"We really wanted this newsletter to be a place where all voices could contribute and where all people with experiences of detransition could be seen and heard, and even platform some of their writing (including sharing perspectives we don’t always agree with but we think are valuable to consider)."
I've already explained on your last post why I think this is a bad idea. To be blunt, I am not interested in hearing from detransitioned people whose opinion is "doctors should have stopped me from transitioning, because only Real Transsexuals™ should be allowed to get healthcare." I am not interested in hearing the opinion of people who think that seeking more research means "until we map out the endocrine system in more detail than ever before, the current generations of trans people will simply have to keep their lives on hold, and if they die of old age before doctors reach a consensus about comfortable certainty, I guess that's just too bad." I find both of these conclusions unconscionable, and it would be disingenuous to equate promoting them with "supporting detrans people."
These opinions are neither rare nor nuanced, and sharing them in the interest of "making voices heard" seems wildly irresponsible to me in the current landscape of lawmaking that restricts trans healthcare. If platforming *that* is where this newsletter is headed-- if that's what you think is "valuable to consider"-- then you will merely contribute to a landscape where support for trans and detrans people are seen as mutually exclusive. Frankly, I started following here because I was interested in research, not vent-posting from your assistants about how activists have gone too far or whatever. This piece doesn't give me a lot of confidence that I shouldn't expect more of the same.
Is your goal to write carefully when informing the public about extremely loaded and complex subjects, or to provide a platform that lends an air of academic seriousness to any given detrans rando while they say whatever the hell they feel like? Because I really think these goals are mutually exclusive.
Its a huge fear! I want to believe that people who talk a big game about ~sharing uncommon and difficult perspectives~ are sincere in their motives, but like, this exact rhetoric about "concern for regret" is used by people like Chloe Cole, who deal with their own regret by trying to legally limit *everyone's* access to healthcare and exact financial revenge on healthcare institutions that didn't read their minds/see the future/etc and save them from themselves.
Writers have to do a lot of extra legwork to clarify this kind of disingenuous euphemism that is so often used as cover for repugnant politics of control, but the effort to write carefully and clearly is an absolute necessity if we are going to have any serious conversation about what it would look like to support trans *and* detrans people at the same time, without throwing one under the bus for the sake of the other.
I just wanted to say thank you for replying to this Substack’s posts and to various commenters. You’re doing a great job making arguments that need to be made.
I mean, I would imagine before the transgender revolution of the 2010s, less than 1% of the total population had done any medical transitioning in the first place. Does that number mean we shouldn't have cared about them?
I have read a lot of your posts. Same goes with the Dolphin Diaries. I don't have a problem with studying de-transition and identifying why people de-transition. So be clear on that. What I grapple with is creating a group of people known as de-transitioners who want to identify as such for the rest of their lives. Should de-transition actually be an identity? Does LGBTQIA+ need to add a D?
If you do de-transition back to your original binary assignment or perhaps live as a non-binary person, do you get to perpetually identify as transgender in some form still? That is not my call. But I believe a person has a responsibility to then exit the community of transitioning or transgender people and live their lives according to their wishes. While we feel for you and strive to understand you, many of us likely don't want you around (as de-transitioners). This will be interpreted as cruel and exclusionary by some. But having de-transitioners around at this exact moment is potentially threatening and a reminder of where some of us could wind up when it is not our wish or long-term best interest in doing so. But why be in our already broad group of transgender people? I think holding up the de-transitioners within the transgender community is mostly non-productive. Don't misunderstand me. Their stories are valuable and the reasons for their detransition is equally valid (I am one of the people who have de- transitioned or microdosed over years only to re-transition). Further, in a perfect world there would be support in place to prevent potential suicides and help with the adjustment of de-transition. I don't have all the answers with this and I'm not here to start a bitter argument and fight. I'm not against your research. But there are many questions that come up. Finally, I'm sure I'm not the only transgender person who stresses that your research must not easily be exploited by the anti-transgender world. Especially in these unique times. My guess is that misuse of de-transition studies scares most if not all of us who are transgender.
To offer a little bit of clarity from my position as a (happily transitioned) trans man:
Medical transition is indeed a permanent process-- it is not possible to revert the body back to its prior form before taking hormones or getting surgery. Personally, I think that anyone who has gone through a medical transition fits the definition of "transsexual" (a term I think applies to me, having been on T for about ten years now) regardless of anything else, because we have gone through the same-or-similar process in changing our bodies. I wouldn't bicker with someone who rejects that label for themself, but I don't flinch at noticing the ways that we share experiences, and would not flinch at sharing a term with them if they wanted to name the thing we share in common.
Whether people who detransition want to [continue to] participate in trans communities, or whether they feel they relate to trans people, is both a totally separate issue and a totally subjective one. I have seen detrans "FTMTF" people talk about how their experience of detransition felt relatable to the experiences of MTF trans women, for instance. I have also seen detrans people express frustration that trans people don't seem interested in trying to understand why or how they relate to us this way, which I think is totally fair. I have one friend who is (roughly) an "MTFTX" person, who originally transitioned in a male-to-female direction and later stopped taking hormones in favor of a more nebulous nonbinary-masculine-ish identity-- since they think of themself as "still trans, just in a different way," I am more than happy to agree, and I'm glad to have them around in the discord server I run for a lot of my close (mostly trans) friends. It's very easy for trans folks like me to feel intimidated by people with an unusual trajectory for how they deal with their gender feelings, but I think it's worth it to prioritize the person and treat them with sympathetic curiosity rather than suspicion, you know?
Generally, I think it's much easier to take people as they come and be curious about their experiences, rather than trying to understand them through dictionary definitions of whatever category they seem to belong to. I'm willing to be generous to The One Percent because I know that situations like my friend are first in my mind when they write about how complicated it is to try and academically define or quantify "regret" and such. But I also really feel your same concern that maybe some of this rhetoric may turn out to be dogwhistling cover for questioning whether trans people deserve a legal right to agency over our own healthcare. I guess only time will tell what they're about, here.
Your points are well taken. I also wrote my comment with a lot of thought and hesitancy because I'm not out to take down people or exclude people for the sake of hard and fast categories. My identity is transgender/ transitioning binary femme with some enbie mixed in there who would like to throw the oppressiveness of the binary away. My concerns are vis-à-vis the larger scheme of things and the academic and political world. On a personal basis I can sit and have a beer or coffee with a de-transitioner and would be delighted to hear their stories and experience. And accept them openly for whatever commonality we share.
“Critics of trans medicine have long responded to the basic premise of trans healthcare by saying, ‘What if they regret it?’
This is especially true now, especially in the United States, where detransition has been largely politicized by anti-trans and right-wing politics.”
I think it's important to emphasize that hesitating about trans healthcare by saying, ‘What if they regret it?’ is not synonymous with being anti-trans and right-wing, although these people are likely the majority of those raising the question. In any case, closing debates by focusing on who said it, rather than paying attention to the arguments, is not the right approach to understanding.
Similarly, I believe that debates about “gender identity,” about sexed brains, and about the relationship between homosexuality and transgender people are also valid and can be fruitful.
I think The One Percent is going in the right direction. I just wanted to emphasize the need to discuss everything and do so within a framework of respect.
Not to be critical, but I just wrote something (link below) about how fretting about "what if they regret it?" *is* actually kind of synonymous with being anti-trans, for ideological reasons. I don't mean that as an accusation or anything-- I don't mean to convince you of anything so much as just explain why it is that people draw this association between "focusing on regret" and anti-trans politics-- it's just very hard to talk about the actual content of ideology when so much of the conversation amounts to shouting "think of the children!!!!" at each other until we're blue in the face.
Lots of these conversations and research can indeed be fruitful and fascinating and worthy of study-- I definitely would love to see better standards of care for people who *want* guidance from professionals about how to deal with their gender feelings-- but the reality is that doctors are, at this moment, utterly unequipped to do that kind of work, and lots of people (like me) are perfectly capable of handling the risk of regret without their input.
The presumption that doctors have some moral obligation to prevent regret (in spite of how it seems impossible to actually achieve this) is an opinion that lines up cleanly with (usually-but-not-exclusively conservative) politics of control, and leads unerringly to policies that limit trans peoples' ability to choose for ourselves what level of risk we are willing to face.
"We really wanted this newsletter to be a place where all voices could contribute and where all people with experiences of detransition could be seen and heard, and even platform some of their writing (including sharing perspectives we don’t always agree with but we think are valuable to consider)."
I've already explained on your last post why I think this is a bad idea. To be blunt, I am not interested in hearing from detransitioned people whose opinion is "doctors should have stopped me from transitioning, because only Real Transsexuals™ should be allowed to get healthcare." I am not interested in hearing the opinion of people who think that seeking more research means "until we map out the endocrine system in more detail than ever before, the current generations of trans people will simply have to keep their lives on hold, and if they die of old age before doctors reach a consensus about comfortable certainty, I guess that's just too bad." I find both of these conclusions unconscionable, and it would be disingenuous to equate promoting them with "supporting detrans people."
These opinions are neither rare nor nuanced, and sharing them in the interest of "making voices heard" seems wildly irresponsible to me in the current landscape of lawmaking that restricts trans healthcare. If platforming *that* is where this newsletter is headed-- if that's what you think is "valuable to consider"-- then you will merely contribute to a landscape where support for trans and detrans people are seen as mutually exclusive. Frankly, I started following here because I was interested in research, not vent-posting from your assistants about how activists have gone too far or whatever. This piece doesn't give me a lot of confidence that I shouldn't expect more of the same.
Is your goal to write carefully when informing the public about extremely loaded and complex subjects, or to provide a platform that lends an air of academic seriousness to any given detrans rando while they say whatever the hell they feel like? Because I really think these goals are mutually exclusive.
Thanks for saying this, I am worried this newsletter will platform perspectives/ folks who ultimately seek to limit access to trans healthcare.
Its a huge fear! I want to believe that people who talk a big game about ~sharing uncommon and difficult perspectives~ are sincere in their motives, but like, this exact rhetoric about "concern for regret" is used by people like Chloe Cole, who deal with their own regret by trying to legally limit *everyone's* access to healthcare and exact financial revenge on healthcare institutions that didn't read their minds/see the future/etc and save them from themselves.
Writers have to do a lot of extra legwork to clarify this kind of disingenuous euphemism that is so often used as cover for repugnant politics of control, but the effort to write carefully and clearly is an absolute necessity if we are going to have any serious conversation about what it would look like to support trans *and* detrans people at the same time, without throwing one under the bus for the sake of the other.
I just wanted to say thank you for replying to this Substack’s posts and to various commenters. You’re doing a great job making arguments that need to be made.
I mean, I would imagine before the transgender revolution of the 2010s, less than 1% of the total population had done any medical transitioning in the first place. Does that number mean we shouldn't have cared about them?
I have read a lot of your posts. Same goes with the Dolphin Diaries. I don't have a problem with studying de-transition and identifying why people de-transition. So be clear on that. What I grapple with is creating a group of people known as de-transitioners who want to identify as such for the rest of their lives. Should de-transition actually be an identity? Does LGBTQIA+ need to add a D?
If you do de-transition back to your original binary assignment or perhaps live as a non-binary person, do you get to perpetually identify as transgender in some form still? That is not my call. But I believe a person has a responsibility to then exit the community of transitioning or transgender people and live their lives according to their wishes. While we feel for you and strive to understand you, many of us likely don't want you around (as de-transitioners). This will be interpreted as cruel and exclusionary by some. But having de-transitioners around at this exact moment is potentially threatening and a reminder of where some of us could wind up when it is not our wish or long-term best interest in doing so. But why be in our already broad group of transgender people? I think holding up the de-transitioners within the transgender community is mostly non-productive. Don't misunderstand me. Their stories are valuable and the reasons for their detransition is equally valid (I am one of the people who have de- transitioned or microdosed over years only to re-transition). Further, in a perfect world there would be support in place to prevent potential suicides and help with the adjustment of de-transition. I don't have all the answers with this and I'm not here to start a bitter argument and fight. I'm not against your research. But there are many questions that come up. Finally, I'm sure I'm not the only transgender person who stresses that your research must not easily be exploited by the anti-transgender world. Especially in these unique times. My guess is that misuse of de-transition studies scares most if not all of us who are transgender.
Respectfully,
Kenzie
To offer a little bit of clarity from my position as a (happily transitioned) trans man:
Medical transition is indeed a permanent process-- it is not possible to revert the body back to its prior form before taking hormones or getting surgery. Personally, I think that anyone who has gone through a medical transition fits the definition of "transsexual" (a term I think applies to me, having been on T for about ten years now) regardless of anything else, because we have gone through the same-or-similar process in changing our bodies. I wouldn't bicker with someone who rejects that label for themself, but I don't flinch at noticing the ways that we share experiences, and would not flinch at sharing a term with them if they wanted to name the thing we share in common.
Whether people who detransition want to [continue to] participate in trans communities, or whether they feel they relate to trans people, is both a totally separate issue and a totally subjective one. I have seen detrans "FTMTF" people talk about how their experience of detransition felt relatable to the experiences of MTF trans women, for instance. I have also seen detrans people express frustration that trans people don't seem interested in trying to understand why or how they relate to us this way, which I think is totally fair. I have one friend who is (roughly) an "MTFTX" person, who originally transitioned in a male-to-female direction and later stopped taking hormones in favor of a more nebulous nonbinary-masculine-ish identity-- since they think of themself as "still trans, just in a different way," I am more than happy to agree, and I'm glad to have them around in the discord server I run for a lot of my close (mostly trans) friends. It's very easy for trans folks like me to feel intimidated by people with an unusual trajectory for how they deal with their gender feelings, but I think it's worth it to prioritize the person and treat them with sympathetic curiosity rather than suspicion, you know?
Generally, I think it's much easier to take people as they come and be curious about their experiences, rather than trying to understand them through dictionary definitions of whatever category they seem to belong to. I'm willing to be generous to The One Percent because I know that situations like my friend are first in my mind when they write about how complicated it is to try and academically define or quantify "regret" and such. But I also really feel your same concern that maybe some of this rhetoric may turn out to be dogwhistling cover for questioning whether trans people deserve a legal right to agency over our own healthcare. I guess only time will tell what they're about, here.
Your points are well taken. I also wrote my comment with a lot of thought and hesitancy because I'm not out to take down people or exclude people for the sake of hard and fast categories. My identity is transgender/ transitioning binary femme with some enbie mixed in there who would like to throw the oppressiveness of the binary away. My concerns are vis-à-vis the larger scheme of things and the academic and political world. On a personal basis I can sit and have a beer or coffee with a de-transitioner and would be delighted to hear their stories and experience. And accept them openly for whatever commonality we share.
“Critics of trans medicine have long responded to the basic premise of trans healthcare by saying, ‘What if they regret it?’
This is especially true now, especially in the United States, where detransition has been largely politicized by anti-trans and right-wing politics.”
I think it's important to emphasize that hesitating about trans healthcare by saying, ‘What if they regret it?’ is not synonymous with being anti-trans and right-wing, although these people are likely the majority of those raising the question. In any case, closing debates by focusing on who said it, rather than paying attention to the arguments, is not the right approach to understanding.
Similarly, I believe that debates about “gender identity,” about sexed brains, and about the relationship between homosexuality and transgender people are also valid and can be fruitful.
I think The One Percent is going in the right direction. I just wanted to emphasize the need to discuss everything and do so within a framework of respect.
Not to be critical, but I just wrote something (link below) about how fretting about "what if they regret it?" *is* actually kind of synonymous with being anti-trans, for ideological reasons. I don't mean that as an accusation or anything-- I don't mean to convince you of anything so much as just explain why it is that people draw this association between "focusing on regret" and anti-trans politics-- it's just very hard to talk about the actual content of ideology when so much of the conversation amounts to shouting "think of the children!!!!" at each other until we're blue in the face.
Lots of these conversations and research can indeed be fruitful and fascinating and worthy of study-- I definitely would love to see better standards of care for people who *want* guidance from professionals about how to deal with their gender feelings-- but the reality is that doctors are, at this moment, utterly unequipped to do that kind of work, and lots of people (like me) are perfectly capable of handling the risk of regret without their input.
The presumption that doctors have some moral obligation to prevent regret (in spite of how it seems impossible to actually achieve this) is an opinion that lines up cleanly with (usually-but-not-exclusively conservative) politics of control, and leads unerringly to policies that limit trans peoples' ability to choose for ourselves what level of risk we are willing to face.
https://artofgender.substack.com/p/on-regret