If It Were Anyone Else...
If It Were Anyone Else...
A short tribute to my detrans partner-in-crime
My best friend is having “top surgery” this week—to remove what grew while he was taking estrogen over a period of 8 years. He detransitioned two years ago, about half a year before me.
Having had this same surgery ten years ago, I am not too worried about the procedure itself. It’s not a complicated surgery. For me, I’m a bit frustrated that the same people who profit from transition surgeries also profit from detransition. (My friend tells me he asked the surgeon if she’d seen detransitioners before. She had. Apparently people seeking reversals are not rare.)
My friendship with him was very intense to begin with. We met in 2017 at a mutual friend’s place during Toronto Pride. We entered into a long-distance romantic relationship almost immediately. Characteristic of relationships involving borderline people, there were a lot of highs and lows. I rarely feel like I click with new people, so I was reluctant to let the relationship go too soon, but I called quits on us dating after two months.
For whatever reason, though, nothing else about our friendship changed. We had been talking almost every day since we met. We continued to do that. Eventually, he moved in with me. And then we spent nearly every day together for three years after that.
We had a few yelling matches over the years. Most of them were about political beliefs. I was very deep in social justice at this time and not at all open to alternate beliefs. He described himself as a centrist and took fairly moderate positions; I imagine he was frustrated with my unwillingness to compromise with him.
Before the past couple of years, I had great difficulty getting along with anyone who had beliefs that were too different from mine. Online activist culture is very punishing. Over years of involvement in it, even just hearing the “wrong” thing triggered a fight-or-flight response in me.
My friend was in an interesting position. I trusted him implicitly. So we were able to have conversations that I would have refused to have with literally anyone else. It took me a long time to really and truly appreciate this, but I really did need someone to challenge me on my beliefs. No one else in my life would have been able to do so. If it were anyone else, I could have just ignored them.
My friend influenced my decision to detransition. It’s not a secret.
Near the beginning of the pandemic—spring of 2020—after eight years of going on and off estrogen and anti-androgens, after changing his ‘gender identity’ multiple times, and only a year post-orchiectomy, he told me that he was going to permanently change his legal documentation back to his birth name and (correct) sex.
While he’d changed his mind about his personal feelings towards his “gender” before, he’d never actually gone quite so far as to amend his documents. So it was a significant step, but I remember feeling apprehensive. I might have voiced it—I don’t think I did then, though I did tell him later—but in the back of my mind, I was convinced he was making a mistake and would eventually retransition. I still believed that “trans” was an innate part of someone and that he was in denial.
He wasn’t.
He told his endocrinologist he was detransitioning and got a prescription for testosterone (since he can no longer create his own). The facial hair he’d had removed began to grow back. He cut his hair short. He also started wearing a binder when he was leaving the house (fortunately not too often because of the pandemic). He slowly changed all of his identification.
I waited.
What happened was the opposite of what I expected. I had lived with him for two years at this point, and we had both witnessed extremely vulnerable moments with each other. He’d needed emergency psychiatric care more than once in the year prior. I’d seen some impressive meltdowns. But after he detransitioned, he seemed so much calmer and more sure of himself than I had ever seen him.
He tried to get me to read the /r/detrans subreddit a couple of times. I refused (because it was full of TERFs, obviously). I wouldn’t touch anything to do with detransition. His ideas about transition and gender continued changing, though. I was rarely open to hearing him out, but it was there. It was happening right in front of me. Like I say, if it were anyone else, I could have just ignored them.
And on one night, when I finally directly addressed my despair at not being able to have solidarity with women anymore, I caved—because I knew I needed to detransition, too. I think I’d subconsciously known it since I stopped testosterone four years earlier.
Shortly after my own detransition began, my friend moved out so he could reconnect with family, some of whom he hadn’t seen in almost a decade. He’s quite a ways away now, but we’ve stayed in touch. Our lives have bumps in the road, but we’re both in recovery, both far better off than we were two years ago.
The upcoming reversal mastectomy is hopefully his last step in “detransitioning.” So I’d like to manifest the following by speaking (typing) it into the world—I wish my friend the best of health. I wish him the quickest recovery possible. I wish him ease in putting this behind him.
Here’s to slowly making our way out the messiest shit we ever got into.
