Article by Kye Schevers, retransitioned trans man

[AliasGrace47]

https://aninjusticemag.com/detransition-as-conversion-therapy-a-survivor-speaks-out-7abd4a9782fa?gi=6d63c58e88b6

I'm not linking this bc I agree w it, I'm still very GC & I still think notions of innate gender identity are ridiculous & v sexist. However, I do think the fact that WoFL and others operate in a different country & political context mean that some of their questionable actions have slipped under our radar. It's tricky as it is v important to promote detransitioners' voices & an alternate narrative when trans ideology has such a stranglehold on the media.

But imo Schevers was taken advantage for promotional reasons of their detriment. They are clearly v mentally fragile, & felt pressured to give interviews etc & play down the dysphoria when the feminist methods of curing it weren't working. Apparently detransitioners who retransitioned were derided as returning to the cult. I personally do see it as a cult, but using the sort of language to vulnerable people was wrong. They were also in an abusive relationship w another detransitioner. People like Keira Bell clearly want to speak for the movement, but many of the people involved are v fragile & the default should be supporting them to get proper, not trans ideological, therapy, not pressuring them to be activists & figureheads. These US orgs are encouraging that if they loved their bodies, the dysphorua could be worked through day by day, although they doubt it will change. I wonder if maybe if the trans men try and detransition older, it may be too late to undo the dysphoria.
Someone in the comments blames WoFL for friends' suicides. The weaponisation of suicide threats by TRAs makes me wary of these claims, but trans men do generally seem vulnerable, so these may, very sadly, have just been an effect of having such severe body hatred, & poss other issues that are so common w trans men. But the pressuring to be poster figures is unwise w people in these kind of states.
I want to investigate this more when I have time, but from what I've read, Schevers was gnc as a kid, & felt alienated from other girls. Then they hated the new 'softness & vulnerability' of their body at puberty, & faced homophobia. Their mother committed suicide when they were 20, & they had, possibly have, ongoing substance issues & ponder things obsessively (maybe ND, but that's just a hunch). When they went to college, before social media & widespread trans issues, they were often mistaken for trans, & they first were annoyed by this but then embraced it.

The articles are vague on why exactly they believe they're trans, in their case it seems to centre around genuine body dysphoria, but although they've retransitioned they use female pronouns & say they still identify quite a lot w being a butch lesbian woman, as well as a man. I sometimes read butch lesbian subreddits & it's so heartening to read about butch women sometimes taking T or struggling w dysphoria, but generally embracing the bodies they have, still doing traditionally masculine stuff but accepting their breasts, sometimes getting pregnant etc. Sadly this seems impossible for people like Schevers, it's too set in perhaps.
It makes me think of the William Blake quote about 'mind-forged manacles'. Why do people have to be so pinched & restricted by society that they feel compelled to mutilate the bodies they were born to have? There must be a better way, but maybe for people like Schevers, the dysphoria was affirmed so early it that now will not go away. ☹️

Looking at it calmly, I can see that Schevers seems to have been involved in a subset of detransitioning radical feminism that went about things in an inadvisable way, using radfem techniques that have a lot of value, but not when taken to extremes and used to manipulate people in that way. Schevers is also talking about US groups around 2013, the discourse is v different now. I picked up a couple of other insights from the article that I'll post in a moment.

This seems a bit like someone complaining that white wine didn’t get the red wine stain out of the carpet.

Her perspective seems to be that the radfems were unhelpful to her. Sadly the fastens aren’t there to be helpful to her. They have their own agenda.

You are right, they may well have made her situation worse.

But being right is rarely what we need, when we’re vulnerable. Trans ideology sells a lie. Unfortunately ‘the truth’ isn’t a cure in itself.

Consciousness raising? Radical feminism? Is it 1970 all over again?

Sensible, I def agree that truth itself isn't the cure, though I think some of the things Schevers described would be helpful to some trans men, in conjunction with therapy. What do you mean by festens? Or is that a misprint?

Oops. Radfems. The purpose of radfems is political, not to nurture individual detransitioners.

I can’t remember the name, but there was another lesbian who’d detransitioned and became quite well known in GC circles, only to retransition later and denounce us.

I think it has to be borne in mind that there are a lot of mentality unstable people who are drawn to transition as a supposed answer to psychological pain. It’s not surprising that a number remain unstable after supposed detransition as they’re likely not getting the psychiatric help towards learning to accept themselves as they are which is probably the thing which would help most.

These things all draw attention as well. Undoubtedly there will be those who crave that. Obviously those who detransition are not all going to do the same, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I also think that after significant medical transition, it becomes difficult to fully revert as your body has changed so much. That must be awful to live through. I imagine you could spend the rest of your life trying to fit into one of the boxes and realising you don’t fit in either. I think society may perhaps have to adjust and create facilities that allows them a space where they are not going to be challenged.

Keira bell has criticised the rad fems and likened falling in with them as falling in with another cult. She doesn’t go near them now. The other detransitioner who said the Gc movement was like a cult became religious and detransitioned

Pri, that's a good point. You can't change sex, as should be a given.., but it does change key things. I've read about trans men who were previously only attracted to women, but the ingestion of T made them attracted to men. T can also lead to a rise in aggression ofc. That's a lot to cope w as a 20-something who should be discovering who they are, esp combined w comorbid issues or trauma, as Schevers had. Plus the likely loss of sexual function & infertility..

Booteek, do you have a source for Keira Bell saying that? I appreciate she may, but I couldn't find anything on goggling.

Is that the woman who wrote a big (underwhelming) exposé article for Pink News claiming that Julie Bindel had lured her into visiting the UK with the promise of finding a lesbian wife for her? I think her name was Amy but I can't remember her surname.

Feminism is a political and social movement. It's not therapy, nor any kind of solution to mental health issues.

This seems to be reflective of a way of thinking that blurs boundaries and seeks to personalise and make everything refer to the individual self. It's highly solipsistic.

I think there will be quite a lot of people detransitioning and retransitioning over and over again because clearly nothing is really working to solve the problems at the heart of it all.

We know that there are people who become “addicted” (for want of a better word) to cosmetic surgery of the conventional type. I expect that this might play a part in it, with additional gender woo.

Out of interest, I looked for something recent from KB (April 2024). This strikes me as mild.

She adds that it is not only trans rights campaigners who can cloud the conversation. “In an ideal world I would want political influence to be taken out of these services that are dealing with vulnerable people,” she says. “I worry about political influence on both sides. The trans rights side and the people that are more focused on women’s rights, which can sometimes get in the way of real care in this sort of area.”

archived version: https://archive.is/89CwK

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/10/keira-bell-detransitioner-cass-review-tavistock-clinic/

As had been said on threads before, feminism is a collective movement aimed at making improvements to the lives of girls and women. Gender identity is solely about the individual. It might involve making things better for the group on some level, but it is based on the individual. Because that is what the identity relates to, an individual stating they are to be validated as being the concept of what a male or female person is that they have in their head but are materially not. That can only ever be individualistic in nature.

Keira Bell is such a thoughtful young woman.

“Regret is really what we’re talking about, as opposed to detransition itself, which has an abstract sort of meaning, and people interpret it in different ways. “There are people that are technically still transitioned, who have those regrets, and they wouldn’t dare mention it. So it’s a much bigger issue than people realise. “It can be painful for people to turn back. And I don’t think a lot of people will. They’ll continue with it out of fear. People wouldn’t dare speak up because suddenly they’d be called transphobic and ousted from their friendship group.”

Regret seems to me to be the biggest issue. And why is there so much regret? Because transitioning/detransitioning would still both be abstract concepts if they followed the older path of challenging or questioning gender stereotypes. The path of the likes of Bowie, the New Romantics, even goths etc. Trying out new identities that said something about you through hair, dress, makeup etc.

It has been the medical community and the medical community alone that put gender questioning young people along a dangerous, experimental, and permanent path to physical changes with drugs and irreversible surgery. There’d be no regrets if ‘detransitioning’ was a matter of changing hair and clothes as has been done in the past.

Narcissistic sociopathic megalomaniac Dr Moreau’s the lot of them. Revelling in being able to play God and even now post-Cass, truculently and determinedly, despite all the existing and burgeoning evidence, continuing to prescribe CSH’s for teenagers (no one can tell me what to do or not do). I wish to god they’d have their medical licenses removed.

Oh Amy? Her views were...interesting 🤔
I'm so fed up w the state of things now. I've recently started Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For. They're v funny- unluckily she went TWAW in later bits. But for most of it, nobody is trans. There's a drag king who thinks they might be for a bit, but decides not. (Drag kings seem much less unpleasant to men than vice versa..) No reality-denying pronouns everywhere, no transitioning to fit into gender norms, no letting males into purported women's spaces... I hope things are returning to sanity soon- the Cass Review was a big step forward. But there'll be a lot of work to do to pick up the pieces the tras have left in their wake..

Stick, that's a valid point- & much more measured than saying radfems are a 2nd cult.
Arguably feminist principles coincide w therapy that seeks to make the gnc person comfortable w their own body. But feminist activists are not therapists. Consciousness raising etc could be helpful, but it can't replace medical treatment.

AliasGrace47 I think I understand that you were unsettled by reading about Kye Schevers, and as you explained you were under work/study pressure.
Even if the worst possible scenario was true and WoLF upset KS by saying she had gone back into a cult - so what? Not 'so what that KS was upset', which is not a good thing, but it's very anecdotal, and should be noted and added to the general bouillabaisse of evidence.

I'm a radical feminist. I don't belong to a political movement. We don't get membership cards and badges to sew on our check flannel shirts
It's my political analysis of how society works, and it makes sense to me. Others have different analyses. I have to say that the TRA movement has reinforced my radfem analysis, and sometimes I have to stop myself from saying 'We told you so, decades ago🙄' ... [cf the recent discussion about a curfew for men, which was the subject of a radfem play in the 1980s]

I don't know much about WoLF apart from a quick look at their website and not being very impressed. But they're just one group, they are not representative, they may be good, they may be bad, but they are not Radical Feminism Inc.

The TRAs like to make exaggerated claims and spurious links between GC feminists and a whole array of 'baddies'. Sometimes GC feminists, sometimes here on this board, say things that may me go 😱, and that is often picked up by TRAs as 'Look! they're all nasty hateful bigots!' on the basis of one or two OTT posts written in understandable fury.

Somebody being nasty to a re-transitioner is one thing. Not a good thing, in my opinion, but just one thing.

I hope discussing it here has helped you weigh up the evidence and sort out what you believe and why you believe it.

Keira’s point there is effectively that the medicine should be evidence based and not driven by politics from either side, which is a reasonable point, especially when it comes to children.

My only thought is that, in introducing any medical processes that change people physically, so that they no longer fit into the current societal structures that were designed around segregation of women and men in certain situations, then any medics carrying out those procedures need to work out how their patients can fit into society without impacting the functioning of those societal structures. It was one thing when it was a tiny number of people, thus the impact was relatively small.

You cannot entirely remove politics from the situation. The reason women are objecting now is because those medics massively overstepped the mark in telling men they could use women’s spaces, with no consideration for the effect on women whatsoever.

But nothing in that article suggests Keira said radical feminists are cult-like. I’d want to see a source, given that the last two letters of the acronym used to slur us all stands for radical feminists.