It perturbs me when I see people write that detransitioners “were just confused cis women”. At best, it’s a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of our experiences. But often than not, it’s an attempt to neutralize and silence women who are getting too loud or causing trouble.
At no point during my transition or detransition was I “confused”. I was many things, but confusion wasn’t part of the equation. If I had to only one word, it would probably be something like, “deliberate”, “driven”, or “ambitious”.
The insistence that detransitioners are helpless or confused is a two-pronged attack, both a shutdown and a theft. If a detransitioned woman is painted as confused, it implies that she is unable to make a sound choice, and/or can be easily manipulated by an outside force as a result of her confusion. It removes her agency from her story, and casts her in a secondary, inactive role in her own experiences. It renders her story open to reinterpretation by ideologically motivated parties of all kinds (be it conservatives, ROGD moms, doctors/surgeons/psychiatrists, trans activists, people across all parts of the political and moral compass). It’s an old trick; it has been used against women for ages.
Every step of the way, I was doing my best to make careful decisions that were in my best interest. I had a boatload of problems, and when presented with my options, I used what I knew at the time to address those problems as best I could.
I made lifechanging decisions at a young age, with limited information, incomplete knowledge, like all people do. Many of those decisions are not ones that I’d repeat or recommend to anyone else. Many of those decisions led to outcomes that I am not satisfied with, even if other people are satisfied with similar results. I’m especially dissatisfied by the parts of these experiences where I enlisted the aid of outside experts, who ended up causing me more harm than help – real harm, real physical and mental and financial harm. I’m especially dissatisfied by the broader social context I made these decisions in – I’m dissatisfied by things that were outside of my control, and sometimes beyond of my awareness. None of this means that I was “confused” or unable to think critically.
Both then and now, I’ve wanted the very best for myself and those on similar paths. I yelled back then, and I yell now, because we deserve better!
We aren’t confused. We have demands. We want freedom, agency, safety, respect. We want quality medical care. We want improved, honest information made available to people. We want people to listen and actually incorporate our experiences into their workflows, learn from the things that have harmed us, so that they don’t keep happening. We want apologies from those who have caused us harm. We want peer support, actual allies, not just people looking to indoctrinate and use us. We want to be taken seriously. We want these things and more. We want so many things. We wanted these things then, and we still want them now. We haven’t stoped wanting, and therein lies the problem. Nobody likes an unsatisfied woman.
Enduring a trip to hell and back doesn’t make a woman confused, it makes her resilient and pissed off.
I often see more gatekeeping presented as a way to prevent detransition. And while this wouldn’t necessarily be useless, it’s a bandaid solution. Working harder to root out the “right” people to transition from the “wrong” people to transition isn’t going to eliminate transition regret. To get at why we have to ask, who are the “right” people? Are they the ones are suffering the most or who have been suffering the longest? Are they the most gender non-conforming ones? Are they the ones persistent enough to pass through checkpoint after checkpoint? None of these things insure that transitioning is going to work for someone: that it’s going to improve their quality of life.
When I walked into gender therapy I was suicidal and had been off and on since I was old enough to understand what death was. I was already being regularly mistaken for a boy. I was adamant that I needed this. My therapist called me a “classic case” and still we talked for almost a year before I socially transitioned. I then spent another year living “full time” before starting testosterone and spent my first six months of testosterone on a low dose prescribed by a fairly paranoid pediatric endocrinologist. I met every requirement. I passed every checkpoint. I didn’t take any shortcuts. And still, here I am: a woman, a butch dyke, further from normality than ever, bitter about what happened to me. Because none of those measures addressed my underlying problem.
What we really need if we want potential regretters to not be certain that they need this is a shift in culture. We need environments without misogyny that are affirming of lesbianism and gender non-conformity. We need girls to grow up free from abuse, supported in their mental health and knowing that they can be anything they want to be and anything they are. We need to encourage them to love and live in their bodies and provide immediate solutions if they find that they can’t. Because by the time that many girls step into a gender therapist’s office they’ve already made up their minds, for good reason, that they can’t live this way.
the dialogue around detrans people online right now is so fucking awful lmao…. seen threads full of people talking about how they literally do not give a fuck about the struggles of detrans people whatsoever bc we’re “too small of a group” or are “cis so it doesn’t matter”. it’s just like….. so fucked because we literally have all the exact same struggles as trans people? 100% of the same shit? the only line between the groups is one largely of labelling and choices we make w our bodies (which isn’t entirely true, not every trans person medically transitions or stays on hormones and not every detrans person medically detransitions or goes off hormones)
almost every detrans person i know and have talked to struggles with transphobia from strangers on a daily basis. a lot of us are coming out from having been stealth which i have to say has felt exactly the same as coming out the first time. we need the same kind of healthcare that any trans person might need and struggle to receive it for the same reasons. we need the same kind of legal assistance that any trans person might need and often have to go through the same lengthy headache process of getting all our identification changed. we’re at the same risk of violence and harassment for the ways that we look and move through the world. what is the legitimate empathetic reasoning for not giving a fuck about us? and no, “you did this to yourself so you deserve it” is not a legitimate empathetic reason. imo everyone who struggles with gender and presentation socially and/or medically and/or legally is in the exact same boat and we should all be supporting eachother. its kind of hard dealing with knowing that there are tons of people out there actively declaring that they don’t give a shit about me or anyone like me. it makes it difficult feeling comfortable or safe or cared about anywhere
If you aren’t detransitioned yourself, you don’t get to tell people the “reasons” for detransition with any kind of authority on the matter. You don’t get to tell detransitioned people how they must have experienced dysphoria or say that it wasn’t “severe” enough if they were able to find other means of coping than continuing to transition their bodies.
I’m tired of watching non-detransitioned people try and speak over us, try and erase the variance in stories because some of them don’t fit a narrative they like, and consistently belittling our experiences.
People who transition are only helped by having information on the varying outcomes that may come from it, no matter how small of a chance it may be. My doctor didn’t have me ignore the fact that my nipples could fall off after having surgery just because it was a less than 1% chance, they certainly shouldn’t have been telling me not to research about detransition for the same fucking reason.
i really do think that we, as a whole, are becoming more and more disconnected from our bodies.
we’re being encouraged to view our true self as separate from our body—the body is a collection of disparate parts, to be discarded at will or exchanged for new ones, separate from our mind or soul. instead of viewing our bodies as something that developed alongside our minds, they’re an object of scrutiny and judgment; if you don’t like your nose, your fat, your breasts, your labia, your forehead, your lips…don’t worry, because you can (and should) change those things.
go under the knife and reveal your new self, molded into the vision in your mind’s eye for only thousands of dollars and an ultimately unimportant risk to health and life.
adopt a strict new diet. obsess over an idealized form of yourself. shift the goalposts of what “perfect” looks like so the chase is never complete. hate every natural function of your body. devote all your time, money, and energy to an idea.
stare at your breasts and hate them. hate them so completely that you decide that you need new ones, or to get them removed so you never have to look at them again. never try to come to terms with how they look—that’s settling, that’s giving up, that will never lead to happiness. stare at your genitalia. hate it. daydream about something that would look better, feel better, be less objectified, be more acceptable, be more featureless, look more male, look more female, look different.
your body is not you; it’s just a vessel. and it’s your right to customize your vessel with anything that you want—whether it’s drugs, surgery, injections, or extreme diet restriction, it’s not you. you’re not doing it to yourself. you’re doing it to the flesh that formed around the real you. so how can that be wrong?
how can your idea of what your body should be, in complete contrast to what it is, be wrong? how could it ever be influenced by a complex combination of factors when it’s not even you, when it’s barely even connected to you?
how could dysmorphia, dysphoria, body image issues, or a desire for extensive cosmetic surgeries be misguided when you can neatly separate the mind from the body?
as much some folks wanna think it so, my complicated relationship with my gender doesn’t make me trans.
“I’m happier being detransitioned, but saying that people detransition because they’re “not happy” with transition is disingenuous. The truth is that a lot of women don’t feel like they have options. There isn’t a whole lot of place in society for women who look like this, women who don’t fit, who don’t comply. When you go to a therapist and tell them you have those kinds of feelings, they don’t tell you that it’s okay to be butch, to be gender nonconforming, to not like men, to not like the way men treat you. They don’t tell you there are other women who feel like they don’t belong, that they don’t feel like they know how to be women. They don’t tell you any of that. They tell you about testosterone.”
— Cari Stella, @guideonragingstars, Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation
Do you or your followers have any thoughts on that new book by Abigail Shrier? I'm not sure if to make a purchase because the cover alone and sensationalistic title gives me be a bad gut feeling
No, I will not be supporting this book with my money.
The Amazon listing for the book says “Abigail Shrier is a writer for the Wall Street Journal.” What it doesn’t say is that she also contributes to The Federalist, a well-known conservative hellhole. Anyone who willfully collaborates with the right does not have my best interests in mind, I can promise you that.
The title speaks for itself. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The cover has a vintage photo of a little girl with a hole punched out of her pelvis. This is not my narrative. I am resilient, not ruined.
The title and cover align themselves with the conservative idea of “protecting our daughters”, protecting a commodity that belongs to men. It does not recognize that we were already being harmed before we transitioned. It does not recognize what we were responding to with transition. Instead, it posits that the “transgender craze” is swooping in and corrupting sweet young women, reefer-madness style.
The description in the listing says everything I need to know:
These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.”
Uh-huh. Never experienced any discomfort, huh? Right-o. Sure.
A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.
Condescending. “Inoculate your child”? Christ, transitioning isn’t the result of a disease. We aren’t “crazy”. Women who have gone down this path have reasons for doing do beyond being ~infected by those crazy liberal transes~. But the reasons for our trauma aren’t something they’re going to publish in a conservative thinkpiece, because they aren’t looking to solve the root of these problems. They’re looking to preserve it. They don’t want change. They want things to stay the same.
She’s using detransitioned women’s experiences and trauma as a pawn in her arguments, just like everyone else does (across all ideological lines, both left and right). These people don’t care what we actually think or want, they just want the juicy trauma porn they can pick pieces from and use to bolster their own point of view. This book is another example of using the “damaged woman” narrative as a boogeyman. “Look at this pitiful creature, see her moan and gnash her teeth and feel so much regret for what she has done -- your daughter could be next!”
No thanks. I’d maybe borrow a copy if I feel like seeing the latest in how conservatives are warping our stories for their gain in the year 2020, but I’m not supporting it with my money or clicks.