Important article published yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald about detransitioners/retransitioners. It leads with words from Cecile, a detransitioned woman:
But three months after coming off the male hormones and reclaiming her female birth gender, she was once more able to shed tears.
“This was about the worst thing I could have done to my body, my life and myself.”
"I felt like exactly the same person, but I had a full-on beard and had to have whole body electrolysis twice a week for two years,“ she recalls of the traumatic transition nearly 20 years ago. "It was horrible.”
An unusual observation from the mainstream media:
Cecile is one of an unknown number of transgender people who, having undergone one gender transition, have made the decision to return to their birth gender. Known as detransitioning, the practice of switching from, in her case, female to male gender – and then back again – is profoundly under-researched but, say some observers, less rare than many believe.
Despite this lack of research, the article generally supports the notion that transition regret is rare–but at least the author allows for doubt:
Few with gender dysphoria, [Heyer] believes, are likely to find happiness by going under the knife. Like the emperor and his fallacious new clothes, Heyer, who has been happily married to his wife for 18 years now, is a man taking on what he sees as mass delusion. “I was nuts to think that someone could cosmetically change me from a man to a woman,” he says. “Nobody needs the surgery. Nobody ever really changes genders.”
As divisive as his opinion is, Heyer is unrelenting. Over and over again, he hears the realisation from post-operative transgender individuals that they are living a “masquerade”. It is not a pretence that many in the community find easy to acknowledge, let alone shed, and it’s harder still to accurately research. The last thing anyone whose gender realignment hasn’t met expectation might want to do is talk about that disappointment.
We hear from Joel Nowak, telling his own story of detransition, in much more detail than I’ve excerpted here:
[Sports Journalist Mike Penner’s] suicide was framed as a battle with depression, but to some in the detransitioning community, it was much more than that. “When I heard he’d died, it was like a punch in the stomach. I felt some sense of social responsibility,” says Joel Nowak…Regrets, he says … are going under-reported, and if they were less hidden and easier to talk openly about, perhaps Penner’s story might have ended differently.
Nowak…has blogged his way along his own meandering gender tale, sharing painful and often bitter realisations with his online readers. Via his website at retransition.org, he has been contacted by scores of post-operative transgender people who, in his words, are desperate for an exit strategy. “Eventually it’s going to be okay to talk about what it looks like to go back,” Nowak says of those who remain silent, caught in limbo between transgender expectation and a disillusioned reality…
… neatly fitting Heyer’s theory that regret kicks in at around the six- to eight-year mark, by the time Jennifer [Joel Nowak] was 40 she was prey to long spells of depression and feeling increasingly isolated at work and at home. She was becoming, [Nowak] says, a “ghost”…
… “My transition was something I had worked so hard toward and I didn’t want to abandon it. Even to contemplate it seemed too horrible,” he sighs. “But I felt like a fraud.”
The piece ends with more from Cecile, who (after marrying and giving birth to 3 children), still struggles with gender identity, and is planning to undergo testosterone treatment, yet again–despite realizing that gender dysphoria was not cured the first time, and still won’t be:
This time around, there will be no name change, nor will she have her breast implants, hidden by her well-developed muscles, removed. She doesn’t expect her naturally low voice to deepen further by taking testosterone; and she is hopeful the electrolysis she had in her 20s will stop the growth of any facial hair. Phalloplasty remains out of the question. Instead, she’ll focus on testosterone injections – known to raise the risks of heart attack and strokes – and exercise.
She makes it clear that her new gender phase, closely guided by her psychiatrist and endocrinologist, is not about reaching a physical ideal, but a yearning for a feeling of groundedness in a life that has forever felt off-kilter. “I’ve got to the point where I actually think, ‘I don’t care. It is who I am and it is what it is’, ” she says of her body. “I don’t think I’ll ever make peace with not being a man. I’m always going to have gender dysphoria. An operation is not going to change it.”
