Detransition: You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave

Gender clinics force detransitioners to "prove" they are ready to "transition" to live as... members of their actual sex.

Treating transition and detransition as equivalents (ethically and in terms of standards of evidence) is one way gender clinicians hold the reality of what they're doing at bay.

But of course there's no equivalent between intervening on a patient's healthy body, introducing injury and inducing an endocrine condition, to pursue the impossible fiction of sex change, and supporting a patient's recognition of and desire to return to the inescapable reality of their sex. In some cases, medical and legal detransition sometimes requires a higher burden of proof than transition, hormones, and sex-reassignment surgery.

The ways gender clinicians talk about detransition are so illuminating. They'll stick "detransition" in scare quotes, they'll call it "transitioning to" one's assigned gender at birth... anything but reckon with the reality of harm and regret that it was their responsibility to prevent.

To avoid this reckoning, clinicians must trap detransitioners in the ideological framework that legitimizes transition, e.g., telling detransitioners they might be "genderfluid." The patient isn’t allowed to say "I'm just female,” and that means the patient isn’t allowed to break up with gender identity and a way of thinking about gender and sex that harmed the patient in the first place. To detransition medically and legally, detransitioners are forced to keep playing the same mind game.

Then there’s the social trap. How do you break out of the very patterns of thought that harmed you when the world increasingly enforces this dysfunctional obsession with gender on you? What progressive space is outside the trans cult now?

A detrans friend of mine described this as trying to leave Mormonism but still living in Salt Lake City: you can't actually leave the cult when the cult runs the town.

If you used to identify as trans and now want out, progressive circles will insist on forcing you back in, all to 'be kind.'