March 12 is Detransition Awareness Day, a day to bring public attention to the traumatic consequences that radical LGBT ideology being pushed on children has wrought. It’s not a celebration, but a grim warning. Sinead Watson, a biological woman who detransitioned from male-presenting after painful surgeries and irreversible hormone “therapies,” is one of the leading voices attempting to get the word out that “transitioning” is not the answer for every kid who feels uncomfortable in his or her body. In a long thread on Twitter, Watson wrote:
Last year, detrans woman Elie Vandenbussche found that of 237 detransitioners, 70% detransitioned because their dysphoria was related to other issues. This study delves into the mental health issues many detransitioners struggle with.
Also last year, Lisa Littman found that of 100 detransitioners, 60% detransitioned after becoming more comfortable identifying as their biological sex. This study, and Vandenbussche’s, reveals what many detransitioners are battling with.
Tomorrow (March 12th) is #DetransAwarenessDay
I won't ask you to fly a flag, wear particular colours or attend a pride march. Why not? Because I'd refuse to do so if I were asked myself.#DetransAwarenessDay is not a celebration. It is a grim but necessary discussion. 1/x
— Watson (@ImWatson91) March 11, 2022
Watson invited the public to attend a Genspect webinar to learn about stories of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and detransitioning. “Why are we doing this?” Watson wrote. “Why are we talking about detransition? Because it is important. Because it is *happening.* The stories will not be easy to accept – medical scandals never are. But that doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Quite the contrary, actually.”
Watson is sharing stories of detransitioners on her Twitter feed today.
when i was 15, lonely, and hated my body, i got sucked into gender ideology online.
my school encouraged me and i was easily prescribed a high dose of testosterone at 18, and it was very damaging.
this is not rare.#DetransAwarenessDay
me at 19, trans // me now at 23 pic.twitter.com/oNPF5J3Q7m
— helena (@lacroicsz) March 12, 2022
People who choose to embrace their biological sex after transitioning to opposite-sex presenting get no support from the same trans community that cheered on their transgender experience. When faced with regret, that community turns its back on them. Keira Bell, a detransitioned woman in England who sued the Tavistock gender clinic for giving her hormones as a minor, is often defamed online. A quick search of her name on YouTube shows videos with titles like “F*ck Keira Bell.”
Related: ‘Sports Illustrated’ Profile of Trans Swimmer Lia Thomas Is a Nice Piece of Propaganda
Podcaster Katie Herzog, who speaks out about the damage done by the radical trans movement, noted, “Detransitioners are perceived as a threat to trans people but instead of trying to silence them or deny they exist, it may actually benefit trans health care to improve assessment so fewer people are wrongly diagnosed or choose transition when they shouldn’t.”
Not only do detransitioners face hatred from the community they thought was their home, there is no medical help for people who want to reverse the effects of opposite-sex hormones or reconstruction surgeries. In many cases, insurance or national health services paid for their “transition” but do not help to reverse it or repair what was done.
Shocked and appalled that @jk_rowling made up all those lies about what happens when people question trans orthodoxy pic.twitter.com/CLCf0YDlEK
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) June 11, 2020
Watson has told her story on YouTube and on other platforms.
“Like other trans people, I transitioned because I was suffering from gender dysphoria,” she said. “We’re told people with dysphoria are treated with transition, right? But unlike other trans people, transition didn’t help me. The second most common question is ‘why did you detransition?’
Watson describes a medical system that offered no other choice than affirmative therapy that led to the use of testosterone, which changed her voice forever, and a mastectomy. “I detransitioned because I experienced extreme transition regret: realizing that my desire to become a man stemmed from a variety of factors that ultimately led me to want to be someone else, not my ‘authentic self,’ but someone (and something) else entirely,” she wrote.
“My transition was fueled by self-hatred, not self-acceptance. I didn’t want to be Sinéad because I hated Sinéad. Sinéad was a woman and I wanted no part in that anymore. I’d become Séan, a man, and I’d feel better. Or so I hoped.”
Watson reports having recovered her sense of self after detransitioning. “It’s been a long road, but on #DetransAwarenessDay I can confidently say that I am no longer gender dysphoric. I’m finally happy to be me,” she continued. “I wouldn’t have gotten to this place without the support of so many other amazing detransitioners, whose stories I’ll be retweeting today.”
Watson wants to be a source of support for anyone going through the same regret. “I never thought I’d ever accept myself. But I do – and I’ve never been happier,” she wrote. “To anyone struggling with transition regret, you’re absolutely not alone. Recovery is possible: My DMs are open to anyone who needs a rock to lean on, as my rocks once did for me.”
My name is Grace and I detransitioned. On the left: me shortly after top surgery, 2017. This was the darkest time in my life. On the right: me recently. Life goes on, life gets better. #DetransAwarenessDay pic.twitter.com/ItTJbiLJpF
— Grace 💙🦎 (@HormoneHangover) March 12, 2022
During a webinar on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) that was presented in 2021 and is linked below, Stella O’Malley, psychotherapist & author of How Clinicians Work with ROGD, gave a presentation that touched on the complexity of this issue. “There’s an extraordinary celebration of trans identity,” she said, pointing to shows like I am Jazz and other trans representation in the media that is nothing but positive. “When you are over celebrated [you are] painted into a corner,” she said, referring to the extreme pressure the trans-lobby puts on young people questioning their identity. “What we need is a neutral positive environment,” said O’Malley. “We need to be aware of the intense social phenomenon and social context that is happening here.”
One personal story written by Helena describes the social environment that led her to transitioning. For her, it all started on Tumblr.
I found myself in a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!
Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege, you can relax a little and talk about your life without wondering if you are distracting from the struggles of or speaking over marginalized groups, because you are marginalized too. With the new pronouns often comes a wave of positive affirmation from friends and followers, and the subconscious picks up quickly that there’s a way to make the deal of being on Tumblr even sweeter.
Even more disturbing is the effect of the our ambient hypersexualized culture on young girls.
Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women. I must not have really been meant to be a girl, because if I was, this wouldn’t all be so scary and confusing.
When Helena’s parents did not affirm her desire to transition, she went to a school guidance counselor.
To add fuel to the fire, I went to my school guidance counselor and told her I was very depressed (true) because my parents wouldn’t accept me as trans (not so true). She completely affirmed my perception and told me how sorry she was that my parents weren’t more supportive. She looked online with me at the local children’s hospital gender clinic and said she would call to see how long their waiting list was. We also came up with a budget plan for how I would pay for testosterone using an informed consent clinic if I waited until I turned eighteen. In the meantime, she said I should talk to the school psychologist to help me deal with my family being so transphobic. I asked my mom if I could stop seeing the therapist I had been seeing occasionally and switch to the school psychologist. My mom, having no idea that the school was affirming me and helping me put together plans to transition behind her back, agreed.
Helena’s sweet dad took her out after finding out she wanted to be a boy and tried to teach her to drive stick, thinking that if he showed her how to do “guy things” she wouldn’t want to transition. “It was this weird belief system I found on the internet that made me want to be trans, not a repressed yearning to do ‘guy things’. I had never been all that interested in ‘guy things,'” she wrote. Helena started taking hormone injections she procured at Planned Parenthood as soon as she turned 18.
I remember the intake process taking about 20 minutes, at which point the social worker told me she would talk over my intake with the nurse practitioner, and they would decide if I was a good candidate for testosterone. I waited anxiously by myself for a couple of minutes, and then the social worker came back. She told me that I was a perfect candidate for testosterone, and since I had traveled so far, and seemed “so sure”, that they would even work around their typical policy of taking blood samples and waiting for test results to prescribe the hormones, and give me my prescription that very day.
After a terrifying experience with testosterone-induced psychosis, Helena finally began to understand she had made a mistake. But when she told her therapist she regretted her transition, the therapist blamed it on transphobia, saying, “‘you’re trying to talk yourself out of being trans because transphobia is making you hate yourself.’ Ironic that nobody ever questioned my desire to be trans that way.”
But Helena figured out eventually that she had “been manipulated, taken advantage of, and involved in a cult-like community.” She discovered her story was not unique and is the definition of the cultural phenomenon that is ROGD.
Pre-existing mental health issues, check. A friend group where multiple people began identifying as trans around the same time, check. Decline in mental health and parent-child relationship since identifying as trans, check. Expressing distrust/dislike of non-transgender people and spending less time around non-transgender friends, check. Isolating self from family, check. Only trusting information about gender from pro-transgender sources, check. Increased social media use directly preceding the identification as trans, check.
I was in shock. This was… me! Perhaps more importantly, this was… EVERYONE! All of those young biological females I had been friends with online and offline who identified as trans also fit this exact description.
Helena’s conclusion is a terrifying indictment of the medical community.
Though there is much strength to be found in overcoming, the fact is that today, any young person who remotely struggles with self-esteem, making friends, fitting in to common gender roles, or body image is now vulnerable to being subjected to what amount to medical experiments that may permanently destroy the prior functioning of their bodies before they have had the chance to build identity and strength through the normal means of overcoming life’s challenges.
Please read the whole account. It is fascinating.
The webinar on ROGD below is worth watching in its entirety. Voices of sanity are finally speaking. Will they be heard? A quick glance at the major news networks today does not reveal any articles on Detransition Awareness Day or the harms that radical hormone therapy and irreversible surgeries are doing to the youth. Please share this article on social media today with #DetransitionAwarenessDay.
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