“My name is Helena, and as of this writing, I am a 23-year-old female who, as a teenager, believed she was transgender. »1 “Hi, my name is Sky and I’m a detransitioner. “When I was 11, I found a video on YouTube called ‘How to bind her boobs safely’.” I looked up what it was, and I discovered the trans community. »2 These are the beginnings of poignant testimonies among tens of thousands, which are found on forums3 where detransitioners and desisters (people who have identified themselves as trans and who renounce medical treatment or reconcile with their birth sex) talk about themselves.
Posted at 3:00 p.m.
As part of Detransition Awareness Day (March 12) and International Women’s Rights Day (March 8), we wanted to relay the voice of young girls, more and more of them who, in adolescence , began to hate their bodies and to wish for a transition (social and medical approach towards the other sex), then made the opposite way after realizing that this one had ruined their life.
These voices are unfortunately inaudible. In terms of transidentity, the dominant journalistic line is that of trivialization. An article published a few days ago in these pages4 presents an author of children’s books whose objective is to tell “beautiful stories” in order to present transidentity as “one normality among others”, in particular thanks to childish illustrations “filled with sweetness”.
Is transidentity really to be trivialized? This is not what emerges from the testimonies, such as that of Helena, of which we translate some of the words from English: “The transition worsened my mental health considerably. It was telling the suffering child in me that I hated her and that I wanted to destroy her. It was an act of war against myself. »
Adolescence is a period of experimentation and the search for identity that gives rise to all sorts of confusion, doubts and conflicts. Young people do not always have an accurate perception of their condition. They need to be listened to, invited to explore the causes of their discomfort, and not to be led to consider the transition as the only remedy. More and more medical institutions around the world are advocating caution in the face of invasive medicalized approaches to transidentity. Finland was the first to develop guidelines prioritizing psychological exploration. In Sweden, the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm has banned since May 2021 the use of puberty blockers administered to slow the development of secondary sexual characteristics in children. Very recently, the National Academy of Medicine (France) published a statement calling for giving priority to psychological support for as long as possible and delaying any medical intervention. 5 However, many testimonies report hasty consultations and prescriptions of puberty blockers or hormones, without prior examination, from the first visit. This is the case of Helena. “Shortly after my 18and birthday, I made an appointment at a family planning center to start a testosterone regimen. I remember the admissions process took about 20 minutes. During my first appointment, I was prescribed 100 mg of testosterone, which I had to inject into my thigh muscle every week, starting the same day. »
The treatment is far from trivial. “No words could have prepared me for what was about to happen. […] While I was on testosterone, my anger had to come out. I felt like my body was going to explode if I couldn’t punch or throw something, and that scared me. Crying was no longer an option, as it was almost impossible to cry. When I was overwhelmed with emotions, instead of crying easily like before, I started to feel extremely angry, and instead of hitting others or anything around me, I was hitting myself. »
When Helena realizes her transition was a huge mistake, her therapist tries to persuade her otherwise. “She wasn’t really hearing me, and was questioning the things I was saying from a ‘you’re trying to talk yourself out of being trans because transphobia makes you hate yourself’ angle. That’s when I started to realize that something was wrong with the trans movement and institutions in general. […] I left that session feeling frustrated, and I don’t think I ever went back. »
Despite pressure from her therapist and her old circle of friends, Helena’s determination to detransition is the strongest. But it is not without difficulty. “In many ways, I’m still getting by […] I had to start not by acting, but by turning inward and finally respecting the emotions that I had tried to reject and suppress. Each time I deepened my compassion for myself, I could then move on to an action that would allow me to move forward in the outer world. This was how my process of healing and recovery went after years that were not only messed up, but sinking me so deep that I nearly drowned. »
Helena was able to get out of the spiral of medical transition without permanent damage. Other young people who have undergone surgery, or who have become sterile as a result of these treatments, have not been so lucky. Can we at least hear them and not trivialize or normalize their stories?