Dear Detransitioners
Dear Detransitioners of 2022,
You’re early, and we all know it. You are the beginning of many more to come.
You are already vulnerable in so many ways. When you share your stories with us, you become even more vulnerable. Along with your supporters like me, many of you hope that it’s ultimately worthwhile for you to put yourselves out there. We know your stories are one of the most important tools - arguably, the most important - to help turn this trend around. And we all want to see that happen…
But it sucks to have your pain and suffering be a tool. For anything.
I can imagine that at times you might feel like a sacrificial lamb… or a guinea pig… or a witch on trial… in addition to also feeling like a survivor of a cult, or of an abusive relationship. And many of you did experience abuse prior to your transition, and you wish someone had f*cking noticed that, just like you wish they had noticed a thousand other things hiding behind the convenient and simplistic explanation of “I’m trans.” Things perhaps you didn’t have words for, or understand at the time yourself. Or, for that matter, things you did try to express… and no one heard you.
It’s not fair that this happened to you.
It’s not my fault and this isn’t about me but as a therapist can I just say I feel embarrassed and apologetic on behalf of my profession?
Just as much as your stories might be the most important tool we have in responding to this crisis… My profession might be the worst culprit in creating it. Maybe this is hyperbolic, but maybe it’s not.
I’m no more blaming my colleagues in general than I am blaming myself for where I was a few years ago on this matter, before I really did my research, checked in with my gut, branched out, and heard from people like you. I get why therapists got duped. I remember what those trainings are like. I attended one of them, where an activist disguised as a social worker lectured us about whether parents should prefer having dead daughters or live sons and the importance of stopping puberty before it starts as the latest wave of suicide prevention. When you’re sitting in a room full of 100 of your colleagues - clearly this was in pre-pandemic days - and the company you work for has put together a training, you expect that this trainer is qualified and has something of value to offer. And you are expected to sit respectfully: quiet, polite, deferent, attentive. As for me, I already felt like a sore thumb or a tall wildflower at that company as it was. (I have an unfortunate habit of bringing that pattern wherever I go. I’m working on it.) The last thing I wanted to do was draw more attention to myself and be seen as inappropriately challenging an authority figure.
Besides, wasn’t I supposed to be one of the most liberal, progressive, LGBT-friendly therapists at the company? One who gay people could feel safe with - not like those old school conservative Christians?
Then, shortly after that training, when I moved offices within the company, my one friend, the only woman in the building to reach out and connect with me, decided I was the best person to pass along all her most fringe clients to before she moved out of state. I was the one, she imagined, who would help her kinky clients, and the polyamorous ones, and of course, the trans. Naturally, I wanted to live up to her expectations.
I had many trans clients, and I did my best to help and understand them. I never saw any of them make significant improvements in their mental health… and I was accustomed to being quite effective helping people make rapid progress. They seemed to be dealing with some unique forms of neuroticism unlike anything I’d seen before. Their problems were stubborn as hell. But questioning their gender identity was never on the table.
Slowly, I started to notice that more and more of the youth I was seeing were identifying as trans. Teen girls who had originally come to me for social anxiety, depression, trauma, or family conflict were now telling me they were nonbinary. Intuitively, that seemed like an odd explanation for their troubles, but I went with it, not quite grasping at the time the important context of just what exactly was going on with their entire generation.
I remember one girl in particular had the worst life. I mean, childhood sexual abuse, death of a loved one… you name it, she had gone through it. Her life was so chaotic that it was very tough to get her to show up to therapy consistently - and if anyone needed to be seen frequently, it was her. We never really got established with weekly therapy, but when we did meet, there was so much that needed to be addressed. There was never anything unfeminine or remotely gender questioning about her. The only thing different about her in the gender and sexuality department was the abuse she had endured. And she was naturally a strikingly beautiful young woman. When she came in one day with her hair tucked under a ball cap, in a relationship with a girl and now both of them identifying as nb, I was surprised. Given that she was apparently bisexual, as I was discovering, and considering everything boys and men had put her through, it was understandable she would feel much safer with a female partner, as she was reporting. But why they both felt the need to dispose of their femininity altogether was beyond me. Deep down, I felt sad for her. I thought, have men tortured you to such an extent that the very fact of being a young woman feels unbearable? But of course, given the standards of care I had been inculcated into, this wasn’t okay to say, so I didn’t. That might have been the last time I saw her. We never did get the therapy ball truly rolling.
Other girls were what we used to call lesbians. And their gender expression was what we used to call androgynous or tomboyish. I took no issue with that - in fact, I barely even noticed. I grew up with many bisexual friends, I’ve never been terribly girlish myself, and I connect more easily with women like me who would rather wear hiking boots than high heels. But again, then came the new identifications and pronouns, and for some, the pursuit of hormones and surgeries.
It wasn’t until later that I even consciously realized why I became more and more reluctant to take on new adolescent clients. It was just some combination of a growing inclination, and fate - fewer were seeking me out, and I was becoming more passionate about treating couples. But in retrospect I can see that a part of me didn’t feel right about adhering to the affirmation model. It took me a while - and a lot of research - to be able to put my finger on why. And then it took another little while for me to decide to publicly say so.
So as for my colleagues, I get it. There are the trainings; the expectation of deference; the lumping in together of the T with the LGB, and the desire to be supportive of all; the natural tendency as therapists to give our clients the benefit of the doubt and regard their experiences as valid; and the novelty of an emergent trend, combined with the inability to zoom out and see the bigger picture because the nature of our work has us focusing on one individual at a time. Psychologists are not sociologists, nor are therapists anthropologists. And we’re all fairly agreeable, conscientious, polite, open-minded people.
In other words: half of the qualities that make us good therapists also make us the perfect candidates for inculcation. And somehow, those qualities dominated the other half: our capacity for critical thinking; our training in the assessment and differential diagnosis process; our mandate to provide only the least invasive, medically necessary treatment; and our skill at digging in and exploring what might really be going on.
If there ever were a time that therapists were being called to wake up and snap out of our haze of agreeableness and trust, recognizing the ways in which these traits can make us naive to potential dangers and neglectful of our real responsibilities… that time is now.
But for many of you, detransitioners - and I promise this letter was meant to be about your experiences, despite these winding tangents into my own - that time comes too late.
It comes too late for you to receive the care you needed at the time you needed it, in time to help you refrain from making life-altering decisions from an immature and fragile state of mind. And perhaps for some, sadly, it may come too late for our profession to ever earn your trust again. It saddens me greatly that some of the people most in need of the type of support my colleagues and I are best equipped to provide have been so sorely let down by us that they won’t ever dare to receive it.
I want to tell you that I am sorry, as many of us who have come around to seeing this issue more clearly are. That it’s understandable if you hate us, though I hope for your own sake that you’ll find forgiveness in your heart and find excellent therapists when you need them. And, most importantly, that it’s not your fault.
You probably already know this - at least, I hope you do. But from your stories that I’ve heard, I know many of you blame yourselves just as much as you blame anyone else, if not more so. So if you’re in that category, please hear this: it wasn’t your fault. Adults, especially medical and mental health professionals, had a job to do, and we failed you. Sure, you made some embarrassing decisions, and maybe you were gullible, and now you live with regrets. But someone could have, should have, stopped you.
You don’t just go to the doctor and say, “I have an infection and I need antibiotics,” and walk out with a prescription for antibiotics. The doctor needs to examine you, perhaps run some tests, and tell you what she thinks you really need, according to the training only she should be expected to have. The fact that we have just allowed our patients to dictate the nature of their problems and solutions to us as if they’re the experts is an absurd abdication of responsibility.
So if you haven’t gone through a phase of being mad at us, go ahead and get mad, then. Don’t let that stop you from valuable self-examination of the personal flaws and pre-existing wounds that rendered you vulnerable to ideological harm in the first place… but you can do that without hurting yourself through unnecessary blame and shame. Maybe even with a good therapist, if you’ll allow us the opportunity to regain your trust.
Most importantly, take care of yourself. It’s brave to put yourself out there, and you’re helping lots of people, but it also comes at a cost to you, and you’ve paid dearly enough as it is. You may feel as though you’re on the front lines of a battlefield. Rest assured that despite the unique value of your efforts, there are legions behind you who can help, too. Doctors, parents, therapists, wise trans folks, and waves of desisters and detransitioners to follow will all play our parts in turning this tide. It’s okay to rest sometimes, whether that means sitting out for a round, taking an extended vacation, or straight up retiring. You’ve sacrificed more than enough. Go take care of yourselves and let others do their parts too.
Find things that bring you joy and solace. You spent years of your life caught up in something that did not ultimately give back to you or contribute to your wellbeing. You also invested your sense of self into a false sense of identity, and now you’ve had to start over. You have lost time that could have been spent developing yourself in ways that will benefit you in the long term: cultivating your character, hobbies, passions, interests, and confidence. So don’t waste time on Twitter if it doesn’t make you happy. Go for a run, plant a flower, climb a rock, play a piano, write a poem, sing your damn heart out. The battle will continue without you, and you can return whenever you want.
You’re brave. You have done something some people go a lifetime without: admitting you were wrong after having invested your time, faith, money, effort, sense of self, and even your body. That’s rare. Most of us keep digging our heels in, even when it starts to become clear that we’ve made a mistake. It’s just human nature: our stubborn egos, resistance to grief, and the sunken cost fallacy. By finding the courage to abandon what you thought was a sure path miles in to your journey, turn around, and hike back to where you started, you become uniquely wise and strong. We all have much to learn from you. And that doesn’t have to mean you’re okay with any of this. Just know, for what it’s worth, that certain experts in human behavior find yours commendable.
Here’s wishing you joy, peace, hope, solace, rest, confidence, dignity, and contentment.
Yours,
Some therapist
