The first time Tracey was a lesbian, it didn’t last long. She’d left a small New Zealand town for the adventure of university and came out as lesbian. But she hesitated about how to tell her parents.
“I went and saw the queer support group — and they supported me to find my trans identity,” she recalls. “It was quite a rapid shift.”
She was 18, a bit older than most other teenage girls going transgender in a wave across affluent and anxious counties. Tracey was serious about trans; it took up more than three years of her life.
She ran youth groups for queer school kids and settled into the rhythms of her own identity group on campus, meeting twice a week and sharing lunch. “We became friends in a whole new subculture. The closed-off trans community perpetuates a real feeling of difference. I would look at other young women around campus and think: ‘They’re wearing makeup or they look comfortable — and I don’t feel like that.’ ”
From the dial-up internet of her home town she graduated to trans broadband, following multimedia stars such as YouTuber Ash Hardell, who looks a bit like Tintin and runs through a cartoonish Q&A about her double mastectomy — “My Insto was flooded with folk who were confident that they knew my breasts, for sure, most definitely, would grow back.”
Identity under the knife
Identity goes under the knife online and wakes up with the right pronouns and rainbow emoticons. “On social media you can really curate what your identity is,” Tracey says. “I guess a lot of this comes down to your precious gender identity — this special property that you’ve got.”
She had been unsure about the value of having a female body since the age of 13. “I felt really uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable with the expectations that are put on teenage girls, like I wasn’t good at what you’re supposed to be good at, to be a young woman. I didn’t really feel feminine.
“I had pretty classic anorexia for most of my teens. When I saw the queer support people they were, like: ‘The reason you’ve got this anorexia is because you’re uncomfortable with your body — because you’re not a woman’.”
Seemingly conservative, her parents couldn’t see the liberating appeal of trans. “They said, ‘Why would you say you’re not a woman? Wouldn’t it be better to defy all the expectations that are put on women, accept you’re a woman and be a good role model?’
“I remember going back to the queer group and saying, ‘Can you believe they said something so transphobic to me?’ ”
But she began flirting with her own thought crime. She took a risk, in private with a fellow queer group member she judged a friend. “I said, ‘I think it’s OK for women to be only into other women’, which you’d think in a tolerant inclusive community would be an OK thing to say.”
Except it wasn’t. “The backlash was so strong. I was likened to being a racist. It was such a transphobic thought that a female could only be into another female.” Yet her friend wouldn’t have batted an eyelid to see Tracey involved with another woman because, so the theory went, Tracey was actually a young man.
“I started questioning, just privately, the stereotypes. In the LGBTQ community we were kind of equating women with femininity.”
It seemed strange these two things were “tied together quite tightly”, given all the talk about fluidity. There were other doubts. She watched at one youth group as a 15-year-old boy announced to cheers and applause that he’d got his first cross-sex hormones. Others in the room would get the message.
“I was kind of wary. You don’t always teach people stuff by saying it expressly, do you?”
She recalls sharing a worry with a close friend in a queer group. “We could see concerns with telling young trans kids they were born in the wrong body. We thought it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe setting them up to go down a medical path. And you know how often they say these kids are so suicidal? We didn’t think that was healthy.”
Whispering campaign
Word started going around the queer group about her illicit sympathy for women content with women and only women; and the word was transphobic.
“It was kind of a wake up — hang on, this isn’t what I signed up for.”
Questions and doubts came in a tumble. “It was very rapid, which was kind of scary because I felt like everything unravelled really quickly, and I think that’s somewhat common. I became really aware that I was going to lose all my friends, lose my whole community as soon as I said I was not trans. I moved cities before I told anyone.”
Ostracism and threats followed her online. Someone wanted her arms broken, she was warned she’d never be allowed to keep a job, not even in a cafe, and a woman unsettled her with a promise “to shout in my face” when they met on the main street. It was harassment at her gym from an obsessive 40-something man, who identified as a woman, that sent her to the police.
For Tracey, “detransitioning” was pretty straightforward. She had changed her appearance, her look, but not her body. Anorexia had often put her in hospital and her low body weight meant even gung-ho doctors were unlikely to approve hormones for her.
She knows young women in New Zealand who’ve undergone medical detransition; it seemed harder for them to prove they were “sane enough” to come off testosterone than it had been to begin.
Having survived both, she suspects anorexia and trans are not that different. “A lot of young women do express their hate and their discomfort for their bodies and their gender and their role in society through altering the body in shocking ways.”
Now 23, she accepts her female sex and, much as her parents suggested, tries to loosen the social knot that ties womanhood to narrow expectations. She works in construction, blissfully free from gender politics, and thinks this kind of life “more radical” than the progressive mirage of trans. She’s a lesbian, again, and not sure what her parents make of it — “but I don’t push it in their face”.
She was a little horrified to recognise herself in last month’s story in The Weekend Australian about a girl gone trans who would abuse her mother as “a white privileged bigot, transphobic, a boring heterosexual”.
Tracey says: “My goodness, that was me. I think my parents are probably relieved that I’m not going after them that hard any more.”
She feels for other teenage girls who wonder if trans will bring them the freedom denied by a constricting femininity. They should ask themselves, she suggests, what rule requires them to choose between their freedom and being a woman?
“The other thing I would advise, where possible, do an activity like rock climbing or playing a team sport, something that gets you really in touch with your body. You’re just focusing on clinging on to that rock face, so it’s good.
“Even just going camping, because you’re away from all the screens, you’re not worrying what you look like. It makes you realise all the great things that your body can do.”
There has been a glut of celebratory media since Bruce Jenner changed his name to Caitlyn in 2015 and declared “figuring out what to wear” was the hardest thing about being a woman. Maybe feminism seems dated and same-sex marriage has had its victory lap. So trans must be the next exciting social nirvana, making detransitioners look like a reactionary rump.
Their story just doesn’t fit into a narrative of courageous kids who lead the rest of us on a journey to their true, harmonious identity. The word transgender gets 47,000 hits on the ABC website. There are none at all for detransitioner or detransitioning.
When an English pop star relaunched as non-binary this month, he was high-fived with a BBC headline: “Sam Smith changes pronouns to they/them.” Meanwhile, in remote corners of the web, reports of trans regret are quietly coming in, such as this one a few days ago: “It was all a big mistake. My surgeon told me my (gender reassignment surgery) went as perfect as could be. I still despise the results … Sometimes I think about detransition but I can’t get back what I lost and I’m tired of surgeries and document changes and finding hormone balances … I will be dependent on exogenous hormones for the remainder of my life either way … I have decided to sue my surgeon for malpractice and lie by omission.”
Parents, sometimes choking with doubt, clinicians, teachers and journalists line up to “affirm” today’s new trans kids. To question the choice is branded a transphobic denial of “the trans right to exist”. But who will be there to affirm tomorrow’s detransitioners, to witness their “lived experience” of regretful rumination, sometimes damaged bodies and impaired health?
Reddit’s online detrans group has almost 5000 members. This emerging trend is ignored in the “world’s most progressive” treatment guidelines issued by Australia’s biggest gender clinic for young people at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. Criticised for the omission, clinic director Michelle Telfer and the three colleagues who helped write the 2018 standards claim “true de-transition is uncommon”.
They assert detransition is more often the result of “outside pressures” from family, for example, or religion. Yet trans “affirmation” activists angrily reject any talk of “true” or “false” gender change, any idea that pressure from social media or peers may have something to do with the surge of teenagers swapping pronouns and demanding hormones. Why can’t stories of trans success coexist with frank debate about confusion, regret and risks, such as sterility, cardiac complaints, brittle bones, post-mastectomy haematoma or urology problems?
A mother’s tale
Denise, a US-based medical professional with a background in writing, says her website 4thWaveNow was probably the first to try to link up parents blindsided by teenagers who suddenly declared they were trans, with no previous hint of confusion about their sex.
Across five years the site has had almost one million unique visitors, Australians among them, and has become an online magazine with a wealth of information found nowhere in mainstream media, including articles by world-class scholars of sexuality demonised by trans activists for insisting on nuance. Parents such as Denise, whose 22-year-old daughter, Chiara, stopped identifying as trans before any medical treatment and came out as lesbian, are dismissed as bigoted, right wing or religious extremists. In fact, anecdote suggests many parents of these teenage girls are quite progressive.
Denise is a lifelong political liberal and counts a healthy lesbian daughter as a success.
“The kind of thing that’s brought up is, ‘Oh, the parents aren’t supportive.’ And you know what the go-to is — ‘it’s trans or suicide’,” Denise says. “Nobody wants to hurt trans people, nobody I know. But it seems just common sense that everyone would want to reduce the number of false positives (especially among vulnerable teenage girls).”
Denise lives in a left-wing milieu and struggles to get people to grasp that it’s a strange kind of liberation to promote trans boy status for teenage girls who don’t fit the feminine norm, who feel pressured by intense expectations online and may take time to accept they are lesbian — as Chiara did.
In January Chiara got to know three young female detransitioners — Dagny, Helena and Jesse — and they pooled their stories as the Pique Resilience Project. In videos and podcasts the Pique four come across as thoughtful and engaging, with plenty of humour, sometimes rueful. Three went on testosterone and regret it. Like 4thWaveNow, the group has attracted little interest from mainstream media.
“How do I put this? The idea of affirmation — the idea of people born in the wrong body, the idea that you should always affirm a young person who thinks they’re trans — has been injected into the body politic,” Denise says. “It is in every institution in our society — members of 4thWaveNow have had five interviews (with mainstream media) that have been canned at the last minute.”
The Pique group has not given up. Later this year they’ll take their cause to the political capital: “Ms Detrans Goes to Washington.”