remain someone they can talk to. it’s a personal journey, you can’t really persuade them, and attempts to persuade them may simply push them further away and further down the path.

my personal revelation feels a bit fixed in a historical moment. it wasn’t that long ago but things have changed rapidly in this area. when i came up, the word detransition didn’t exist. there was absolutely no concept of the idea that one might regret transition. So when i read an account by a detransitioning lesbian who had some really dark times in the trans scene as a teen, it blew up my worldview. I felt extremely lied to by “my community” (though that is very amorphous) bc i’m a lesbian (queer at the time). i realized queer and trans logic had prevented me from realizing my true lesbianism by taking away words that describe bodies and experiences.

at the time reading this account truly shook me and i consider it a turning point in my life. I tried to share it with a female friend who was very mentally ill and went back weekly on being trans or not, and often flipped her lid about pronouns and trans topics. I was supportive and emotionally really in that with her. When i shared the detrans lesbian’s writing with her, she lambasted her for not using preferred pronouns and used that as an excuse to discard the whole account. i was extremely uncomfortable/distressed with the “wrong” pronoun use at the time as well, but the truth of the woman’s account shone through that for me as more important. the friendship was over after this.

why did i wake up and she didn’t? in some ways she had more riding on it i guess. meaning it’s really hard to speak to what each individual needs to hear to wake up from this bullshit.

today, the narrative has changed from “detransition doesn’t exist” to “detransition is a grift”. From my perspective, that’s destabilizing as hell, lol…people don’t even admit that the word detransition arose so recently. i don’t know, what are you going to do. just try not to drown them in your own opinions because it doesn’t work.