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What’s So Scary About Detransitioning?
Trans communities have always honored complex gender narratives
When news first spread that 60 Minutes was planning to cover “detransitioners,” the trans community rightly panicked. Detransitioners — cis people, predominantly cis women, who used to identify as trans and now regret their transitions — have become a major flashpoint in the ongoing culture war around trans people. They are central to the work of Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier, who claims most adolescent trans boys are girls transitioning due to social contagion. They were the subject of a controversial 2017 piece by The Stranger’s Katie Herzog, even though most estimates suggest that only around 2% of all people who’ve transitioned go on to detransition. They were photographed topless for The Times of London by photographer Laura Dodsworth, who accompanied her work with hand-wringing text on how “unnerving” she finds these bodies with their “missing organs.” They have been at the center of major legislative setbacks for trans rights: In the U.K., detransitioner Keira Bell’s testimony against the Tavistock clinic (which she believes “should have challenged” her self-identification as trans) led to the banning of gender-affirming puberty blockers for those under age 16.
You can hardly blame people for associating the very word “detransition” with transphobic politics, and it seems ominous that 60 Minutes, which has covered trans issues very rarely in the past, would start with such a flash-point group. Let’s be clear: The problem with these narratives is not that they’re about people who’ve stopped transitioning. Trans communities have always held room for complex transitions and shifting identities, and many common treatments — like puberty blockers, which allow gender-questioning youth to forestall adolescence while they figure themselves out, or low-dose hormone replacement therapy, which provides emotional benefits without immediate physical changes — are designed precisely to give people time to find out whether transitioning is right for them. Trans narratives have included stories about stopping or reversing transitions ever since Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, in which the nonbinary narrator takes testosterone for some time and ultimately decides against it. Gender exploration is a process, and not…
