Transition is Not the Panacea We Were Promised
I am terrified for the people who might one day find themselves in my shoes.
It's been about eight months since I decided to detransition and about six months since I started informing the people in my life that I was doing so. My feelings about gender and identity have changed a lot over this period of time, and I find myself faced with the fact that I am no longer comfortable speaking my mind.
I have a few friends who are transgender, but the majority of the people I know have never been through the process of medical transition themselves. I’ve tried to discuss my feelings about detransition under my real name in full view of my friends, but only a few times. I tried to avoid topics that I thought might be too controversial, and I usually stuck to my own firsthand experiences rather than trying to paint trans people with broad strokes.
Each time, I've gotten one of two responses: complete silence or hostility. Both responses have been unsettling.
Silence — no reactions, no comments, no messages trying to understand — hasn’t felt like a neutral response. It felt like a collective holding of the breath. It felt condescending. It felt like a, ‘Well, Michelle’s certainly gone off the deep end. Maybe if we just sit tight, she’ll pass through this phase and move on.’
I considered that I might be reading too far into it, but it was confirmed when I later chose to explain for the first time why I was opposed to Bill C-6 (see Detrans Canada’s brief for details). In response, a friend [who is not trans] declared that he was no longer going to stay silent, that I was being “outright transphobic,” and that my words were “harmful” to people who might be questioning their gender.
When I subsequently chose to enact boundaries — surprise, surprise, I’m not going to remain friends with someone who feels entitled to punish me for wrongthink instead of having a discussion — he sent an explosion of verbal abuse in the middle of the night, accusing me of having been radicalized and calling me misogynist slurs.
Apparently going from ‘I like looking like a boy, but I don’t want to be one’ to injecting testosterone within 18 months isn’t being radicalized… but going from ‘My gender identity doesn’t match my sexed body’ to ‘I was influenced online to believe an idea that has no basis in material reality’ is being radicalized. Who knew?
While this has been the only extreme reaction from a (so-called) friend thus far, some people whom I had been in contact with for years simply chose to unfollow me on social media without a word. To me, this is an indication that these people were never present for me; they were only present for the ideas that I represented.
To the larger trans movement, it seems that the only “valid” narrative for a detransitioner is for them to take sole responsibility for their regret; as if the choice to transition exists in a vacuum; as if there weren’t medical professionals who provided them access to drugs and surgery; as if there weren’t activists breathing down the necks of those professionals, ready to ‘cancel’ them for not immediately affirming the identity of anyone who walks into a clinic.
Detransitioners are meant to accept that “egg culture” — social media content which tacitly suggests that anyone who doesn’t conform to gender roles is secretly trans (i.e., an “egg” waiting to be “cracked”) — is harmless self-reflection; as if people who ruminate or dissociate could never be harmed by repeated suggestions that [very broad] experiences might mean they are a trans person in denial.
At the beginning of transition, detransitioners were given a number of reassurances: “Only trans people think about gender this much”; “It’s normal for people to have doubts during their transition”; “Gender euphoria/gender envy are signs that you are trans”; “Transition will solve all your problems”; “If you think you’re trans, you are”…
… and then after detransitioning, we get hit with, “Well, it’s your own fault for not knowing” and “You should have educated yourself better.”
Any criticism of the community’s actions brands us instant enemies.
Meanwhile, scientists and doctors deny the possibility that identifying as transgender might, in fact, be a social contagion, because their work is centred around the treatment and medicalization of individual people rather than researching social aspects within the community. People who aren’t spending all of their time in online trans communities watching them interact simply aren’t seeing any of this influencing happening.
They aren’t looking into why someone might be eager to immediately begin hormones after suddenly “figuring out” why they are so depressed, anxious, or socially awkward and learning that there might be a solution. It could very well have nothing to do with being transgender at all — in my case, I had multiple undiagnosed developmental disabilities — but that promise of a shiny new you can be extremely tempting.
(Until it all falls apart, of course, when you realize you’re still the exact same person, except now with an irreversibly altered body and a new gender role that society expects you to follow.)
The modern trans movement pushes a one-size-fits-all narrative that is undoubtedly going to harm thousands of young, vulnerable people when they are finally able to access the missing pieces that they couldn’t comprehend when they were younger or less informed.
Medical professionals should be working with patients to identify all parts of that narrative before blocking someone’s natural puberty (which could very well prevent them from realizing they’re gay or lesbian, stunt their growth, or cause osteoporosis); before putting them on cross-sex hormones (which could very well cause atrophy of the genitals, infertility, sleep apnea, or increase risk of diseases, etc.); and before asking insurance to cover cosmetic surgery (which could very well produce botched results, could require many follow-ups to fix, could destroy someone’s ability to have sex, have children, etc.)
I can’t believe it is controversial to say this.
Now, I don’t believe the vast majority of people involved with trans activism are bad people, because I was one of them for ten years. I thought I was being compassionate. I thought bodily autonomy should trump all other aspects of medical care. I thought detransitioners were responsible for their own “mistakes” and that any conclusions made based on their experiences should be dismissed. I thought I was doing the right thing.
I am admitting now that I was wrong.
Immediate affirmation seems like the most empathetic response to someone presenting with dysphoria. It feels like it’s progressive. Trans issues have been unceremoniously lumped into LGB issues, so the prescribed agenda is full acceptance of someone’s identity, no questions asked, with anything else being considered “conversion therapy.”
However, the health care required of someone who is ruminating about and dissociating from their body should be completely different from the care required of someone who is attracted to members of the same sex.
If a gay man is feeling emotionally distressed about his attraction to other men, his care should involve helping him accept that this is how his body experiences attraction, that it’s completely natural, and that he doesn’t need to change himself in order to enjoy his life.
So why is it that when a trans person is feeling emotionally distressed about their body, their care involves affirming subjective feelings that their body is “wrong” and that changing their body is the solution, rather than helping them accept their natural state of being?
For many patients, affirmative care is literally conversion therapy (particularly when there is evidence that most gender non-conforming youth grow up to be gay men and lesbians), and we have all been duped into believing the opposite.
Since I transitioned eleven years ago, real life authority figures — doctors, scientists, celebrities, politicians — are now parroting the same mantras that I first saw on Tumblr; the ones that I know had an impact on the decisions that I made about transition when those mantras were only being repeated by regular citizens.
I am terrified for the vulnerable people who might one day find themselves in my shoes, and I am gutted that I am considered callous and selfish for expressing that terror.
These days, I am really struggling to find my place in this world.