If you search the phrase “protegimus invicem” on Google, your top searches will be me. It’s in my Twitter bio. It’s not really anywhere else online. It’s also written on a Post-It note on the wall behind my computer desk, next to photos of myself with all of the detransitioners and gender apostates that I’ve met in person.
Only one person has ever asked me what it means. It’s my clumsy attempt at creating a Latin motto for myself and roughly translates as “we protect each other.” If I remember correctly, I came up with it around the time I came home from the conference in Killarney and spending time with about a dozen people who’d been through something similar to what I’d been through.
In the couple months before then, I’d been working on the script for a video (which I ended up recording while walking around Killarney National Park) in which I speak frankly about the experience of being a public-facing detransitioner.
I’d been public for two years at that point and had grown extremely jaded about where the discourse was heading: tired of “allies” in the movement using negative emotive language for our bodies, frustrated with journalists more interested in clickbait than the truth, and annoyed that a lot of the new players in the movement seemed driven by personal ideologies (whether religious or political) rather than objectivity.
I had been very tempted to disappear forever. At the very least, I was going to take a break. But the primary feeling when I came home was that I didn’t necessarily need to leave advocacy; I just needed to switch my focus to supporting other people like me. I had to commit to protecting them, in whatever way I was capable of doing. It was becoming clear that no one was going to prioritize us the way we would do for ourselves.
This past weekend, I came away from my second conference this year in which I was able to spend time with other detransitioners. These meetings have been very important to me, particularly as someone who is very isolated in everyday life. There’s something about being with other deep-voiced women who went through the same surgery I did which can’t be replicated in any other friendship. (I have kinship with the men, too!)
There’s also a bit of a surreal feeling to being around so many people who know who I am. I wasn’t presenting this time around, but many people I’ve never met approached me to say kind things. Something in particular that gave me whiplash was arguing with a jerk on Twitter who claimed that detransitioners have nothing to offer except horror stories, about an hour after a parent had told me he appreciated how my writing focused on understanding the phenomenon of gender and transition as a whole.
That Twitter argument prompted me to leave in the middle of a presentation that I really wanted to listen to. I’m embarrassed that a dozen people can tell me to my face that I made a positive impact on them (and my advocacy work got shoutouts from two different speakers), but one dickhead online can still manage to ruin my morning.
Overall, there were a lot of great presentations, but most of what I heard were things that were not new to me. The value I found was in the people present – and not just other detransitioners.
Different organizations have tried to support detransitioners as best they can, but it has been difficult for each of them to escape the perception that they are only helping us to further their own motives. Many of them are involved with health care (including mental health) and feel that they have an obligation to fix the problems that people like them caused, but I—and likely others—will always be a bit perturbed that the industry which profited off of harming us in the first place will also profit off of our continued suffering.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that “detransitioners”—like every group of people—are not a monolith. Not everyone wants to be public; some people want to be recognized. Not everyone experiences grief about their medical treatment; some people believe they were mistreated. Not everyone has the same relationship with hormones. Not everyone changes their name afterwards. Not everyone looks substantially different after “detransitioning.” Some people believe the focus on our narratives is exploitative; some people find comfort in telling their stories.
Sometimes the criticism levelled against these organizations can be used to make better decisions. Sometimes it’s unfair or it’s a problem that simply cannot be resolved.
No matter what you do, there will be someone who is not happy.
Detransitioners have tried to organize for ourselves multiple times. Some of these for-detrans by-detrans orgs have had a bit of success, and some have fallen apart or slowly faded from view. It’s tough. People who have detransitioned are ultimately the same types of people who transition in the first place. Most are still in the process of recovery, many have strong personalities, and everyone has different opinions on where our focus should be.
I’m not sure how we will move forward from here. We need movers and shakers to step up—and it will have to be people that other members trust—and then we need financing. That’ll be the difficult part.
A lot of people lately have been saying we need to be able to gather outside of a political or advocacy context. I certainly feel this way, too. But we are a small population of people, most of us are broke, and I imagine it will be a little difficult to convince people that a small vacation to allow us all to spend time together is a good use of charitable donations.
Perhaps having one organization to speak for all of us will never work out. Perhaps, like labour unions, we need a lot of small groups – one for women, one for men, one for gay men and lesbians, one for people who have had genital surgeries... or maybe by location (US, Canada, UK, etc.) Ideally, we would have as many as possible, a representative from each group could meet together every so often, and this “board” could likely advise organizations that are not detrans-led with thoughts from a spectrum of perspectives.
Maybe that’s a bit of a pipe dream. It would be nice, though.
I have no good way to end this except to say that I do have hope for some upcoming projects. I’m sure we will manage to formally organize eventually, but in the meantime, we continue to loosely network behind the scenes.
One of our existing active organizations is Detrans Help, which could use more help itself. Reach out to them if you’re a detransitioner interested in getting involved (or if you just need access to resources and/or advice).