Dead Name: Living Nightmare

a film review

Sean was only two when doctors first diagnosed him with a childhood cancer severe enough to require the amputation of his left leg. He battled and won, but three short years later, he was sick again, this time with a form of leukemia. 

When he was eight, Sean’s older brother died of a heroin overdose. The fractured family still reeling, tragedy struck again; Sean’s mother also passed away when he was only a teenager. By the time he reached his freshman year of college, Sean had more bad news: the cancer had returned to his body, stage 4 colon cancer, a terminal diagnosis.

In just two decades, Sean had experienced more trauma and loss than many people experience in a lifetime, so it’s not too entirely surprising that he sought to shed the skin of his identity. Who wouldn’t want to escape a hand like the one he’d been dealt? Who wouldn’t dream of becoming someone else?

And that’s just what he tried to do. Shortly after beginning college, Sean announced to his father, Bill, that he had begun the process of transitioning to a female identity, a decision met with the loud applause of his three female LGBT activist roommates. There was no turning back.

Bill accompanied Sean to a few appointments with medical professionals. He was dismayed to discover that the psychology experts who should have recognized the clear signs of trauma, instead prescribed cross sex pronouns and a new name: Eliza. Sean was warned by at least one endocrinologist that a choice to begin a regiment of the female hormones he desired would be a death sentence; his already compromised body could not handle the assault. But that didn’t seem to matter to Sean. A short time later, he was dead.

Bill is convinced that hormones were in play,

“He was about 118 pounds from the time he started chemo up until December 9th. And at a visit two weeks later, he was up to 126. There is no reason that we can come up with why he would have that much of a weight gain for someone who’s a consistent eater. If anything, we would expect a decline from the cancer. He was taking some kind of hormone that would push the weight up.”

Sean’s is one of three heart wrenching stories profiled in filmmaker Taylor Reece’s recently released documentary “Dead Name,” which was available for rent on Vimeo before the platform removed it for “hateful content.” (You can now find it here.)

The film explores the agony of three heartbroken parents whose lives have been upended by the recent trend known as “gender identity” in the three primary ways it sinks its hooks into young victims: trauma, an abusive attention-seeking parent, and general social contagion.

In addition to Bill and Sean’s tragic tale, the film introduces us to Helen, a lesbian woman battling to protect her young son Jonas from the brainwashing of her ex-wife, who convinces Jonas he’s really a girl named Rosa when he’s just 4 years old. In one particularly horrifying portion of the film, we see Jonas parroting the narrative his Munchausen’s mom has drilled into him: “If you want girl parts and you don’t have them, there’s a special surgery. And they can turn your penis inside out, and there’s a vagina inside.”

Jonas can tell you with certainty that the Easter Bunny and Santa are figments of the imagination, but the hidden vagina inside the inverted penis? That’s a real thing. Thus saith his mentally ill mother.

We also meet Amy, whose teen daughter secretly got a prescription for testosterone via a telehealth consultation with Planned Parenthood, without so much as a psych evaluation or a physical to ensure her body was healthy enough to absorb the new drugs. Amy is branded the family villain for her resistance, with an entire community of “experts” who should know better warning her that if her daughter commits suicide, it will be all her fault.

The film is hard hitting from the start, asking important questions like, “Who the hell prescribes hormones to a kid with terminal cancer?” and “What do you do when the court holds your right to custody of your child hostage to your willingness to participate in his bodily and psychological harm?” “What’s the rush to reassign gender?” “What do you do when society determines that the people ready to butcher your kid for profit are the good guys, and you’re the abuser?”

“Dead Name” is a record of parental dissent. It’s a protest that might not be heeded for another 50 years, but as the lawsuits of broken detransitioners pile up and the irreversible damage they’ve suffered becomes too great to ignore, the record will show that a few brave souls loved selflessly enough to protest the human rights atrocities of the trans cult.

May they be remembered as the heroes that they are.