A better future for LGBTQ and gender nonconforming communities

Is it possible to build bridges and find middle ground? Are there ways to bring nuance? In essence, can we all do better?

Today we are welcoming a guest post by

Lay vs Radblr

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Lay is a detrans lesbian who has lots of nuanced perspectives to share on trans, LGBTQ, detrans, disability, and feminist topics.

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I have used endless names over the years, something quite common among both trans and detrans people. Old habits die hard, so even now I go by several: my legal name, a more androgynous nickname with my offline friends and girlfriend, and yet another nickname that I have come to enjoy using online and in my activism.

That last nickname, Lay, holds special significance in my detransition journey.

In fact, when I chose it, I was still very much ashamed of my own reconnection with cis or non-trans womanhood. It was an unexpected choice for me, as it had been the first androgynous nickname I had used as a young teen before I truly developed dysphoria. Yet I somehow felt the sudden urge to use it for my new detransition blog.

At the time, I was still hiding from my real-life friends and my transmasculine partner (now ex) who did not know the shift that was going on inside my head.

They all knew I had drifted from trans male identity to agender identity to bigender identity all the way to identifying as a nonbinary woman, but they did not fully know that not only was I reconnecting with cisgender, or rather non-transgender, womanhood fully and my own body type, but also redefining what non-transgender womanhood meant to me and many other detransitioned women.

Detransition is the untold taboo of the trans community. Talking with any of my trans friends about my detransition journey had them react with tangible, visible discomfort, quiet nods, and insistent, unnecessary reminders that transition isn’t wrong for all people. That hurried, panicked response born out of (partially understandable) paranoia instilled a strong sense of shame in me. I couldn’t talk about my experiences, no matter how gently, no matter how many times I had proven myself to be a great trans ally and showed warmth at trans people's happiness post-transition.

As a physically and mentally disabled lesbian woman, I honestly view the issue as a mix of the common struggles within disability politics and LGBTQ identity politics.

Treatments of all kinds are often shamed, and going from one identity to another, such as lesbian to bisexual or vice-versa—and of course trans to non-trans—can involve a lot of stigma and tense discourse.

Against ableism, disabled activists often need to fight people who—usually due to some miracle healing story or unfortunate side-effects they experienced or heard about—believe that all psychiatric and pain medications only make you sicker, that everyone should be healed by mere natural remedies or even prayer, or that you simply need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and not rely so much on medicine, even if it improves your wellbeing.

I link this in my mind to how some detransitioners, post-detransition, become hateful against the entire physical transition industry and insist we should outlaw all gender transition practices due to their own unfortunate, and at times traumatic, experiences with side-effects, complications, reverse dysphoria, or overall regret.

Beyond that, I also see some disabled people mock anyone disabled who chooses a non-traditional treatment journey or who criticizes bad doctors, and in that same vein I see plenty of non-detransitioners laugh at anyone criticizing in good faith the affirmation-only model some doctors use (as mine did).

They choose to actively downplay the physical, emotional, and financial impact reverse dysphoria and detransitioning can have on someone's mental and at times physical health, and shun the people brave enough to tell their stories, insisting that doing so will only feed the rightwing bigots so it should be kept as private as possible.

One shouldn’t even write detrans in their online profile, only cisgender, as that alone—something often done to find fellow detransitioners—is a sign of transphobia and cis entitlement. This can lead to an intense feeling of isolation within the LGBTQ community for detransitioners, with some only finding refuge in conservative circles, who often do not even have their best interests at heart, simply wanting any ammunition against LGBTQ and gender nonconforming (GNC) people.

They may also end up in openly and self-admittedly transphobic radical feminist circles—not simply trans-inclusive radical feminists with healthy criticisms of the trans movement, some of them trans themselves, but outright hateful radfems—who shun any kind of sex-incongruent pronoun usage or any transition whatsoever, and view all medical transition as self-harm. This group very much lacks nuance and tends to assume the very worst of trans-identified people to a harmful degree.

Neither of these groups are healthy for anyone, especially not a freshly detransitioned person who is in a very vulnerable stage of their life. Detransitioning shakes the very foundations of your sense of self, making it easy for you to fall prey to the wrong crowds. As a detransitioner, it often feels like I’m simply a political weapon and a point of discourse, not a person with very real suffering and a story worth learning from.

I do believe in anyone with a clinical disorder, including gender dysphoria, having agency in their own healthcare. I also believe that GNC people should get to do whatever they want to their bodies to a reasonable extent, with enough research and therapy. Despite that being the case, and me firmly wanting transition to still be an option for severe cases of dysphoria, I still believe that the way that doctors and the trans community treat people questioning their gender identity or considering transition is unhelpful at best, and at times incredibly harmful in ways that could very much have been prevented.

The issue is that people who are deeply suffering do not often think beyond their own two shoes. I am incredibly sympathetic as this was me just a mere few years ago… People who are terribly dysphoric want, and nowadays often demand, to have their treatment as soon as humanly possible.

Trans people and trans allies are often visibly excited when someone is questioning being trans or transitioning, celebrating a bit too much too early, leading to the person at times feeling boxed in like I did. People seeking transition now have a community of folks (a community constantly growing) who often have been in their shoes and feel their pain in their own hearts.

So, of course, with this feeling in their own heart, they tend to push for treatments happening as fast as possible without precautions, often projecting their own transition success stories or their personal desperation to get HRT or surgeries.

This comes from a very good place, a heartwarming place. But even in very good places bad things can fester, and the toxic positivity of those spaces can actually lead to them brushing any toxicity under the rug, excusing it as the enemy camp (often radical feminists) just pretending to be one of them to bring slander to the movement, or something they should never be held accountable for, no matter the role they played in it.

They believe that anyone asking questions about someone’s transition wants them to suffer or are against transition as a whole. They think detrans stories can only bring harm, instead of simply being information that at times can bring someone well-needed clarity.

Anyone looking close enough can tell you there is a sharp rise in detransitions, in large part due to more transitions happening in the first place. But if you listen in on detransition stories—ones that aren’t simply spewing transphobic rhetoric, of course—you can see that there are ways the detransition could have been prevented without overall denying all transitions.

In fact, detransitioners often aren’t calling for an end to all trans-related medical procedures, and many of us actually are friends with people whose lives greatly improved thanks to those treatments. We simply want people to hear our stories, and for the trans community to push not only for access to treatments, but also for representation of non-trans gender nonconformity.

The way that the trans community constantly makes jokes that anyone GNC is an “egg” waiting to crack open into a wonderful trans person actually causes real harm and is part of what led me down a path that personally wasn’t right for me. Paired with an unfortunate lack of GNC representation, I was also faced with endless explicit details of people’s feelings towards their bodies like mine online, with people describing how disgusted they were with breasts in masculine outfits, or with their curves, and all kinds of things that, as someone who already struggled with body dysmorphia and eating disorders, I was already prone to developing insecurities about.

People assigned female at birth (AFAB) in general are especially prone to body insecurities, as are a large number of GNC people assigned male at birth, so it isn’t too far-fetched to think that one could develop dysphoria over time as a result of being constantly bombarded with people’s detailed insecurities about their chests or genitalia in their LGBTQ friend groups.

This isn’t the root cause of every dysphoric person’s dysphoria, of course, but it is something I wish more people kept in mind especially early in the stages of questioning one’s identity or considering physical transition. It is essential to fight for both GNC representation and transgender representation, and boost both cis GNC voices (detrans included) and trans voices.

People need to hold traumatized and marginalized people very carefully when they are reaching out and questioning their gender identity. This isn’t to say you should scare them away from possibly being trans, of course. But there does need to be a balance.

When I reached out to people while questioning myself, as a teenager, I faced a sea of well-meaning trans folks and allies openly celebrating me being a handsome little trans boy, in a way I was never celebrated for being a GNC girl. It sucked me in and, once I grabbed a label, I felt it was impossible to go back: I would definitely disappoint all the people who had cheered my arrival into the trans world, or at least make them feel very awkward.

I then saw people describing their own breasts as disgusting, and other secondary sex features they were born with as something to be fixed, some curse they were born with; the same way that reading constantly about other physical features can harm people, especially female/AFAB people, and make them develop insecurities… I had already had dysmorphia about my face and my weight, but I then developed severe insecurities about my entire body and it led to me developing actual dysphoria.

For me, it personally was very much social contagion paired with internalized lesbophobia, internalized misogyny, trauma, and OCD. Many friends I love dearly have had dysphoria that required treatment, and I don’t hang around pressuring them to detransition. I wouldn’t wish the emotional turmoil reverse dysphoria brought me on my worst enemy.

Anytime I share my story, I always have to give disclaimer after disclaimer that I don’t hate trans people, I’m not after anyone’s basic human rights, and I’m not shaming anyone for transitioning. People get defensive, people take it personally, they see it as an attack on trans rights. I know that rightwing, conservative people truly do weaponize detrans stories, and so do some radical feminists, unfortunately. But I also cannot keep it all inside… And I hate only being able to share my struggles without shame in detrans-only spaces.

It isn’t as simple as just reverting back to how I used to be. I identified and lived as trans with severe dysphoria for 13+ years. I have severe reverse dysphoria. Touching my face and feeling the bit of stubble I grew on testosterone disgusts and upsets me. I constantly have to shave it, and I’m too poor to afford laser treatment—a struggle many transfeminine people have as well.

Yet, when it’s a detrans woman it’s seen as shameful and all my fault, meaning I shouldn’t complain or be too open about it online or offline. I think of all the detrans friends I have, whose lives were forever changed in very difficult ways and were often rejected by trans people. All the trans friends I have in real life would get visibly uncomfortable whenever I talked about my detrans experiences and shut me down, change the topic. I only found comfort in fellow detrans people, and with the only feminists I could trust to not be trans-hating, most of them being trans or detrans themselves.

We detrans folks are not all weapons against the trans community. We may be bitter about how we were treated and how we were harmed by the TQ+ community, but many of us (if not most) still deeply care about transgender people, dysphoric people, and all GNC people.

We have been in the shoes of currently dysphoric people, after all. We know how painful they are to wear. Many of us, me included, still do trans activism. But, as a detrans lesbian woman, I refuse to sit back and watch as more people live through painful unnecessary detransitions, which hurts not just the detransitioners, but also adds to trans stigma.

I believe we can all do better, and that trans people, detrans people, bio/cis women, all marginalized folks can build bridges between the communities and find middle ground to finally minimize harm. That is my firm goal as a feminist, detrans activist and trans ally.

I am grateful for every voice bringing nuance in the conversation. I believe in better care and a better future for the LGBTQ and GNC communities, including the brave women and men who survived detransition and are still here to tell their stories.

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