Their stories have upended his assumptions
It’s like being tangled in a net that just pulls tighter the more you struggle.
Reuters has a special report on detransitioners.
For years, Dr Kinnon MacKinnon, like many people in the transgender community, considered the word “regret” to be taboo.
MacKinnon, a 37-year-old transgender man and assistant professor of social work at York University here, thought it was offensive to talk about people who transitioned, later regretted their decision, and detransitioned. They were too few in number, he figured, and any attention they got reinforced to the public the false impression that transgender people were incapable of making sound decisions about their treatment.
But what if it’s not a false impression? What if it’s not high quality thinking to assume in advance that it is a false impression? What of the (surely very real) possibility that in a climate of feverish noisy nonstop affirmation of the claim that people can be “in the wrong body,” many or most transgender people really are unable to make sound decisions about their treatment? What if they’re unable to make sound decisions because of the intensity and fervor of all the affirmation and the bullying of dissenters? And caught in a spiral they can’t get out of because of this very belief that it’s a “false impression” and “offensive to talk about”? Why didn’t any of that occur to MacKinnon for years?
Anyway, he decided to do some research on the subject.
In the past year, MacKinnon and his team of researchers have talked to 40 detransitioners in the United States, Canada and Europe, many of them having first received gender-affirming medical treatment in their 20s or younger. Their stories have upended his assumptions.
Many have said their gender identity remained fluid well after the start of treatment, and a third of them expressed regret about their decision to transition from the gender they were assigned at birth. Some said they avoided telling their doctors about detransitioning out of embarrassment or shame. Others said their doctors were ill-equipped to help them with the process. Most often, they talked about how transitioning did not address their mental health problems.
It’s so sad.
In his continuing search for detransitioners, MacKinnon spent hours scrolling through TikTok and sifting through online forums where people shared their experiences and found comfort from each other. These forays opened his eyes to the online abuse detransitioners receive – not just the usual anti-transgender attacks, but members of the transgender community telling them to “shut up” and even sending death threats.
It’s interesting that even here, in a special report on detransitioners, there’s room for a snipe at “the usual anti-transgender attacks” – as if critics were just shouting at people for fun as opposed to pointing out what a catastrophic mess this new ideology really is.
The stories [MacKinnon] heard convinced him that doctors need to provide detransitioners the same supportive care they give to young people to transition, and that they need to inform their patients, especially minors, that detransitioning can occur because gender identity may change. A few months ago, he decided to organize a symposium to share his findings and new perspective with other researchers, clinicians, and patients and their families.
You know how that went.
A Canadian health provider said it couldn’t participate, citing recent threats to hospitals offering youth gender care. An LGBTQ advocacy group refused to promote the event. MacKinnon declined to identify either, telling Reuters he didn’t want to single them out. Later, after he shared his findings on Twitter, a transgender person denounced his work as “transphobia.”
Around and around we go, caught in the circle. Claims of “transphobia” keep people from getting good advice, and then when they want to reverse the process, the claims of “transphobia” catch up to them anyway.
In the world of gender-affirming care, as well as in the broader transgender community, few words cause more discomfort and outright anger than “detransition” and “regret.” That’s particularly true among medical practitioners in the United States and other countries who provide treatment to rising numbers of minors seeking to transition.
Except it’s not “treatment,” is it – not as commonly understood. It’s a very new very drastic intervention, that mutilates healthy bodies in an effort to make them match reported (but entirely untestable) “gender identities.” I don’t think “treatment” is the right word for that.
When someone does detransition, they say, it’s almost never because of regret, but rather, a response to the hardship of living in a society where transphobia still runs rampant.
Is it? Or is it a response to the hardship of coming to understand that they trashed their bodies for a mistake?
Doctors and many transgender people say that focusing on isolated cases of detransitioning and regret endangers hard-won gains for broader recognition of transgender identity and a rapid increase in the availability of gender care that has helped thousands of minors.
Yes but that’s just it. This “rapid increase in the availability of gender care” is a fad for a new and bizarre ideology, and it could well be that everyone will end up regretting it. The rapid increase is horrifying and scary.
To be continued.
H/t CB.
Guess what? The impression is not a false one. Deciding to pursue a course of medical treatment that promises something it’s not possible to do is the definition of a decision that is unsound. The falseness is in the claims of those offering such “treatments,” not in the correct perception that a course leading to sterilization and lifelong medical experimentation on your own flesh is not a good or healthy one. It’s like getting on board a burning plane that is supposed to take you to Oz. You’ll never reach the stated destination, and the trip itself is dangerous and terrifying. Sure you post brave, smiling selfies while you’re in the air, but you’re still going to fall out of the sky before you get to where you’d hoped to because Oz isn’t real; and nobody can take you there. Anyone who says they can is lying, and cannot truly have your best interests at heart. You left reality when you climbed aboard and took your seat, but nobody on the flight is going to tell you otherwise. There is no safety demonstration from the cabin crew because this plane (though on fire) is never going to crash. Should you have second thoughts, and try to make your way to the emergency exit (or look for a parachute), you will be subjected to threats and abuse, and told that your doubts and fear are going to kill everyone on the flight, and that you should shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.
Or maybe they just had the same experience the rest of us had – grew up. I can’t imagine too many people go through puberty without angst, despair, and yes, dysphoria. It felt like my body was betraying me. I stabilized with distressing body dysphoria. Fortunately it manifested in anorexia, which did not lead to surgical alteration or sterilization. I eventually was able to work through the worst of it, and now manage to live even in a body that doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. I know it does, no matter what it feels like.
And these days, I feel like getting down on my knees to thank the therapist who accepted my statement that I didn’t want to be a man, I wanted to feel okay being a woman my way. He said “then that’s the direction we’ll work on”, and never brought it up again.
Growing up is painful; this generation is not going to get away from that any more than any previous generation has. It’s just the not fair shit life throws at us. (And it sorta is fair, if you take fair to mean that all the other members of your sex have to go through the same damn thing.)
For most, “watchful waiting” will be all that’s needed; the pain and confusion will pass because people grow up. But now we have people telling you that your pain is not normal, that there’s something wrong about you that you need to fix, and guess what? For the low, low price of your fertility and the rest of your life, they can fix you. Or at least they claim they can help you.
* Affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm. It’s the only possible treatment for gender dysphoria.
– But what if it turns out that the child wasn’t actually trans, and your affirmation of the dysphoria thus led to chemical and surgical intervention that ended up being a real tragedy?
* Hmmm, you raise a good point. But on the flip side, what if the child was indeed trans, and you didn’t affirm, and the kid ended up growing up as the sex that they were assigned at birth? Isn’t that just as bad?
– Well, if such kids would end up “growing up as the sex that they were assigned,” and that ended up OK, what makes you think that any kids at all are truly “indeed trans”?
* WHAT?! YOU TRANSPHOBE!!!!
This seems to meet the definition of an iatrogenic medical condition. If you caught an infection because the hospital was dirty and there were not enough cleaning staff you could have a case in court. If the doctors are ideologically captured and reckless and they mutilate you because you don’t know better, that seems like a strong case.
There is a class action against the Tavistock clinic in the UK, I hope that is just the beginning. There does not seem to be another way of resolving this, as debate is so highly policed and restricted.
So then let’s do it this way. Let’s litigate these fuckers out of existence. I feel horrible for the young people who will have to be mutilated until we get there, but I cannot see another way through this. Hopefully after one or two succesful cases the insurance industry will step in. Let’s see.
Reading through the stories is revelatory, and sad. They include a woman who deformed her ribcage wearing a binder tightly, and as a teen deciding to have her breasts removed after a man had groped her. And this one:
They are told they can become boys and believe that boys are safer than they are. Miller is a lesbian growing up in a church where lesbians aren’t allowed or acknowledged.
In the days when so few men (whether as AGP’s or homosexuals who wanted other men to see them as women) pursued transgenderism, “woke” people would think “be kind.” These were people obviously suffering from something deep-seated it was thought. Much of the rest of society was either bemused or hostile.
So only a very few, the most committed, would actually pursue surgeries and medicalization.
But now that the medical establishment and the “woke” crowd have embraced the idea that there is such a thing as a “gender” and that people are “really trans” a lot more people are going to pursue surgeries and medicalizations. And a lot of those people aren’t going to be as totally committed to the fantasy because they’re not the sort of people who would have given in to their compulsions in the past.
There is going to be a LOT of regret. Especially with the women who wouldn’t have done this at all in the past but who (in the “affirm/affirm/affirm” climate of today) are doing so in large numbers.
That crapola in the original article about “fluid” genders! To just acknowledge the existence of “gender” being “fluid” as a real concept but to blithely ignore the implications while you remove healthy organs and experiment with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Their stories have upended his […]
It is ingenious for all of these mental health professionals to act as if regret is unheard of when we know that there are cases of regret with all kinds of cosmetic surgery. Unhappy people think changing their appearance will make their lives better and in some cases it does. A child who is self conscious about ears sticking out, maybe being teased or bullied for it, may be very happy after a minor ear pinning surgery. A woman who thinks her life will be better with larger breasts may be unhappy when she realizes her breats weren’t the reason her relationships didn’t work out, or she finds the attention her new breasts bring isn’t welcome. There are plastic surgery “addicts” who go from one surgeon to another, thinking the next surgery will be the one that makes them happy.
You hear detransitioners say the same thing. They kept waiting for the next drug or procedure to be the one that made them happy. They would be happy for a little while, but when the excitement wore off, or enough time passed and they still weren’t happy, the answers they got, if they had the courage to say anything, was that they weren’t finished with their transition yet, and they will be happy in the end. Perhaps we see more women detransition or detransion faster, because there is less involved in their transition. Testosterone, mastectomy, hysterectomy, metoidplasty, some liposuction or implants for body sculpting are everything a woman can do short of phalloplasty, and phalloplasty is not something many women choose.
Women who have transitioned often have an easier time passing, so they’re more likely to be perceived as men earlier in transition. If being perceived as a man isn’t the panacea it was supposed to be, detransition becomes an option. Men’s transition is more complex, hormones, breast implants, laser hair removal, Adam’s apple reduction, facial feminization surgery, voice coaching, hair and makeup lessons, etc. There are more things for men to do to be perceived as women, so there is a longer time before they reach the point where their unhappiness can be explained away by not being far enough along in their transition.
The wave of female detransitioners is growing quickly, but the wave of male detransitioners is probably a few years off. I am curious to see if detransitioners are taken more seriously when more of them are men.
And since gender identity is supposedly hardwired into the brain, I guess we have to conclude that detransitioners literally change to a different kind of brain. And not only that, but there are no real detransitioners (← “zOMG! Questionsing other people’s identities! Denying their existence! Genocide! etc. etc.”), only trans people returning to the closet and going back living in denial of their true gender identity because of internalized transphobia.
Me #7
I hope you’re right, but once again I wouldn’t underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance: “Only an idiot or a monster would do X unless it was the smart/moral thing to do. But I’m not an idiot or a monster, and I did do X, so it had to be the the smart/moral thing to do”. The more people have invested in/sacrificed for a cause/ideology/belief system the more they have a stake in defending their choices. And literally cutting off pieces of your own body is about as big a sacrifice as one can imagine (unless it’s cutting off pieces of your children’s bodies, which is why the parents of such children are even less likely to ever admit any error on their own part).
But in the meantime they use their male socialization and entitlement to bully everyone else into “validating” them. I’m guessing this is something that TiFs are less likely to engage in, and less likely to be successful at when they do because they’haven’t had male socialization and its attendent sense of entitlement.