Woman Pens Essay About Her (De)Transition

There are manifold arguments to be made that transgenderism is a phenomenon of social contagion. I’m not an expert (nor do I particularly care to be), so I won’t stand on the proverbial soapbox to tell you all what I think of it. No one cares, myself included.

That being said, there are plenty of voices that are informed and insightful, and the sad truth is that many of them are being strategically ignored or silenced. One example is Helena, a young woman who spent the majority of her teens identifying at least in private as a trans male. By the time she was 20, however, she realized that she was not transgender, and began the process known as detransitioning. Helena wrote about her experience in an essay called “By Any Other Name,” and I cannot encourage you enough to read it.

In the piece, Helena describes her poor mental state as a teen and the solace she found in tumblr, a cesspool of the internet most of us recognize by name but the toxicity of which few of us truly understand. As someone of a similar age as Helena, who also spent many formative teen years on the same platform (though mercifully not in the deepest quagmires), take it from us both: tumblr would be burning in hell if it weren’t already the deepest pit of the selfsame inferno.

Helena writes,

The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie uncle knew the term “CRT”.  As cultish religions tend to operate, open devotion to the religion is mandatory. Perhaps the outsiders most likely to understand the way social dynamics worked on that website would be survivors of Scientology or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.

. . .

Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. . . . With the new pronouns often comes a wave of positive affirmation from friends and followers, and the subconscious picks up quickly that there’s a way to make the deal of being on Tumblr even sweeter.

But the most shocking part of Helena’s story isn’t even the insular internet conclave in which she found herself—we expect isolated cults to be, well, cult-y. What was truly disturbing was the institutional, medical malpractice of every professional Helena spoke to that immediately affirmed her transgenderness without asking any clarifying questions. When she went to Planned Parenthood for testosterone boosters, they gave her the highest dose without even doing a blood test.

In fact, the only time professionals began to question her self-understanding was when Helena began to express regret for transitioning and doubt whether she was truly transgender.

Helena describes the therapy session in which she told her therapist she may not be transgender and was met with resistance:

This was the first moment I started realizing something was off about the trans movement, and institutions in general. I had experienced this massive realization, and it was agonizing but at least it was finally something real, and here I was being met with all these rationalizations for why this of all things was a psychological symptom. Not the effects of the testosterone, not my belief that all of my problems would be solved by transitioning, not my aversion to being female, but the fact that I now knew transitioning had been a mistake.

Luckily, just as she found a pro-transitioning community in tumblr, Helena also found support for her detransition journey. Seeing people going through the same experiences as she had gave her comfort in knowing that the problem was not her personal failing, but rather a larger phenomenon in the world; Helena writes that, as a biological and self-identifying woman, she is in a much healthier place than she used to be and is continuing the journey of growth and self-love on which we all embark.

In summarizing this essay, I’m leaving out major and significant points of Helena’s story, but no paraphrasing can carry the impact of her own words. I implore every last one of you to read the essay, understanding it as one individual’s experience, and use it as a building block in approaching the transgender movement and affected individuals with compassion—more than the institutions, tumblr, and professionals she encountered showed to Helena.

Helena, if you come across this post, the Chicks wish you every good thing and respect the hell out of your strength in not only surviving the journey you’ve been on, but in overcoming it and being bold enough to share your story.

I will close with one final quote:

 In order to move through and overcome painful emotions, we must first acknowledge the core emotion that is occurring and have compassion towards ourselves for feeling the emotion in the context within which it is occuring. Trans identity took me far away from this into blaming and punishing my body for the emotions I was feeling. It resulted in an even wider disconnect from understanding the conditions that led me to feel such sadness, fear, and grief. Transitioning made my mental health much, much worse. Not better. It was a “fuck you” to the hurting child inside of me. It was telling her that she didn’t matter. It was telling her that I hated her and wanted to annihilate her. It was an act of war against myself.