Who Gets To Talk Detransition?

Throughout the movement for trans liberation, the Right has had total control over the narrative of detransition. It's time to change that.

The story is supposed to go like this: a trans cult, or maybe the medical establishment, steals a young girl under its ghastly wing. A wounded girl, a scared one, desperate for reprieve from a violent world that has whipped her into self-hatred. The kidnapping cultists promise an escape. A cure to the horror of her body. Then, mutilation follows, which a brave few will eventually try to undo—only they never quite can.

No, wait.

The story is supposed to go like this: some people are trans men. They are assigned female at birth, but they are men, and so some want to make their body male. But sometimes, a select few regret their transition. They aren’t trans men. They’re actually cis—in agreement with their sex—but they’ve made a mistake for whatever reason. They are very scarce. A statistically inconsequential minority to which we ought not cede ground. After all, why should a society be concerned with a statistically minuscule people?

Regardless of which way you tell it, two constants remain. One: the trans and the detrans are antagonistic; the detrans have been hurt by transition care and now threaten its existence. Two: those that detransition are seeking to correct a prior mistake. Be it from the right or left, the story is always that of failure and regret.

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Part I: When Your Worst Fears Come True

September 2023 marked the eighth anniversary of me starting testosterone. Getting HRT was something I’d fought for with great difficulty and determination: I’d burned bridges with an abusive family; I’d come out a year prior to the entirety of my university class and had already lived as a man; I then dropped out of university so I could work a full-time job to afford HRT. I did all this with full knowledge that I could not access the legal transition system in my country. I’d be unable to change my gender marker and would have to deal with that fact in a place where most people barely know what ‘transgender’ is, let alone accept it. But I was willing to weather all of that, and to my luck, I had no trouble passing for a man, and the vast majority of friends and acquaintances accepted me.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic to start testosterone. In adolescence my masculinity had been denied to me, the feminine traits of myself and my body forcibly exaggerated to put me in my (woman’s) place. Now, it felt like having all the features I’d come to despise overtaken by new growth. Like a ruin reclaimed by fresh ivy. I wasn’t entirely content—I wanted to be indistinguishable from a cis man, untouched by any insidious womanhood whatsoever. Only I found most cis men either uninspired-looking or repugnant, so… a pretty cis man? Androgynous, but not too androgynous, so I don’t get gay-bashed?

The real end goal I wished of my body was nebulous. There was no man I could cite as the Ur-Man for me, trans or cis, neither in character nor appearance. It wasn’t for lack of the much maligned Good Male Role Models in my life; I simply resonated with none of them. But there was life to be lived anyway. So I put one foot in front of the other, and sometimes, I knew my steps were dictated as much by fear of transphobia as they were by my own desires.

There are many things to fear while living as trans. One of my most personal anxieties was detransition. A forced one would be most horrid; to be put in a position where my bodily autonomy, so hard-won, could be stripped away as if it never existed.

But my strangest fear was that I would want to detransition. Not from some cruel necessity or right-wing brainwashing or what have you; genuinely, rationally, actively want it.

I knew why I feared that. Whenever I met another trans man or heard of their stories, some jigsaw puzzles would simply not fit. I never once desired to be a man until I learned of trans men’s existence. Never sought to play the role of a man and only half-enjoyed them now, if at all. Never, not even now, dreamt of myself as a man. At times another trans man would have the same ‘odd’ pieces, but then something else would find itself amiss again. On and on that list went.

One might call this a foregone conclusion in retrospect. Shouldn’t I have known? Shouldn’t a doctor have known? But this rather ignores that the psychology and study of transsexuality are hopelessly warped with attempts to eradicate it. My country’s procedures were dated. The questionnaires I took to have my doctor conclude I’m transsexual? Those were lousy with decades-dated misogyny (do you like housework? do you get aroused by housework? or maybe by cars?) and with voyeuristic, invasive questions (how do you have sex? how do you masturbate?) There were correct answers; there was no variation, which is only allowed for the cisgender. That procedure has since improved, especially in the West, but the traces remain. How does one introspect on one’s gender when that was the model for it? How does one even attempt to unravel the relationship between misogyny and desire to abandon womanhood when to do so threatens access to medical care? What sign ought I have looked for to distinguish myself from trans men when it was demanded no distinctions exist?

One does not exit a hostile care system with a healthier, more stable identity. That is nothing short of a miracle.

September 2023 marked the eighth anniversary of me exiting hostile care with a coveted prize in my grasp. It also marked the moment I looked in the mirror and saw exactly what I’d sought to win in that hellscape: an indisputable man. Not a cis man, of course, but one bereft of all the features that had haunted me to the point of self-harm. I was free, I had won; no one would ever look at me and think me a woman—no one ever did, those days.

I had won. And in my victory, I felt nothing at all.

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Part II: Failure and Regret

The Right invests much bombast into transition regret. Loud ring the warning bells: this could happen to you! Your child! A girl with so much to live for, rendered barren, flat-chested, a misshapen man-thing! You, too, will live to regret it!

It amuses me. Queerness and butchness had marked me long ago; I was never particularly buxom or fecund. Never, in the heterosexist sense, something worthy of desire. I was a misshapen man-thing far before I asked people to call me ‘he.’ The people who made sure I knew I was a monster man-woman were precisely the kinds of people that now warned me away from turning myself into what—according to them—I already was. The sheer parental panic with which I’d been forced into makeup and dresses, you’d think I transitioned already.

Even more amusingly, sometimes the Right claims to care about butch lesbians. Tomboys are being mutilated, they say. It’s an imposition of gender stereotypes; women can be masculine!

But if the Right believes women can be lesbian and masculine, what’s with the whole fixation on ruined femininity and birthing wombs?

Indeed, the Right’s acceptance of detransitioned women is full of little caveats. They are to be paraded as damaged goods at conservative rallies. Their lost breasts and ovaries will be ever-ogled, figuratively if not literally, and the ‘irreversible damage’ left by testosterone examined with morbid fascination. They are the Right’s Magdalenes. They’re proof there’s good in the transgressive—that is, that the enemy can be pitied, assimilated. As an underclass, of course. They’re never to truly cease being damaged, for they must be proof that sex can only be ruined, never changed.

For a detransitioner, there is temptation in the Right’s conditional acceptance. It offers an easy answer to their current pain. The past choice they may regret or suffer under—why, it should’ve been prevented! If only you listened to the right authorities, all would’ve been well. Not altogether different than regretting a marriage or college major. Many an adult decries stupid choices of youth—and those certainly happen—but what’s scariest of all is the notion you weren’t making rash or ill-informed decisions. I know I wasn’t. And if that is so, then it means the current self—the mature one, the one with 20/20 hindsight—could make a mistake, too.

Right-wing detransitioners take for granted there exists a guardian angel that could’ve healed them of the gendered distress they once felt and showed them a path to contentment. That is a very tall order, considering how misogynistic and hostile psychiatry and psychology are, historically speaking. And that’s to say nothing of religion. But at least they would’ve been prevented from transitioning; misery averted—right?

My guardian angel, you could say, was lack of funds. I wanted top surgery—double mastectomy—but there was no way I could afford it, not in many years’ time. Now I realise I would’ve come to regret it and would’ve likely sought to reverse its effects. So I’m all good, right? I benefitted from how flawed trans healthcare is, didn’t I?

Perhaps. But there was a reason I wanted a mastectomy, and not a frivolous one. Every time I needed to see a doctor for a respiratory infection, I did so in fear of transphobic malpractice. I would minimise the time I spent in places where my chest could be exposed—gyms, pools, beaches, goddamned corporate retreats. And then there was the way my body, breasts included, had been used to prove to me I was not just a woman but Woman, a biodestined vessel for coy giggles, cookware, and pregnancy. And how that made me feel.

Indeed, I would later find out there are women and nonbinary people that do not identify with manhood yet seek the exact same top surgery I once wanted, for similar reasons. With no regrets. They wish to take control of their body and do so. And I know that, had I been able to get top surgery in the past, it would’ve made me happy for a good while.

So what’s more important: years of constant anxiety, or lack of hypothetical regret?

The right-wing detransitioner assumes one’s current self to be the ultimate judge of one’s choices—but take that principle to its logical conclusion, and it will seem like no decision should ever be made. There is always a prospective Future You which possesses more knowledge. Always the possibility of regret. Of course, decisions in life are sort of inevitable, but don’t worry about that—the powers that be will handle that. Ancestral tradition, or a caring authority figure. That’s also all humans with exactly the same issues, but don’t worry about that either. Maybe God is speaking through them. You never know.

In the end, the prescripts of the Right march to the same grim conclusion. That the only decision you can ever make with total certainty is death.

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Part III: Death, the Tarot Kind

Queer culture delights in tales of transformation. We were all once larval—in the closet, often abused and scared. Trapped in a world of rigid roles and brutal dominion. But one day, we hope to metamorphose into our true shape and to take flight above a blissful, lawless, ever-shifting sea of change.

Most queer people are cisgender, and more still do not seek to transition, but the nature of all our transgressions is intimately entwined with gender anyway. We’re all doing it ‘wrong,’ by the wider society’s definition, even the most masculine of cis gay men or the most feminine of cis lesbian women. Unsurprising, then, are the queer community’s various attempts to embrace gender variance and to lay bare the plasticity of sex.

There is nothing per se about detransition that does not fit this mould. If gender is to be fucked with, why not take it for a swing? Indeed, in my experience most queer people would agree it’s entirely possible to detransition without weaponising transphobia or lapsing rightward.

But that’s usually a hypothetical thought exercise that ends exactly there. Maybe that queer person knows a detransitioner, maybe they don’t; regardless, the lives of the detransitioned do not interact with queer ideas of sex/gender, or indeed queer ideas about anything. The only time the detransitioned are really remarked on is only to state our statistical insignificance—or rather, the statistical insignificance of transition regret. I don’t personally regret my transition for the most part, so I wouldn’t even count there.

Whereas the Right sings lyrical about all the motivations and trials and tribulations of the detransitioned (and deftly twists the verses to fit the chorus), the Left does not usually consider the lives of the detransitioned at all. Mistakes happen, they suppose. Kind of funny we ‘failed at gender’ twice. Too bad we’re so miserable, they guess. What, ‘the patriarchy made you do it’? BuzzFeed feminism is so-o-o 2010s, bro.

It would be accurate to surmise the queer community has ceded the concept of detransition to the Right. The queer stance is, in effect, ‘it doesn’t matter anyway’—a defensive and reactive one.

That is not to say the Left as a whole is to blame for grifting detransitioners or the Right itself—the blame is always, first and foremost, on the ones that actually do the harm. And the negligence of the Left doesn’t really harm those that happily push others under the bus—sadly, some people are just assholes. No, the consequences are felt instead by detrans people that have no desire to participate in the transphobia circus, and after that, trans people themselves. The Right’s deathgrip on the detransition narrative means detransition itself is conceptually tied to the Right. Because there is no alternative trans-positive narrative, there is no way to exist as detrans and not affirm someone else’s transphobia, no matter how many times you say you don’t hate trans people. After all there is only one thing people think of when they hear ‘detransitioner.’ And now you are it, whether you like it or not.

I feared I would detransition because, on some level, I knew I might. But why fear it? It’s hard to be trans. There are clear privileges to socially presenting as your birth sex. Doctors will readily help you undo transition. I didn’t want to grift—well, fucking fantastic. Easy enough to not do something. What’s the problem?

I feared it because it’s soul-crushing to know your existence hurts the people you love most. Your friends, partners, mentors. So many cis people in my past knew me as The Trans Person—and now what? How much of the good I had done would be ruined? And by what possible example could I imagine my life as a detransitioner? What is there to even aspire to? And what about everything I’d sacrificed to transition in the first place? All the strife and ridicule I endured, only to have it whispered to me from leering faces: “See? We were right all along.”

All that, to face alone.

At a certain point my resistance to the idea of detransition was motivated only by this. Only by what others would make of me against my will. Not my personal desires. Nothing else at all. To be turned into such a spectacle, a public property of a person, felt like nothing short of death.

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Part IV: Afterlife

I decided to start this substack after listening to every podcast appearance by Lucy Kartikasari I could find. She is a detrans woman with a similar yet different story; she transitioned much younger, but went through a similarly arcane approval system and years of waiting; she is not a lesbian; she has detransitioned, and she speaks in favour of trans healthcare and trans rights. The name Dolphin Diaries also originates with her—or rather, with a different, anonymous user, whose idea she broadcast on her TikTok. A dolphin as a symbol of detransition; a mammal that evolved from the ocean to walk on land and then returned to an aquatic life. I find it an appealing and pithy comparison, one free of unnecessary gendering or judgement.

There are precious few voices that speak of detransition in a positive, non-right-wing light. It’s a perspective fraught with thorny, uncomfortable questions. A perspective which is easier to ignore—unless you can’t. If for no one else, I write this for people that felt the same way I did. Trapped, not by ‘mistakes’ or by ‘gender ideology’, but by the image others have painted of them before they could even protest.

I do not write this for the Right. There is nothing I can say that would sway you, and there is nothing you can say that would sway me—and believe me, I have listened more carefully and with far more good faith than you ever have. Feel free to comment how much you pity my womb, or something. I promise to leave its fertility a mystery. I’m a tease that way.

As for other potential readers of this blog: while I do believe it a failure of queer rhetoric to adequately synthesise detransition into the overall gender politic, I don’t believe it’s everyone else’s job to create that synthesis. Who better than a detransitioner, after all? I ask not that you solve my problems for me.

I ask only that you listen.