Detransition Awareness Day: Inconvenient Truths and Community Building

Originally posted on 3/12/21 on Health Liberation Now!

Apparently today, March 12^th is Detransition Awareness Day. Today is supposed to be a day for informing people about detransitioning in the name of creating more and better resources. Well then, here are some things I want people to be aware of concerning resources for people who detransition and why they’re in the state that they are today.

As someone who played an important role in creating one of the first communities and support networks for detransitioned women, who worked in that community for close to seven years, I have a lot of regrets now. I and others in that community made many bad, misguided choices that lead to the formation of a detrans community that is better at radicalizing people into transphobic ideology than it is with helping people access the resources they need to live a good life. We created a community that often encouraged people to use their trauma to attack the trans community and trans healthcare rather than helping people heal and get on with their lives.

Ideologically-Motivated Detransition as a Conversion Practice- A Personal Account

Oringially posted at Health Liberation Now! on 2/18/21

I am a genderqueer transmasculine butch who went through something akin to conversion therapy combined with ideological radicalization coming from a transphobic radical feminist perspective. According to that ideology, trans identities are false and the product of living in a patriarchal society, so I tried to “de-trans” myself in order to fit the radical feminist ideal of lesbian womanhood.

Confessions of a Former “Crypto-TERF”

Originally published on Medium on 1/17/21

I’m disturbed by many of my past actions as a detrans radical feminist. I said and did things that I now find very harmful and unethical. I was deceptive and tried to manipulate people, tried to change how transmasculine people thought of themselves and what choices they made. At the time I was able to rationalize to myself that my behavior was actually helpful because I believed so strongly in what I was doing.

Transphobia in the Detrans Women’s Community

Originally published on Medium on 1/21/21

[CW: Transphobia, transmisogyny, ableism, references to sexual and domestic violence, homophobia]

During my time as a detrans woman, I said and did many things that I now see as harmful and transphobic. At the time, I thought I was acting in accordance with feminism and working in the best interest of transmasculine people. In my mind I was trying to help people, I would never have acted as I did if I thought I was doing harm. Nonetheless, my motivations do not cancel out the harm of my actions, nor do they excuse them.

Rules and Guidelines from Support Groups for Detrans Women

Originally posted on Medium on 2/21/21

Below are the rules and guidelines for two support groups for detrans and re-identified women. Some of the same women were involved in starting and formulating the structure and guidelines of both groups. I played no role in creating either of these groups but I participated in both of them, more so in the second group than in the first.

Healing from the Past

Originally posted on Medium 1/22/21

[CW: mention of suicidal impulses, addiction, self-destructiveness, transphobia]

I keep thinking back on what my life was like when I was at my most fanatical. I was working on a farm in Oregon. I didn’t know anyone in the area. I was very depressed and hated myself. I felt like getting drunk all the time but I was trying not to drink and was mostly successful with that. I only had to do a few hours of work a day in exchange for room and board, so I had lots of free time. I ended up spending a lot of it online. I also read a lot.

Working Towards Acceptance

Originally published on Medium on 1/3/21

When I detransitioned, I believed that I’d finally figured out what I was and was in the process of solving my gender issues once and for all. I didn’t think I’d be hit with intense doubts four-five years in. It was shocking but at the same time unsurprising. I’d struggled with having complicated gender feelings in the past and had long wished that my sense of gender was more stable and simple. So while I hadn’t expected these feelings to come back, I wasn’t totally surprised when they did because this fit with past patterns. I’d tried several times to make my gender less complex and ultimately failed each time. This attempt had just taken a lot longer to fall through, and while devastating, forced me to accept my genderweirdness in all its complexity and chaos.

Coming Out

I originally wrote this for my old tumblr blog some time during the summer of 2020. I ended up deleting my tumblr and my other online media related to detransition a few months later.

Detransitioning didn’t work out for me. About five years after detransitioning, I started wondering if it had really been worth it. I felt disappointment and regret. I went through a lot of hardship to detransition and live as a woman and it just didn’t seem worth the trouble anymore. Along with that, my sense of self started shifting and I started feeling more like a trans person again. I resisted this at first and tried to work through these feelings and re-establish an exclusively female sense of self but doing that felt wrong. It felt like I was going against myself. Accepting these feelings, accepting that I was trans made me feel more whole and at peace with myself.

Moving Between Worlds, Deciding What To Do Next

Originally posted on Medium on 12/26/20

I feel like I’m between worlds, between different groups of people, between detrans and trans. I don’t feel like I fit into either group. It’s surreal thinking of myself as trans after seeing myself as detransitioned for years. That was a huge part of who I was. And now my time as a detransitioned woman feels like it was a distortion of who I am. A failed experiment with damaging consequences for both myself and others.