While the Minnesota Legislature and Senate were crafting ramrodding their landmark transgender legislation pieces through the “Trifecta” session1 a legislator was asked about detransitioners. He replied that since there are so few of them, we needn’t pay attention to them.
At one time I would have been shocked by the response, but I no longer am. I can see how transgender ideologists will not allow anyone who may counter or slow their drive to reshape the sexual and gender landscape to speak out and be heard. Detransitioners are those who were convinced that they had been born in the wrong body for their gender identity and have gone through at least some medical phase of affirmation, then realize that they were mistaken.
Just before the pandemic started I took a flight out to Seattle for an event at the Seattle Public Library for WoLF. The main topic was how transgender activities affect women, and there was great attention paid by transactivists. I was profoundly affected, not just by the speakers and what they had to say, but to the loud attempts outside the library and in the auditorium, to prevent this event from happening. Failing that the disruptors outside were yelling and banging on the windows, I think to let us know that they were very unhappy indeed for women to be speaking their experience.
I had flown to meet a Facebook friend or two in person after having known them online for several years. One had come down with the flu that weekend, and Ophelia hadn’t come down to the library event but agreed to meet me the following day. So I was a bit at loose ends. I wasn’t quite ready to go back to the Air BnB near Fremont Street since there was nothing interesting to do there but go to bed.
I started talking to three people who had milled near the local hotel, and was invited to a meeting that was being held down the street for detransitioners and their families. We were to have pizza and talk about our experiences. They were happy to have me along even though I was not in their position, but since I was a gender skeptic, at least I would be open to listen and not reject their experiences. Plus, there was pizza, so I had no resistance and joined them.
There I listened to young adults who were facing a long medical and psychological road back from transition. I met their families, their brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents. And we sat around in a circle to listen to each other and explain what had happened. There were girls with sexual abuse histories, there were young adults on the spectrum, there were boys who had not understood that it’s quite all right to be effeminate as males.
One of the key points that I took out is that even though it had taken years to get treatment, they had never been counseled to determine why they believed they were in the wrong sex. For each of them, their medical and psychological care providers accepted that they were as they said, and counseled them on how their lives would change once they “transitioned.” It was very much the happy path for them, all the promise in the world.
The science is coming in, slowly, about the fact that medical gender affirmation does not turn out to be the magic bullet that took unhappy teens and young adults and led them to happiness as their “authentic selves.”
Minnesota made it illegal now to try to “change a child’s gender identity” through therapy. It is considered to be conversion therapy now, and we are even a state that provides the services to patients from states where “transgender care” (read gender affirmation) is not allowed until someone reaches 18. This is what they were working on when Finke so callously dismissed the experience of detransers. If we hear their stories, and know what they’ve been through, we will be cautious before putting them down a path that can lead to major health problems down the road and not even provide happiness to the patient.
If there truly were care being provided for the patients, the providers would want to study and understand why there are detransitioners, to learn from their mistakes. This is how science works. Researchers want to know what went wrong in an experiment so they can improve methodology, or even determine whether they are working from a valid hypothesis. Gender ideologists don’t want any negativity to be expressed that might slow down their drive to transition children, or get them on puberty blockers.
The claim that people can be “born in the wrong bodies” is an extraordinary claim, and one that should be approached with caution. It takes extraordinary evidence to convince a skeptic, and the detransitioners are a powerful counter-evidence to the claim that children know, or young adults know, or that anyone can know that they are transgender.
We do need to be able to hear the stories of the detransitioners, it’s not a “gotcha” against trans ideology. It’s about people’s lives being shaped when they are vulnerable, and a reason to take a more measured approach to early medical affirmations. Current thinking is that the human brain is still immature up until 25 and people make rash decisions.
Why do they want to “affirm” them so young? Understanding detransitioners will help us counter such urgent attempts to provide early medical gender conformance.
This is when a party controls both of the legislative bodies as well as the governor’s office. They can pretty much do what they want because the minority party can’t stop them.
That ridiculous, twisted "logic" about detransitioners "being so few in number that we needn't bother thinking about them" could very easily be applied to trans-identifying people themselves - and boy, wouldn't that make them squeal! The myopia of these cult members really blows my mind sometimes.
So, they claim to be all "marginalised" somehow, despite currently having the favour of so many multinational corporations and governments around the world along with the power that affords - primarily because they are so few in comparison to so many other groups. They are currently claiming that the legislative push-back in some US states against their overreach which so adversely affects women and children is somehow tantamount to a "genocide" against them - which is palpable and indeed, really offensive nonsense. Yet despite their hypocrisy, they still seek desperately to deny the entire existence of and significance of the rapidly growing cohort of detransitioners by trying to bully them into silence. That's always been doomed to fail, especially seeing as the changes to legislation and the practice of such professions as medicine, psychoanalysis and counselling regarding those who are vulnerable enough to claim a trans identity for any reason have cast such a wide net that the existence of a growing cohort who come to regret being medicalised has effectively been guaranteed. It's truly astonishing to me. If this movement was *not* based upon a destructive cult, they would champion detransitioners, listen to them and lobby to reinstate what they witheringly refer to as "gate-keeping".