Talking detransition in Gender Rebels

Here’s an excerpt from the chapter I contributed to Gender Rebels, a new anthology edited by Sybilla Claus (you can read my recent interview with Sybilla here!). In the rest of the chapter, I discussed the factors that push and pull girls toward trans identification and—in this passage—I write about some of the things that help girls drop a trans identity and move forward in life.

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The question of what leads girls and young women to detransition is an interesting one. In trans spaces, it's common to hear that almost nobody regrets transition. Simply put, this isn't true. We don't know how many do because there's been very little research and because most research only follows patients for six months or one year after starting hormones or getting top surgery. Based on talking to a lot of people who have changed their minds, it takes anywhere from a year to 10 years for someone to realize they made a mistake—even though they often had questions and doubts about being trans and about transition the whole time. 

It's also not true that the only reason people detransition is because they were not accepted in their trans identity or couldn't get the medical interventions they wanted or because it wasn't 'safe' to be trans. I've talked to dozens and dozens of young women–online and in real life–who changed their minds about transition or decided they weren't and had never been ‘trans’ after all. None of them mentioned any of these factors. 

Realization 1: What transition offers will never be enough

Instead, these young women talked about four major factors that led them to change their minds. The first one was realizing that transition was not "enough," that transition could never make them into a man—or a nonbinary androgyne, for that matter. They realized that transition has very real limits. Hormones and surgeries can make you look more like a man. But appearing isn't the same thing as being—and, over time, the difference between appearing and being starts to matter. These young women would often say things like: "If it were really possible to change sex, I would do it. I still wish I had been born a man. But what transition could provide wasn't enough. I still didn't feel like a man on the inside." 

You might think that only people who did not 'pass' successfully would say things like this. But I heard it most often from young women who in fact had 'passed' convincingly as male. Even if everybody they interacted with believed they were male, they knew otherwise. And that made them feel like imposters, like they were wearing masks they could never take off, or like they could never get close to anybody because they could never be honest about who they really were. 

These young women described needing to falsify their childhoods so that they could be stealth or training their mannerisms to be more masculine. They also talked about feeling insecure: always wondering if they were passing or if they'd been ‘clocked,’ always wondering if they were 'trans enough' or 'man enough.' They described dropping their trans identities as a relief because that meant they didn't have to keep pretending anymore. They could stop acting, stop self-surveilling, stop trying to convince everybody else (and themselves!) they were something they were not.

Realization 2: My desire to transition was driven by other factors in my life

The second reason that young women told me they changed their minds is that they realized that being ‘born in the wrong body’ wasn’t the problem—something else was. Sometimes, they realized transition was a way of rejecting their sexual orientation. Once they found a way to accept themselves as lesbians, the idea of identifying as trans no longer made sense.

Other young women realized that trauma or sexual abuse made them feel like their bodies were wrong. Others addressed their depression or anxiety or OCD or ADHD and their feelings changed: they realized that they were looking for an explanation for feeling wrong and that trans wasn't the right answer.

This is what our minds do: make meaning. Especially when we suffer, we need meaning. And when that suffering feels senseless, we will make meaning out of whatever ideas are within our reach. 

Other people were drawn to the idea of being trans because they were lonely or felt like they didn't fit in or felt like they weren't the 'right kind' of girl or woman, and trans offered a solution: you feel like you're doing it wrong because you're really a man or you're really nonbinary. 

Some girls adopt a trans identity as part of a process of individuating from their parents. This seems to be the case when normal pathways to individuation are blocked, like if a young person feels they have to be outwardly good and compliant to be accepted by loved ones and so cannot act out in the ways adolescents and young adults need to. Coming out as trans means you can say, no, that's not me, you know don't me, I’m not doing that, and thus accomplish the tasks of individuation by a different route.

Transition can serve as a kind of rite of passage into adulthood, something most cultures and religions across human history recognize the need for but which most of us growing up secular today must navigate life without. The need for a rite of passage—some recognition that one has moved from childhood to adulthood, some way of asserting that we’ve changed—clearly runs deep in human nature. 

Some young women finally feel welcome in trans communities, having never felt welcome anywhere else (but they may also feel anxious, because this sense of belonging is contingent on holding the 'right' beliefs). 

Others are looking for what's effectively a shortcut to adulthood and having an identity: developing your interests and skills over time is a lot harder than adopting a gender, but it's more rewarding, too. Other people really don't like themselves and want to start over and be successful, popular, attractive, cool, whatever this time around and transition offers an irresistible opportunity to 'start over': new name, new appearance, new life story, new direction. Or because one simply doesn't know what to do next in life and trans provides an answer and then a whole template of actions to undertake and the community to cheer you on.

The thing is, whatever underlying factors are in play will matter down the road. A lot of young women who changed their minds about transition regret not trying to fix other issues in their lives first. 

Realization 3: Maybe the world is wrong about who girls and women ‘really’ are

The third reason is realizing that they identified as trans because transition was a way to reject the ways women and girls are treated and portrayed. Honestly, I get it. Girls and young women are socialized to fear growing old as women because old women are treated with a lot of contempt and misogyny, as though they've 'outlived' the purpose of their existence, which always seems to come down to pleasing men and raising children. 

Female characters in pop culture are often sexualized and one-dimensional. Most girls can’t project their insides onto such flat surfaces. The expectations that extreme pornography smuggles into our sex lives can be terrifying. The list goes on and on. So, there are lots of reasons for girls and women to feel like we got the short end of the stick and to look longingly at the freedoms men and boys enjoy. 

As a teenager, I often felt envious of my brother. Even now that we’re grown up, I look back and see that some things were harder for me simply because I was female: I couldn't stay out late and walk home alone after midnight and not worry. I missed a lot of school because my periods were so painful. I hated and rejected my body in ways that he never hated and rejected his. He made it look so easy, but I’m sure it wasn’t. But the truth is, I have no idea what it feels like to be male and—when I look at men—I am projecting a woman's idea of what it means to be a man. I'm having a female experience of what it might be like to be male. I don't have access to anything else. 

Realization 4: Your beliefs keep changing

The last reason is that young women changed their minds because their beliefs about sex and gender changed, and being 'trans' no longer made sense. To believe that you’re trans, you have to believe that there is a right and wrong way to be male or female. So, someone who desires to be masculine must be a man and not a woman. Someone who doesn't see themselves as a man or a woman must be nonbinary. 

But these beliefs fall away if you think that man = male and woman = female. Then there's no wrong way to be male or female. Your sex is just something that you are, a fact about your body, that doesn’t determine what your interests are or what you want to do with your life. I don't have any feeling of being a 'woman' that is separable from my embodied experience of being female. 

I'm a human being, with a personality that's distinctively mine and includes some typically feminine and some typically masculine qualities, and I have a female body. Every cell in my body is female. Therefore, I'm a woman. A woman can be feminine or butch (or neither or both, depending on the day of the week), tall or short, straight or gay or bi. She can have any personality, any interests, any talents. A woman can be unconventional in any way she pleases. 

To me, this is a very freeing way to think about sex and gender. What it says to me is: I am OK just the way I am. I don't have to do anything to be a woman. It's impossible for me to do "being a woman" wrong because it is just something I am.