I am an Observer

As s mother of a 15-year-old girl who has for the most part desisted from the trans identity she held over the last year and a half, I do not rest easy, not for one minute of one day. I am the lead of a local groups of parents of Rapid Onset Dysphoric Kids and two days ago FIVE new families joined.  That is a record no one will celebrate.  That means that five more kids may be harmed by the medical community and may hopefully join the ranks of those whose name is verboten in WPATH, gender clinics, main stream media, TV and therapists’ offices—desisters and detransitioners.

I am an Observer.  I am a Watcher.  I am a Cataloger.  Who am I watching you ask? I am watching the growing number of detransitioners and desisters.  I am reading about their anger, their strength, their compassion for each other, their wisdom, their regret, their resilience, their warnings, their confusion and their hope for a better future.

As Detransition Awareness Day approaches - March 12, 2022 - here are some of the musings of the unsung heroes and survivors of the gender ideology from various sites:

“[F]un fact, my surgeon said i was the youngest patient [15] he had EVER operated on. the surgery was extremely painful with some complications. my chest is maimed with heavy scarring (not helped by the fact that in the weeks/months post op i was too depressed and in pain to take proper care of the incision sites so the scars are worse than they were supposed to be) and i have nerve damage and pain, or sometimes weird tingling sensations (??) to this day, if my chest isn’t completely numb which it is most of the time. also, i HATE the way it looks. now that i am flat chested i can pass as male and i realize i don’t actually like presenting as male that much. i miss being feminine . . . from the second i woke up in the operating room i knew it was a mistake. i had no idea how painful it would be, physically and emotionally, and i had expected some sense of like… joy? euphoria? that i would finally be in the right body. . ., but i didn’t expect it to be pure misery either.  

i wasn’t a man, i wasn’t male, i was/am an artsy kid into cosplay and role playing and alter egos. imagining myself as a dude made me imagine an alternate reality of sorts, where male me was more confident, intelligent and happy. i thought once i got the surgery and “became male”, i would somehow obtain all the traits i imagined of this fictional happy boy version of me. . . .

i thought i was so sure of my identity, i felt so confident that this was the right thing to do, and now i’m realizing i was just lost and in over my head.”

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“I decided to detransition a month ago, after two years of presenting as a woman, and I've never been happier. I was bullied very badly for being gay in high school, and I have a very conservative fox news loving father who didn't accept me, so I thought transitioning would be the answer for me. I've always had more feminine interests and hobbies, (reading, writing, poetry, art) so it was easy to convince myself I was trans. however, even after this, I was still depressed and suicidal and self harming, and little had changed for me. only recently I realized I don't need to change my body to be happy, I need to accept myself for who I am. I'm learning how to love myself, and be ok with who I am, and that's bringing me happiness, not changing everything.”

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I didn't transition because I wanted to be a guy-I transitioned because I wanted to be male. I thought I was supposed to have been born that way, and despised the fact that I was "born in the wrong body" Why did nobody tell me that my body was right? That regardless of how I felt, it wasn't going anywhere?  . . . I just wish someone had told me that transitioning wouldn't fix anything. I didn't need to change myself, I needed to find myself. And now that I have, I feel like an absolute idiot for putting myself through this hell on earth . . .

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“I know right?! It's something that's so celebrated transitioning like you're finally taking a mask off when in fact you are really putting a new one on. I think gender expression is important and I think something to certainly be played with, but changing biological hormones is ridiculous and doesn't cure anyone of anything, only induces pain at the end of the day. I'm sorry you had to go through that pain. . . . I hope you'll be able to find peace.”

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“I've been very annoyed at the argument against the social contagion aspect of transition, when it seems so obvious to anyone willing to open their eyes and look that it plays a significant role.  . . . Let's say we ignore all the copious amounts of posts about how great and awesome being trans is and how special it makes you. Let's even ignore all the posts about how inherently awful cis people are and how they'll never understand how special and awesome it is to be trans. Even foregoing all that, I'm left thinking about the brain space I was in around puberty ish (maybe 12 to 15) when I was a wannabe goth kid. I used to beg and plead and wish I had schizophrenia or depression or bipolar or whatever because I thought it would make me edgy and "cool".  . . . And the thing is, the community I was in encouraged this. Yes, the broader community did not and judged people with these illnesses, but the counter culture sub-community I was in furthered that narrative of: severe mental illness= interesting, mysterious, and cool.

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“If you feel like you left a cult, it's probably because you left a cult. Brainwashing through memes and social media, asking for donations, requiring a belief in some entity that is unscientific in nature (gender identity- we can't prove it exists, believing in the concept of gender identity as truth would be by definition a religious belief), the catchphrases (trans women are women, gender is a spectrum, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc), the shaming and cancelling. The lack of tolerance for other viewpoints. The peer pressure to not be friends with people of different viewpoints, even to cut off family. The promotion of drug use. This is what cults do. This is what was done to me. There might not be a proper name for this cult yet, but I know I left a cult. I won't accuse anyone of being in a cult, but I can speak for myself and my own experiences, and those were my experiences. These experiences fit the criteria for cult like behavior, even if there is no clear figurehead.

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“Sorry I'm posting so much, I've just been having a couple really crappy days

I can't believe I was allowed to get a mastectomy at 18 and suicidal nonetheless. I don't know why I wasn't stopped when I panicked before the surgery. I don't know why my psychologist didn't question me or try to get me to reflect on the choice more than "I don't like my breasts so they have to come off".

I didn't like the way they looked. I didn't like the way they felt. I felt gross. I think I could've learned to like them. I wish I would've gotten help in loving myself and accepting my body instead of changing the bits I didn't like. My body wasn't even done growing when I got them cut off.”

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“I discovered the online trans community, who enabled my feeling of self-hatred and led me to believe that transitioning was the cure all to all of my problems. … [I] realized that transitioning had not fixed any of my problems.  …. I’m finally getting to know my autistic masculine female self and I love her.”

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“I DO acknowledge I made the choice to transition, but it shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place! Removing healthy body parts to treat a mental health issue? Telling an 18-year-old girl that cross sex hormones would fix her? Why shouldn’t I blame the people who allowed this?  

I saw a handful of therapists to start transitioning. None of them tried to work with me through my dysphoria. None told me that dysphoria can go away naturally, or that there are options other than biomedical. I was 18. Fuck.”

I recognize now that trans ideology sold me on the idea that I could identify into the powerful group. I was hurt  knowing I couldn’t marry a woman at that time. Hurt that I couldn’t have a family that looked like the only families I had seen until then. The idea I could identify out of oppression and be a straight man instead, felt liberating. There are few studies behind detransition rates, but I can tell you that there are thousands of us.  Our voices are hidden because we’re seen by the queer community as an inconvenient consequence of their movement. We are just collateral damage for the greater good.  Many, maybe most, are gender nonconforming lesbians….  Most desisted at the same age as me, around age 25.  This is not a coincidence. This is the age your brain becomes fully developed.

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You [therapist] are dealing with people who have very complex issues and the only one that is focused on . . . is this gender thing. … and I’m convinced . . . there is no such thing as a trans person. . . . I am delusional and you’re [therapist] not going to help.