Detransition is Gender Liberation, Too

Here's to never being satisfied and forever changing.

Today, a piece came out in USA Today about my detransition and retransition, so I wanted to take a moment to speak about it in my own words.

I was never really certain about my transition in the way that most gatekeeping hormone prescribers and curious members of the public demand that a trans person be. I didn’t “always know” that I was not cisgender. I haven’t “always known” anything about myself. Very few truths about me have always remained true, my existence is too interpersonal, contextual, and ever-evolving for all of that. (So is most everyone else’s, I think). I don’t think that the fact I’d eventually choose to exercise my body autonomy at age 30 by taking hormones is a decision I could have foreseen when I was a child.

All that I knew about being transgender when I was a kid was a fact that most children intuitively know: gender assignment was a violation of my freedom, of everyone’s freedom in fact, and it was wrong. As an infant and then a child and teenager, people kept imposing labels on me; they kept forcing me and my body into prescribed gendered boxes, and while the specific labels and boxes never really felt like the right ones, the most disturbing part about it all was the forcing. No coerced identity would have ever felt right.

Children can tell when secrets are being kept from them, and when adults are restricting their choices. They notice that they and the other children are being lined up boy-girl, boy-girl, without ever being told what a girl or a boy even is. They can see their parents frowning when they reach for the doll with the shimmery hair, or climb atop the neighbor kid on the playground. Kids know that they are forbidden from sitting with their legs spread wide or flicking their wrist, and their gender illegibility is shamed in them, long before they get any answers about what gender means or where it comes from or why it’s so important that they make themselves easy to understand.

Like the cloned children in Never Let Me Go who grow up being conditioned for a life of forced organ donation, children in a cissexist society grow up conditioned to fall within certain gendered boundary lines, and by the time they learn that the reason for this is almost completely arbitrary, they can’t imagine any alternative. Not until some of them hear about gender transition and find the prospect very compelling, for some reason.

You can say that reason is because some of us are inherently trans, but there’s absolutely nothing in the way of brain science, genetics research, or even sociological data to back that up. Besides, the search for a biological “reason” that people are transgender or queer runs counter to the goal of queer liberation in the long run. Science only needs to explain the existence of transgender people (or queer people more broadly) if our existence is in some way aberrant or a problem.

If queerness is accepted as a form of human diversity that simply exists, then there is no need to excuse it by claiming that it is never a choice. It can be a choice, if a person wants to make it, and hopefully it satisfies them, but maybe it won’t. Freedom to choose means freedom to forever be dissatisfied, to search endlessly for more, and yes, to be capable of making a mistake.

I would say that viewing myself as transgender was a choice. I decided to break away from the straight, female categories to which I had been assigned, and doing so allowed me to view the legal and societal power structures that had restricted me more clearly. It helped me better understand myself. But that does not mean the actual act of breaking away was always the truest reflection of who I am.

The version of me that transitioned was a person on the run — and how a person behaves, thinks, and self-conceives when they are fleeing is not a great reflection of whom they might be if they were safe. If we all lived in a world free from mandatory gender assignment, and where our bodies were not mined for meaning about the kinds of sex we liked, the clothing we should wear, the personality qualities we have, the roles we should play in society, and the connections we are allowed to form with others, who knows who each of us might be.

But none of us get to live in that world, or ever gets completely free from the frameworks of heterosexuality and the gender binary. These frameworks shape every legal institution we encounter, every school we attend, every item of clothing we put on, every substance we take into our bodies, every piece of paperwork that ever gets printed about us, and every look another person ever gives us. And so we make due with rewriting and recombining those frameworks as best we can.

It should come as no surprise that those us who break away from the binary have to experiment and revise how we understand ourselves quite a bit — sometimes getting things “wrong,” sometimes searching forever for the semblance of something “right.” Sometimes reveling in the “wrongness” of all the available options is kind of the point.

For the first two and a half decades of my life, society mostly viewed me as a straight woman. An unkempt, sometimes off-putting straight woman who didn’t get along with other straight women or do much to satisfy men, but there was nothing else that I could really be. I didn’t like it. I hated the assumption that my life was for marriage and my body was for birthing, I hated that simply by existing in a neutral state I was somehow dirtier and less put-together than men, and I hated how the men I loved related to me — never picking a goddamned sock off the floor, never caring about my sexual fantasies, lording themselves over the apartments I paid for without offering any contribution to my emotional or psychological life.

Of course, a majority of straight, cisgender women resent these aspects of their situation, too. How can we tell their dysphoria and mine apart? We really can’t. I think any single one of them could make the exact same decision as I did if they wanted, and try becoming a man, and some of them might like it and some of them might not. Most would probably conclude, as I have, that being a man has its benefits and its drawbacks but neither of the prevailing gender options in society are really all that great.

Transphobes will claim that I really only transitioned in order to escape sexism, and to that I will say, yeah, so? It worked! Are you jealous? Do you want to join me?

I decided at some point that being a cisgender, straight woman and dating straight men was no longer a situation that I could stand, and so I came out as nonbinary back in 2016. Nobody really cared. Everyone misgendered me. No one, including the most exhausting of trans “allies,” did anything to alter their understanding of me. They invited me to “women’s only” dance parties and talked about me being femme presenting because I had boobs.

My straight boyfriend was terrified of getting criticized for using the wrong pronouns for me, and his brain reconciled this tension by simply referring to every single woman in his life with they/them pronouns. I still got passed over for jobs while more gender-conforming women in my academic cohort (who had less work experience) got offers. Random old men still followed me down the street asking for my number. I still hated my boobs. I still lost an adjunct teaching contract for not shaving my legs.

Disavowing the cis female label had done nothing for me, because nonbinary people are still legally, socially, and institutionally illegible. They are offered essentially no room in society in which to exist. Everyone treats them as if they are their body or their assigned gender. And so identifying as nonbinary offered me no escape, it only made me more acutely aware that freedom from coercive gendering was something I might never touch.

I was curious about testosterone, and so in May of 2018 I gave it a try. It wasn’t the life-defining moment from all the stock narratives. It was a test I found appealing because I hated the way I was living and because I’d become enchanted with a long-haired, pretty Enjolras cosplayer on Tumblr with a husky trans guy’s voice. He was gorgeous and unreadable, and lived in a world of his own creation that almost no one else understood, penning fanfiction about his beloved Les Mis characters and playacting at their lives with his fellow trans guy boyfriend, unconcerned by how their long hair and flowy clothing prevented them from ever passing.

I wasn’t exactly like him, but in his path I saw freedom. A life of creativity, self-authorship, and expressive beauty detached from cisgender feminine constraints. Love and sex that stood outside recognizable scripts. And so I gave T a shot. Or rather, I gave it a slather on my legs every morning.

I liked a lot of what it did for me. I loved the lower voice. I enjoyed feeling my musculature change. My face got a bit more boyish and I drew fewer stares entering the men’s restroom. And I did love so many queer men’s romances, like the ones between Revolver Ocelot and Naked Snake, or Hannibal and Will. I had loved men. I wished I was capable of having more egalitarian relationships with them. I figured I could be a gay man, an effeminate one, an elfin creature from video games in my imagination but a person who’d be respected by their partners in my real life.

That seemed close enough for me. It seemed like a goal I could round myself up to, a narrative I could create of my past that would keep the tittering questions at bay and prevent the medical gatekeepers from stealing my freedom. And the constant changes of transition would feel less scary if I could believe the narrative. If an effeminate gay man was who I’d always been, then there was no fear that transition would ever be the wrong move.

After all, there was so much public fear-mongering about how horrible it was to ever regret a transition. TERFs regarded detransitioners as “ruined” women and men who had been preyed upon by the “trans cult,” but trans people and our allies also broadly regarded detransitioners as an extremely niche group of confused cis screw-ups and bigoted transphobes. To transition and then change one’s mind about it was an unspeakable, disgusting fate, almost no matter whom you asked. That didn’t exactly make gender exploration any easier. I contemplated transition for years but didn’t move forward, because I so deeply feared getting it wrong. And then once I started, I was terrified of how it might look for me to turn back.

“Don’t Die Wondering” pin, from the collection of the National Museum of American History.

The reality is always more complicated than the narrative queer people have to use to justify our existence. I liked getting stronger, but sometimes I winced at the growing thickness of my trapezius. I loved the look of body hair on others, and sometimes on myself, but my feelings came and went in waves, and the new growth never stopped being so damn scratchy. My libido soared and my body felt like it was more my own, rather than an object for men to use— but it turned out that had its downsides, because I found objectification and dissociation so sexy.

As my appearance changed, kids called me homophobic slurs and strangers asked me what I was. My straight boyfriend pulled away. I was freed of the confining scripts that heterosexuality had foisted on me, but that also meant I had no idea how to hit on someone, who might be interested in me, who was supposed to make the first move, what the sex looked like, what the long term goal of a relationship was. And all the hateful words I’d heard about transitioning bodies made me feel disgusting at times. Knowing that the source of my shame was external didn’t make it stop ringing in between my own ears.

Some trans people would say that I detransitioned because I was too weak and couldn’t handle the difficulty of being visibly queer or a man, and to that I would say, you’re right! I thought I wanted to escape society’s confines, but then I felt completely unmoored! I wanted the freedom to gender-transgress but I couldn’t handle the heat of being transgressive! You got me. I still wish that weak people like me lived in a world where we could experiment, too.

Some might say that I am less trans than the people who possessed the clarity of mind and strength of spirit to always stay the course, no matter the societal rejection, and I would tell them, I agree! I am in still indebted to them for making it possible for me to break free. Maybe there never was any specific gender identity that I needed to arrive at, maybe all that I needed was to be able to escape.

My detransition in 2020 was pretty pathetic. I was alone a lot, applying makeup badly in the bathroom and trying to make a straight man love me. I was away from the supportive, gender-diverse community I had built since my transition started, and neoliberal society had begun its most visible collapse. I didn’t want to be a socially illegible freak sitting alone at the end of the world. I was a coward. I thought I had to make myself into someone who could be understood easily and loved effortlessly again, though even as a straight woman I’d never been that.

It didn’t work. I was just miserable. I’d never been good at pretending to be a woman, but I was especially uncommitted to the performance the second time around. Time would show I was just as horrible at pretending to be a man. But I had to at least try — to completely cross into an opposing territory, as society saw it, seemed like the only way to actually make my escape.

Tag from Freddie Beg on Tumblr.

I got vaccinated. I saw friends. I ended my relationship. I began to transition again. I felt an urgency to make up for lost time, so I increased my testosterone dose. I got top surgery. I cut my hair super-short and made sure to always square off the edges so they lined up with my ever-squaring jaw.

I began to pass as male 100% of the time, and I found that seductive. It felt like an opportunity to begin a completely new life, as a new person with a new outlook. Besides, it felt good for people’s assumptions about to me to run so counter to all the assumptions they’d made before. I chased after passing, obsessed for a few years about what would make me the most easily parseable to strangers as a man. Every time that I moved through the men’s sauna or the leather bar without remark I felt that I was somehow getting away with something. It was gratifying. There was relief in unquestionably no longer being what others had always insisted that I was.

But being a man wasn’t really a core truth of me any more than being a woman or being an enby had been. They were all just narratives others had created that I was using to try and feel free. And they could be imposing.

A new friend would learn that I was trans and then suddenly begin gushing that I was such a dude, such a man, so completely a strong masculine guy while I was curled up on the couch on the verge of tears. A queer friend’s straight boyfriend would say I resembled a famous, incredibly butch male boxer and I’d guffaw at how incorrect that he was. A fellow trans guy would tell me I needed to tighten my grip on my handshakes so I’d seem like less of a fag. A trans femme friend would grind up against me at the leather bar, saying that she could be a gay man for me tonight, we could be fags together, we were just two gay men around all these other fags. I knew all of them meant these things to be validating, but they made my blood run cold.

Everyone was still just regarding me as some gendered symbol. As a category the boundaries of which had to be constantly reinforced. I could never just exist. I could never break free. No matter how legible my appearance became, the reality of me was still getting missed — and so long as I kept trying to manage others’ impressions with my presentation, or with my transition, it always would.

I didn’t want to be masculine. I never had been. I was forever the kid in the outfield picking dandelions, terrified of being beaned with a ball, which in my home culture made me a failure at both manhood and womanhood. I liked some men, but I’d never had any positive feelings for the supposedly “manly” physique, or any physique for that matter. I was disaffected by the world of sexual identity and of bodies. It had no place for me. Even the “queer men” I most identified with seldom actually identified as men for very long.

Not All Girls Are Expected to Be Feminine

As much as transition had initially felt like an opportunity to slip through the veil and reenter the world as a completely new person, I hadn’t changed. In my mind’s eye, I was still the soft, weak, stubby, hairy-legged girl-thing I’d been before. And I wasn’t disturbed anymore to see her splintered long hair and round thighs in my mirror. She was me, and the flat-chested boy with the short hair and dangly earring was me, and he felt equally out of place, too. To feel uncomfortable and detached was our defining characteristics. Our discomfort was an indictment of the gendered system in which we were born. It was our rebellion. It was our identity. It was our escape.

I can only imagine how differently my transition would have gone if detransition, doubt, and gender experimentation were treated as completely neutral, even inevitable things. The shame that trans people (and detransitioners) feel is inherently systemic: it is difficult to deprogram yourself from binary gendered labels when every legal statute, social norm, and external glance pathologizes you. You try to just do whatever you want, whatever feels good, but you can’t stop asking yourself if this color is feminine, if this way of sitting helps you pass, if you stand out like a sore thumb as the only man in your department, if it’s okay for someone like you to wield the flogger or be the baby in your relationship.

Of course our path to self-discovery is flawed and never-ending. The widespread adoption of gay marriage necessarily meant the possibility of gay divorce. So why is it a problem for the embrace of transition to mean more detransitions? 

Is detransition not a form of gendered freedom, too? Are we not all owed the fantasy of the escape from all this fucking gender, even if the utopia we try to build is constructed from the bars of our old prison cells?

I really don’t know what the fuck I “am” anymore. Gender liberation is not really a question of individual identity anyway. I understand that all existence is action-based and relational, and that an identity barely matters at all when it’s not an activity that we do.

So what do I want to do? I want to grow my hair out. I miss the feeling of skirts swishing against my legs. I want to hold hands and stare into a lover’s eyes and feel that they find me beautiful. I want to get railed like a fleshlight and then tucked into bed. I want to cuddle with friends on the couch without them fucking sexualizing me. I want to dance at the street festival without ever taking note of who might be looking.

I want to try climbing a rock wall and see if I have the strength for it. I want to take a break from testosterone to see if I become less anxious and impatient. I want to get heavier dumbbells and build up my chest. I want to bake more. I want to sit still in the park watching the waves. I want to make my peace with my body growing older and getting weak. I want to keep walking down the street and saying hello to my neighbors no matter how I look, no matter who I become, accepting that who I am will be forever changing.

My detransition in 2020 helped me to better understand what is good for me. So did my initial transition and then my retransition. And yet they were all incomplete. If I were to ever detransition again, it would surely bring me insight, and reflect another truth of me while still never representing the whole truth. Some trans people truly identify very strongly as women or men, or as enbies, but for me, being trans is all about feeling uncomfortable with any category, and with the action of breaking away again and again and again. It’s the disavowal, not the desire. I’ve always been better at being a hater than at loving things.

Perhaps I’ll be on the run from gender the whole rest of my life. If none of the gender destinations that society has to offer are safe places for me to stay, then my wellbeing can only be found in the ability to move. And that freedom of movement is essential for the gender liberation of all people — transgender ones, detransitioners, and the many billions out there who only think they are “cis” because society has repeatedly and violently forced them to.

…

I think the author of the USA Today piece, David Oliver, did a really responsible job with a topic that most cis reporters really fucking bungle. I want to thank him for being so thorough in his reporting, while also taking a light touch to a subject that is often overly dramatized. Detransition is not a “mistake” to be feared, it is a potential stage of any person’s gender exploration journey that ought to be accepted and not assigned any stigma. I strongly recommend checking out the piece, and sharing it with any loved ones who know relatively little about transgender issues, or harbor “concerns” about the possibility of transition regret.