Fuck You and Fuck Your Fucking Media Spins
Another day, another media piece discounting bad experiences with detransition. And no, I’m not interested in helping you make more.
Author note: This piece is written as an homage to Anne Tagonist’s Fuck You Reloaded from 2009, a letter describing extractivist research patterns in trans health. As we witness this pattern happen surrounding the topic of detransition and “transition regret”, I resonated so strongly with the themes of Tagonist’s letter that I felt compelled to make my own.
Dear journalists, academics, writers, and whoever else is looking to get on the latest “what’s with this explosion of detransition” press train,
I got your email. Or your text. Or your phone call. And no, I’m afraid I will not be participating in your latest study, paper, article, or book on detransition, nor will I find people for you who will. I will be frank. I do not trust you.
I get a lot of emails. A lot of emails. Whenever another bomb threat or arson happens at a clinic, a ban on gender affirming care passes, or another piece about detransition hits the media and makes a huge splash, my inbox fills up with requests for comment. Phones blow up. I am one of the ones they call to find out what’s going on. The one who knows who is who, what their politics are, what connections they have, what anti-trans activism they have been doing that is erased in the press. I was inside these networks, after all, and report on them extensively alongside my spouse. There is no shortage of emails, they are exploding out of my ears.
Today is another one of those days. Nonstop, my phone overflows with texts, messages, mentions, and everything else. “Have you seen the latest Atlantic piece?” Yes. And honestly, it’s not that much different than the other half a million pieces about de/retransition in the media, just with an extra helping of “academic expert speaks on record about listening to detransitioners while calling the ones they consulted TRAs for speaking openly about experiencing detransition as a radicalization funnel and conversion practice.”
I do not trust that the research will have a real impact on people’s ability to access care. I do not trust that the press articles will lead to supports for survivors of trans conversion practices. I do not trust that people getting out of high control groups, whether religious, TERF, or far right, will have anywhere to turn to because of these publications. I do trust that they will have a negative impact on people’s ability to access care — they already are. Because when such pieces come out, handwringing about what to do about detransition, they get cited by legislatures investigating families of trans youth. They get celebrated by TERFs and conversion therapists. Even literal NARTH reincarnate. And when that happens, it’s local trans communities that are holding back the fires, and they need people familiar with these scenes to back them up. So fuck you.
Journalists, researchers, academics interested in detransition have come and gone for years. There’s always some new eyes looking to get in on the topic. Usually they are cis, sometimes they are trans. Many times it ends up the same. They poke their nose into de/retrans spaces, make themselves as a friend who will “get the work done” and make resources appear, but they just need a little help getting there from people with “lived experience”. The ones who do the work on the ground filling voids left by our providers, our allies, our churches and synagogues, our politicians. They just need a little help, they say. Help them recruit participants for a diverse sample. Help them get narratives to pull heartstrings. Let them measure our hearts, our psyche, our trauma, our hormones. Drain us dry and produce something based on promises of better care, but what am I seeing? Texas and Florida governors acting like dictators and pulling care for everyone, weaponizing CPS against children. Articles translated and spread across the globe into areas where queer and trans people vanish on the streets. Anti-trans parents pulling their kids overseas to make them “desist” because of what they heard online about transition regret. Therapists and academics calling us uppity, crazy, and unfair if we so much as whimper a protest. Fuck you.
Experiences with de/retransition are diverse. Which means that for some of us, it is horrific. It is traumatic. Which means that every time you extract from us, you do so by ripping open wounds that have barely begun to heal. You do so by tearing into flesh and scarred minds that are trying to keep us alive while, again, holding the firehoses with our trans peers as you set our grassroots efforts ablaze. You do so while emboldening the very actors who have done us and people we love harm. People who are also reading your pieces and screaming for help and for what, to be slapped in the face by the ones they thought they could trust? The ones they thought they could trust because we thought we could trust you? Fuck you.
I love my peers. I love the people who confide in me, who are also hurting, who want to be seen as who they are and what they have been through without being thrown through the wringer by yet another deceptive nose poking their way into our lives. I love the people who are trying to figure themselves out amidst this mess, whether they’re trans or not, whether their transition is helping or not, whether they’re detransitioning temporarily to get through hell or because of their health or because they’re stuck with abusive partners or family and need to get out before they can be safe. Which is why I’m not going to feed them to you. The majority have no interest in politics, let alone anti-trans politics, and thus shouldn’t become weapons against other people. They deserve better than this. They deserve to be listened to, to be respected, to not have their wounds sucked dry by leeches only to have the blood thrown in their faces. No. Not acceptable. Fuck you.
Visibility isn’t a magic cure. It’s a target. People deserve better than to be fed to the latest hit piece with the promise of visibility. Trans and de/retrans people are plenty visible and guess what we have? Some of the worst legislative years in history, escalating fascism, “therapy associations” built by people who say their teenage transfemme clients have porn-induced autogynephilia, those damn clinic threats, and literal ex-trans ministers lobbying medical boards.
You cannot, in one breath, say that you support trans and de/retrans people and our access to care, and then in another breath use them as political bludgeoning tools while discounting the ones whose experiences are just a little too inconvenient for you. And if you try, do not expect me to trust you.
There are instances where trust can still happen. But that trust has to be earned and maintained. We need to be able to trust that we will be respected, that our voices and experiences will be both heard and valued, and more importantly, that our lives and the lives of other trans and de/retrans people will be improved. Until then, the people who are doing the work improving those lives are not journalists, academics or researchers publishing from the comfort of the ivory tower. They are on the phone talking someone through thoughts of suicide, or accompanying them to appointments, or building support groups, or scouting out resources for them that aren’t going to scramble their brains with bogus statistics or Janice Raymond and Mary Daly or finding God or the Goddess. They are the ones consoling people who have had their brains scrambled and need help untangling it. What have you actually done to support them, practically? Because I’m not seeing it!
You want to actually help us? Get out of the ivory tower or the press. Help someone go to an appointment they’ve been avoiding for years. Find therapists that, again, aren’t going to scramble people’s brains with talk of autogynephilia or God(ess) or Jungian archetypes. Pack people’s things into your car when they need to escape an abusive home. Find people a place to live that doesn’t depend on controlling parents or partners. Find us jobs so we can keep our hormones. Fuck, how about you hire us for a job. An actual job, not just tossing a few bucks our way.
If you can do these things, I will trust you more. If not, if your idea of “working in/with community” is to come in, make promises, take our stuff and then go “thank you ma’am/sir” and march on back to your secure tower, then kindly get stuffed. Because you don’t actually need us, not with your newly polished CV, health insurance, a home, and safe people to confide in while tossing matches on our lives. And we don’t need this. If this is your “help”, then no thank you.
With love,
An uppity, crazy retransitioner
