He now thinks he was rushed into transitioning
The Guardian shares a story of detransitioning.
Elan Anthony knows more than most about trans identity issues. Born a boy 42 years ago, he transitioned from male to female at 19 and then detransitioned to male three years ago. While his story is enlightening, it is also immensely challenging and it took him a long time and a lot of therapy to conclude that he had made a mistake.
He says – in the same paragraph – both that he believed he was female and that could never change, and that at times he wondered if he’d gotten it wrong and should actually be a man.
“I started to realise that I could have dealt with my own issues so much better without changing my body because that has brought so many more difficulties. Detransitioning isn’t as unusual as you might expect, but it is underground, for a number of reasons, and the trans community isn’t happy discussing this.”
He now thinks he was rushed into transitioning by well-intentioned but ultimately misguided people.
“I’m an only child and grew up in Ohio,” he says. “When I was young, I was bullied a lot, being very bright but physically weak, which singled me out as a super-nerd and resulted in a lot of violence. I started to fantasise about being a girl from about age six because that would make me safe and take me away from my place at the bottom of the male hierarchy.”
I at the same age spent a lot of time pretending to be a male character from one story or another, because the story spoke to me in some way and I wanted to play at being the protagonist. It’s not exactly the same as fantasizing being a boy, I think, because I didn’t do it all the time and because it was pretending, which requires less suspension of disbelief than fantasizing. But at any rate I think it’s an ordinary feature of childhood and not necessarily a symptom of gender dysphoria.
“As I reached puberty, these feelings became part of my sexuality and I experienced some gender dysphoria, but I was also attracted to women so it was confusing. When I was in high school I had several girlfriends and my gender dysphoria declined until I got to college. Initially, I didn’t meet any women so all my gender feelings came back. Looking back, I think that was because, as a freshman, I was back to being at the bottom of the heap, which affected my confidence.”
University counselling referred him to a gender clinic and it was then that he began to discover there were other people who felt the same way as him.
“It was a revelation – other people had these feelings too, and I could relate to them, so could be really happy.”
Yes – but what that also does is make one vulnerable to social contagion. Social contagion is not necessarily a bad thing; I wish more people were subject to for instance anti-racism via social contagion; it depends on the content. Having friends who think the rules of gender are bullshit is one thing, and having friends who think the rules of gender are awesome but they sometimes don’t match one’s personal body is another.
But he now sees that this is where things began to go wrong.
“I told the psychologist I wanted to be female but nothing about the other issues involved, such as being bullied. I wasn’t aware that bullying had anything to do with my gender issues, but he didn’t ask any deeper questions. So, I was just like, ‘This is who I am and this who I want to be’, and they were like, ‘That’s great!’, and after just two sessions I was given hormones, which was actually not good practice.”
Sometimes instant validation is not the right response.
Realising he had made a mistake was a gradual process. “I couldn’t bond with people and eventually started therapy to work on why I couldn’t have relationships and why my body was so tense. I eventually realised that a lot of this had to do with trying to present myself as female, which was unnatural for my body. I was holding my shoulders in and my butt out and doing all sorts of things that were outside the natural movement of my body. This was causing strain and stress on my body and that was when I realised that this whole transition was a problem. It was a long process and the big revelation was that the roots of my problem lay with the early bullying and feeling unsafe being a man. I stopped taking oestrogen and started on testosterone.”
And he lost some friends as a result.
Elan is studying psychology and aims to work towards a doctorate: “I’m interested in continuing to work on this subject, although I also do find it emotionally taxing, especially because there is a large movement towards promoting and supporting trans rights and trans issues in psychology right now. It sometimes can be difficult to be critical in any way of trans issues in that environment, but I am interested in helping people work with their dysphoria in whatever way possible.”
The tricky part of that is that “promoting and supporting trans rights” has evolved into meaning treating gender dysphoria as literally being the alternative sex, as opposed to meaning helping people work with their dysphoria in whatever way possible. The latter is obviously a more flexible and reasonable way of understanding GD.
He is very aware of the irony of his situation, transitioning originally at a time when there was minimal support and now detranstioning at a time when transitioning is totally acceptable, but detransitioning is less so.
“I don’t have much community around detransition and the overwhelming number of detransitioners are natal females who have their own community. I do know a few male detransitioners and have talked to them, and I think the next step for us is to have more of a community also.”
Detransitioning has brought its own pain, especially as he feels there is little leeway in offering any criticism about transitioning.
“Being critical about trans issues is definitely going against the grain right now in psychology. I have felt like I was fighting a constant battle for some time, but it feels like there are a lot more people speaking out about detransition, as well as more clinicians who are interested in looking at alternative ways to deal with dysphoria. In the beginning I felt like one of the very few people working on this but it feels different now.”
Being critical about trans issues is definitely going against the grain right now in politics, too, which is a very odd thing. It’s very odd to make a psychological state a matter of political loyalty, and so much so that it becomes a reason to beat up women who try to get together to talk about it.
People shouldn’t be told they are a woman (or a man) because they fit the gender stereotype of what a woman or man is suposedly like. But I think some people do have actual physical dysphoria and are happier if they get a physical sex change, and in that case should be allowed to do so and should be accepted as being the sex they have physically changed to. Do you think so? Or is that too extreme for you?
I think people should have care and support when they feel a need to change their anatomy, when their anatomy is their problem. I think people should have care and support when they feel a need to live outside whatever gender norms match their anatomy and/or presentation. And I think people should have care and support figuring out which applies (if either) and making their own darned choices that way. Is this a difficult sort of policy to grasp or implement?
@Anna #1
I’m not Ophelia, but I wish to point out that “should be allowed to [get surgery]” and “be accepted as the sex they have physically changed to” should not be tied together like that.
In the first place, right now medical transition is being pushed and any suggestion that it is not right for everyone, or that it should not be available on demand sans psychological evaluation (decried as “gatekeeping”) is called transphobia, and scientists who dissent are fair game for harassment.
In the second place, people can’t really change sex, so it matters what precisely you mean when you say “accepted as the sex they have changed into.” There’s an ontological problem there, and it’s not trivial. People who transition can be accepted as trans people; i.e. as people who choose to live as if they were the other sex. That’s not the same thing.
I certainly imagined myself to be a large number of things other than human, being a huge fan of fantasy and sci-fi reading. And even when I was a human in my daydreaming, I was very rarely an ordinary suburban kid.
Though I never imagined myself as a woman. Perhaps because aided by the fact that ‘protagonist’ had heavily overlap with ‘male.’
And even more drastic are the ones that treat having hobbies/interests/personality traits more stereotypical of the other sex as literally being that other sex. Or in elavating the concept of gender to be some unassailable, ineffable, transcendant thing that must never be questioned, while accepting and cementing patronising stereotypes into it.
Ooh, not in my world. Alice in Wonderland; Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden; Laura in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books; Caddie Woodlawn; Anne of Green Gables; Nancy in Swallows and Amazons and the sequels; Jo March; Jane Eyre; I could go on this way for hours.
I think there’s a lot to be said for trying to maintain a distinction between dysphoria (hating part of your body for some reason) and dysmorphia (feeling like a body part attached to you is “not yours”).
For example, if you had dysphoria about your height, you’d just hate the height that you were for whatever reason. Maybe you were teased, or maybe you hate not fitting through doorways. But if you had dysmorphia about your height, you’d be actually tripping over your own feet, because you’d keep not realising how far away they were.
Anyway, with regards to trans issues, I thought that the physical side of it was more to do with dysmorphia that dysphoria. It’s not that trans people hate the gender they were assigned because of the body they were born with, it’s that it literally feels alien to them. I mean, it’s probably still a lot more complicated than that, but have I kind of got that right?
Teasing those two feelings apart, while being supporting of them, is never going to be easy. Especially as one may well lead to the other, and surgery may be a viable treatment option in either case.
” People who transition can be accepted as trans people; i.e. as people who choose to live as if they were the other sex. ”
Ok, I can get behind “she’s a transgender woman” rather than “she’s a woman” for someone who’s had hormones, sex change surgery, etc. I don’t think someone should be considered transphobic for making that distinction. Where I do draw the line is people (not you but some people) who are all “Candis Cayne is just a mutilated delusional crazy man” AS WELL AS people who are all “you like trucks that means you’re a transgender man.”
“right now medical transition is being pushed and any suggestion that it is not right for everyone, or that it should not be available on demand sans psychological evaluation (decried as “gatekeeping”) is called transphobia, and scientists who dissent are fair game for harassment.”
I also agree with you that is bad.
@Anna #7
Ah, I getcha. My understanding is that surgical transition is the best option for some people. It’s not perfect, but if a well-informed grown-up chooses it, I’d respect that and support them. I don’t think all trans people are nuts.
I actually think “trans” is not one thing; different people transition for different reasons, and between the political dogma, the politicization of the science, and what I believe is social contagion, people suffering from GID are being very poorly served. So are gender nonconforming people and people whose dysphoria could respond to less drastic treatment.
I saw this today which seems very relevant…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/world/97443298/more-transgender-people-asking-for-reversal-surgery
Oof. Interesting.