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“As Christians, we know that death doesn’t get the last word. Death doesn’t get to give us our final name — only God can do that. Our hope, the gospel hope that we hold out to everyone trapped in transgenderism and any other sinful system, is that through the power of the blood of Christ we can have our ‘forever names’ written in the Lamb’s Book of Life instead.”
–WILLIAM WOLFE
If you don’t think that the transgender movement is demonic, you just aren’t paying close enough attention.
Once you click past the flashy social media campaigns about “love is love” and “equality” or punchy (though absurd) lines like “trans women are women” or “men can have periods, too” or toss that Vanity Fair magazine with Bruce Jenner (one of the most decorated male athletes of all time) pretending to be some dolled-up babe on the front cover into the trash, you don’t have to dig very deep before you start smelling the sulfur.
That’s because right beneath the surface of this glamorized, sanitized, and euphemized radical campaign aimed directly at our kids, and at the most vulnerable and unstable people in society, are some of the most gruesome, horrifying, heartbreaking — and yes, demonic — stories you will ever hear in the modern era.
Just consider the insane idea that “you can change your gender,” that you could somehow make your body deny the billions of cells that are irreversibly stamped either XX or XY. That a man could become a woman. Or that a woman could become a man. Even worse, the notion that children as young as four years old might know they are “transgender.” I’m sorry, even worse than that — that infants can be identified as transgender.
It’s such an anti-reason, anti-biology, anti-life, and anti-God concept that it has to come directly from the pit of Hell. And it does.
The God of Heaven tells us in His Word that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Jesus reminds us, “’Haven’t you read,’ he replied, ‘that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’” (Matthew 19:4).
And then Satan comes along from Hell and whispers, “Did God really say…?” (Genesis 3:1).
Did God really say men are men and women are women? Of course, following the doctrine of demons has always had dark and disastrous results; the transgender movement is no exception.
Thankfully, there are a few brave reporters and storytellers who have plumbed the depths of this evil movement to bring back first-hand accounts from the front lines. They have gone down the diseased rabbit trail, seeing and hearing the stories of brainwashing, broken bodies, and fractured homes, of betrayal, gaslighting, and even death.
I want to draw your attention to one reporter, Brandon Showalter, who does just that, and one recent documentary, “Dead Name” — which Big Tech has tried to censor — that also does just that.
Brandon Showalter is a senior investigative reporter for the Christian Post. Over the past couple of years, he has been working tirelessly to expose the harm that the transgender movement is causing children and youth. One of his most significant exposés thus far is titled “Yes, trans surgeries are being done on minors. Here’s proof.” In it, Showalter documents how children “are being surgically disfigured under the banner of a non-existent ‘gender identity’ in clinics and hospitals around the country.”
Showalter rightly points out that “Due to the media’s refusal to research and scrutinize these issues, the American public has been kept in the dark about these atrocities. Yet the facts are steadily emerging because of the dedicated work of alternative media publications and tireless online investigative sleuths. The horrifying realities are becoming undeniable.”
On both accounts, first, that the media won’t cover the truth about the damages done by transgender “treatment” on teenagers, and second, that the horrifying truth is beginning to break out despite the censorship, Showalter is spot on. We saw some of this “breakout” with the videos from Boston Children’s Hospital going viral a few months ago, as doctors from The Center for Gender Surgery there coolly describe how it “offers vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction, breast augmentation, facial harmonization, and other gender affirmation surgeries to eligible patients.”
To be clear, these euphemistically named “gender-affirming” procedures are unnatural, grotesque, and ungodly surgical acts. Nazis went to prison for life after World War II for performing similar experiments on prisoners of war. But today? We celebrate such awful offerings as “progress.”
In an opinion piece for the Freedom Center, entitled “The Transgender Movement Brings the Horrors of Frankenstein to Life,” I wrote:
“The concept of ‘gender reassignment surgery’ is nothing more than mankind trying to play God. These doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital have all the wild hubris of Dr. Frankenstein, and they are producing eerily similar results. Their work is leaving an increasing number of disfigured people to suffer forever in the wake of such prideful efforts, shuffling about this earth — scarred, confused, and hurting.”
Showalter bravely puts “doctors” like these on notice. He writes,
“As more and more de-transitioners who were sterilized and disfigured as minors start to raise their voices and as others around the world begin filing lawsuits against the medical institutions that harmed them, let me hereby put the U.S. journalists who covered up this grotesque medical abuse of children on notice: You will not be allowed to feign ignorance and pretend that you did not know.”
And that is where the “Dead Name” documentary comes in.
Brandon Showalter talks with John Wesley Reid about Dead Name, the censorship that followed, and the travesty of the transgender movement.
Released in December, “Dead Name” is “an intimate portrait of three parents whose lives have been shaken and forever altered because their children have declared (or have been given) a transgender identity.”
The three parents profiled are:
At one hour long, “Dead Name” shows “parents struggling with disbelief, loneliness, helplessness, isolation and despair,” each fearing “the medicalized transition of their child.” The documentary lets viewers in on their “inner thoughts, the struggles, and the declarations to fight for children who feel lost to them.”
Regarding the name of the film, Showalter writes:
“In the transgender sphere, calling someone by their ‘dead name’ means referring to them by their birth name, not their newly chosen name. Their self-selected name is often the first step in the trans-identification process. Parents of transgender-identifying children are usually pained to hear that the name they chose for their child is ‘dead.’ Filmmaker Taylor Reece titled the documentary this way because it is emblematic of the entire spectrum of problems parents face. After a name change, a trans-identifying child starts to blot out their entire identity. After that, experimental drugs and body-altering surgeries usually follow.”
In “Dead Name,” one of the children who has been ushered along a path of transition and towards a “dead name” is only four years old. That’s right, four. Barely out of toddlerhood. The trailer begins with a shocking series of lines from this young boy, Jonas. He says, “If you want girl parts, and you don’t have them, you can do special surgery where they turn your penis inside out and put a vagina inside.”
Those are words that should never come out of anyone’s mouth — let alone from a four-year-old child.
After the documentary works through the three main stories, they bring in some commentary from outside experts, including a clinical psychiatrist, and then Brandon Showalter. Regarding his work exposing the evils of transgender ideology and appearance in “Dead Name,” Showalter said this in an exclusive quote provided to the Standing for Freedom Center:
“I’ve lost count of how many parents who are in similar situations as those profiled in “Dead Name,” moms and dads who have reached out to me in the last five years as I’ve been on this beat at the Christian Post. My heart breaks for them because they are desperately trying to save their children, whom they love more than their own lives, from irreversible medical harm. I think it is important for the public to understand that though they may believe that trans ideology is damaging, they really have no idea the scope of the nightmare until it’s their family that has been disrupted and their children have been the victims of this mass medical experiment.”
“Dead Name” is a film that everyone needs to watch. But because the mainstream media and Big Tech are completely on the side of radical gender ideology and the transgender movement, they will do everything they can to slow the spread of the truth found in documentaries like this one.
This is why, without warning or explanation, Vimeo yanked the film from their website on Monday, January 23, less than two months after the documentary was first published on the platform.
The filmmaker, Taylor Reece, told the Christian Post she “was very distressed to find ‘Dead Name’ vaporized from Vimeo and without warning.”
After all of his work on this issue, and his appearance in the documentary, Showalter too was frustrated to see this setback. He tweeted out, “…’Dead Name’ (see YouTube trailer) was just scrubbed from @Vimeo. For ‘hate speech,’ naturally. Even those that bought it for $14.99 can’t see it anymore. What gives? Trans activists censor, that is what they do. Just as this film was starting to gain some traction and moving people deeply because of its truly unique angle, POOF! Gone.”
Showalter admitted to the Freedom Center, “I was not surprised to see Vimeo removed the documentary given how censorious trans activists and their allies are. I’m thankful that this poignant film can still be seen at DeadNameDocumentary.com.”
Before being deep-sixed from Vimeo, Reece says that “Sales and rentals were brisk. The response has been incredible from more than 16 countries around the world.”
Now that they have a new website where the film can be purchased for only $9.99, though, Reece anticipates that the attempt at censorship will only fuel increased attention to the work. She noted that, “ironically, every time the trans activists cancel someone, whether it is a journalist, a filmmaker, or a comedian, inadvertently they raise the profile of the piece of work at hand and ultimately give it more sunlight and play than it might have had in the first place.”
While “Dead Name” doesn’t address the harms of the transgender movement from an explicitly Christian or even religious point of view, here at the Freedom Center, we think it is still an important documentary that is well worth your time. There have been few reporters doing the work to expose the horrors and harms of this demonic ideology like Brandon Showalter is doing, and so if he thinks this is a film worth watching then I am happy — though haunted — to recommend it.
Again, you can watch the film here at DeadNameDocumentary.com. And you can read Showalter’s reporting at the Christian Post.
The Apostle Paul was not joking, he was not understating things, and he was not trying to sound scary when he told the early Church in Ephesians 6:11-12:
“Put on the full armor of God so that you can stand against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens.”
No, Paul was telling the truth. There is more to this world than meets the eye. There are angels. And there are demons. There are dark, Hell-sent malevolent forces and powers working to destroy God’s creation.
I would submit to you that there are few better (or worse) visible examples of demonic power at work than what happens to children and families who get sucked into the vicious vortex of transgenderism. Whether they intended it to or not, that is exactly what “Dead Name” ultimately documents.
But as Christians, we know that death doesn’t get the last word. Death doesn’t get to give us our final name — only God can do that. Our hope, the gospel hope that we hold out to everyone trapped in transgenderism and any other sinful system, is that through the power of the blood of Christ we can have our “forever names” written in the Lamb’s Book of Life instead.
Jesus came to set the captives free and to make the wounded whole. Those wounded include refugees from the transgender movement. Those who once were dead have now been made alive.
So, watch “Dead Name.” Read Showalter’s reporting. Then pray that God would free those trapped in the demonic and dark world of transgenderism. Pray that He would rescue them from the dominion of darkness and bring them “into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14).
Follow William on Twitter! @William_E_Wolfe
Ready to dive deeper into the intersection of faith and policy? Head over to our Theology of Politics series page where we’ve published several long-form pieces that will help Christians navigate where their faith should direct them on political issues.
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