I’m probably going to detransition because I’m convinced being out and trans is done

I began HRT in September 2019 and came out publicly in January 2021. For 3 years, only those closest to me have ever known that I used to be a dude when I was a kid. Recently, I decided that I would have to begin a ’soft detransition’ in which I stop HRT and become more of a type of guy.

This sounds like a pretty drastic decision for me to take, and it sort of is. I’ve only been on sanctioned hormone prescribing since January of this year, and were I to continue, I’d be on the list for genital reconstruction surgery this coming January. For a minority which many inside preach that detransition is death, the reactions span from concern to betrayal. I think it requires a little explanation on my part, because this is not a decision I came to lightly.

My entire adolescence felt like watching the world through the eyes of the main character of a terrible film, all day every day; like if Napoleon Dynamite had the same vibe as Schindler’s List. Awful things happened to me, in front of me, by me to other people, all the time. People would assume that I wanted all of these things to happen, because I was diseased, or I was evil. Transition has allowed me to feel like I’m actually at the controls, that I can actually be present in my body and person.

I did then, and continue to believe, that my transition is not something to be celebrated. I transitioned because I was truly overcome with the feeling that if I were to do nothing about the torment rising inside me day by day, I would not live for much longer. My transition is not necessarily shameful, yet it is something to feel at least some shame about. I never feel confident coming out to people.

Paradoxically, when I do disclose my transition to people, I never claim that I was always a woman, because I can’t erase the life I lived through until the point I came out. Of course, there are things I wished were different about my life from the start; but to consider them would be to imagine that I was a completely different person, who lived a completely different life. All the same, I feel that it is impossible, philosophically and materially, to really understand “what it feels like” to be a cis woman. I’m not in their head and they’re not in mine, and the point in my life where I could have found out has passed 20 odd years ago.

I also believe, I suppose controversially, that it’s my duty to fulfil gender expectations, because to be clocked is a failure that will carry consequences. I never wanted my transition to become a negotiation with strangers for basic respect. At the end of the day, the vast majority of people you meet in your life, you will never see twice. Unless that person is close or you see them every day, it isn’t such a disaster to be clocked now and again.

For the entire of my egg phase; from the point at which I learned that people like me existed but the criteria did not include me; to the building distress rising daily which I could not relate to anyone around me; to acceptance of my transness and beginning transition; I have never considered my gender to be about sex. I suppose it’s pretty common of trans women to be distrustful of suitors as being chasers, but before and after my transition, I have never wanted my relationships to be about what’s in my knickers, or their knickers. If my transition was about sex, I would have had a lot more of it by now.

I had always hoped that my transition would be a purely point-to-point teleological process. Medical transition, then social transition, and at the other end I’d get bottom surgery and finally come out the other side. I could get on with the rest of my life, without any special regard for the process I had just been through. Some things would just be a bit different about me compared to the average woman. As you can probably tell, events have transpired this year that have shattered that plan.

When I began my transition I believed that there was a social contract between the trans person and the rest of society, that a transitioned life was a valid way of living, that people would allow me to go about my business as a young professional woman. I would be permitted to use facilities where I would be less likely to be sexually assaulted, if I behaved myself with regard to convention, respect and the law. That has been torn up this year.

Ever since the 2019 Labour manifesto embraced the language of extreme anti-trans hate, the direction of travel has been obvious. The Bell vs Tavi decision, the Cass Review, and, as we can’t help but remember, this year’s handing down in 4WS vs Scot Gov, have all landed bruising blows against trans people. What all three share is that they all have made a mockery of legal procedure or precedent in some way or another.

When the Bell decision was partially overturned on the basis of its application of the principle of Gillick competency, puberty blocker prescribing from the NHS never returned; many of the claimant’s expert witnesses were of dubious expertise and had enthusiastic ties to far-right organisations. D. Aaron and Craig Konnoth allege in the New England Journal of Medicine about the Cass Review that “if the US government issued a report in a similar manner, it would be violating federal law”, and Hilary Cass herself gave up the charade of neutrality almost immediately in the days following the release of the report. Both are referred to by both our failing Health Secretary, the hated Wes Streeting, and the second Trump White House, in its own hit piece on trans healthcare (which, to give credit to Hilary Cass, does not even pretend to be rigorous) as if they are findings of incontrovertible fact.

In the 4 Women Scotland case, the Supreme Court gave one line to the only pro-trans intervenor in the case, Amnesty International, just to acknowledge they’d shown up, and then dedicated the rest of its report to reproducing the most extreme language of anti-trans hate, verbatim. The decision went directly against the words and intentions of the writers of the Equality Act, against the European Charter of Human Rights, and against European Court of Human Rights case law. Furthermore, the Supreme Court adopted the behaviour of its trans-atlantic distant cousin in violation of the tradition of English law; by removing protection from where it once stood, when the question should have been declared beyond its purview and referred to Parliament.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission was until very recently led by Kishwer Falkner, appointed by a Tory who originally made her name as an anti-trans hate crusader, and is perhaps more famous for her short stint as Prime Minister, when she smothered the British economy already underwater from 14 years of 4 compounding crises. The EHRC was already distrusted from its hatchet job on the anti-austerity Labour Party as it existed from 2015 to 2020, and it rushed as fast as possible to misinterpret the 4WS vs Scotland in the cruellest manner possible, leading to what is not just a bathroom ban but an everywhere ban.

No one seems to care about any of this, though. There is no urgency on the part of the one organisation which could set these things straight, Parliament, to do so. I once regretted that it seemed the only people capable of standing up for transgender people were ourselves, the people who were about to transition, and the men who are prepared to admit that they’ll fuck us. As ’allies’ drop us when the going gets tough, and the few signals of public support we have blink away in the face of constant attacks from our hated rabid news media, that appears more true than ever.

What grates me so much about the campaign waged on us by our country’s disgusting press is that trans people are never permitted to speak for ourselves. We may only be spoken about, by those who wish to drive us out of sight and mind, or spoken for, by ’allies’ who are only in it for brownie points or to extract what little income most of us recieve.

We supposedly live in a “liberal democracy”. To me, those two words actually mean things, and are not some sort of Cold War relic, or reference to American technocrats. The `liberal’ means that there are common sense rules that are applied equally and fairly, and the `democracy’ means that the power to make and enforce those rules ultimately stem from the average person, with no patronage or station. In a country where the rules are not enforced fairly and the rules are made arbitrarily, by partial judges and a violent executive, the boundary of what is and is not permitted is up to whether the State is giving you permission or not. And to be frank, I do not want my body and person to be subject to constant scrutiny and negotiation by the State.

It is for these reasons that, along with the Palestine exception, I believe that the embrace of transphobia is in the process of destroying liberal democracy.

In our culture, we have plenty of tales of persecution, from which the persecuted have come out the other side, vindicated yet decorated by martyrs. Roman persecution of early Christians, and centuries of antisemitism from the Exodus to the Holocaust, has given the West its fair share of these stories; the histories of gay liberation in the late 20^th century another secular example. The question I beg to ask is what happened to the early Christians, the Israelites and the closeted, who decided they did not have enough stomach for the fight ahead? Were they derided and abused by those who kept the faith? Was compassion or sympathy shown to those who chose to be left behind?

Even though I am convinced, and also constantly reminded by my friends, that I pass perfectly, do I want to continue to step in front of the crosshairs, to step in view of the laser dot on the wall? Like I said previously, I have never felt up to negotiating or responding to a challenge in the places made battlefields for people like me. It’s already been a decade since I went swimming, and I must have wasted at least a hundred quid on clothes that don’t fit me and I didn’t try on in the changing rooms because I was terrified of anything from a stink eye to a full blown panic from someone who wanted to kick up a fuss.

Does this make me a coward? Or am I adapting rationally to the threats that I face? Is it okay to be a coward? And more to the point, what do I leave other trans people if I appear to have deserted them? I have a contentious relationship with the concept of the ’trans community’. Beyond the divide between transmasculine and transfeminine people, which reflect the same inter-gender misogyny and distrust of allegedly inferior cis people, and while I understand perfectly that I’m pretty fucking disagreeable, you must understand that you don’t just get along with other people automatically because they are also trans.

The other component is the proselytism that many transgender people online participate in. Now, I knew about trans people, and NHS gender identity clinics, when I was 13. Someone in my year at secondary school went to the Tavi! Yet, I spent 5 years telling myself that it didn’t apply to me, because you had to be really, desperately sick to qualify under their criteria for treatment, right up until the point that I broke down. Near or around the time that I did crack, there was a site that asked you “would you push the button to be a girl”, that then said that you could be a girl by dint of having wanted to push the button. There was also a sense of urgency, because I still felt like I was not yet at the end of my first puberty. No one wants to be the trans woman who repressed for decades, then whose dam broke and who became a Susan’s Place hon. There is a reason why adults advocate for trans kids; it’s because we desperately wish that we had the same opportunity before our first puberty.

I want to make clear that I am not preparing to `switch sides’ to anti-trans hate, and I should declare now that if in future I go back on this, you need to find me and kill me. I affirm that I will not waver in my defence and love for other transgender people, nor my hate for the wicked, pitiless thugs who have brought us to this point. The thing is: I have always based my transition around the belief, which was later affirmed by an NHS professional, with whom I discussed my childhood at great length, that my transition is a treatment to a condition of the mind. I really was in the deepest pit of despair when I made the decision to transition this time 7 years ago. What the community told me was that it wasn’t shameful to need transition.

Now, I feel we are approaching a point at which it leaves me open to attack from any direction. What differs is that I am debating internally whether the cure is easier to go through, than dealing with the symptoms another way.

What does it mean to detransition without making a heel turn? Does it automatically mean ’leaving’ the ’trans community’ behind? Am I betraying my friends or withdrawing the strength of solidarity, by saying I can’t go further because I’m scared of what might happen? What would happen to me if I didn’t make this decision, and then I fell victim to the attack that I feared could happen? Where would that leave me if I had not made this decision? This is the turmoil that rages inside me at the moment, and I’d like for once a dialogue from an audience outside of my long-suffering close friends.

The social contract with trans women has been severed, and it’s made outlaws of all of us. It appears that nothing we need is safe. All I believe we ever needed was a legal bulwark against discrimination, a guarantee that we could use the bogs where men wouldn’t ask us for our rates, and allow us the treatment that helps us pass. One by one, the pins are going down.

I turned 25 recently. Even though it feels like every year since I turned 21 has gone by like nothing, I was nonetheless struck by the enormity of the next 50 years I’ve supposedly left to live. And in the middle of that, I thought to myself, that if I was to choose, I wouldn’t want the set of things that I’m permitted to do to shrink further than it already has.

I presume other trans women have made the same estimation. Have I only heard the ones who have stated that they’re prepared to live under the cosh indefinitely? What happened to the other women who feel like me, that feel defeated by the rising tide of hate and material efforts to get rid of transness? Am I wrong in assuming this, that other people in my situation have spent loads of time thinking about this?

I think about my romantic life, or lack of it. Can I recreate a healthy sexuality out of detransition? Do I even have a healthy sexuality as a trans woman? Am I succumbing to the propaganda of heterosexual reproduction, even with the knowledge of my own horrific childhood, and the knowledge that everyone I know who has had kids, hi by the way if you’re reading this, has had it fall apart in front of them almost immediately?

Now that the process of going from A to B now involves a complete diversion through D, can I really pick up the pieces and pretend that this never happened? Is that what I want? Is pretending this never happened part of the heel turn towards the hated “detrans” figure? If there’s one thing that sets me aside from the detrans quisling, it’s that I refuse to believe that I was ’tricked’ by anyone into transition. I fucked my own life up, thank you very much.

I suppose that we don’t like to think about this. We’d love to live up to the stories of the trans men and trans women who survived the 70s and 80s. The ones that lived to have full lives. We’d love to think that we’re gonna come out the other end unscathed. Right now I can’t see myself there.

https://youtu.be/CtH1lQX_eEY?t=2034

@failedst8.bsky.social