The Trans Community Hasn't Only Redefined Woman—They've Redefined Harm

Reflections from an anonymous guest poster

The following is a guest post from a fellow survivor and brilliant thinker.

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Trans ideologues have made headlines recently for their attempt to have British author J.K. Rowling arrested under Scotland’s new hate crime laws, which ban “deliberate misgendering” for trans-identified individuals. As is commonly the case, the activism from the trans side inevitably leads back to a supposed assault on “trans kids,” a group they see as being most threatened by “transphobic” language or attempts to gatekeep access to medical transition.

It’s certainly an emotionally persuasive argument. After all, who would want something bad to happen to kids? The problem is, it ignores two things: what a trans kid is and what harm is, in this case. As someone who formerly identified as a trans teen, let me break this down for you in a little more detail.

When I began my medical transition in the early 2010s at the age of 17, the vast majority of what we would now call “trans kids” were gender nonconforming gay boys and lesbians. As trans ideology has spread, it’s begun to include people at younger and younger ages, with pediatric gender clinics popping up in every major city in the country. For context, no such clinic existed when I began my transition. Nowadays, many of those GNC gay kids still get pulled into medical transition, but there are just as many feminine straight girls who spend too much time on TikTok and become convinced there’s something wrong with them simply for being female.

Let’s set aside the social contagion kids of today’s generation and pretend that we still live in the early 2010s world where most people who transitioned young would be defined as “true transsexuals” by even the strictest definition. It’s rare that you’ll see someone from that group talk in detail about their transition. Most go on to live stealth lives (like I did) and do their best to keep their sex a secret, and from my own experiences, most live with a regret that they try to hide even more than their trans status.

Still, when it comes to the subject of trans kids, teens and adolescents, who better to ask what is hurting them and what is helping them than someone who used to be one of them? Someone like me.

Most of the people crowding today’s conversation on this subject are people who are pre-transition, very early into transition, still very young, very old transitioners who begin medicalizing after decades of living as straight men and creating stability in their lives, as well as well-meaning liberals who don’t think deeply on the subject and consider “trans” to be synonymous with “gay” and “acceptance” to be synonymous with “do whatever you want.”

Encouraging people to do whatever they want is often the most harmful thing you can do for them.

Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a girl. I was a hyper feminine child who never really fit in with other little boys and gravitated toward everything feminine and essentially nothing “boyish”. At the time, whenever my siblings and I would make up games, I would be the girl, and it felt like being myself. This is called play, and it’s part of childhood. Allowing your child to play and have an imagination is harmless, and discouraging it is absolutely harmful.

When I went through puberty, I instantly knew I liked boys and came out as gay to my family. No one was surprised, but that didn’t mean it was accepted. I received a lot of backlash and turned to online LGBT support groups, where I quickly discovered trans ideology and instantly connected with it. As a vulnerable and impressionable teenager, without any structured education, I easily fell for the lie that I had a feminized brain and that it would be this way for life if I never transitioned.

Still, despite the fact I had a long history of wishing I was a girl, it wasn’t accompanied by any deep-seated self-loathing. I wished I was many things when I was young. I wanted to be a pop star, but did that mean I hated myself because I couldn’t sing a note? Did that mean I should devote my life to trying to become that when it was impossible in the body I was given? 

Of course not. Because no child needs blind affirmation. No child needs to be encouraged to become the impossible. A responsible adult, a responsible society, does not affirm people—whether they’re 4, 14, or 24—in a delusion. No matter how real it might feel inside that person’s head.

And don’t get me wrong. It does feel very real. There were times in my childhood where I was genuinely baffled that I wasn’t actually a girl. That’s part of growing up: learning your place in the world and learning to accept things you may not understand at first, then maybe even growing to like them.

In my case, I would go on to medicalize at the age of 17. When I began the hormones, I was sure. When I began dating my most serious boyfriend, I was sure I wanted to marry him and be his wife. When I had my penis inverted in my early 20s, I was sure. When I started getting into my mid 20s, I was confused. When I got into my late 20s, I realized I’d made a mistake.

Many people see this type of come-to-Jesus moment as one where I decided that I felt like a man inside and chose to detransition to affirm that gender feeling. But that’s their lens. What I really decided was that gender wasn’t a feeling at all, that I was a surgically and hormonally modified male regardless of how I tried to paint that with my own perception.

And when you see the truth, you can’t unsee it. My choice became to live a lie, to die, or to live in truth. I chose to live in truth. I detransitioned.

When you frame it this way, true happiness in transition becomes impossible. Why? Because it requires a belief system to uphold. If someone says they are happy with their transition, what they are saying is they believe the damage they caused to their bodies makes them the opposite sex or at least lets them “live as the opposite sex,” but they won’t see it as damage.

However, anyone who has read about the effects of cross-sex hormones or seen the surgeries performed on trans patients knows that’s objectively what it is. How can you support something where the line between life-saving care and horrifying mutilation is the personal belief of someone who was either so mentally underdeveloped or so mentally unwell that they would fall for such a belief system in the first place?

The vast majority of detransitioners like me see their surgeries as medical abuse and suffer horrifying effects. Is it that we’re just unhappy customers while the rest of these patients are happy, or is that we’re all being lied to and mutilated and some people haven’t woken up to that realization yet?

Looking back on my life now, after having reached a point of return… a point of coming home… I see my past for what it is. A simple youthful confusion based on being feminine and gender nonconforming that was pathologized. It was something that could have been a passing thing and is now permanent. 

And it was the trans community that first taught me to hate myself. Not to hate myself for being confused, but to hate my body for not aligning with that confusion and to severely damage it in an impossible quest to change it into something it could never be.

If that isn’t the definition of “harm,” I don’t know what is.