Dear Christopher, part 1
The Dear Detransitioners series begins
First, an introduction to what we’re doing here
I recently announced my new book project intended to help survivors of gender malpractice (SOGM) and have been spreading the word on detrans Twitter. Several SOGM have reached out to take me up on my offer: free correspondence, aimed to be mutually beneficial. My hope is to find the most helpful words of wisdom, expressions of empathy, and thought-provoking questions that I might be able to offer people who have suffered in the unique ways that SOGM have. Out of the responses I write to participants, I hope to gather material that will be refined into the book, tentatively titled “The Detransition Survival Guide.” Along the way, I’ll share raw correspondence on this blog.
This correspondence is neither medical advice, nor a substitute for therapy. I strongly encourage all SOGM to seek therapy, yet I understand that many have felt harmed and betrayed by therapists. The first step in providing competent care for SOGM is to understand their resistance to therapy and the many reasons they have not to trust or place any hope in the hands of so-called professionals. Among my topmost career goals are to restore integrity to our profession and build a more competent care community for SOGM. I’m happy to help find and vet trustworthy therapists who share our concerns and are competent to work with this unique population.
I have each participant sign a contract to clarify our expectations and agreements. In the contract, they specify what name they would like to go by — their real name, a pseudonym, or initials, for instance. Christopher Ostrowski has chosen to use his full name publicly. In the near future, you will see more correspondence with Christopher, as well as several other SOGM.
Christopher’s story follows. Below that, you’ll find my response.
Christopher’s story
I was the kid who was misdiagnosed bipolar but was actually autism spectrum, I was placed on lithium and shut down, all of my exceptional scores from my youth went down, and I compartmentalized my existence. I had learned about sexual reassignment surgery when I was 13, this is back in '96, I also learned about the book The boy who was raised a girl talking about John money and Bruce Reimer around that time, and I fixated on that.
I was married first when I was 18. We had a kid. The marriage wasn't working out, I was running my own recording studio and met a woman who I ended up marrying years later.
She ended up going to be a nurse, I started to go to school to be an x-ray tech, and started having back problems. Around 07. Drs realize i had degenerative disc disease, and herniated disc,, scoliosis and I was doing freelance audio engineering for a while. My second wife had a son who I was helping to raise.
Custody with my own son was getting difficult with my first wife. Eventually I started to seek out stronger pain control methods for my spinal issues and eventually I realized that a friend of mine from guitar center was transitioning with medications they were getting from Germany where they lived.
I couldn't stop thinking about it for a year and started putting together all these things about my childhood, wondering if this was the great reason why I was different from everybody.
The American psychological association had just come out with the DSM-5 which turned transsexualism into gender identity disorder, but then made a leap with some low quality studies ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30426079/ ) to affirm this new term dysphoria, and since I was employed as an x-ray tech & medical assistant, I was watching them basically telling the world this was no longer a disorder but that any feeling like that is normal and that this was a viable treatment for it.
I came out to my wife at the time that I was bisexual and she coming from a homophobic background couldn't cope with it at all and for like a year we went back and forth in the relationship trying to make some kind of arrangement work, but eventually I left I was living on my own, my son was two or three hours away, my second marriage was dissolved, my stepson was sort of caught in the middle of it, and I was suicidal. I figured if I didn't have anything to live for I might as well try this thing.
At the time I was studying for the MCAT shifting my major to pre-med, and I even applied to medical school. Around this time my tremors were getting worse, and my neck and back pain were becoming untenable. I was taking a lot of medication to try to keep making money. I had moved into a studio apartment so I could work on my makeup and dress and mannerisms in private.
and when I did finally go to the LGBT center of Hollywood, I had lost 50 or 60 lb and I isolated for a year....because I had developed an eating disorder and trying to make my body thin so estrogen would affect me better, further reiterating how this was all obsession and dysmorphia, finding myself compelled to do something about it.
I started my hormones after a 10-minute intake with a therapist who wanted to discuss my transitioning goals and show me a video in 2014 when I was 30y/o. Any discussion about a long-term therapist or psychotherapist was optional and I could make a phone call if I wanted to but it wasn't required.
After 5 or 6 months on hormones, I began to get some different pronouns in public, and decided to go full-time female, much to the chagrin of my employer and my family, but my mom and my grandfather both died of stage 4 cancer as I was breaking up with my second wife and when I was just about to get hormones.
My son had found out from some pictures online and a friend who said I think your dad is trans, so I met with him at my grandmother's house at my grandfather's funeral so we could hang out and talk about it. The LGBT center only asked about my bipolar in a passing away, treating it is separate from these other feelings that they called dysphoria. I eventually changed my legal name and gender after doing 6 months or so of hormones around 2015 and meet my third wife online.
in 2017 (I'm 34 at that time) the LGBT center finally was able to contract Dr Alexander Sinclair Beverly hills, as well as an electrolysis center in Beverly hills to do the breast augmentation, as well as start clearing the groin of hair with electrolysis in preparation for sexual reassignment surgery. I did 50hrs on the groin. I actually had three surgical consultations via email or in person regarding srs with different surgeons, BUT as somebody who wanted to be in the medical field I just never felt like it was actually a vagina when they described it or when I would look up the surgeries to watch them or when I would look in the books to see how they were directing surgeons to make the incisions.. It seemed more like crude medicine, and I thought to myself even if there's stem cells in an implanted uterus is that really going to make me feel like a woman is it really going to make me happy...
I had also had a couple of spinal surgeries one on my l5 s1 and an acdf of c3-4 around 2016, both surgeries which didn't actually take care of all the problems I was having. Eventually I saw a neurologist at the movement disorder clinic at Cedars-Sinai in Beverly hills and was diagnosed via dat scan young onset Parkinson's disease. I had also been carrying with me degenerative disc disease, and the rigidity from the Parkinson's was making the degenerative disc disease harder to manage. I had tremors, I was having swallowing problems, among a slew of other symptoms with my gait and balance.
My wife was having feelings of dysphoria with her sex because of past trauma and abuse and the loss of a baby due to domestic violence at 12wks when her abusive ex folded her in half and raped her until the baby died. It was never reported, and she went to multiple clinics trying to get them to remove the dead fetus but none of them would saying she would pass it naturally, she was never able to dilate so she started to get septic and her mom had to pay for a private doctor. Between that and getting bullied at school when she was young because everyone thought she was a boy because of rumors, she decided to try testosterone as well for 6 months and of course I was going to affirm it because that's the authority, and the LGBT center was more than fine to overlook all of her trauma and history to just jump for this possible feeling in the wrong body.
After 6 months her voice started to change, her beautiful singing voice was gone, she started noticing the hair on her face and the balding and she decided to stop.
In 2018 we became homeless after noticing the toxic situation my wife was raised in, and we decided to move to Oregon living in our van, we settled in Portland for a little bit, where I had reconnected with a friend who I knew back just before I met my wife in 2015.
This friend I knew in Oregon had an orchiectomy through the LGBT center of Hollywood and was fast tracked on hormones, and within 5 years deleted all their social media and killed themselves. We had some bad roommates while we were in Oregon and ended up on the Oregon coast trying to start fresh. I was in the middle of my SSI case for my disabilities, and since I'd been in the medical field I had 300 pages to back up my claim. But since we had just moved we lost our health insurance so I was not able to get more documentation or see any more doctors eventually my case failed in 2021.
I tried to work a little bit part time because we had no other help when we lived in Cannon Beach. , and when covid hit my wifes ex started to withhold visitation from her two kids and wouldn't let them come out for summer. My son was starting to get into some trouble at his house with his mom- my first wife, and so we moved onto her land living in a truck camper trailer trying to have a farm so we could be closer to my wife's two kids, and I could maybe repair some of the bad behaviors with my son.
My ex was still narcissistic and was starting to become hostile towards us, not letting us throw away our garbage turning off our power so we bought the trailer from her thinking it would help and then she kicked us off the land, but the trailer wasn't on a truck so we couldn't move it so we had to sell it and move to Las Vegas, sacrificing all the visitation we'd fought for since we arrived at her house in lake Los Angeles. It was during this time that i had no hormones, my teeth were beginning to break, I was trying to move bricks around to protect my farm from the goats that my ex had put out there to destroy all of our things, hurting my back again with no health insurance, and once the garden was destroyed we left.
In Las Vegas we started working ubereats, I was just living as some almost non-binary person because I just felt like my transition had failed, I started feeling really strange walking out of the house with these breast implants on me, not being able to take care of the hair on my face, having no way to even attempt passing... and I started to withdrawal some more. Eventually SSA sent me to get my psych evaluated because they had no information about my bipolar which hadn't been treated since I was 18, and they wanted to know what that was all about. The doctor, after going through my entire medical history and testing me determined that it was autism spectrum not bipolar according to the signs and symptoms, the tests, and my presentation.
My wife Grace has a son who's also autism spectrum, we suspect that my wife is as well. Once that diagnosis happened when I was 38, I stopped holding myself to some normal standard, and started thinking about my entire history in a different light. I was already with somebody who loved me and accepted me and, sexually everything was good with us no matter what, so I started to let go of needing to get hormones again or focus on surgeries.
Once people wanted to redefine the word woman to include trans, and once lia Thomas started to take over women's swimming as if that was appropriate whatsoever, and when JK Rowling started getting canceled just for standing up for abused women, like my wife, who have endured a ton of abuse and Malice from Men... It struck me that none of this was what I signed up for.
The dream of becoming a woman wasn't an real actuality, and the medical field is promising something that is just a dream. Biological sex is a reality, and evolution designed us to get used to our puberty to grow through it, not to sidestep it and make our own plans.
I started to think of dysphoria more as a dysmorphia, and started to see dysmorphias like eating disorders and body identity integrity disorder as a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Both dysmorphia and OCD are, according to medscape, treated w/medication for stress management, and cognitive behavioral therapy to help curb fixating triggers. Dysphoria was never treated that way.
I also started to really notice how the surgeon I went to was posting all kinds of pictures on his Instagram of all these surgeries in a blase manner. He would go to trans clubs to have women pose with him with their hand on his neck pretending to choke him out. I started realizing how none of these cosmetic surgeons since the 2000s have been focusing on reconstruction, they've only been focusing on cosmetics and beauty and youthfulness, and you end up seeing human Ken doll human Barbie people addicted to surgery, and we know these people have mental conditions, but none of these surgeons are therapists, and it's not their job to screen people via psychotherapy to help them come to a logical growth, or to make peace with their past or trauma or origin of their fetish or whatever.
Now I speak out against this because I never during my 6 years of transition thought that children should have access to this. I never thought that people would take women spaces away and violate them so perniciously, and flaunt fetishes in front of children so unapologetically. And now there's all these signs of pedophiles and exhibitionists trying to hijack some of this culture for their own nefarious ends. I feel like there's a lot more to be said but this is a Cliff's notes.
Thanks so much for listening
My response
Hi Chris,
Thank you for your patience while it’s taken me time to sit and focus on your heartfelt letter. In the future, I hope to be able to respond within a week, but please bear with me if I can’t always keep up.
…
Here are some of the things that strike me in your story at initial impression. I’ll number them. Please pick one at a time to respond to each week for the next several weeks or let me know if you’d like to go in a different direction.
1. Misdiagnosis. You wrote:
I was the kid who was misdiagnosed bipolar but was actually autism spectrum, I was placed on lithium and shut down, all of my exceptional scores from my youth went down, and I compartmentalized my existence.
That’s quite a summary. You later explained that you didn’t receive an autism diagnosis until you were living in Las Vegas and were already starting to feel that your transition had failed. Then,
My wife ... has a son who's also autism spectrum, we suspect that my wife is as well. Once that diagnosis happened when I was 38, I stopped holding myself to some normal standard, and started thinking about my entire history in a different light. I was already with somebody who loved me and accepted me and, sexually everything was good with us no matter what, so I started to let go of needing to get hormones again or focus on surgerie
It sounds like the autism diagnosis was a big part of coming to accept and understand yourself, similar to Michelle’s journey. It also gave you a different narrative and context for making sense of what set you apart from other people. It helps you see, in retrospect, why certain things were challenging for you (eg. social relationships), and why having a rigid obsession (eg. “I must really be a woman”) appealed to your brain’s ways of working.
What are your thoughts and feelings in retrospect about having been diagnosed bipolar as a child and placed on lithium? It sounds like perhaps there is some anger about the sense that your brilliance was repressed. I get the sense you now realize you’re high-functioning autistic/ high IQ / Asperger’s type (pick a term), and you realize that while certain things are abnormally challenging for you, you also have exceptional gifts in other departments. Is there the sense that the responsible adults in your life let you down by falling to recognize your unique gifts & challenges? Is there a sense of what could have, should have been?
And what do you mean when you say you “compartmentalized my existence?”
I couldn't stop thinking about it for a year and started putting together all these things about my childhood, wondering if this was the great reason why I was different from everybody.
Do you now attribute that kind of thinking to autism?
2. Relationship stress. While many autistic people are late bloomers in relationships, you married and had a family early, then had a second wife and stepchild, and so on. You don’t describe the quality of those relationships in depth, but they were troubled. How do you feel that understanding your autism would have made a difference in your marital and family relationships? How did these relationships help or hinder your management of stress, pain, and responsibility? Relatedly:
3. Coming out as bisexual while thinking about being trans. It seems that for many people who eventually “come out as trans” or as gay for that matter, “I think I’m bisexual” is a first step. What made that apparent as the next step for you? You were married to a woman, and thinking you might be a woman. Were you starting to have sexual feelings about other men? Was there a link between your fantasy of yourself as a woman, and desires toward men?
This pertains to 2 & 3. What do you think now looking back about the dissolution of your second marriage and how that corresponded with your process of trying to figure out whether you were bisexual, trans, etc?
4. Early onset medical issues, disability and pain; seeking relief from pain. I find it quite interesting that your story leads from efforts to manage the pain of degenerative disc disease, to seeking out cross-sex hormones. I’d like to understand that better. What was the connection between seeking pain meds, and finding appeal in the idea of cross-sex hormones?
5. Suicidality. You wrote:
I was living on my own, my son was two or three hours away, my second marriage was dissolved, my stepson was sort of caught in the middle of it, and I was suicidal. I figured if I didn't have anything to live for I might as well try this thing.
This has a strikingly similar tone to other things I’ve heard. For example, in my conversation with Ollie. There’s this sense, “I was ready to throw my life away anyway, so I thought, what the heck, might as well try this.”
Prior to my work on gender, I’ve also heard a similar sentiment expressed by others who have gone through times in life of feeling suicidal. For example, years ago, in Hawaii, I met a young vagrant living a simple existence in the rainforest. He had been severely depressed in his home state of Michigan, and was ready to end things, but decided he might as well make Hawaii his last stop. Once he got there, he enjoyed the natural tropical life enough to stick around. But he didn’t have any ambitions besides making it through another day, smoking weed and playing guitar. There was this sense of just living for the moment, and that while being a hippie in the jungle was preferable to death — some might call it a pretty nice existence — the normal challenges faced by people his age, like finding a calling and earning a living, might not have been.
Where are you at now in your relationship to suicidal thoughts and feelings?
6. Definitions/conceptual framework for GD
The American psychological association had just come out with the DSM-5 which turned transsexualism into gender identity disorder, but then made a leap with some low quality studies ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30426079/ ) to affirm this new term dysphoria, and since I was employed as an x-ray tech & medical assistant, I was watching them basically telling the world this was no longer a disorder but that any feeling like that is normal and that this was a viable treatment for it.
This highlights what I describe in this article as the narrative of pathology vs. that of depathology. How did you make sense at the time, and how do you now, of the paradox that something can at once be considered non-pathological, and yet require medical treatment?
7. Significance of cross-dressing
At the time I was studying for the MCAT shifting my major to pre-med, and I even applied to medical school. Around this time my tremors were getting worse, and my neck and back pain were becoming untenable. I was taking a lot of medication to try to keep making money. I had moved into a studio apartment so I could work on my makeup and dress and mannerisms in private.
What do you recall the significance for you was at the time of practicing coming across as female? In retrospect, do you see more of yourself in the AGP, HSTS, or something else?
8. Eating disordered behavior
and when I did finally go to the LGBT center of Hollywood, I had lost 50 or 60 lb and I isolated for a year....because I had developed an eating disorder and trying to make my body thin so estrogen would affect me better, further reiterating how this was all obsession and dysmorphia, finding myself compelled to do something about it.
Did any medical or mental health professional catch your eating disorder or express concern about it? Do you see there being a link between your ED & ASD?
9. Lack of proper assessment & treatment
I started my hormones after a 10-minute intake with a therapist who wanted to discuss my transitioning goals and show me a video in 2014 when I was 30y/o. Any discussion about a long-term therapist or psychotherapist was optional and I could make a phone call if I wanted to but it wasn't required.
Did they evaluate anything else about your mental health? Also:
After 5 or 6 months on hormones, I began to get some different pronouns in public, and decided to go full-time female, much to the chagrin of my employer and my family, but my mom and my grandfather both died of stage 4 cancer as I was breaking up with my second wife and when I was just about to get hormones.
Yikes! And
My son had found out from some pictures online and a friend who said I think your dad is trans, so I met with him at my grandmother's house at my grandfather's funeral so we could hang out and talk about it. The LGBT center only asked about my bipolar in a passing away, treating it is separate from these other feelings that they called dysphoria. I eventually changed my legal name and gender after doing 6 months or so of hormones around 2015 and meet my third wife online.
Yikes again! How old was your son? Sounds like a lot of complex family issues, alienation…. I don’t even know where to begin but I’m curious how you think about this time in your life.
10. Medical issues, continued...
in 2017 (I'm 34 at that time) the LGBT center finally was able to contract Dr Alexander Sinclair Beverly hills, as well as an electrolysis center in Beverly hills to do the breast augmentation, as well as start clearing the groin of hair with electrolysis in preparation for sexual reassignment surgery. I did 50hrs on the groin.
Was electrolysis covered by insurance? Was it painful? What was going through your mind the whole time?
I actually had three surgical consultations via email or in person regarding srs with different surgeons, BUT as somebody who wanted to be in the medical field I just never felt like it was actually a vagina when they described it or when I would look up the surgeries to watch them or when I would look in the books to see how they were directing surgeons to make the incisions.. It seemed more like crude medicine, and I thought to myself even if there's stem cells in an implanted uterus is that really going to make me feel like a woman is it really going to make me happy...
So it sounds like you stopped short of any kind of “bottom surgery”? Did the hormones affect your sensation, sex drive, pain, ability to get an erection?
I had also had a couple of spinal surgeries one on my l5 s1 and an acdf of c3-4 around 2016, both surgeries which didn't actually take care of all the problems I was having. Eventually I saw a neurologist at the movement disorder clinic at Cedars-Sinai in Beverly hills and was diagnosed via dat scan young onset Parkinson's disease. I had also been carrying with me degenerative disc disease, and the rigidity from the Parkinson's was making the degenerative disc disease harder to manage. I had tremors, I was having swallowing problems, among a slew of other symptoms with my gait and balance.
How are these symptoms doing now? Do you see them as having been affected by the drugs you were on?
11. Wife
My wife was having feelings of dysphoria with her sex because of past trauma and abuse and the loss of a baby due to domestic violence at 12wks when her abusive ex folded her in half and raped her until the baby died. It was never reported, and she went to multiple clinics trying to get them to remove the dead fetus but none of them would saying she would pass it naturally, she was never able to dilate so she started to get septic and her mom had to pay for a private doctor. Between that and getting bullied at school when she was young because everyone thought she was a boy because of rumors, she decided to try testosterone as well for 6 months and of course I was going to affirm it because that's the authority, and the LGBT center was more than fine to overlook all of her trauma and history to just jump for this possible feeling in the wrong body.
After 6 months her voice started to change, her beautiful singing voice was gone, she started noticing the hair on her face and the balding and she decided to stop.
What was it like for you to see her go through this? Did it bring up doubts about your own identity? Did it sadden you?
12. Family drama, life issues…
In 2018 we became homeless after noticing the toxic situation my wife was raised in, and we decided to move to Oregon living in our van, we settled in Portland for a little bit, where I had reconnected with a friend who I knew back just before I met my wife in 2015.
This friend I knew in Oregon had an orchiectomy through the LGBT center of Hollywood and was fast tracked on hormones, and within 5 years deleted all their social media and killed themselves. We had some bad roommates while we were in Oregon and ended up on the Oregon coast trying to start fresh. I was in the middle of my SSI case for my disabilities, and since I'd been in the medical field I had 300 pages to back up my claim. But since we had just moved we lost our health insurance so I was not able to get more documentation or see any more doctors eventually my case failed in 2021.
I tried to work a little bit part time because we had no other help when we lived in Cannon Beach. , and when covid hit my wifes ex started to withhold visitation from her two kids and wouldn't let them come out for summer. My son was starting to get into some trouble at his house with his mom- my first wife, and so we moved onto her land living in a truck camper trailer trying to have a farm so we could be closer to my wife's two kids, and I could maybe repair some of the bad behaviors with my son.
My ex was still narcissistic and was starting to become hostile towards us, not letting us throw away our garbage turning off our power so we bought the trailer from her thinking it would help and then she kicked us off the land, but the trailer wasn't on a truck so we couldn't move it so we had to sell it and move to Las Vegas, sacrificing all the visitation we'd fought for since we arrived at her house in lake Los Angeles. It was during this time that i had no hormones, my teeth were beginning to break, I was trying to move bricks around to protect my farm from the goats that my ex had put out there to destroy all of our things, hurting my back again with no health insurance, and once the garden was destroyed we left.
For now I will just acknowledge this was a lot to deal with. Let me know if you want to go into any of it further.
13. Changing views
was already with somebody who loved me and accepted me and, sexually everything was good with us no matter what, so I started to let go of needing to get hormones again or focus on surgeries.
Once people wanted to redefine the word woman to include trans, and once lia Thomas started to take over women's swimming as if that was appropriate whatsoever, and when JK Rowling started getting canceled just for standing up for abused women, like my wife, who have endured a ton of abuse and Malice from Men... It struck me that none of this was what I signed up for.
The dream of becoming a woman wasn't an real actuality, and the medical field is promising something that is just a dream. Biological sex is a reality, and evolution designed us to get used to our puberty to grow through it, not to sidestep it and make our own plans.
I started to think of dysphoria more as a dysmorphia, and started to see dysmorphias like eating disorders and body identity integrity disorder as a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Both dysmorphia and OCD are, according to medscape, treated w/medication for stress management, and cognitive behavioral therapy to help curb fixating triggers. Dysphoria was never treated that way.
I also started to really notice how the surgeon I went to was posting all kinds of pictures on his Instagram of all these surgeries in a blase manner. He would go to trans clubs to have women pose with him with their hand on his neck pretending to choke him out. I started realizing how none of these cosmetic surgeons since the 2000s have been focusing on reconstruction, they've only been focusing on cosmetics and beauty and youthfulness, and you end up seeing human Ken doll human Barbie people addicted to surgery, and we know these people have mental conditions, but none of these surgeons are therapists, and it's not their job to screen people via psychotherapy to help them come to a logical growth, or to make peace with their past or trauma or origin of their fetish or whatever.
Now I speak out against this because I never during my 6 years of transition thought that children should have access to this. I never thought that people would take women spaces away and violate them so perniciously, and flaunt fetishes in front of children so unapologetically. And now there's all these signs of pedophiles and exhibitionists trying to hijack some of this culture for their own nefarious ends. I feel like there's a lot more to be said but this is a Cliff's notes.
It sounds like for you, coming out of the haze of identifying as trans involved a confluence of these factors:
-having unconditional love and support in your life
-maturing, phase of life
-getting tired of the medical ordeals
-the politicization of the issues, and related injustices
-coming to terms with biological reality
-evolving your conceptual framework for understanding mental health issues
-feeling disenchanted, disillusioned, disgusted even with the medical professionals involved in “gender affirming care”
-concern for women and children
Is that right? Is there anything you would add or change?
Whew, ok! That’s a lot of ground we’ve covered. Please pick out just 1-2 parts at a time to respond to my questions, clarify, correct, suggest different ways of viewing, or do whatever you find personally beneficial in response.
Thanks so much for sharing your story with me,
Stephanie
