Powerful testimony from a MTF detransitioner

[HootyMcBooby]

This man talks about his "gender reassignment" surgery regret.
Found this guy recently on YouTube, he talks candidly about his regrets and how he got caught up in gender ideology, and now as a man living without a penis.

Heartbreaking.

There will be so many of these people in the years to come.

Thanks for sharing OP. That was a tough watch.

There is often this idea that the soul is entirely separate from the body, but i'm not at all sure that it is true. To that extent we are our bodies....even when we rebel against them, or hate or reject them - we are still defined by that rebellion, hate or rejection.

There is a system of belief that....."The soul is ontologically inseparable from the body to the extent that certain functions of the soul cannot be actualized without corresponding bodily parts. Thus, if certain components of the body were destroyed, then certain functions of the soul would be destroyed also"

I've heard detransitioners talk before of the shock and grief that they felt when they woke up to find that part of their body had been amputated ( when the initial euphoria wears off), even those who go on to live in a trans identity for many more years. They are still largely defined by the body part they no longer have - and with an awareness that any constructed replacement facsimile is nothing but that.

Even if "souls" were separate from the body, the notion of having right-/left- handed souls, or blue eye/brown eye souls would sound preposterous, yet somehow having half of all souls "aligning" with being male and the other half "aligning" with being female is taken as a given.

It is sadly no different to being disabled. You may passionately hate and reject the painful, immobile wreck you're having to live in, and its distortions and endless coming up with new ways to make your life more difficult. But you're stuck with it. Until your last breath, that's what you've got.

Mental health comes from learning to live with reality as it is. And if necessary getting mental health support to learn to make friends with your body as it is, with all the problems involved.

That should be required watching for anyone considering any sort of pharmaceutical or surgical body modification!

Great video. Heartbreaking 💔

He's clearly still a believer in souls that have an identity, but he's directly challenging his own thinking on this.

This is a healthy place to get to for anyone who identifes as transgender because although it means that they have still internalised their sense of what it means to be male/female (rather than taking a view that there is no set way to be male or female), importantly it detaches this thinking from the need to permanently modify the body. Ideally they would think of any permanent modification in the same way, not just surgery i.e. puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones too.

There will always be people who make sense of who they are through a lens of "masculinity" and "feminity", using "gender expression" to demonstrate their sense of self in this regard. This will never go away, no matter how much people challenge sex-based stereotypes. These stereotypes are baked in culturally: we all face them from the moment we're born (e.g. the family arrives at the hospital with pink dresses for a baby girl or a "my first toolbox" for a boy) and we all have to decide which to embrace and which to fight against. But the key point is that it's not necessary to internalise this belief to the point where you deny your own physical body and want to "transition" to a different physical reality. Some people will continue to believe that it is - these are the people who need access to good mental health care to unpick and address why they are feeling this way, underpinned by an evidence-based approach to any treatment.

Very much agree with your last para especially.

It is possible to believe, as Hilary Cass does, that some children have an incongruent GI without insisting that that belief entails the necessity of administering PBs or cross-sex hormones.

It is possible to hold a belief in GI - to protect that belief in law, even - while outlawing the wrong body narrative in schools and elsewhere and accepting the reality of sex and maintaining single sex spaces and services.

In the most recent edition of The Mess We're In podcast, a young man who considered medical and surgical transition (but decided against) told us that in Tokyo, he met many, many trans-identified people; that anyone used any toilets in certain edgy lgb bars. And yet a man would never be permitted (or would think of) using women's facilities or services in other contexts. That shows that it is perfectly possible on a societal level for people to think of themselves as having a special identity, but respect that society recognises physical bodies and respects women's rights. There are also the Fa'afafine of Samoa, who are proud of who they are and never claim to be women.

If TRAs had stopped there - at GI being a personal, subjective belief and sex being different from GI and immutable, 99% of the harm that this movement has caused would not have come about. (It's still essentially misogynistic and homophobic, of course.) The reason they didn't stop there is because it's a men's right movement at heart.

This all makes a lot of sense.

There are many beliefs that are misogynistic and homophobic e.g. the major world religions. Thankfully, these beliefs have become stable enough to accommodate believers who are neither of those things. Hopefully, the belief in gender identity will evolve to a) recognise itself as belief-based (or have that recognition placed upon it in legislation) and b) become predominantly intolerant of ways to demonstrate "gender expression" that involve physical body changes.

I think it's helpful in many ways that Dr Cass and some others who push back on the harms are believers (e.g. Gillian Keegan when she was education secretary - although she believed that (transwo)men with GRCs should use the ladies' she also thought that gender identity shouldn't be taught in schools).

Regarding point b, take the major religions as a blueprint: most mainstream believers would not tolerate physical harm to the self or others. It's the extreme ends of the beliefs that advocate for this (e.g. Waco). They also don't demand that non-believers adopt their tenets, except in specific circumstances where the non-believers have chosen to enter their space e.g. women covering shoulders and knees in mosques (men too in some cases) and some European cathedrals. Also their belief is only taught as truth in religious schools.

As much as I feel sorry for this boke, my sympathies lie with his wife. She is the innocent victim in all of this. It would have been absolute hell for her and she still can't have a full marriage because of the lack of a normal sex life which she has been deprived of. That said, I wish them both well. This man's powerful testimony should be mandatory viewing at gender reassignment clinics before anyone undergoes this surgery.

Similarly I saw this on Twitter, from a v young MtFtM detransitioner - just heartbreaking.

He was put on puberty blockers by 11, so had no pubertal development, now as an adult male detranistioner is 5 foot 3, no male secondary sexual characteristics, gynaecomastia from taking oestrogen. All because he was made to believe at the age of 7 that he should be a girl.