Detransition: the conflict with reality continues
Detransition as a combination of radical acceptance and evolution
If living in transition (i.e., denying one’s sex as a social intervention) is living in conflict with reality, then detransitioning is the process of reuniting with reality.
However, a body that has been altered to conflict with reality will never be restored to its original form. The conflict can never be resolved.
Transition procedures put bodies permanently in conflict with material reality in a way that is visible (and sometimes audible) to other people and in a way that limits quality of life in the long-term: reducing the number of people willing to date us; affecting the ability to form healthy relationships; interfering with sexual function and intimacy; inducing infertility and sterility; and destroying our bodily integrity with scars, disfigurement, and the removal of typical functionality. In some cases, there is ongoing iatrogenic suffering.
It is nothing less than a crime against humanity that vulnerable people who don’t think their lives are worth living are being given “treatments” that severely restrict their future opportunities, especially when they are too young to understand how important those options will be as a mature adult.
My burden as a defeminized woman is knowing that my body will never again be in harmony with reality, and my task is to radically accept all of the consequences that come with it.
It isn’t an easy task. It is an intense and emotionally exhausting process to realize that you desire a reunion with reality that you’ll never be able to fully achieve. As many have pointed out before, for some people, there is no “detransition,” and sometimes this prevents people from making meaningful attempts to reunite with reality.
It’s not all that shocking that, e.g., a man without a penis might feel like he can’t be a man anymore. He is faced with the cognitive dissonance of knowing that, of course, men have penises, while also recognizing the reality that he himself is no longer a fully intact man; and medicalized “detransitioners” often continue to be accidentally referred to with the pronouns of the opposite sex.
These are the exact same “painful little reminders” about the realities of our bodies that people experience in transition, and detransitioning doesn’t magically give you the kind of mental resilience you never had before.
The process of transition is destabilizing, but it does become more predictable after a while. Detransition is the same kind of process, but it is frustrating to essentially be starting over from the beginning – now as a defeminized woman or a demasculinized man – in a state of uncertainty, not knowing how well you will be integrating in a few years’ time.
Another aspect, I think, is that transition is framed as a positive process of creation while detransition is framed as a negative process of restoration.
A transition is imagined as the process of using medical technology to change one’s form to as closely match the opposite sex as possible. You cannot succeed in changing sex, but perhaps you can get to a result that is good enough for the patient. Thus transition is viewed as a creative process (with limits).
Laypeople seem to expect detransition to work similarly, in reverse. However, breast reconstruction will not give a woman her unscarred chest back, even if it can give her a similar shape. The results of a penis reconstruction (“phalloplasty”) are even more imperfect. Functionality to removed body parts will never return. Thus detransition is a restoration process (with limits).
It seems as though an altered person considering detransition must choose between the creative choices they made in cultivating their life as a “limited” version of opposite sex… or acknowledge that their pursuit has turned them into a “broken” version of the sex they always have been and try to restore something that can’t really be fixed.
In attempting to describe some of the reasons why (re)transition may seem appealing, I don’t mean to genuinely suggest it as an alternative outcome. On the contrary, I think it’s a means of prolonging the inevitable. If you desired a reunion with reality once, you will eventually desire it again, and the longer you put it off, the more side effects of medicalization you will expose yourself to and the more difficult it will be socially.
In my experience, all of the reasons I’ve presented are outweighed by the stability of reality. There is something very grounding about embracing the way you were made. Being a woman is not contingent upon other people recognizing me as one. Watching transitioning people make convoluted arguments about how they qualify as the sex they want to be recognized as makes me so grateful that I don’t have that kind of unnecessary stress anymore.
There but for the grace of God go I.
The framing of transition as a process of creation is untruthful. Transition is a process of destruction. The mastectomy I underwent did not create a male chest; it destroyed a female one. The hysterectomy I underwent did not create a male reproductive system; it destroyed a female one. Testosterone did not give me a male body; it altered my female body.
Likewise, the framing of detransition as a restorative process can be unhelpful, and it may serve us to instead think of it as a process of creation – just not in the unrealistic way that transition might get framed as a process of “creation.”
When I first detransitioned, the version of myself I knew as a woman and held in my mind was the 21-year-old version of me who had never taken testosterone and never undergone surgeries. But I was 32 years old when I detransitioned, I had short hair, and I was 90 pounds heavier than I was at 21. I could certainly grow my hair out and lose weight, but I would never look like a stick-thin 21-year-old woman again.
Transition alters the normal course of human development, no matter what age one starts at. Trying to “restore” oneself to what one might have looked like is impossible because we simply do not know.
A few years ago, I saw a fundraiser on behalf of a detransitioned woman in her early 20s that planned an entire list of surgeries to “get her body back,” which included not only breast reconstruction, but also voice feminization, rhinoplasty, jaw contouring… the list went on. It felt like there was an implication that detransitioned women haven’t restored their lives unless they met a certain threshold of femininity (one that perhaps they would not have even met without unnatural intervention). It made me sad for her.
At the time a person decides to detransition, there is often an urgent feeling of wanting to “undo” everything and so desperate measures (e.g., more surgery) are in order.
What we must take from detransitioning is, above all else, not making the mistakes associated with transition. We should not rush into permanent body changes. We should not prioritize “passing.” We should learn aspects of critical thinking so we can challenge what we believe. We should learn to recognize abusive relationship dynamics. We should have the self-awareness to work on our weaknesses. We should stabilize our lives in terms of health, wealth, and community. As best we can, we must find meaning that is divorced from this one horrific experience.
A person who keeps flip-flopping between identities has something unresolved in their life that they have not addressed, and they keep fooling themselves into thinking that being someone else will fix the problem. In all of their identities, they remain impulsive, unstable, easily manipulated, dogmatic, and ultimately unfulfilled.
The 22-year-old version of me was brainwashed into thinking she was a man. I don’t want to be her again. If I tried to restore my life to hers, I would inevitably make the same kind of mistakes I did when I was 22.
The person I must become now is someone different than who I have been. It’s an evolution. That’s the creative process of detransition. It’s more than simply recognizing truth and doing the right thing. It’s real growth. It’s being consistent. It’s having stable, loving relationships. It’s calmly disagreeing. It’s dismissing troublemakers instead of engaging. It’s having places to be. It’s having people to protect. It’s the radical acceptance of the state of our bodies. It’s the knowledge that our experiences did not break us.
The conflict with reality persists, but it doesn’t have to be the defining feature of our lives.
Evolution is not an overnight process.
We have our dark night of the soul. And then we have work to do.