The Times:The detransitioners

[NeurotrashWarrior]

The detransitioners: what happens when trans men want to be women again?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-detransitioners-what-happens-when-trans-men-want-to-be-women-again-fd22b7jhs

I'm afraid I don't have a share token.

2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

When I told people I was going to create a photographic series about trans men who wanted to “detransition” and become women again, I was told to expect a backlash. Actually, I was told I would be crucified — look at what happened to JK Rowling recently. At the very least I’d better take a holiday from Twitter. One person told me I should not be focusing on detransitioners when trans people are still struggling for acceptance. But this would be to silence key voices when we should be having an inclusive and nuanced discussion about gender identity, especially at a time when the government is deciding how, or whether, it will reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

Mutilation isn’t defined by necessity (or not) of the procedure though - in legal terms, neutering pets is a “permitted mutilation” but I suspect most of us agree than spaying cats is an entirely appropriate procedure for the animals’ individual welfare.

I have read this, and while it is indeed sad, the point remains that those who shouted long and loud that it was people's 'right' to do as they wish with their body, remain at large and continuing with their message. Doctors, psychiatrists and many other professionals are included in those who have been persuaded that it is right to allow these things to happen at the wish of the individual patient. Imagine the furore if doctors refused - careers could be ruined at the least. Look what happens to others like JK Rowling who merely state a biological fact on social media. I also think that the people who had procedures and hormone therapy should take responsibility for their own bodies and not jump on someone else's bandwagon without a long period of reflection and research.

Lethargic to you and your little sister

I see a lot on MN about how trans women aren't women and men are taking our rights away, but less about the (actual majority of trans youth) FtM transitioners and why they feel the need to no longer be women, which is actually more concerning for me from (my interpretation of) a feminist point of view.

There are many threads about detransitioners and also many female ones, as well as tbe long running trans widows which is the other feminist aspect to this. And obviously children.

I do agree that for me the implications for current and long term health care, in all its aspects, for any trans identifying females (also non binary as many female nbs get mastectomies too) is a huge feminist issue.

It's also where I find that the narrative unravels the most. From the ironic simplicity and ongoing sexism of trans men only hitting the headlines for being pregnant to the seriousness of the impact on their sexed bodies of taking the hormones etc.

It's notable that the sheep studies looking at the impact of blockers on the teen and adult brain (of sheep, as apparently sheep brains are very similarly organised - more irony ) were at pains to point out that the study involved male sheep and further studies on female sheep were needed, iirc.

It's looking like the short and long term outcomes for girls who take blockers are worse than boys from Tavistock data.

@ChurchOfWokeApostate

I would never refer to a woman who had a double mastectomy due to breast cancer as being ‘mutilated’ so I do see the issue, however it’s hard to not think of it in these terms as these are healthy girls/women who are having these procedures done unnecessarily

I agree.

I think it’s important to find the factual middle ground. Not ‘top surgery’ nor ‘mutilation’ but ‘medically unnecessary irreversible double mastectomy’ and sometimes ‘total’ (ie, includes deliberate removal of both breast AND nipple).

These young women have already been through so many struggles relating to self esteem that we should do our best not to contribute further to that, whilst still speaking honestly about the irreversible changes that have been signed off by so-called medical professionals.

The word “mutilated” may be a bit far, but I am adamant that the term “top surgery” and “bottom surgery” should never be used. Twee euphemisms just mask reality. It’s deliberately misleading from advocates.

@R0wantrees

I agree with you about that, of course. But that's not the point I was making. I was wondering if, nowadays at least, lots of those girls and women are actually calling themselves trans, changing their names and pronouns etc. without having hormones and surgery, ie similar to what the new generation of self-declared transwomen are doing?

What do people think?

X post Du

people who had procedures and hormone therapy should take responsibility for their own bodies
To a degree - but if a young person is told by medical and psychiatric professionals that yes they are trans and surgery & hormone therapy is the answer for them to feel better, you can hardly later blame the adult that young person becomes for believing what they were told as a youth by authority figures.

The issue here is those with responsibility to young people - doctors, counsellors, teachers - unquestioningly affirming young people presenting with issues around gender identity as trans, with no other options or possibilities explored.

but less about the (actual majority of trans youth) FtM transitioners and why they feel the need to no longer be women, which is actually more concerning for me from (my interpretation of) a feminist point of view.

Unfortunately, many of these threads are started but few survive! I started one about the recent Mermaids article on Spiked by Jo Bartosch, and had included our family story (up on the safe schools alliance thread) and it was deleted after a day or two without any communication from MNHQ to me.

Many of the women speaking about the this specific aspect of the trans/feminism rights clash are mothers of trans identifying daughters so sometimes they choose to later delete their own footprint, which is completely understandable.

Just because it’s less visible, please don’t assume it’s because we don’t care - for many of us it’s the absolute biggest priority.

I also think that the people who had procedures and hormone therapy should take responsibility for their own bodies and not jump on someone else's bandwagon without a long period of reflection and research.

I'm not sure whose bandwagon the detransitioners are jumping on?

I take issue with that statement when it's young girls entering the system and pathways, being encouraged by professionals and groomed by others, pom poms waving by Pride, lgbt charities and at school, accommodations being made at school also, and then being told to wait till they're 16-18 by which time they're desperate to complete.

Thomasin describes how easy it was to get medication as soon as she was in adult services and yet other young people who have other mental health issues find it harder to get treatment eg anorexia as soon as they're 'adults.' (I have a friend who's daughter is both anorexic and now autistic.)

Lee describes being given testosterone at her first psychiatric appointment.

There's a massive amount of responsibility held by those professionals and the systems.

Where's the gatekeeping by anyone anywhere?

But that's not the point I was making. I was wondering if, nowadays at least, lots of those girls and women are actually calling themselves trans, changing their names and pronouns etc. without having hormones and surgery, ie similar to what the new generation of self-declared transwomen are doing?

Apologies, I misunderstood.
In my opinion there are distinct differences between the intentions and driving factors of males and females.
Understanding these sex-based differences is very important.

GCGaydad I know what you mean, though most of those call themselves queer trans non binary.

There was a recent twitter thing around a young woman who works for mermaids wearing a jacket saying trans rights or fist fights, describing herself as queer trans non binary, but in the images was 'deliberately' being 'femme' as part of her queerness and basically was wearing a pale pink wig/ dyed pink hair (not sure), short denim shorts and lots of make up. Hyper manga levels of "femme."

Now, ironically, she was describing it as a performance and owning it as a performance and in some ways, I felt that actually, saying you can remain a female and dress either entirely non conforming or hyper feminine and it's all fine (she also does drag king) is good, that's all clothes and makeup etc is personality and a cloak we wear and take off. Which is what feminism knows and say...

It's just that unfortunately when men say this it appears to result in them claiming access to women's spaces. And there appears to be an aggression and enabling (of actual medical transition) that goes hand in hand with the queer nb activists too.

A lot of these young women also do have mastectomies and male it trendy to do so.,

I find this article especially disturbing:

www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2019/05/234065/lachlan-watson-top-surgery-scar-interview

DuDu

Your thread is still here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3956977-Newly-Published-Mermaids-article-by-Jo-Bartosch-for-Spiked

[quote GCGayDad]@R0wantrees

I agree with you about that, of course. But that's not the point I was making. I was wondering if, nowadays at least, lots of those girls and women are actually calling themselves trans, changing their names and pronouns etc. without having hormones and surgery, ie similar to what the new generation of self-declared transwomen are doing?

What do people think?[/quote]
I think it sorta starts that way. Coming out as trans is a bit like getting on a travelator though - they start out maybe feeling around the edges of a non-binary identity and then get caught up in the culture and the sense of ‘achievement unlocked’ that comes with each stage of transition.

Plus, as R0 alludes to, a large part of the appeal of being trans to an adolescent girl/young woman circa 2020 is to avoid getting leered at by middle aged men/find a tribe of other GNC girls (bear in mind that currently there are seemingly few options between ‘orange tan and fake eyelashes, TOWIE girls’ and ‘uWu trans softbois’ - and not many newly emergent lesbians are going to feel much appeal in the stereotypes cooked up to attract the porn addled hetero male gaze!

There is a growing subset of transmen who try and shame gay men for rejecting them on online hookup sites, but I think this is a byproduct of being on the far end of the travelator - they’ve been sold the lie that everything is happy-clappy-inclusive under the rainbow flag, despite the very nature of homosexuality (and indeed, heterosexuality) being an exclusive attraction.

My DsD has spent almost a year identifying as a boy, but after some careful unpicking that has come out to really mean ‘I’m not like the majority of girls at school, my newly realised attraction for other girls makes me the subject of lesbophobic bullying, I find my dad easier to get along with than my mum and I hate that adult men leer at my new breasts’. If we let her get on the beginning of the travelator (social transition) and affirmed all those feelings as meaning she was a boy in a girl body, she could very easily become Ellie, or Lucy in 4-5 years time.

The young women you are encountering are at the beginning of the travelator. Some will desist before medical intervention occurs (like Tomasina) and others will be in menopause by their mid 20s, Like Lucy. Not affirming and delaying every step as much as possible gives their brains time to fully form, and for them to truly find their own tribe (certainly only possible outside of high school, for me, even in the early 90s).

I struggle with not calling the removal of healthy breasts in the name of a bankrupt ideology mutilation. Female genital mutilation is just that. So is this.

‘Top surgery’ and ‘bottom surgery’ are phrases designed to hide the truth. Mutilation of girls is what this is. The girls and women in this article have mainly recognised that they are women. It must be hard to accept that your body has been ravaged by an ideology under the willing eye of medical practitioners but that is what has happened.

Perhaps they want to see it as akin to plastic surgery in order to live at peace with what’s been done to them. Which is understandable. But plastic surgery is only desirable if you want the outcome. If you don’t then it’s just chopping off bits of the body.

If these women need not to say the word mutilation in order to live at peace with what they have undergone then I understand. But the word means inflict severe damage on a body and that’s what has happened here.

[quote NotBadConsidering]DuDu

Your thread is still here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3956977-Newly-Published-Mermaids-article-by-Jo-Bartosch-for-Spiked[/quote]
Phew! Maybe I just lost it in a middle aged moment then? There were two in AIBU (started by other posters) not sure how long they lasted but one had a very enlightening post from a mum who is accepting of their child’s transition but found Mermaids very unhelpful as they advocated doing it all as fast as possible, whereas the mum wanted her child to at least be 18 before taking any irreversible steps.

If these women need not to say the word mutilation in order to live at peace with what they have undergone then I understand. But the word means inflict severe damage on a body and that’s what has happened here

One could almost say its a bit like sex. If you can't talk about it. If you can't name the parts and talk about the the process i and what the risks are. If you can't talk about contraception and acknowledge the pros and cons of each and potential side effects etc

Should you really be doing it.

I think a lot of the girls and young women who identify as non binary are binding their breasts, so not taking hormones but still damaging their bodies.
Didnt that doctor from cbeebies have a masectomy?
So to be a non binary woman you are changing your body but to be a trans woman its just dress, some dont even shave their beards.
It seems like more damage is being done to more girls than the other way round and that concerns me.
I don't know, its complicated, what seems obvious is that all these treatments should come with a lot more gatekeeping and exploration before they are given.
One 23yo woman who's been through a full hysterectomy and regrets it is one too many.

I also think that the people who had procedures and hormone therapy should take responsibility for their own bodies

At age 9, 10, 11, 12 years old? They might still believe in the tooth fairy when they are being set on this path.

@Franke

It's a very powerful article. What stood out to me was the failure of psychiatrists to explore the issues around the apparent dysphoria these very disturbed young women were experiencing. The ease with which their 'transness' was accepted and the speed of their access to extreme medical intervention. To see it all written down in these very few examples is shocking.

Psychologists have been told that non-acceptance of a person's self defined 'gender identity' is considered to be 'conversion therapy' and has been banned in the UK for several years now.

www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/memorandum-understanding-conversion-therapy-uk

From the memorandum of understanding :

For the purposes of this document ’conversion therapy’ is an umbrella term for a therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of sexual orientation or gender identity, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity on that basis

Just so angry and sad for these women who have been sold a such a devastating lie by professionals who should have helped them instead. Utmost respect for them going public and to the Times for publishing it. Thank you
I hope this prompts more professionals currently practising affirmation models to speak out.

On the language point, I had assumed the ‘mutilation’ word derived from FGM, which is a well understood and widely-used phrase for cultural misogyny depriving women of natural healthy genital function at great personal cost.

Clearly there could be a trade off between individual support/alienation and use of preferred terms (and bearing in mind detransitioned women may have different takes on appropriate language) vs. Finding a powerful but accurate term to be used to foster wider public understanding and to prompt advocacy, leading hopefully to a political solution to this problem.

So now I am wonderIng how women who have experienced FGM feel about this term applied to their experience and physical presentation? But also I think that there is a danger if the alternative narratives of what has been done to women offer any sanitised image of what has been done to women, because that could dilute the political reaction which is where the future solution needs to come from.

It’s easy for me to say all this as I am not a detransitioned woman nor someone who has had FGM perpetrated on my female anatomy. I want to do my best for those affected by these misogynies.

Thank you for sharing this article and how courageous of those involved to tell their stories. I’m interested in the themes about young women struggling to terms with being gay, I was debating this with DH recently and he argues that there is far greater social acceptance of being gay than trans, and why would young people choose that harder path without good reason?

I thought that was a fair point but not knowing myself what it is like to question my sexual identity, this article helps to clarify - these young women are seeking to fit in and had a perception that being the opposite sex is the best way to be ‘normal’, as well as having experienced overt homophobia. DH’s argument is probably based on naivety about what it is like as a teen being in a sexual minority, I’m thinking this has always been hard and these days is even harder with transition as a get out option, and such a narrow range of ‘acceptable’ looks for young women, as the comments on the article discuss.

Does that make sense? Help me get this a bit clearer in my head? I work with young people and have daughters - how do I give them the widest range of role models I can while they are young? I recently read an amazing book about a girl wearing a hijab for the first time, in which she was described as a princess, and I could see this blowing my 4yr olds mind as this was not her conception of princess. This helps but doesn’t seem like enough?

I also think that the people who had procedures and hormone therapy should take responsibility for their own bodies

This makes sense for say, tattoos, but no sense at all when the hormones and procedures are prescribed by doctors and carried out by surgeons.

Transition is prescribed as the cure for gender dysphoria (soon to be renamed gender incongruence) - even cosmetic surgery, pointless as it is, IMO, makes so claims beyond the aesthetic (which is why surgery is not seen as a solution for body dysmorphic disorder).

You can’t get a tattoo until you are 18 but you could get cosmetic double mastectomy at 16 via at least one private surgeon in the U.K. up until earlier this year.

@DuDuDuLangaLangaBingBong

Thank you for those links, I read the Spiked one and your own story.
Absolutely recognise the appeal of opting out of being a woman. From what I see of my sister's experience, it is more not wanting to be female rather than wanting to be male. Again, likely impacted by early attention from males (poor thing has always been well endowed in the breast department so I can see why she hates her breasts if they bring so much unwanted attention and remind her of that). Also my sister spent several years convinced she was autistic, which certainly fits, and I wonder if this means she finds it harder not to fit in a stereotypical box.

I find myself challenging sexist comments (as in ones that reinforce gender stereotypes) my sister makes because I don't want my children hearing them and thinking they're true. It seems we're going backwards! I want my daughter to feel she can do and wear whatever she wants and not be constrained by her gender.

I don't want to be transphobic and I don't want to alienate my sister, but it seems I can't share my concerns or beliefs without being seen that way.

Doesn't help that I have no one in RL I can discuss this with. People I know are either oblivious or mega woke.