Originally a comment by Artymorty on Furor, I tells ya.

It highlights the big problem with gender ideology, and it’s a problem that I think even the best-intentioned psycholgists and psychiatrists didn’t quite understand as their profession became increasingly warm to the idea of sex changes for their patients. The problem is that it’s not about these people’s personal private ideas or their personal bodies, and it mostly never was. It has always been about getting everyone else to play along. People don’t go off and change their names and get surgeries so they can content themselves in solitude with their newfound “womanhoods” and “manhoods”. They do it so they can move through the rest of the world as though they’re the opposite sex. It’s all about everyone else’s cooperation, participation, obeisance to it.

Clinicians treated “gender identity” treatment like a simple, zero-sum thing: patient feels bad about their sex; patient gets sex change, patient feels better about their sex. In reality, it was more of a three-body problem type thing: patient feels bad about their sex because they see that there’s all these newfound “trans identities” everywhere; patient gets “sex change”; patient is happy because he is in a social environment that is rah-rah for trans; the landscape has thus shifted and this action leads to more patients coming in. Then eventually there’s a backlash in the social environment — the very one that drew so many people into “trans” culture in the first place — and now that environment is non-cooperative with their fantasy, and now the fantasy doesn’t seem at all worth the cost.

But there are no refunds on sex change operations.

The difference between trans people and detransitioners isn’t that they’ve reversed what’s been done to them; it’s that they’ve had a change of perspective on the world around them and how they fit into it. The vast majority of people who’ve already adopted trans identities and medicalized themselves would never have done so if they’d known that the cultural climate over the past few years was only a blip, and that the rest of the world was not going to go along forever with their pretend identities.

The only people happy about their trans surgeries are the ones for whom the penny hasn’t yet dropped. But it will soon enough for most of them.

It’s a tragedy, ultimately. Not so much in Willoughby’s case — he’s clearly a narcissist and he’s out to lunch — but for many others, it is.