AMC Cancels Film Highlighting the Dangers of Transgender Surgeries
June 21 was supposed to be the release day for the Deplorable Films production, “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care.” This film showcases medical professionals and detransitioned individuals who have thoughts and experiences concerning the health complications of mutilating one’s body with gender-affirming surgery. However, AMC theaters across America have canceled the premiere.
The unreleased film received immense pushback. The largest culprit for this cancellation is the transgender activist group, the Queer Trans Project. Despite the fact that they had not received access to the film, they wrote a letter to AMC, accusing the film of being “anti-trans” and containing “misleading and harmful” information. They wrote, “[We] implore you to reconsider this decision immediately and demonstrate your commitment to supporting a more inclusive and accepting society.”
What is notable about the film is it does not portray strictly conservative or Christian views. Rather, the perspectives come from members of the LGBT community who underwent transition surgeries and regretted it. Abel, one of the detransitioners featured in the film, said to The Daily Wire, “I would tell anyone who wants to transition, especially the young boys … that the transition will not save them. It would actually destroy their lives.” He continued, “Even if that is what they think they want — the actual negative side effects, nobody will tell you.”
The film’s website elaborates on the detransitioners’ collective experience that “Without diagnostic clarity or mental health evaluations, their doctors quickly affirmed them as ‘transgender,’ and mindlessly ushered them along the path of medical transition.” It continued, “These young people were harmed — injected with powerful compounds and surgically altered; irrevocably changed and turned into lifelong pharmaceutical customers by the doctors they trusted.”
While this film is being deemed “anti-trans” for not being “inclusive or accepting,” the truth clearly demonstrates that attempting to surgically alter one’s gender leads to nothing but a destroyed body accompanied by lifelong infections, pain, and suffering. “No Way Back” is designed to help individuals better understand what they risk when contemplating these surgeries and to expose what the medical “professionals” do not share with their patients.
“My first reaction is this is an illustration of the fact that there are a lot of people who are not interested in the truth,” Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement, told The Washington Stand. He continued by discussing how only by knowing what you believe and why you believe it can one welcome other worldviews without feeling threatened. “When you are afraid that what you believe is not true, that’s when you get really uncomfortable with other people’s perspectives,” he added.
For Backholm, what makes this film dangerous to trans activists is that the implications morally devastating for them. If they are wrong about transgenderism, then what they are doing with transgender surgery is no different than “Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who was experimenting on [Jews] just for fun.”
Even though “No Way Back” is meant to spare people from the lifelong pain and suffering of surgeries that can ultimately do nothing for them, the transgender community simply cannot risk that truth being proclaimed. Backholm concluded, “These are medical experiments, [potentially] done in most cases with good intentions … but the implications of [being wrong] make them terrible people. So, they have planted their flag, they have made their decision, and emotionally, the only thing they can do is defend it.”
Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.