Detransition Anecdotes Don’t Even Give Readers Half of the Story
When right wing and Christian media highlight sensational stories of detransition, they mislead their readers and contribute to the ongoing moral panic about transgender people.
by Evan Urquhart
In the right wing press, stories of people who were once trans but have subsequently detransitioned abound. In particular the story of Chloe Cole, who says she transitioned at 12 or 13, had accessed puberty blockers and top surgery and testosterone by 16, and then came to regret her decision, seems to resonate. Cole has therefore joined a handful of other prominent detransitioned people, primarily detransitioned women who were formerly living as trans men.
One story about Cole and others ran in Christian media today. Ryan Foley of the Christian Post reports on a school board meeting for the Conejo Valley Unified School District in California, which drew call-ins to comment from Cole, as well as another detransitioned woman and a man who detransitioned after having lived as a trans woman. (It is not reported by Foley whether Cole and her fellow detrans activists all live in the district.) The story repeats Cole’s criticisms of a children’s book, as well as sharing the outlines of her personal story and the stories of the others, and quotes them critiquing medical guidelines that allow young people to transition.
Contrary to Cattinson’s statements as screenhotted above, most of these treatments are either mostly or fully reversible. Puberty blockers have many uses outside of transition and are generally well-tolerated enough to be used for purely cosmetic purposes, as in much younger children who go through precocious puberty (a benign condition which causes early onset of pubertal changes such as breast growth and menses). Cross sex hormones are also largely reversible, which is underscored by the existence of trans women and trans men (who have reversed the effects of their natural puberty), and by the appearance of Cole herself, a lovely young woman who does not appear outwardly gender-nonconforming. The cosmetic aspects of top surgery are also fully reversable with breast implants, and even breastfeeding, which Cole has claimed will be impossible for her, has been done by at least some trans fathers who have given birth to children after top surgery.
However, that’s only one piece of the context needed to fully inform readers about the realities of detransition. Numerous studies have shown that detransition is uncommon for patients who seek gender affirming treatments. As an example, surgical regret for knee surgery, which is often performed on young athletes with knee injuries, happens in somewhere between 6 and 30 percent of cases. Regret after gender confirming surgery, by contrast, is consistently under 5 percent, and many studies have put it below 1 percent, an astounding success rate, far above that of most medical procedures.
In 2021, I reported for Slate on members of the detransitioned women’s community who had grown disillusioned with the detransition movement. My sources for that piece said that, while the detransitioned women’s community promised them relief from gender dysphoria without transition, their dysphoria not only persisted but became harder to cope with over time. They said that, once they’d entered the community, the narrative shifted and the emphasis became more about permanent vigilance and resisting the temptation to re-identify as trans or re-transition. This seemed, to me, reminiscent of dynamics in the ex-gay movement of the 1990s, many of whose leaders eventually recanted and came out as gay, rather than ex-gay, and some of whom apologized to the gay community.
This is not to suggest that all detransitioners experience such struggles, or that all of them will one day retransition, much less apologize for their harmful activism. But the personal anecdotes of people like Cole (who is still only a teenager), are not a good jumping off point to understand the reality of detransition. It is even less useful in understanding transgender people, the overwhelming majority of whom are unlikely to ever detransition. Stories like Foley’s about detransitioner’s idiosyncratic journeys mislead right wing readers because they don’t show even half of the real picture.
(a final excerpt from the Christian Post article by Ryan Foley)
