They Detransitioned. They’re Still Trans Allies.
Lucy Kartikasari was only 19 when she underwent mandatory sterilization as a part of her transition to male. Eight years later, she started detransitioning.
by Madisyn Parisi
Detransition — the process of “stopping, shifting, or reversing” transition — can be a taboo topic in trans spaces. For many, it evokes Fox News-style images of figures like Chloe Cole or Maia Poet, who routinely partner with anti-trans orgs like Genspect to testify against gender-affirming care. They describe their bodies in terms of mutilation and irreversible damage and push conspiracy theories about mainstream medicine.
But detrans people aren’t a monolith. Studies place rates of detransition for those who’ve sought affirming care anywhere from 1-13%. People detransition (or desist — stopping before medical transition) for a multitude of reasons, including involuntary disruptions, shifting conceptions of identity, and regret.
For Kartikasari, there’s “a very specific sense of loss” that comes with being a detrans person. She transitioned in the Netherlands where until 2014, any trans person who wanted their gender recognized on legal documents had to undergo mandatory sterilization procedures.
In many ways, she seems like the perfect candidate for a conservative pundit’s news story, but she’s not; instead, she’s “a detrans woman looking to defang transphobia.” Kartikasari has shared dozens of videos online about her detransition, all while fending off critical comments from both trans and transphobic people. She regularly attends trans rights protests, and she’s supported several of her friends through their own transitions.
“‘Do you think you might be trans?’” she recalls asking a friend of hers – who’s since realized he’s a guy. She doesn’t want credit, but remarked, “It was very funny to kind of exchange the gender ball that each of us were holding.”
She’s not alone in that.
The concerted anti-trans efforts of the past decade have meant there’s been time for many detrans activists who once peddled “gender-critical” ideology to come out on the other side: some retransitioning, while others continue living as their birth-assigned gender while testifying against transphobic laws their old coalitions fought for.
One such woman, college student Chrys Navarro, transitioned during the height of COVID quarantine in what she described as “the worst time” of her life. At first, her detransition was gradual, but then she experienced “whiplash” when the permanence of her choices hit her. In that whiplash, she also, briefly, found God.
Unlike Kartikasari, who had a staunch network of queer people supporting her when she detransitioned, Navarro was guilt-ridden and desperate for structure. She found it in a local church, which she now calls “predatory.”
Navarro described a “patriarchal” embrace of conservative Christian gender roles, which got so extreme that she lost friends. But she never could fully accept the brand of conservatism offered by her old church. Instead, she started examining what’d made her feel the need to transition in the first place.
“I was never within that sliver of what femininity is supposed to be,” Navarro said. “And I feel like I never gave myself the chance to be OK with that.”
Kartikasari expressed a similar sentiment: Her mother was an Indonesian immigrant, which she says left her with two pillars of femininity: beauty and education. She thrived in school, but she never felt she could live up to the beauty standard.
While prominent detransitioners often make similar arguments — that gender nonconforming girls are pushed into trans identities — they’re not advocating for the same policies. Kartikasari first expressed a desire to transition at age 12, and by the time she’d seen a gender care specialist, four years had passed. Left to wait without outside help, she lived those four years as a teenage boy.
Not having support during such a critical time “crystallizes … identity and is essentially a funnel,” she argued. “The idea of transitioning after three to four years of waitlist, I was like, ‘well clearly I’m a boy.’”
Despite the conservative narrative around transition regret, for her, it was the lack of gender-affirming care — access to nonjudgmental therapists who could’ve asked her the right questions and helped untangle her complex feelings around her gender – that solidified her trans identity.
“If I had gotten to talk to a gender specialist when I was 12, I might not have transitioned to begin with,” she said.
Instead, she started puberty blockers, then testosterone, eventually culminating in top surgery and her sterilization.
Devin Cantu, a nonbinary detransfeminine person based in the U.S., also felt trapped by what felt like restrictive, binary ideas of transition from the medical system. They said the main thing causing them dysphoria before their transition was their chest, but their insurance wouldn’t cover top surgery unless they were already on testosterone for a year — which they didn’t want to do. Increasing the options for partial or nonbinary transitions, rather than forcing every trans person into an all-or-nothing framework, has long been a goal of trans activism around healthcare.
Resources available for detrans people are incredibly sparse. Becoming a conservative mouthpiece, on the other hand, is a whole culture industry, and it pays; Chloe Cole testified under oath she makes up to $200,000 a year from her anti-trans activism. But that support only goes so far.
Detransitioners, much like trans people, face a unique kind of dehumanization and tokenization from conservatives. Kartikasari said in rightwing spaces, detrans people get “trotted out … as props for the horror show.”
Navarro’s still unpacking how those detrans spaces harmed her. She was wrestling with heavy feelings of grief and guilt surrounding her transition – in one of her most popular videos, she confesses that sometimes, her deep voice feels like a “punishment” for transitioning. “It only exacerbated my guilt,” she said about her radicalization. “It made me want to control things I can’t control.”
The very profit model depends on that ostracization and self-hatred. “The … situation they want is a desister, not a detransitioner,” Cantu said. “Because if you’re a detransitioner, you’re just damaged goods.”
Still, all three expressed empathy for the detrans people doing this kind of activism, even as they condemned it.
“You can not let your grief and pain become a weapon to enact pain on others,” said Kartikasari.
There’s a vast overlap between trans and detrans experiences: from the medical procedures to the social transitions.
Kartikasari receives the same gender-affirming care many trans women do: her access to estrogen is dependent on the existence of the same gender clinics. Cantu lives life presenting as a woman, but they’re much happier post top-surgery. All three mentioned suffering from transphobia, too. Cantu noted they have to consider “the local sentiment” on trans people before they go swimming.
In a world that treats detrans and trans people as diametrically opposed, these three are trying to bridge the gap, both online and sometimes, a little closer to home, too.
Despite, or perhaps because of everything she’s been through, Kartikasari has been helping with her transmasc friend’s T-shots for years now.
She’s not planning on stopping.
Madisyn Parisi is a queer journalist from Maryland and the writer behind The Backbone, a newsletter dedicated to stories that hold power to account. They cover tech, culture, and trans topics.