Unlikely allies (but are we really?)

Can bridges be built between trans and detrans people?

In this post, we turn the stage over to Maddie, a research assistant and designer extraordinaire for the DARE study, and guest writer with The One Percent. (Maddie also designed our logo!) She'll explain what it's like to work, as a detransitioner, on a study that explores detransition experiences led by a transgender researcher.

If you are interested in learning more about Maddie’s story, she was featured in a VICE documentary, which you can watch here.

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If you look at how the media reports on detransition (or trans/detrans Twitter) you might reasonably come to the conclusion that transgender people and detransitioned people are at war with each other. I once felt this way too, coloured by my experience trying to exist comfortably in both worlds (which I found impossible).

Back then, I spent a lot of time searching the internet for anything that could comfort or reassure me that academics and healthcare professionals cared about regretful detrans people like me. Eventually I came across a study called Re/Detrans Canada, which was looking for people to interview. I remember the frustration that bubbled up in me when I read the recruitment materials, seeing that the study was led by a trans researcher, Kinnon MacKinnon. I’d seen the dismissive positions trans researchers tended to have; I didn’t trust a trans person to do the experience justice. I saw others in my position with similar doubts. I decided I could not partake in the research study. I didn’t trust that participants could be honest with him about regret, or that it would be reported in a truthful way that risked saying anything negative about trans medicine. I never imagined I would regain that sense of trust.

Now, several years later, I have the privilege of working as a research assistant on another study on detransition, the DARE study, led by the very same researcher. So what’s that like?

Honestly, it’s kind of great. Even the hard moments, like when my colleagues have trouble even understanding—let alone accepting—my post-gender transition perspectives, come with some emotional counterweight. It's been a shockingly safe space for me to figure out my relationship to trans and detrans politics.

Before going any further, it must be stated that the attitude of the trans researcher whose study I work on plays a major role in my comfort level. He happens to be a very open-minded person—the sort who hears something about detransition that makes him uncomfortable and, upon looking into it, decides it’s actually worthy of research after all. I trust that he cares about both the trans and detrans communities, and have heard him advocate for perspectives that may not be his own, but that his research participants hold. I do not feel the need to censor myself to him, nor do I worry that he has ulterior motives. It’s honestly quite healing to me to be able to engage in academic conversation about an issue that was once so emotionally volatile to me.

I can’t lie: on a very selfish level, there is a sort of internal protective factor that comes with working on a project like this. As someone who has struggled with the political morality of detrans activism, it sometimes feels like the “no, wait, I’m not a transphobe… see, I have trans friends!!!” kind of the workplace. I allow myself to engage fully because I know in my heart that this project will never go ‘too far’—it will never start advocating for extreme positions, it will never edge towards dehumanizing large swathes of gender-diverse people. It’s a huge weight off my conscience to not worry about hurting people I care about, and to know that people will push back if I start to go too far.

This is not even true, necessarily, but it soothes my scrupulosity obsessive worries, which is good enough for me. It also, frankly, just feels good to have some solidarity with members of a group that, in many ways, I am more part of than not, even if I no longer consider myself to be a trans person.

That’s not to say that working on a project led by a trans person—and, naturally, involving a good many other LGBTQ+ researchers and clinicians—has not come with challenges. On an emotional level, I remember being frustrated out of my mind the first time I attended a meeting for one of Kinnon’s previous projects aimed at developing support around detransition/retransition. It involved many trans researchers, LGBTQ+ health educators, and clinician community members all working together on an advisory committee - and me! It was a continuation of a feeling that had been weighing on me for a long time, this sense that people like me were always going to come second to trans people: once in our misguided transitions, and then again in our needs as detransitioned people.

It was excruciating to sit and listen calmly to people who had priorities very different from my own. I remember talk from a youth gender clinician of “controlling the narrative,” of advocating for a more trans-friendly sort of detrans experience focusing on positive experiences. People were upset with how negative they perceived detrans activists to be. I felt it was cruel to insist people were misrepresenting their own experience just because it wasn’t “trans positive” enough. I did not yet understand that “community-based research” often has stakeholders outside of academia, with their own views of what the project should lead to.

I was frustrated by the thought the project might end up deprioritizing detransitioners in an effort to create a more trans-friendly narrative, something I feel many studies by others have done. It’s a strange balance when many of the people involved are primarily—but not exclusively—invested in political goal (expanding access to gender medicine) that is sometimes at odds with detransitioners (though I also think the conflict is overstated). I think seeing this balancing process in action has been good for me; I came from a social world where people are categorically unwilling to reach across the aisle.

Relating to my own detransition, working on detrans research has given me a wonderful gift in being able to hear countless perspectives from people whose experiences range from eerily similar to my own to completely opposite. As a research assistant tasked with screening research subjects and transcribing their in-depth interviews, I have been able to listen to many people with testosterone-altered voices. This has really softened my feelings of regret towards my own deepened voice. I don’t mind it at all on other people; I think it sounds nice. I’ve had to confront that, in the best way.

It’s also been illuminating to hear people describe things I know intimately from my own experience of transition and detransition, only to come to a conclusion that dramatically conflicts with my own sense of the process. Again, I’ve had to confront my biases in a way that has expanded my understanding of myself.

I never imagined that I would be a research assistant, let alone on a project as close to me as this one, let alone on a project led by someone who ‘should’ be my opponent. I’m so glad I am.

This experience has given me so much hope that bridges can be built, or rebuilt, and that a respectable discourse can exist not only between trans activism and healthcare, but also between trans and detrans people.

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