was to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a clinician who near-immediately recommended them for life-altering treatments and surgeries. The ease of access to an official diagnosis showcases why a bill signed by Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox banning transgender treatments for minors last month is toothless, given exceptions for individuals who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
“My first therapist was pretty lousy, honestly. He didn’t really do much. We were referred to a gender specialist who then diagnosed me with gender dysphoria,” said Cole. “I don’t remember it being very thorough.”
Cattinson’s testified to a similar experience.
“When I was 17, at that point, I had been identifying as trans for about four years,” she said. The gender therapist “affirmed me on [my] very first appointment” and suggested testosterone therapy after just three sessions. Cattinson believes doctors overlooked her anxiety, depression, and autism, which was misdiagnosed as borderline personality disorder. The therapist, she said, “just didn’t seem to care that much.”
“It just felt like I was being put on a path to transition rather than him actually deeply exploring my issues,” she said.
The testimonials corroborate the breathtaking revelations exposed in a whistleblower op-ed published in the Free Press last week from an ex-counselor in a pediatric gender clinic.
“I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there,” wrote Jamie Reed, a liberal 42-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter. “By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’”
The Daily Caller documentary offers a dark reality to contrast the deceptive family-friendly narrative depicted in Discovery’s “Generation Drag,” a six-episode series that follows kids on their road to performing at an adolescent drag show in Denver.
“Damaged” chronicles the lives of several detransitioners who came to regret their attempts to change their gender. The stories are remarkably similar to the children featured in the series by Discovery, kids who claim they feel different than their peers in childhood but can’t quite figure out why. Loving parents caught in the lie of transgenderism bend over backward to affirm their child’s identity, worried that to do otherwise could risk moving their children towards suicide. Data from the conservative Heritage Foundation published last summer, however, found just the opposite, that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.”
Not all the children featured in “Generation Drag” actually claim to be transgender, but several do, and their parents are clearly struggling to reconcile whether aggressive affirmation is the right approach. By the end of the season, one mother with a trans-identifying child asked a pair of other moms with children who believe they were born the opposite sex to form a support group.
Even the parents whose children simply love drag wonder out loud if allowing their kids to cross-dress at such an early age is a good idea.
“When Vinny wears women’s clothes out, there are definitely times where I’m like, ‘this is weird, people are gonna look at us. I don’t want people looking at us like that,’” says Mike, a Denver father of a child drag star when out shopping for new shoes. “But it doesn’t bother him, it doesn’t bother his mom, so that’s my problem to get through.”
Covered up in the series, however, are the explicit performances that have come to define drag culture.
The Discovery series presents drag as a harmless avenue for children to explore their identities. It conveniently omits the hosting of explicit performances around children despite drag itself being inherently sexual. Many kids end up going through an identity crisis as they hit puberty in the process, and for some, such as those highlighted by the Daily Caller, the damage is permanent.
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