by Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
Each of the detransitioners I talked to told a remarkably similar story — of having had no gender dysphoria until puberty, when she discovered her trans identity online. Some, like Chiara, desisted before ever starting testosterone. (Chiara’s mother sent her to live on a horse farm for a year, where she had no internet; the physical labor helped her reconnect to her body, and the lack of internet allowed her to leave her trans identity behind.)
Others, like Desmond, did not turn back until an accumulated course of testosterone left her doubled over in pain from the uterine atrophy it produced. The only way to alleviate the pain, doctors insisted, was hysterectomy. So a year ago, she underwent the procedure. When she awakened without a uterus, she realized her entire gender journey had been a terrible mistake. “Somehow I decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk anymore.” Having paid an extortionate price for her new identity, Desmond felt only buyer’s remorse.
Nearly all of the detransitioners I spoke with are plagued with regret. If they were on testosterone for even a few months, they possess a startlingly masculine voice that will not lift. If they were on T for longer, they suffer the embarrassment of having unusual intimate geography — an enlarged clitoris that resembles a small penis. They hate their five-o’clock shadows and body hair. They live with slashes across their chests and masculine nipples (transverse oblong and smaller) or flaps of skin that don’t quite resemble nipples. If they retained their ovaries, once off of testosterone, whatever breast tissue they have will swell with fluid when their periods return, often failing to drain properly.
For Erin, trans identification seemed to fuel her gender dysphoria. Presenting as a man may have calmed some of her distress, she said, but it was also emotionally exhausting. “I felt I got kind of another dysphoria trying to be male and male-identified,” she said. “My body doesn’t fit into men’s clothes. It’s always frustrating trying to find pants. I’m just not the right shape. When I wear men’s coats or sweatshirts, it just feels like I’m this kid trying to wear my dad’s clothes. . . . I’m a curvy person, and it was making me unhappy to just think that maybe if I exercise or maybe if I change my posture—it became a thing I was thinking about all the time.”
Each of the desisters and detransitioners I talked to reported being 100 percent certain that they were definitely trans — until, suddenly, they were not. Nearly all of them blame the adults in their lives, especially medical professionals, for encouraging and facilitating their transitions.
“If you did make a mistake by transitioning, it’s not like you blindly one day decided that this is what you wanted to do,” Benji wants those considering detransition to know. “Probably, your guidance counselor, social worker, doctor, therapist, psychiatrist, parent, school teacher, told you that this is a good idea or supported that this is a good idea or helped you hash out why this would be good for you. This is not something that you came to the decision on your own — especially if you were under eighteen, you were like a child. Other people should have been looking out for your well-being.”
A big part of the problem is that eighteen may be the age of majority, but especially today, eighteen-year-olds are very immature. So many of these girls who are drawn into the transgender world are already battling anorexia, anxiety, and depression. They are lonely. They are fragile. And more than anything, they want to belong. Adults in their lives should realize this, but instead, the moment these girls voice the shibboleth “I’m trans,” nearly every adult, even medical professionals, regard them with the awe owed to a prophet, not the skepticism usually applied to a suffering teen.
Benji offers this thought experiment: “Imagine if there was a cult, and every single member of that cult wanted a gastric bypass because they needed to be skinnier because of the tenets of their cult. It wouldn’t be ethical for a doctor to give all these women gastric bypass just because it’s their religion. So when I see these people who have like spent years on Tumblr, indoctrinating themselves, and then they go to the doctor — it’s like, the doctor is the one who has the responsibility to be like, ‘Can this person tell what is reality? Is this person making a decision that’s good for them?’”
Many detransitioning young women have since come to believe they were just young lesbians who had internalized homophobia and been led to believe that not being typically feminine meant they were not female at all. Nearly all of them struggled with mental health and engaged in self-harm. As I spoke to each one, I wondered how much easier things might have been if — instead of turning to their iPhones — they had gone to the mall together and pierced their ears or smoked a cigarette.
Those who transition often assume that there is no going back. This is gender ideologues’ favorite dogma, that epistemic access to one’s gender identity is perfect: “Kids know who they are.” Because no one can be wrong about his or her gender identity, there is no reason ever to change your mind.
Parents who oppose their daughters’ transitions unwittingly participate in the fiction that the daughter they once had is gone for good. Many parents I have talked to mourn their daughter’s transition as a kind of death. But detransitioners exist. More are coming forward all the time.
Here is the important point: there is life after detransition.
The psychological struggles that lead a young woman to transition are often acute. More than likely, even after detransition, those struggles remain. At some point, we all have to face our pain.
There are also worse mistakes to have made than transitioning. You may have altered your body, and it may not, on its own, revert back. Laser hair removal exists for a reason — as does plastic surgery.
That hideous public diary that calls itself “social media” and mocks us with so many small-minded pronouncements and embarrassing images — it does not matter. Not really. Sooner than we think, we may all regard it as little more than humanity’s most colossal distraction, an endless ledger of wasted time.
We are, all of us, doomed to hurt those we love. Most of us disappoint our parents in some respect; or at least, we are not exactly who our parents would have designed, had they been granted just a little more say. Worse yet, we disappoint ourselves.
But then, each day, we awaken to a miracle: another chance to try again. To ask forgiveness. To call our moms. To go just a little easier on ourselves.
If you believe you’ve made a mistake by transitioning, the best time to turn back is now. The further you travel toward that impossible horizon, the harder it is to retrace your steps and find the person you might wish to be once more. Then again, if anyone excels at reinvention, it’s you.
Reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated. That’s no small thing. It may even be everything.
