Finding middle ground: The importance of empathy

Posted on October 5, 2019 by 4thwavenow

by Juliette

Juliette is a 19-year-old woman who identified as transgender for a brief period in her earlier teenage years. She wrote this piece particularly for parents who may be wondering how to best support and respond to their trans-identifying daughters, based on her positive experiences with her own parents during that time in her life. Juliette is originally from the Netherlands and now lives in the UK, where she is studying for a degree in linguistics.

Cases of young teenagers claiming to be transgender out of the blue seem to be on the rise. Though there are plenty of opinions and discussions on this to be found online, some voices are hard to hear: those of parents reluctant to give in to their children’s wishes to transition, and those of people who once identified with the transgender community and no longer do. I myself identified as transgender for a short time in my teens, but grew out of it. As I was looking for people with similar experiences, I came across 4thWaveNow. I recognise myself in many of the stories shared here, and I feel very sympathetic towards the parents sharing their struggles. I hope that sharing my experience with transgenderism and the ways in which my parents supported me in this will provide some insight to other people going through this.

When I was 16, I came out to my parents as genderqueer. This was following a coming-out as gay, which followed a coming-out as bisexual. At the time, I viewed this as a logical progression: I was breaking out of the heteronormative, cis-centric mold imposed on me by society. As a final step to complete this progression, I decided I would start hormone treatment when I turned 18, and start university ‘as a man’ — or at least, not as a gender-conforming woman. It never got that far, though: some six months later, I had started to grow out my hair, wear dresses and skirts again and didn’t think twice about ticking the ‘female’ box on my university application forms. Now, I have many other things to concern myself with outside of gender: I have recently finished an internship in linguistics in Singapore, and I look forward to earning my bachelor’s degree in linguistics at Cambridge University over the next three years. Rather than spending my free time obsessing over gender, I spend it on art, playing the violin, and going out with my friends.

Sometimes, though, I think back to when I identified as transgender. Mainly, I think about how it affected my parents, and my relationship with them. My parents never rejected me outright. However, when talking about this period later, I learnt how sceptical and worried they were. Now, I admire that they were able to keep most of this to themselves and trust me to figure myself out. Thankfully, I did manage to do just that, and I am now very glad I never made any permanent changes to my body. Looking back now, the reasons for my so-called gender dysphoria and wish to transition, followed by acceptance of my biological gender only about half a year later are painfully clear. They have little to do with gender beneath the surface.

As most teenagers do at some point or other, I started questioning my sexuality in high school. I was around 15 years old at this time and often turned towards the internet to share my thoughts and find like-minded people. The internet offers a wealth of stories and experiences from others on this topic and I spent a lot of time reading through these. In particular, I spent a lot of time on a blogging platform called Tumblr. On Tumblr, the LGBT community is particularly active. People share their personal experiences, as well as thoughts and opinions on sexuality as it relates to society, culture and politics. At the time I was discovering this content, I was young, impressionable and curious. Discussions about inequality, sexism and homophobia were a cause for me to be passionate about. Of course, in many places around the world people of non-traditional expression and sexual orientation aren’t considered equal, which ought to be discussed. However, rather than encouraging change and communication, many of the activist blogs I frequented on Tumblr encouraged a victim role. It was not unusual to see posts demonising people who identified as heterosexual or cisgender. In these communities on Tumblr, respect was earned not by showing strength, but rather by demonstrating the highest degree of victimhood. This means that the person with the most complex, unique and marginalised identity has the most authority — the unspoken rule was that someone who has not had the ‘lived experience’ could never understand, and could never have a useful word to say about an issue. Looking up to others in this community, I felt very tempted to immerse myself in these alternative identities. Besides, not identifying as heterosexual, I already felt like I fit in. It was a small effort to delve deeper.

As a teen, I struggled with identity and often found it hard to express myself. On Tumblr, the biggest discussions around self-expression usually centred around gender. This is how I became interested in dressing androgynously and rejecting traditional femininity. There were countless blogs of young people, mostly biological females, with boyish haircuts, wearing masculine clothes and asking to be addressed with gender neutral or masculine pronouns. Many spoke at length about their dislike of stereotypical femininity, their perception of heterosexual relationship and their discomfort with their female bodies. This struck a chord with me. As a young girl, at many points in my life, stereotypes and expectations felt forced upon me because of my being female: my family often asked me if I had a boyfriend yet, when I would finally grow out my hair beyond my shoulders, how many kids I wanted. These pressures made me insecure, partly because I didn’t want to fulfill some of these expectations, and partly because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to. I saw the experiences of non-binary, genderqueer and transgender-identified people on Tumblr as an escape from these pressures of traditional femininity.

However, none of this explains why I considered something so drastic as hormone treatment to change my feminine features. A much-used term on these gender-related blogs on Tumblr was gender dysphoria. Many people on the blogs I frequented described feeling trapped in their body and uncomfortable in their skin; they described being unhappy with their breasts and their hips, and feeling unattractive. On these blogs, these feelings were considered symptoms of gender dysphoria, and a sure sign that transitioning to the opposite sex with the help of hormone treatment and invasive surgery was the right course of action. At no point were negative side effects of these procedures discussed, nor was the possibility considered that these feelings might not be related to gender in the first place. At this age, there was much I disliked about my body, and combined with my need to reject traditional femininity, it seemed logical that gender dysphoria was the explanation for these feelings. I was convinced: I now had a way to experiment with self-expression and reject stereotypical femininity with masculine haircuts and clothing, and the term gender dysphoria to explain my bodily insecurities. After this, it wasn’t difficult for me to convince myself that transitioning was the key to happiness and security.

For me, the road to wanting to transition was a slow one. Initially, I simply enjoyed experimenting with more androgynous fashion and hairstyles. But over time, gender became an obsession. Relevant to my experience is the rest of my life at this time. My family had recently moved from the Netherlands to Scotland, where I started a new high school. At 15 years old, this was a very big shift for me and I struggled to make friends during my first year at school. On top of this, about a year after moving, my parents divorced. Perhaps as a cry for attention, an act of rebellion, or simply as a distraction, I became obsessed with all things gender identity. Everything around me reminded me of the biological and societal differences between the sexes. I became obsessed with hormone treatment and surgery, with disguising the feminine parts of my body and with ways to disassociate myself from femininity in all manners of expression. I was convinced that when I finally transitioned, and had the acceptance of my friends and family, I would be happy.

But every step I took — cutting my hair, wearing men’s clothes, adopting ‘masculine’ mannerisms — only made my insecurities worse. I felt like I didn’t fit in, I felt unattractive, and I felt like I would never be happy being in the body I was in, even more so than before I began presenting as male. I felt entirely dependent on outside validation that I came across as masculine —validation I didn’t often receive. For a while, I didn’t talk to my family about these feelings. But at some point, I felt so unhappy that I decided to talk to my mum about my wish to transition. I didn’t have to bring it up, but one day when I was in a particularly gloomy mood, my mum asked me directly if I wanted to be a boy. She’d noticed that I’d started wearing masculine clothes, cut my hair shorter and shorter, and had put the puzzle pieces together. That question allowed me to share the thoughts and feelings I had about gender and my body. During this conversation, my mum mostly allowed me to talk without interrupting, until I brought up the topic of transitioning.

I don’t believe I ever fully intended to transition; when I talked to my mum about hormone treatment, I had already decided I would start it only after finishing high school, so I would be able to start my ‘new life’ at university. I could tell my mum was hesitant: she expressed that she wasn’t convinced that hormone treatment was the right course, and she was very happy to hear that I wanted to wait a couple of years before starting treatment. Still, though, my mum was very understanding, and clearly wanted to fix my unhappiness as best she could. That reaction helped me step outside of my own head a little: it helped me realise the gravity of the decision I wanted to make. However, I was less receptive to my mum’s admission that it would be difficult for her to think of me as anything other than a daughter. I understand this now, and I am sure many parents here feel the same. At the time, though, this wasn’t something I wanted to hear: it made me feel pressured to fit an image my mum had of me.

We reached a compromise, though: my mum agreed to contact a gender therapist for me. We had one visit with this therapist — who didn’t push treatment, but simply wanted to look further into ways of self-expression without the constraint of labels — but when trying to book a follow-up appointment, we never heard back. My mum only received a response to her emails a few months later because of an issue with the therapist’s e-mail, and by this time I was no longer interested in transition. I wonder from time to time if I would have gone through with transition had I had more appointments with this gender therapist. It’s a scary thought, since I no longer have any desire to be male. However, I do feel like the appointment was helpful. It made me feel valid, but at the same time, it made the situation feel very real all of a sudden. It helped me to see how big of a change transitioning would be, and perhaps this was ultimately the first push for me to grow out of this phase.

Altogether, I identified as genderqueer and later as transgender for only about six months. I don’t remember exactly what led me to grow out of these feelings of gender dysphoria, but I think the most vital step was settling in at school. Making more friends and finding other ways to express myself, as well as feeling more at ease socially helped build my confidence. Around this time, I also started exercising, and this was a great way to relieve stress and learn to feel more at home in my body. By the time my fifth year of high school rolled around, I was too busy with friends, crushes and university applications to think much about gender.

Throughout all of this, my relationship with my parents was vital. My parents never rejected me — they expressed at times they didn’t agree with my self-diagnosis, but at no point did they make my insecurities feel invalid. My dad in particular was open to however I chose to express myself, and encouraged me to experiment. He complimented me on both my feminine and masculine clothes. He even took me to a male barber to get a haircut. I didn’t experience this affirmation as encouragement to transition; rather, it boosted my confidence and showed me my relationship with my dad wasn’t dependent on how I expressed myself. Both my parents made it clear that things like the way I dressed, the way I labeled myself, or who I loved would never make them reject me. Knowing I had their support and trust made it easier for me to return that trust, and kept me from feeling a need to rebel.

Now, I know how difficult the whole ordeal was for them, and I feel some guilt for worrying them as much as I did. The topic of gender doesn’t come up a lot in conversation: I feel too embarrassed to bring it up, even though I know my parents don’t think any less of me for it — though my family doesn’t shy back from making fun of my haircuts. At the time though, they took me seriously, for which I am very grateful. It allowed me to grow out of this phase of my life without need for intervention and before taking any drastic measures.

My view on these gender-related issues has changed gradually over the past few years. I see this sudden gender dysphoria that some teenagers express as symptomatic of other problems, rather than as a problem on its own. I interpreted my insecurity as gender dysphoria and my dislike of stereotypical femininity as a wish to be male. Frustrated with my situation — feeling alone at a new school, feeling insecure about my body, having to deal with my parents’ divorce — gender became an obsession. It functioned as an escape and as a problem to fix. I convinced myself that everything in my life would improve if I transitioned. I believe this might be the case for other young people claiming to experience gender dysphoria: obsession with gender serves as a way to avoid dealing with more complex, underlying issues with confidence, identity and security. These need to be dealt with first, before transition can even be considered. I also believe that the sudden increase in cases of gender-confused teens can be explained in part by the internet. I was introduced to these concepts of gender identity through the internet. It is also very easy to find people online that will affirm your feelings and encourage you to transition, even though these people are not nearly familiar enough with your real life to make these judgements. Validation is easily found online, which is why some teens might withdraw there to avoid confrontation instead of talking to family and friends in real life.

Despite my scepticism towards claims of gender dysphoria from teenagers, I would still urge parents of teens going through this to act with empathy before anything else. I don’t believe many teens would act this way on purpose, or to be manipulative: for me, it wasn’t in any way enjoyable to constantly deal with these obsessive thoughts and insecurities. For that reason, I would encourage parents not to view this as an act of rebellion from your child, but rather as a cry for help. What was by far the most helpful for me was knowing that my parents’ love for me was not lessened by how I chose to express myself, and that all their scepticism came from a place of concern. I also believe it is important not to reject your child outright, and to trust them to figure things out in their own time. Allow them to experiment with their fashion and hairstyle, and allow them to try out a different way to express their identity. Many children and young teens expressing gender dysphoria at some point in life later find they are gay, or that they simply feel more comfortable dressing like the opposite sex. If this turns out to be the case for your child, it is important that you support them — your acceptance will likely mean a lot to your child. Remember that for your child to share these thoughts and insecurities about their identity and body in the first place shows they trust you and are willing to talk, and this trust is something to be treasured.

From the ashes: Butch lesbian & her family rebuild life after transition

Posted on July 14, 2019 by 4thwavenow

Carol F. is a 39-year old woman (adult human female) from a conservative area in California. She was raised in a religious environment. From ages 35 to 38, she identified as a transgender male and lived her life being perceived as such. The disconnect between her lived experience as female and how she was treated while being seen as male caused her to begin to question the trans narrative. A few months ago, Carol began to detransition, after being on testosterone for almost 4 years and undergoing a bilateral mastectomy.

Carol has spent her time since starting detransition being vocal about how the push for transition harms women and girls, particularly those who do not perform femininity in the “traditional” way. In this essay, she talks about her own transition-detransition process, as well as the often negative impact of the transgender movement on the lesbian community, spouses, and family members.

Carol can be found on Twitter @SourPatches2077

by Carol F.

My decision to detransition began when I started taking antidepressants for depression and anxiety. A month into treatment I felt like my whole world had come alive. I could feel true joy for the first time in years and I could take pleasure in everyday things. I had struggled with being very angry and agitated and often had enraged outbursts over nothing, but it had begun to be less overwhelming and I found I could manage and control my emotions.

I suddenly–and with some horror–realized that I had never needed to transition. My life didn’t feel overwhelming anymore. I could feel my emotions more clearly and sort through what had seemed before to be a complete disaster of thoughts and feelings. I started to question my motives, my perceptions, and my feelings, not only around transition but around all the life decisions I had made. I began asking myself what it would be like to live as a woman again, but I had gone so far with transitioning. How could I admit just a month into taking anti-depressants that I was wrong, how could I turn back? No, I told myself, it couldn’t have been that simple.

We are told that being transgender is this deep-rooted thing, that it is part of our being, our core. It’s who we are, it’s our truth or truest self. I believed this when I started transition, how could this have been so flawed? How could my feelings have been so wrong? I kept these thoughts and feelings to myself and decided I would just continue living as a man, that it was too late to change this. I made my bed now I will lie in it.

I continued living my life as I had. I graduated college that spring and began working in the mental health field. I got a job working at a youth psychiatric hospital. This is when the second realization happened that made me question further being trans and trans ideology. At this hospital I saw so many young gender nonconforming girls come in claiming they were trans men. They wanted to go by male pronouns and male names. They were 13 years old, they were 15, they were 17. They all looked like little butch lesbians to me, and I felt a pang of shame and sadness. I saw myself in them. I saw their pain and fear and the abuse some had experienced. I saw the mental health issues they struggled with and how these issues left them longing for escape. They harmed themselves, they tried to end their lives, and they hurt. I wanted to reach out to them; I wanted to tell them it’s ok to be a lesbian woman. I wanted to show them a strong functioning butch woman. But how could I, when all they could see when they looked at me was a bearded man? How could I tell them what I couldn’t tell myself?

It was at this facility that I also began to work closely with men, something I had never really done before in my life. I had steered clear of being close to men in any way, although I had not realized I had done this; it was all unconscious at the time. Being considered “one of the guys” and having to play that role as much as I could left me with a deep sadness and longing for connection with women again. I knew I didn’t fit in. I hadn’t had a boyhood or been socialized as a male. I had had abuse and discrimination thrown at me just for being born a female, something they could never understand. Socialization makes up much of who we are, dictating the kind of path we are set on at birth. It has expectations and demands; it molds us and forms us in ways we are rarely aware of until you cross over to the other side in a kind of covert way. I often felt like an interloper in the male world–an alien observing private behavior and culture rarely seen by the outside world. This experience of being an intruder or imposter in the male world more than anything informed me that, yes, I was in fact a woman. There was no changing that. In a strange way this experience let me see how much of a woman I am. I had always labored under the impression that I was more male than female because of my mannerisms, likes, and way of dress. However, being on the other side with men solidified the truth that I was female and a woman through and through. My mannerisms, the way I dressed, and all the rest were just window dressing. It didn’t make me woman or a man, it was just me.

Then there were the London lesbians. There was the protest at London Pride where a handful of radical feminist lesbians stepped in front of thousands and made their voices heard. I had been following a well-known transman on social media and he had posted a story from Pink News. The headline went something like “transphobic lesbians storm the parade” or some kind of nonsense like that. I read the story but was a little annoyed because it didn’t say what they were protesting. Just that they were transphobic. I posted on social media asking others why the women had been protesting and what their message was. The response I got was basically “who knows, they are just transphobic and being hateful.” Well, I thought, maybe so but it’s always better to know the full story before making a decision to write people off. I began my internet search, and wouldn’t you know it, that led me to radical feminism. And that was the hammer that broke my illusion right open. The next several months was me and radical feminism and I heard the phrase I wish I had heard years ago, “The only thing that makes you a woman is that you are female.” A simple, to the point, and really quite obvious observation. How could I have thought otherwise? I agreed with it, but had still not taken the final step to detransition. But the push to do so began to be ever-present and its whispers grew louder every day.

My stubbornness is both a hindrance to me and my great strength. Sometimes it takes getting to the tender and protected parts of me to push me into a kind of submission, letting go of the thing I have been gripping so tightly for so long. It was the lesbian stand-up comic Hannah Gadsby who broke that grip. I saw her Netflix special, Nannette, and it hit parts of me I didn’t know were there. Her raw anger slapped me right in the face and told me something I hadn’t wanted to ever admit: Being a butch lesbian woman was fucking hard, it could be sad, it could be vicious, and it could break a woman.

When you walk through the world as a living example of everything that the world tells you is ugly and disgusting it can break you. And it had broken me. I knew, as I sat there in my room sobbing, that I had some real truths to face about myself. About my motivations for transition and the deep pain I carried with me. My internalized homophobia was something I always denied but it was damn strong and I had used it as another tool to hurt myself with. But the time had come to stop hurting myself, I knew this.

I contacted my doctor the next day and told her I wanting to quit my testosterone shots. It’s now been 4 ½ months since I last injected testosterone. I feel good and healthy. I’m on the mend and it’s wonderful.

The factors

ADHD is a very misunderstood disorder by most people. It affects almost every aspect of your life. I was not diagnosed with ADHD until I was 36, but after receiving the diagnosis it made a lot of the way my brain works finally make sense to me. I now see that ADHD played a large role in my fixation and desire to transition. People with ADHD often get hyper-focused on a particular thing. That thing becomes an obsession and we think about it nonstop for days, months, or even years. I got it in my head at 22 that I was trans and there it stayed for 15 years until medical transition had become almost completely unregulated. When I was 34, I found myself in a very mentally vulnerable place. Often when people with ADHD become mentally overwhelmed, we go back to a fixation we might have had or one we have kept with us but maybe have ignored for a while. We go to these fixations for comfort and organization, to feel better and safe again. I went back to my ideas about being a trans man and transitioning.

Looking back now, I think this was probably one of the most devastating times in my life. I had recently become a parent, which although a happy life change, is also a very stressful one. Around the same time, I lost my grandmother (who was more of a mother to me). I cut ties with my mother because I could not in good conscience allow her around my child and for this my brother and sister refused to have anything to do with me. I lost my good friend and brother-in-law to suicide. My wife literally lost her mind with grief and I felt like I was drowning. I became very depressed and wanted out of my life. I isolated myself, watching transition videos nonstop for months. I wanted to kill myself but knew what a shit move that would be to my family, so I latched onto transition as a way to feel at peace again. ADHD also affects one’s ability to reason though things thoroughly. Even though we may think about a subject nonstop we are not actually doing any kind of real analysis. It’s more like a movie that just keeps playing our favorite scene. The scene I played was one in which I was a strong man who lived a happy life.

When you are told from the age of 8 that the way you walk, talk, and act is like a boy by your mother, your schoolmates and other adults, it’s so easy to buy into the idea that you really are a man and that makes you completely normal after all.

I was raised in a very religious household where we were taught that women were put on this earth to serve men. I was not allowed to cut my hair or wear anything but long dresses, as my body was deemed immodest by default. My father had died when I was 2 in an accident and my mother had remarried into this religious atmosphere. My stepfather and mother abused me extensively from the age of 4 to 9. I learned to cope with the abuse by detaching myself from my body. I took back my power by never allowing my abusers to make me cry, I withstood the pain upon my body by disassociating. I believe this early abuse and dissociation from my body gave rise to the feelings that my body was wrong, not my own, and some kind of foreign entity—the same things people describe when talking about gender dysphoria. The sense of “wrongness” that one feels with their body.

When I was 9 my stepfather and mother divorced. I had a little more freedom to be myself and I began to express my likes and dislikes, as is normal for children to do. I wanted to play football, I liked boys’ clothing and style and I loved the idea of having short hair. My mother, although not as religiously fervent as she had been with my stepfather, was still a staunch fire-and-brimstone Christian, and very homophobic. She would become angry at me for wanting these “boy” things and punish me if I behaved “like a boy.” She ridiculed the way I walked and my mannerisms, telling me that I needed to walk and act like a girl. I had one bright spot in my childhood, and that was my paternal grandparents. They allowed me to wear boys’ clothes when I stayed with them and do my hair any way I wanted. Of course, I had to be very careful that my mother never found out, and we all knew it.

My mother’s behavior introduced an internal hate inside myself as a gender non-conforming girl. This would later be compounded by the homophobia I faced when I came out as a lesbian. I had never given the trauma I had to go though as a young lesbian the kind of gravity it deserves. When I was 17 my mother was growing very worried because I was showing no interest in boys or men. She decided to set me up on a blind date with one of her friends’ 22-year-old son. I was sheltered and ignorant and scared of my mother, so I went out with him. She had never met the guy and had not actually seen her friend in years; they only occasionally talked on the phone. I knew within the first 5 minutes of being in the car with him that he was very dangerous and unpredictable. I could feel with everything that I was that he was fully capable of killing me. I knew I couldn’t set him off, he would use any excuse to become angry. I spent the next 30 minutes of the car ride being as polite and submissive as possible, all the while strategizing on how I could get out of this. When we got to a town I lied and told him my mother wanted me to call her and let her know we arrived and I faked exasperation with my mother’s request. I went to a payphone and called my mother. I told her I wasn’t feeling well and was coming home. I then told him that she had told me I needed to return home because her employer had called her into work due to an emergency and I had to watch my sister and brother. He was displeased, and I made every effort to ensure him of how upset I was that our night had been ruined and assured him that we would go out next week. The drive home was the longest drive I’ve ever taken. I made it home safe and for the first time ever I yelled at my mother for her stupidity in putting me in a dangerous situation. This showed me how expendable I was as a woman if I could not adhere to the roles expected of me. I was better off dead than a dyke.

When I finally did come out as a lesbian at 19 years old, I was put through hell by most of the people most important to me in my life at the time. I lost friends, I was told I was never allowed at family gatherings because I was sick and would cause harm to the little kids. I was ridiculed and called every nasty name in the book. I was propositioned by men who were sure they could make me straight if I allowed them to have sex with me. I was told I was too pretty to be a lesbian, I was trying to be a man, I had been turned by a child molesting dyke, and the list goes on. I faced harassment in public life, mostly by men who would yell out “dyke” to me as I walked down the street or became confrontational with me if I looked at their girlfriend or god forbid smiled and said hi. I was not even safe at my job. There were men who would make jokes about raping a woman who got out of line, men who called me “spike” and “sir” to my face and refused to work with me. Men who talked openly about beating up fags or killing their sons if they were gay. It was enough to make anyone want to escape. I just wanted to live my life, I wanted to be unnoticed, but I couldn’t be. I hated this, I hated myself, and I felt like I must be the most disgusting creature in the world—that I must be wrong.

Trans explains why I’m wrong

The first time I heard the word transgender applied to women was in 2002 when I was 22 years old. It seemed as if overnight the young lesbian community had started to embrace this trans idea. Most of the butch lesbians I knew refused the label “butch” and instead said they were trans men. My wife and I were friends with several lesbian couples at the time and every butch woman in that couple now claimed to be trans. The first time I was corrected by a young butch named Lacy, she said “Oh I’m not butch, I’m really a trans man.” I had no idea what she was talking about so I asked. As I remember, she gave the simple answer, she was a man trapped in a female body. I was disgusted by this and repulsed even, but it never left my mind. I then began to ponder what it meant to be a trans man. A man who had a female body seemed to tick a lot of boxes for me. After all, I was always told I behaved like a boy. I walked like one, I acted like one, I was attracted to women. I liked men’s clothes and short hair. It started to make sense. It explained everything that was wrong with me. All the ridicule, all the abuse I had suffered through wasn’t my fault, or even the fault of the people who did it. What I suspected must be true, these people saw something in me that was wrong and broken. I latched onto the trans label very quickly and began telling friends and family that I was trans and that I wanted to transition.

However, this was 2002 and standards of care were still relatively strict compared to today. I had to see a gender specialist, live as my desired sex for at least six months, and undergo at least 6 months of therapy before being allowed to receive cross-sex hormones. I managed to find a gender specialist in my hometown and began working with her. She demanded that if I wanted hormones I needed to start living as a man, going by a male name and pronouns and being in male-only spaces. This was impossible for me. I had large breasts that could not be hidden and a curvy, obviously female body. I was also stricken with fear at the idea of going into male-only spaces. This seemed incredibly dangerous to me. I refused and decided to let go of transitioning. However, I always kept it in my mind as the explanation for why I was the way I was. I didn’t demand people recognize me as a trans man but I saw myself as such, and it brought me comfort that I was normal.

Transition wasn’t what I thought it would be

I made the decision to start medical transition in spring 2015 at the age of 35. Older than most transitioning woman to be sure, but not unheard of. Although many teens and younger women are transitioning, there is also a large population of adult women, mostly butch lesbians, who have also transitioned in the last 5 years or so. These mostly go unnoted because we are adults and already living on the outskirts of society. A simple look at a butch-lesbian dedicated subreddit or Facebook group will show many conversations about butches transitioning. The loss is very real and is leaving devastation in its wake in the lesbian community. I’m just one of the many. Only four months after I started testosterone injections, I had top surgery, or more precisely a double mastectomy. I hit the ground running with regards to transitioning. I couldn’t seem to do it quick enough.

Detransitioners know about the honeymoon period of transition. It lasts anywhere from 6 month to 3 years, depending on the person. Two years seems to be about average. Transitioning, although it ends up not helping in the long run, does help for a while. This is what makes it so hard to explain to those who are either still trans or those who have never been in this situation, because transition did help, for a while. I felt better when I started taking testosterone. I had more energy, I was less depressed, and my mood seemed more stable. I thought this meant I had made the right choice, and even my therapist and doctors saw this as proof that hormones were good for me.

I have done a little research into testosterone use in females, and although there isn’t much out there, what I have found seems to indicate that elevated mood and energy are some of the positive effects of testosterone use. Even males who use testosterone experience this. But what made me feel good was not some spiritual lining up of my brain with the right hormones (yes, a therapist did say this to me) but a simple side effect of a drug. No different than drinking alcohol or using any other substance to ease emotional pain. Another reason transition helped was that being seen as male enabled me to walk through the world like just another person. I didn’t draw attention and I got treated better than I ever had, by my co-workers and strangers alike. I have since heard of some trans-identified females who make the decision to continue living as men, not because they actually believe they are men but because they know it’s safer and easier for them than if they were to detransition and live as woman again. I honestly can’t blame them. It was wonderful to experience the freedom and safety of moving through the world being thought of as a man, if only for 3 years.

After about 2 years on testosterone I noticed that my anxiety had started to become much worse. I discussed this with doctors and psychiatrists, but they didn’t think the testosterone could cause this effect. As time went on my anxiety became worse, to the point where I was taking an anti-anxiety medication daily. It reached a breaking point when I could no longer leave my bedroom without having a panic attack. I couldn’t drive because that triggered a panic attack as well. I really couldn’t do anything but keep myself sedated on benzos and stay in bed. This is when I hit bottom. I went to a psychiatrist and got an antidepressant called Viibryd that is also used for panic disorders. Starting antidepressants is both mentally and physically hard. Those first 2 weeks on the medication were like hell. My brain felt like it was ripping apart and I had panic attacks that were so bad that I really did want to die so I would not have to feel them anymore. But by week 4 the side effects dissipated, and I began to feel joy, a sense of peace, calm and clearer headed.

On top of the anxiety and depression, transitioning had ended up making my dysphoria worse. Why? Because now I was worried that men would discover I didn’t have a penis when I used the male bathroom. Because I was smaller than most males. Because my voice wasn’t as deep. Because my hands & feet were smaller. Because my body shape was more feminine then male. Because the way I talked and gestured was seen as feminine. Because my chest had scars across it. Because I was soft spoken and not aggressive. Because I was raised as a girl and was never part of the boy’s club, so I didn’t know how to interact in male culture. Because every day, I stepped outside my house and was consumed with not being found out for what and who I really was: a woman. It seemed like I had switched one set of problems for another.

There were also the health side effects I was experiencing. My skin seemed to always have something wrong with it. The first year I had terrible acne, which is expected, but after that subsided, I always seemed to have some kind of rash or irritation that I hadn’t had before. My vagina was showing signs of atrophy and was painful all the time. To alleviate this, I would have needed to start taking a topical estrogen cream that you insert into your vagina. For someone with dysphoria around their genitalia, this is really the last thing you want to have to deal with. I was always aware of my female genitals because they hurt and were unhealthy. Again, not helpful if you have dysphoria around this area. I was also seeing my cholesterol climb every time I had a blood panel done, which was every six months. I knew it was a matter of time before I would need to be on medication for this. I was also starting to creep into the range of concern for diabetes. Additionally, I was quickly losing my hair and, in another year or two would likely be bald. All this happened in a span of 4 years on testosterone. I was completely healthy with thick beautiful hair before starting testosterone.

As of this writing, I have been a little over four months off testosterone. My cholesterol levels have dropped, risk for diabetes has gone down, and my hair is starting to fill in a little. The atrophy to my genitals and uterus has reversed and I am in good health. I feel happy and content. There are some things I will never get back, though. I had a double mastectomy only 4 months into transition, so my breasts are gone. I mourn this, I mourn that I will never get the chance to make peace with them like I have started doing with my sex and body. We all carry scars from life, and these are mine.

The family suffers too

I believe it’s very important to recognize the pain transition and trans ideology can cause to the family members of the trans-identified person. The families are the forgotten victims in all this, and this is unacceptable. The trans community takes little care in the impact transition has on not only the trans person themselves, but also their family. These are some common things I heard when I began my transition.

“You are the same person you have always been”

“You will be a better person/spouse/parent because now you will be living your true self”

“Your journey is important”

If the family is upset, sad, angry or generally just confused about the transition of their family member, here are the things said to the spouse/parents/child/family member.

“This isn’t about you, it’s their journey”

“You aren’t being supportive”

“You are being transphobic”

“They have always been this person, you just didn’t know”

This is so problematic because trans ideology is, at its core, extremely self-centered sometimes even in the narcissistic range. The trans person is encouraged to view the family’s emotional state as hateful or transphobic towards them if they experience normal human emotions of sadness, loss, confusion, or anger. Trans people are not encouraged by the community to see transition as the major life-changing event that it is. Instead, it’s downplayed and given the emotional weight of a new haircut or a change of clothes. The family members are expected to say nothing but positive things and show no “negative” emotions. They are shamed into silence. Mandated to keep their feelings to themselves lest they be labeled the most horrible thing one could be called in our society right now: transphobic.

When I began transition my wife who I had been with for 15 years was devastated, and rightfully so. In the beginning she believed as I did in most of what trans ideology had to say. She really did think I was trans and she was supportive. However, her life was also being turned upside down emotionally. She had lost her brother to suicide only a year earlier, she was a new mother, and now her wife was trying to become a man. She was scared, sad and feeling loss. She naively turned to the trans community for support during this time, trying to find other spouses of transitioning people to talk to. She thought these “support groups” would be a place for support. A place one could talk openly about the emotions they had as they went through transition with their family member. What she got instead was everyone saying how happy they were for their spouse and how exciting this all was. No negative emotions. When she started expressing her confusion, fear and anger over my transition it wasn’t long before she got the “TERF” word thrown at her. She had never heard the word before and after multiple people labeled her a TERF and eventually ran her out of the support group, she went online searching for “TERF” (as we all would if we didn’t know what something meant). She found gender critical and radical feminist information, chats and web sites. It was there she found support. I find it quite funny that it was the trans community itself that drove someone to turn into a “TERF”.

What I’m trying to show here is the very unhealthy & damaging effect trans ideology has not only on the trans-identified person but also their families. I really do believe this is cult-like, even religious behavior. It is divorced from reality, basing everything on a belief supported by feelings and very little science. It is faith-based and you must believe. It is all or nothing, good versus evil with no room for nuance or critical analysis. I’ve seen this before, as I wrote about in the beginning of this article, because I was raised in religious extremism. Trans ideology mimics this very closely. It can capture people on the fringes of society, people with mental health issues and people in pain from trauma. It promises relief from symptoms, an answer for which people are searching.

The community positions itself as the most oppressed demographic in society, while holding the people on the outside hostage with threats of suicide and blame for murders committed against the trans community. It showers acceptance and validation on its members as long as they adhere to trans dogma. The trans people who do not adhere to the ideology are called truscum, traitors or TERFs. People such as myself who detransition are told we no longer have a right to say anything about the trans experience because we are no longer trans or never were trans to begin with. Many of us are shunned from the community — like a dirty secret. This shunning of former members is a great deterrent to detransitioning for some. For those who do detransition, we usually slink away and are never heard from again. For those who do speak out we are labeled TERFs (a label that has come to mean nothing but a person who doesn’t completely agree with trans ideology), or ridiculed for not knowing we weren’t trans. We are told that we took valuable resources away from “real” trans people and that we should be quiet and go away.

I began as a true believer, I thought I had found my answers, I thought it all made sense. I had euphoric feelings of relief and happiness when I began transition. Four and a half years later, and I am rebuilding my life from the ashes. I burned myself and my family up into a million pieces and now we have to make sense out of the disaster. I am very lucky and grateful that I have a wonderful wife who has stuck with me more than she ever should have and a son who is immensely forgiving of his mother’s flaws. I find that every day is better than the last, if only by a half step. The resilience of the human spirit is amazing to me. Never give up.

Genderflux: How one young woman fell down the rapid-onset rabbit hole

Gallery

Posted on May 16, 2019 by 4thwavenow

This gallery contains 15 photos.

GuessImAfab is a 22-year-old re-identified female who identified first as nonbinary, and then a transgender man, from the ages of 18-21. She lives in the United States. GuessImAfab was on testosterone for a year and a half and spent a … Continue reading →

A grand conspiracy to tell the truth: An interview with 4thWaveNow founder & her daughter Chiara of the Pique Resilience Project

Posted on February 27, 2019 by 4thwavenow

Interview by Grace Williams

In this interview with Chiara Caignon, one of the co-founders of the Pique Resilience Project (PRP), and her mother, Denise Caignon (aka “Marie Verite”), the founder of 4thWaveNow, the two women tell the story of Chiara’s temporary trans identification and how this inspired the creation of 4thWaveNow. They talk about what life was like for both mother and daughter during the teenage years when Chiara believed she was a man, and Chiara describes the influences that eventually led to her desistance.

You can read Chiara’s personal essay, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Path of Desistance,” written for the Velvet Chronicle.

For several years now, 4thWaveNow has been administered and edited by a small, dedicated group of parents; it’s no longer a one-woman show. In the meantime, Chiara has gone her own way, recently joining forces with three other detransitioned women — Dagny, Helena, and Jesse — to launch the Pique Resilience Project. The purpose of PRP is to offer support to the growing number of young people who have realized that transition was a mistake for them, as well as to young people who are questioning their gender identity but have not yet transitioned. PRP has so far released two videos (here and here) and a podcast. Chiara was also interviewed by Benjamin Boyce about her experiences with trans identification and desistance on Feb. 21, 2019.

Chiara and Denise were previously interviewed (using the pseudonyms Rachel and Janette) for an article by Charlotte McCann in the Sept. 1, 2018, issue of The Economist,
“Why are so many teenage girls appearing in gender clinics?”

Grace Williams conducted this interview with Chiara and Denise via email. “I am one of the thousands of parents who have benefited greatly from 4thWaveNow,” says Grace, “and I’m deeply grateful to Chiara and the other young women of the Pique Resilience Project for their work to help young people like my daughter.”

Chiara, I’ve watched the videos you and the other women of the Pique Resilience Project have made and I’ve been really impressed with how articulate you all are. This is something new: a group of detransitioned/desisted women starting a YouTube channel. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired you to do this and how things are going so far?

I was put in contact with Dagny, Helena, and Jesse a few months ago, and we had our first meetup in January. The initial goal was to create an ongoing multimedia project, focused mainly on raising awareness. All four of us have unique experiences and are committed to sharing those in the hopes of informing others about the dangers of automatic gender affirmation and the influences of social media. We also dive in to other factors that fuel dysphoria, and the importance of exploring those before embarking on medical transition.

We’ve had incredible, overwhelmingly positive feedback so far, as well as a ton of opportunities that have arisen for us to expand our platform. Several parents and young people who are questioning their gender have contacted us for advice, and I personally have helped two so far in the process of self-reflecting and moving toward desisting. I’m very excited about the future for us and this project.

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Denise, what are your thoughts about PRP?

Chiara has always done things her own way. She’s tough and intelligent, so in one sense I’m not surprised that she could pull off something this important. And at the same time, what she and the other three women of PRP have created far surpasses what I could ever have imagined five years ago. Their message is one of strength and hope—not only for their primary audience, young people who are questioning their gender, but for parents whose daughters and sons have pursued and/or desisted from a trans identity. Not every young person will desist or detransition, but these women show and tell what that can be like. By joining together as a group, the PRP women are offering an alternative vision that we haven’t seen in quite this way previously (although there have been some really inspiring detransitioners who’ve been writing and vlogging about their experiences for several years now). I really think their insights and experiences will help many people in the years to come—and that includes not only those who detransition/desist and their families, but also others who continue to live as trans-identified people.

Obviously, it’s been a long and sometimes difficult road for both of you, starting with Chiara’s initial announcement that she was trans in late 2014. Let’s jump into that story, starting from the beginning. First, how did Chiara tell you she thought she was trans?

Chiara told me she was trans soon after her 17^th birthday, in a text message consisting solely of a link to an online informed consent clinic that would prescribe testosterone for minors, with parental permission. Medical transition was her goal from the get-go, and pretty much out of the blue. She had never previously said one word about feeling “wrong” as a girl—in fact, quite the opposite. I had thought for quite some time that she was likely a lesbian (which I fully supported), but there had never been any indication that she despised her body or wished she were the opposite sex.

But we had just watched the TV series “Transparent” together, and good liberal that I’ve always been, my initial reaction was “maybe she IS trans.” If she had not abruptly and immediately expressed such an intense interest in testosterone and top surgery, I might not have embarked on a research mission which in rather short order resulted in alarm bells—primarily because I learned the effects of T are mostly irreversible, and I well remembered my own dead-certainties at age 17 that turned out to be mistaken when I got older. Her constant demand for hormones (and later “can I at least have top surgery”?), coupled with my phone calls to some gender therapists, all of whom in so many words told me if she said she was trans, then she was, intensified my skepticism.

When I asked one of the gender therapists how we could know she was trans as opposed to lesbian, she said, “Oh, it is very rare for a trans man to actually be a lesbian. Very, very rare.” Then there was the (very nice) FTM therapist who, when I mentioned Chiara had not had a full-on relationship yet, said, “A lot of trans teens just skip that step” and added “he’d” be welcome at the next trans teen support group that week. I actually did schedule an appointment with this therapist, as well as signed her up for the group, until my crash online course in all things trans made me think better of it and cancel. Not long after, Chiara and I together found a therapist who used a mental-health (vs. “affirmative”) model and agreed to work with Chiara without enabling medical transition.

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Chiara, why do you think you came to believe you were transgender? What forces were acting on you?

At the time, I of course believed that I was “a man trapped in a woman’s body,” and that I would truly not survive if I was not allowed to transition. (I wasn’t constantly or seriously suicidal, though I had ideation at times—it was more that I saw no future for myself as female; the only option in my mind was living as male. Additionally, suicide rates by trans-identified kids are misrepresented and used to threaten and manipulate people into “validating” identities without question.) In hindsight, however, I was struggling to deal with trauma, internalized homophobia, and social isolation. I was at a vulnerable place, and not all that happy being a girl, so I latched onto a trans identity almost as soon as I first heard about it online.

Was there a lot of talk about suicide online? If so, did that influence you in any way?

There was a large amount, the most notable being the case of Leelah Alcorn, an MtF teenager who committed suicide in 2014. Her death affected me, along with many others, as it was sensationalized and widely held up as a warning to parents: “This is what happens when you don’t let your kid transition.” This mantra continues to be repeated online and everywhere, and perpetuates the idea that suicide is the “only way out” for kids whose parents will not accept their gender identity—this is a false statement that should under no circumstance be peddled to impressionable young people.

What made you feel unhappy about being a girl?

I was dealing with trauma, which caused me to want to escape my body. This, in addition to my resistance to accepting my same-sex attraction, resulted in a rejection of being female.

How did your dysphoria manifest itself? What “triggered” it for you?

It came on in the span of a couple months, but was still a fairly gradual process. The main triggers were my increased usage of social media, which facilitated my exposure to trans ideology and activism, as well as my social isolation and beginning to learn about and come to terms with past trauma. My dysphoria caused me to adopt an appearance that was as masculine as possible—I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, bound my chest, and packed off and on for over a year. I even used the men’s bathrooms in public, and felt good about myself when I passed successfully.

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Denise, as every parent knows who has experienced something similar, hearing your daughter suddenly declare she is transgender and tell you she needs hormones immediately is very stressful. How did you cope?

Starting the website—which was initially a cry into the wilderness, just hoping to find and speak to other parents who were skeptical of their teen’s desire to embark on medical transition—was crucial in helping me to cope with the situation. I suspect there would have been more arguments and difficult times between Chiara and me if I had not had the outlet of writing and finding others online who were in the same boat.

Pretty much all my “in real life” friends at the time were lifelong liberals/lefties like me, who saw (as I had) everything to do with trans activism as purely and simply the next civil rights movement; they hadn’t had a reason to look into some of the more controversial aspects because their lives hadn’t been touched by the issue. So, for the most part, I couldn’t talk to them openly about what was happening in my family.

This was, of course, a very difficult time for Chiara as well. She wanted desperately to transition. Did you make any concessions to her at the time?

I did. At her request, I bought boxer shorts, “men’s” clothing, “men’s” dress shoes, and repeatedly paid for very short haircuts. I was happy to do this, in part, because being “gender nonconforming” in clothing, hairstyles, etc. doesn’t mean a person is actually the opposite sex. I was well aware, however, that these outward expressions of gender meant to Chiara that she was a man (at the time). I drew the line at hormones or surgery, and I didn’t purchase the binder she asked for. (Whether she ever got a binder herself from one of the websites that offer them free, I don’t know.)

What were conversations between you like at the time?

We pretty much had a communication breakdown. Once we were a few months into it, I began to realize that I needed to say as little as possible, because after all, in just a few months, this was all going to be out of my hands (she was 17). Also, parental lectures—or even attempts at meaningful conversation—were becoming counterproductive (that can be true for any parent and teen in conflict, trans-identified or not!). When I did say something, I tried hard to be succinct, instead of going on and on. I would say things like: “You’re a strong, gender-nonconforming young woman. That doesn’t mean you are literally a man. In fact, you could be a role model for other young women in the same boat.” At the time, this all seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Like many parents in this predicament seem to do, I found and looked up to young, detransitioned women who were writing on Tumblr. I thought they somehow had “the answer.” I now know they don’t, and many—if not most—don’t appreciate parents reaching out for help. Nevertheless, I was fortunate to be able to meet two detransitioners I’d discovered online in person when I attended the Michigan Women’s Music Festival in 2015. They were kind enough to reach out to Chiara (with her and their permission) and I remain grateful to them for their generosity.

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Chiara, what turned things around for you? Was there anything that you read or heard that suddenly helped you realize not only that transition was not right for you but that gender identity as a concept was suspect?

At 17, as soon as I graduated high school, I moved to Florida for nine months for an internship on a horse farm. We had very little internet access, and spent most of each day performing physical labor, so I was forced to focus on something apart from trans ideology. Being disconnected from social media, specifically Tumblr and YouTube, allowed me to slowly begin rediscovering myself and my interests and by the time I returned home, I had matured (emotionally, physically, and mentally) enough to return to these social media sites with a critical eye. I found radical feminist blogs, the messages of which resonated with me, and gradually moved away from my trans identity with the support of this new community.

What appealed to you about the radical feminist blogs? What were they saying that resonated with you?

Radical feminism, being focused on women’s issues and liberation, was a breath of fresh air for me in many ways. The people writing about it online were fiercely protective of women and passionate about enacting change. The main points that appealed to me were their acceptance and celebration of lesbian and bisexual women, and their tendency to think critically and question problematic narratives—specifically prostitution, pornography, and, of course, transgenderism. They opened my eyes to the glaring issues behind trans activism (puberty blockers, misogyny, homophobia, women’s loss of rights, etc.), which allowed me to finally realize that I wanted nothing to do with the movement, and the best way for me to fight it was to simply exist as myself and stand up for other women. I definitely do not agree with every aspect of the ideology, but I believe it is the one of the only movements that truly cares about helping women.

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Denise, are you a radical feminist?

I like to think of myself as a “rational” feminist. Some of the tenets of radical feminism seem more ideological than logical—for example, the notion that humans are essentially “blank slates,” with all gendered behaviors being only social constructs. But there is a large body of replicated, cross-cultural scientific evidence that there is a biological basis to typical sex differences, and even some typical gendered behaviors, many of which are rooted in evolutionary selective pressures. Again, we’re talking about averages; individuals should never be assumed to be average. Being gender-atypical doesn’t mean anyone’s brain is mistakenly stuck in the wrong body. Historically, some of the more interesting, accomplished humans have been atypical for their sex. And, importantly, many—though not all—gender-atypical kids grow up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual adults. This has long been well understood, though in the last few years, the trans movement has obscured this knowledge. There is a very real (even if unintended) risk that proto-LGB kids will be unnecessarily medicalized before they are old enough to realize and accept their sexuality. We already see many detransitioned lesbians who themselves say their difficulty accepting their sexual orientation contributed to their transient trans identification. (Of the essays I’ve written, I am perhaps most proud of the one I wrote on this subject, “The surgical suite: Modern-day closet for today’s teen lesbian”).

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Chiara, you mentioned that internalized homophobia played a role in your belief that you were trans. Why were you more comfortable identifying as a trans man than a lesbian?

In many ways, it felt easier for me to exist as a gender-conforming, “typical” man, as opposed to a gay, gender-nonconforming woman. As I mentioned in my recent interview, I think a lot of my desire to transition was based on a fantasy version of myself as a man—I was convinced that all discrimination against me would disappear as soon as I became a straight man. I also believe that our society is still largely heteronormative and somewhat homophobic, and gay people are often subjected to judgement, hate crimes, and insults. This is something many young people begin realizing in their teenage years, and it is understandably tempting to want to escape those experiences.

Did you talk to a therapist about your questions about gender identity? Did you find the therapy helpful or counterproductive?

I have been in and out of therapy for many years. It was incredibly helpful for me in many regards, and I strongly believe it should be utilized to determine factors contributing to dysphoria, before medical transition is permitted. The two long-term therapists I’ve had in the last few years have allowed me the space to explore mental health, come to terms with past events, and build the skills necessary to advance my life in the direction that I want. I hope that therapists will begin to educate themselves on both sides of gender ideology, and use this knowledge to encourage critical thinking in anyone who may be questioning a trans identity.

What were the things you think your mom got right in parenting you during the period when you identified as trans, and what do you think she got wrong? What could she have done better?

I am grateful that she never allowed medical transition, as I am sure I would have regretted it. I also appreciate that she put me in contact with a couple of detransitioned women, as well as paying for therapy for me to discuss issues behind my dysphoria.

But there were times in which I felt that my privacy was invaded, and this made it difficult for me to trust her intentions. I also had my phone taken away. While I understand that she truly felt that was for the best, I do not believe that trying to cut me off from the internet was helpful—I had multiple other ways to access it without my phone anyway, so this only caused resentment and anger on my end. I do understand that this was a very stressful time for her, but I believe that she could have been more careful about how she phrased several things, and stepped back to look at how some of her actions would impact me in the future.

Teens and their parents often have a hard time communicating with each other, even when the trans issue isn’t on the table. Were the arguments you had with your mom around this subject always counterproductive, or did she occasionally say things that stuck with you and helped you (eventually) see things differently? Conversely, do you think your mom was eventually able to understand some of what you were going through and trying to tell her?

At the time, most of our arguments did nothing to change my mind or outlook. At that point in my life, I was reluctant to change my opinions and take advice, especially from my mother. I can look back now and agree with a lot of what she expressed to me, and I do think that some things she said stuck with me and helped me to open my mind to the idea that transition was not the right path for me. I believe that she did eventually understand a lot of what I was feeling, but it was an unfamiliar topic to her at first.

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Denise, do you have any regrets? Were there any things that you wished you had done differently?

I do have regrets about how I handled some things. I was not (and am not) a perfect parent, and I think the increased stress we both experienced during that time damaged our relationship. We’d been very close pre-puberty, but along with the other garden-variety issues that arise for parents and teens weathering adolescence, the trans issue turned the stress-volume up to max. One night, when Chiara was screaming about how awful I was not to approve medical intervention, I screamed back that she should just leave. I immediately wished I hadn’t said it. She didn’t leave, and I never took any steps to kick her out, but I know how much that must have hurt and probably still does. I’ve apologized, but I still wish I could take it back because I never meant it.

Monitoring and restricting her social media and (temporarily) confiscating her phone are things I feel more conflicted about. At the time, it seemed to me that she was being inducted into a cult: the obsessive nature of her wanting “the two Ts” (testosterone and top surgery), scripted language, and a seeming refusal to examine or explore what might be underlying this (as well as a general refusal to talk to me about much of anything) resulted in my feeling desperate to know what was going on inside her, and to try to keep her safe in any way I could. Besides the rumination on being trans 24-7, her grades had dropped from As and Bs to Ds and Fs, she nearly dropped out of high school, she had drifted away from all the friends who had previously been important to her, and totally abandoned all her hobbies and interests.

In an ideal world, I would not have invaded her privacy, and I know from my own teen years how such actions feel like a huge betrayal of trust. Something similar happened to me when I myself was 17. I discovered one day that my dad had searched my closet and confiscated a baggie of marijuana I had hidden beside a diary. I still remember the burning outrage. I confronted my father and for many years could not forgive him. Now, of course, I can understand how worried he was about me and the choices I’d been making. But whether what he did was justified, or whether my similar actions with Chiara were justified? I’m not sure.

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Chiara, on the PRP website, you, Dagny, Helena, and Jesse state plainly that you all experienced rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as described in the paper published by Dr. Lisa Littman last year, but trans activists have tried to dismiss and discredit Dr. Littman’s research, claiming it is based entirely on the claims of bigoted, transphobic parents. Why do you believe that you experienced ROGD? How would you respond to Dr. Littman’s critics?

I believe that ROGD is a very real phenomenon, because I, myself, and many others only began experiencing dysphoria around our teenage years, seemingly in response to significant changes or struggles. I did not begin to have dysphoria until I was a young teenager, and had no desire to transition until I began hearing about others doing so. I became obsessed with the idea that I was a man, and completely fixated on medical transition as the only viable option for me. Since I can look back now and understand that I would not have been happy long-term with that decision, I am very confident in Littman’s study, and believe that discrediting it as “transphobia” is wildly irresponsible. I find it very strange that trans activists see any inkling of criticism as a direct, “violent” attack.

You mentioned that you had no desire to transition until you heard about others doing so. Did your dysphoria increase the more you learned about gender identity and transition?

Absolutely. The more information I consumed on the topic, the more adamant I was that transition was right for me. Other people’s hormonal and surgical results appealed to me at the time, and I desperately wanted that for myself. It was a vicious circle: the more I watched, the more my dysphoria grew, and the more my dysphoria grew, the more I needed to “escape” in the form of this addictive media.

Why do you think so many young people—especially girls—have come to see themselves as transgender?

In many ways, it is incredibly difficult and often painful to exist as a woman in society. Dealing with harassment and strict gender roles is a daily ordeal, and media often portrays us as infantile, sexualized, and unconditionally available to men. Women are targets of assault and murder simply because of their sex—the idea of escaping that, which transitioning to male promises to provide, is very attractive.

What do you think it will take to wake people up to the harm that’s being done in the name of gender ideology?

Honestly, I think this is already starting to happen. The response to our project alone has been big (over 20K video views in the first two weeks) and overwhelmingly positive, which gives me hope that more and more people are beginning to realize the negative effects of this movement. Also, many of the young people who transitioned when the movement was beginning to really take hold a few years ago are now detransitioning, and their voices are growing in number. I am grateful to be part of a project to raise them up, because I believe those experiences are very important and should be shared in order to educate others.

Trans activists claim that only a tiny percentage of people who transition regret their transitions. Do you think the number is this low?

No, I believe that the percentage is actually fairly high. People claim that less than 3% of trans people detransition, but since detransitioners are routinely silenced and discounted, I am hesitant to accept that number as accurate. Also, this estimate generally fails to account for people who desist–that is, abandon a trans identity before taking hormones or undergoing surgery.

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Denise, do you agree?

Yes. And with organizations like Gender Spectrum promulgating immediate affirmation of youth trans identities, we’re likely to see more in the future. Plus, many who detransition don’t return to their gender therapists/MDs, nor are they being systematically tracked otherwise. And regardless of how many detransitioners there are, they matter. Their voices matter. And it shouldn’t be seen as “transphobic” or even controversial to ask that we try—as a society, as parents, as clinicians, even as trans activists—to minimize the number of people who will later feel they were harmed by believing they were trans; particularly people who were irreversibly harmed by medical intervention they later come to regret.

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Chiara, what would you say to the activists and legislators who are pushing for legislation that would make it illegal for therapists to encourage clients to explore why they feel they must transition?

I think that would be blatant malpractice. The job of a therapist is to help people overcome issues and develop the best life possible, and transition is not always the right way forward. This would also prevent therapists from digging into deeper issues behind dysphoria. If this law were to go into effect, if would only increase the number of young people who would later detransition.

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Denise, why have you decided to “come out” now?

After Chiara and her compatriots launched Pique Resilience, I realized we were in a new phase—both as mother and daughter, as well as in the greater effort to raise awareness about the complex issues to do with youth transition. Until now, it was of utmost importance to me to protect Chiara’s identity and privacy, so very little information about her was ever included in anything I wrote. Her courage in bringing her story to light has inspired me to step forward as well. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, anyway. Many families have had very similar experiences to our own, and the more of us who are able to speak publicly about our lives, the better.

I suspect detractors might claim the only reason Chiara desisted is because of something I’ve done or said to somehow cajole her into doing it; that she’ll “retransition” in the future. Or maybe: 4thWaveNow is the master puppeteer pulling the strings of the Pique Resilience Project. But Chiara is an adult, supporting herself, living on her own, making her own decisions. And I’m pretty sure the other three women in PRP are also very much their own persons! As far as our family situation, I feel quite certain that if Chiara had decided to pursue transition (and she told me she absolutely planned to, as recently as age 18), she’d have gone ahead with it. Then I’d be in the position of coming to terms with that decision, which I know I would have. She’s my child. I’ll love her no matter what she does, whether I agree with it or not.

Trans activists have worked very hard to deny the experiences and observations of families impacted by an abrupt onset of gender dysphoria. Just a couple of days ago, trans activist and writer Julia Serano penned a long Medium article, as well as a tweet thread, in which she paints ROGD as some sort of coordinated, grand conspiracy cooked up by bigoted parents and backwards clinicians. It’s strange that activists like Serano (along with many others) refuse to believe there could be some young people (the majority of them female) who identify as trans due to social contagion and other issues (which Chiara and the other women of Pique Resilience Project have eloquently talked about in their videos and social media postings). Why can’t Serano et al understand that people are talking about their own lived experiences? The fact is, if there’s any mutual effort on the part of those of us who’ve experienced or observed ROGD, it’s simply a “grand conspiracy” to tell the truth.

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Chiara, what would you say to trans activists who might claim your mother has brainwashed you into believing that you’re not trans? (They tend to say that about any parent whose kid desisted.)

Parents are often demonized, called “abusive,” and beaten down by trans activists if they dare to question whether transition is right for their child. Parents are generally not in the habit of brainwashing their children—rather, most want to protect and support them. Asking your child to think critically and consider other factors at play is not abusive, it’s just parenting. Further, I am an adult fully capable of making my own decisions and formulating my own opinions. My decision to desist was mostly due to my own experiences and research, not a result of my mother forcing an ideology.

When did you first learn that your mom was the founder of 4thWaveNow?

Just a few months ago, not long after we started Pique Resilience, and years after I desisted. I was very surprised, mainly because I had no idea that my mom was running a blog at all, let alone one of this size. I completely respect and support all the work that has gone into it; it’s become one of the largest and most-visited sites providing an alternate viewpoint, and I’m grateful for the support it gives to both young people and their parents.

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Denise, do you have anything to say to those who criticize parents when they do not immediately affirm their children’s belief that they are transgender?

One of the most pernicious things trans activists and some gender clinicians do is try to drive a wedge between young trans-identified people and their families. While there are certainly abusive parents, the vast majority of us who have serious reservations about the medicalization of our gender-atypical youth do love and care about our kids and only want the best for them. We do our best, given our own personalities and weaknesses (as well as our strengths). While the time during which Chiara believed she was trans was very difficult for us and brought out the worst in us both, I’m very grateful we have moved toward healing the rifts between us, though we have further to go. Above all, I’m very glad that Chiara and the other three intrepid women of the Pique Resilience Project have started their own effort to help young people like them.

When it comes to how this increase in young (mostly) women who believe they’re men will ultimately play out, no one knows; it’s going to unfold over the next few years and decades. But I can say this: the future of the movement to raise awareness about this issue does not belong to 4thWaveNow, or parents. It belongs to resilient young women like Chiara and her friends and colleagues. They are the ones who will make the world a better place for their generation and the next generation of gender-atypical young people to come.

Acts of love

Posted on February 15, 2019 by 4thwavenow

by Inga Berenson

It was a hot summer morning. I was nine or ten, riding my pony from our farmhouse toward the barn where my father was working. This was the first time I had gone riding since a string of bad falls had caused me to lose my nerve, but I loved riding, and was determined to be back in the saddle.

So far, things were going well. The gravel road between our house and the barn was about a mile long, and I was halfway there. My usually cantankerous little mare was being perfectly docile, but I was approaching the house of a quirky neighbor who kept a menagerie of animals – donkeys, zebras, buffalo, and a gaggle of dogs that barked at every passing car. I was mostly worried about the dogs and how my pony would handle the barking – it sometimes made her nervous, but there was no dog in sight as I rode past the house.

I was thinking I was home-free until I heard a commotion from the paddock across from the neighbor’s house. I looked around and saw a giant draft horse push through a dilapidated wire fence and come galloping toward me, neighing and grunting in what I later understood to be equine lust. In an instant he was beside us, rearing and pawing his great, hairy hooves in the air near my face. I thought that was the end of me and my pony.

Then all of a sudden I heard my mother’s voice. I looked around and found her running toward us, yelling and hurling gravel at the big horse. She distracted him just long enough for me to hop off. My pony raced off into the safety of some low-hanging trees, and the neighbor came running out of his house to capture his oversized horse.

As I stood there, weak-kneed from my near-death experience, I saw my mother’s car parked a few yards down the road, the driver’s-side door still open, and I knew what had happened. She had been worried about me, so she had followed from a distance, just to be sure I made it okay.

Illustration by Chiara (Twitter: @chiaracanaan)

I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately. It was about four years ago that my daughter first told me she thought she might be trans. I believe her story is a classic example of social contagion, since she had never expressed any discomfort with her sexed body until she got Tumblr and DeviantArt accounts and began spending all her time on her phone. Since then, I have felt a bit like my mother, standing in the middle of the road, hurling gravel, trying to protect my daughter from an ideology that has sought to convince her that she was born in the wrong body.

I am fortunate. Unlike some of my friends with kids who became convinced they were trans, I feel reasonably confident that my daughter will not medically transition. She desisted from a social transition more than a year ago, and she told me recently that she no longer identifies as trans. However, she still has many friends in the gender-queer community, and I know we’re not out of the woods. When she turns 18 in a few months, she may exercise her right as a legal adult to start medical transition, and there won’t be anything I can do to dissuade her. This worries me greatly. So, as a matter of self-preservation as much as anything, I’ve been asking myself, what if she does transition? How will I cope?

The short answer is I don’t know, but I certainly won’t disown her or ask her to leave my home. In fact, of all the many gender-critical parents I know who have trans-identified children, I know absolutely no one who has disowned their child or kicked them out of the house. I’m sure it must happen, but I don’t know any. Of course, all parents say things they regret – especially during the highly charged arguments with teens who are demanding immediate medical interventions. In one such argument, one of my best friends even told her then-trans-identified daughter to get out, but she immediately regretted it, took it back, apologized, and asked her daughter to stay (which she did). I also know at least three mothers who have lost contact with their trans-identified children, but in those cases, the kids themselves severed the relationship, not the parents. In fact, the mothers continue to try to reconnect with their children, despite being repeatedly rebuffed.

Although I know I won’t disown or reject my daughter, I also know that I won’t affirm her decision to transition. It’s not really that I’m deciding not to; I simply cannot bring myself to do it. It would be dishonest for me to call her my son when I don’t believe she’s male. Plus, I don’t think it’s helpful for me to allow my daughter to dictate how I define words like “male” and “female.” Does this mean I love my child less than the mothers who affirm their children?

Since I cannot occupy the mind of any of these other mothers, I guess I’ll never know. But I do know that my love for my child is so deep and strong that the idea that she has been misled to believe that her body is wrong depresses me to no end. I am angry — bitterly, bitterly angry that this ideology has taken up almost four years of her life so far and god only know how many more years it may take.

Maybe the reason some parents affirm their children’s transgender claims and some parents question them lies in the parents’ own experiences of puberty. When my daughter felt embarrassed about shopping for bras at 13, I was not surprised because I remembered that feeling vividly. I hated it. I hated knowing that people could see my developing breasts and the outline of the bra straps under my shirt. I especially hated the very feminine bras – the ones with lots of lace and little pink bows where the cups joined in the middle. They made me feel vulnerable and exposed and miserable. I also know I got over it – for the most part, anyway.

Trans activists claim that the number of trans-identifying people has increased so rapidly not because there are more trans people today than in the past but because society has become more accepting and they are no longer afraid to come out. But if this were the case, why are the greatest increases occurring in the population of female teens? Why aren’t middle-aged women like me queuing up for hormones now that we can come out? To me, the answer is clear. Women like me had a chance to come to terms with our bodies and accept ourselves as we are. My daughter didn’t have that chance because an insidious ideology was waiting in the wings to convince her that her feelings about her body meant that it was wrong.

But maybe the mothers who readily affirm their children’s trans self-diagnoses didn’t have this experience at puberty. Maybe they were lucky enough to sail smoothly and happily from childhood through puberty, unambiguously pleased to watch their bodies go from child to woman – so, when their children expressed unhappiness about their developing bodies, they were genuinely puzzled and could only agree their kids must have been born in the wrong body.

Whatever the reason for the difference between those parents and me, I resent the fact that the mainstream media will tell their stories, but they won’t tell mine. I resent the fact that my daughter looks at those parents and wishes I could be like them — because I never can be.

If my daughter does eventually decide to take hormones or undergo surgery to medically transition, the only way I could fully support it is if I had clear scientific evidence that she had a condition requiring such an invasive treatment. If there were a definitive medical test – a brain scan, for example – that proved my child’s distress arose from an incongruence between her brain and the rest of her body that could only be alleviated by transition, I think I could go along with it. But there is no such test because individual brains don’t break down neatly into pink and blue categories. Sexually dimorphic brain features are subject to averages just like other physical characteristics. In general, men are taller than women, but if you plot their height on a bell curve, you will see lots of overlap between the sexes. You’ll also see outliers on the “tails” of the bell curve—6’4’ women, and 5’1” men. This is true with psychological and neurological traits, too. Also, trans activists justify their born-in-the-wrong-body claims by pointing to a few studies which indicate that the brains of trans-identified people are more similar in some respects to the opposite sex than their natal sex. But these studies do not control for many factors, including sexual orientation, and we know already that people who are same-sex-attracted have some brain features more similar to the opposite sex.

Without tools to reliably predict who will benefit from transition, I simply cannot support medical interventions for young people whose brains have not fully matured (generally understood to be around age 25). I want desperately for my daughter to accept her body and to avoid the irreversible changes and the many health risks that are inherent in medical transition. But she will soon be 18 years old, and she will have the power to transition no matter what I want – even though she is still at least seven years away from brain maturity. There’s a real chance that she could. Would that be the end of the world?

No, I know that it wouldn’t. As worried as I am about this outcome and as fixated as I’ve been on preventing it for four years, I do have to remind myself that her transitioning would not be the worst thing that could happen. Plus, I will still be able to hold onto the hope that she will detransition before the hormones can cause too much damage to her long-term health. Every day it seems that I read about a new detransitioner. More and more young people are saying enough is enough. They are reclaiming their bodies and their lives, and I find their stories inspiring.

A few days ago I watched a video in which four young women, who formerly identified as trans, answer questions about their experience and share their insights. Their video gave me hope for a couple of reasons. First, they acknowledge the role that social contagion plays in driving the huge increase in kids (especially girls) who are identifying as trans today. It takes real courage to speak up and share stories that contradict the popular understanding of why people transition. These stories not only challenge the narrative of why people transition; they also show that, for many young people, transition does not make their lives better.

But another reason that video gave me hope is that I can see these girls are all okay. In fact, they’re better than okay. They are strong and smart, and they are living with purpose and a sense of future. They reminded me that transition – even medical transition — is not the end of the world. Three of the girls were on hormones for more than a year. Their voices are changed, but they are healthy and well, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Detransitioners have been giving hope to me and other parents for many years, but the relationship between the groups has been difficult at times. Some detransitioners have understandably resented how parents sometimes try to use their stories as cautionary tales to warn their kids about the dangers of medical transition. A big part of the problem is the language people sometimes use when talking about medical transition. For example, referring to the bodies of detransitioners as “mutilated,” their voices as “broken,” or their stories as “heart-breaking” has not been helpful.

One of the most powerful and positive messages of the gender-critical movement is that no one is born in the wrong body. Gender-critical parents like me are constantly trying to encourage our kids to accept their bodies just as they are. Yet I believe we need to extend that same acceptance to all bodies – even bodies post transition. To feel good about themselves and their lives, all people need to be able to accept themselves physically and mentally, and words like “mutilated” don’t help them do that.

Online, the interactions between detransitioners and parents has also been a little rocky at times because parents sometimes overstep boundaries that detransitioners need to be healthy. Parents often reach out to detransitioners for help with their personal situations – to seek parenting advice and guidance. But most detransitioners who speak out publicly are quite young; they don’t have children and they aren’t parenting experts, nor is it fair to saddle them with the responsibility of helping us. They’re dealing with their own issues, are often most focused on helping each other, and they don’t (and can’t be expected to) understand the situation and struggles of parents. What’s more, many have written or vlogged about their own, often fraught, relationships with their own parents, so when other parents reach out to them, they can feel “triggered” by being reminded of their own family relationships. These young people are still maturing and processing what their transition and detransition mean to them. They need time and space to be able to do that, and desperate appeals from parents they’ve never met, for help with kids they don’t know, could interfere with that process.

Also, detransitioners are not a monolithic group. Not everyone who detransitions regrets transitioning. Deciding that transition is not right for you and regretting transition are not necessarily the same thing. Detransitioners who do not regret their transition naturally resent it when people use their stories to make a case against medical transition.

At the same time, those detransitioners who are willing to speak out about the harms of transitioning and the power of reidentifying with your birth sex can be powerful allies in the fight to raise awareness about the regressiveness of gender ideology and potential harms to other young people – whether we’re trying to raise this awareness in the culture at large or just in our own homes. I hope my daughter will listen to the stories of some of these detransitioners and decide to first try some other strategies for becoming comfortable in her natural body.

If, however, she does eventually transition, I hope she can be honest with herself about it and accept that she can never be male – however much she may be able to look like one. I follow several gender-critical trans women on Twitter. Although they have sought medical intervention for palliative reasons, they acknowledge they are male and support sex-based protections for women. They don’t demand that the world repeat the mantra that trans women are women. They have a healthier outlook on the world and a healthier sense of self because they aren’t trying to change anyone’s perception of material reality (like male and female). I appreciate the courage they are showing. Their stance as gender critical has cut them off from the support of the larger trans community, which regards them as heretics and traitors. And it must be noted that they’re not universally accepted among women who are gender critical, some of whom regard them with suspicion.

Of course, my daughter may never come to recognize the bill of goods she’s been sold. She may transition, remain transitioned, and remain committed to an ideology I find regressive. If that’s the case, it will be my life’s task to love her and support her in spite of these things. But that doesn’t mean I will ever abandon my own sense of reality, because doing so would be inauthentic, and parents should not have to subordinate their own authenticity to their children’s quest for it.

What I can do is look after her, help her financially to achieve non-transition-related goals, cook her favorite foods, hold her hand when she’s feeling down. I can even go out of my way to avoid gendered language so as not to provoke or upset her, but I simply cannot utter beliefs I don’t hold. Our relationship needs to be based on mutual respect. I must respect her autonomy, but she must also respect mine.

Also, I want my daughter to understand that it’s ok for other people (even her parents!) to disagree with her and hold different views; that doesn’t mean we don’t love her. Far from it. I want my daughter to be strong and resilient enough to face the reality that life will be full of other people who disagree with her for any number of reasons. I’d rather she learn resilience than fragility that is triggered whenever she encounters disagreement or disapproval from others.

I feel such a sense of solidarity with the other gender-critical moms I’ve met here on 4thWaveNow, on Twitter, and in real life because they’ve seen what I have seen – that this ideology has made our children less resilient, it has alienated them from their families, their former friends, and, worst of all, their own bodies. Most of us have watched as our children went from well-adjusted kids to teens preoccupied with online worlds, feeling oppressed and seeking medical transition.

For our efforts to call attention to the regressive nature of the ideology, we have been called “bigots,” “transphobes,” even “Nazis.” So-called gender therapists gaslight us and pretend to know our children better than we do. And some journalists, blind to their sexism, have dismissed us (in one case, as merely a “bunch of mothers”), despite the advanced degrees and professional careers many of us hold, not to mention the voluminous research we have done to educate ourselves about this particular subject.

And, yes, we have made mistakes. We are certainly not perfect. There are so many things I have said to my daughter that I wish I could unsay or at least say differently. There are so many times when my strong emotional reaction to things she was telling me created a barrier and shut down communication between us. Of course, she has said things that hurt me too, but as her mother and the adult in the relationship, I rightfully bear a larger share of the burden to try to make things right between us.

I can’t change the past, of course. What’s done is done. But I do know this: My mother has been dead for more than 20 years, but I think about her every day. She was far from a perfect parent, but she loved me fiercely. The love she gave me in the first 30 years of my life still sustains me today. I know that now, in a way I didn’t fully understand when I was younger.

I don’t know what the future holds for my daughter. My fervent hope is that she will reject the idea that she needs to change who she is, but whether or not she does, I hope one day she will look back on my resistance to her transition as the act of love that it is. I hope that her knowledge and memory of the fierceness of my love will sustain her, as my mother’s sustains me.

What I wish the Atlantic article hadn’t censored

Posted on June 25, 2018 by 4thwavenow

by Jenny Cyphers

Jenny Cyphers is a homeschooling parent. She has been writing about that experience for many years, in various online forums. Jenny has been married for 24 yrs to the father of their two children, one adult and one teenager. They all live, work, and create, in Oregon. Jenny and her teen daughter were recently interviewed for an article about gender-dysphoric youth in The Atlantic.

4thWaveNow editorial note: We are grateful for Jesse Singal’s reporting on this complex issue and appreciate that he included the seldom-heard voices of teens who desisted from a trans identity, and their parents, in his article. We are aware that in some circles, the discussions we host on our site are considered transphobic and that we, a loosely-organized group of parents writing on this site, have been defamed as a “hate group” by those on the extreme end of the activist spectrum.

As always, we encourage those interested in the issue to read as widely as possible so they may come to their own conclusions. We contend that by leaving out all mention of 4thWaveNow, The Atlantic not only failed to offer parents the alternative opinions and resources we offer, but they also contributed to an environment that, due to censorship of critical voices, continues to propagate the distorted idea that cautiousness around medical interventions for minors is inherently harmful to trans-identified people in general.

I knew, when I agreed to be interviewed for The Atlantic article “When Children Say They’re Transgender,” that some of my words might be cut, or changed in ways I didn’t intend. But Jesse Singal is a good journalist. He’s personable and honest and willing to take on some really difficult subjects. He digs deep, records, researches, cites sources and ties things together in a nuanced way. Along with editors, he carefully adds and discards words, phrases, sources, quotes, and relevant ideas that lend themselves to the overall picture of what people will read and take away from what they’ve read. That’s what good journalism is.

There are a few things about our story and the way it was presented in The Atlantic that I’d like to clarify. First and foremost, the last-minute editorial decision to unlink the essay “A Careful Step into a Field of Landmines,” I’d written for 4thWaveNow, combined with removal of all mention of the site, needs to be highlighted because in doing so, The Atlantic failed to include important resources created to help parents support their gender dysphoric and nonconforming youth. The result is an article focused on the “situation” of “trans kids” that obscures parent-led examination and support for youth to explore identity without harmful medical interventions, the consequences of which can last a lifetime.

There are more choices for families than to either support their teens’ requests for pharmaceuticals and surgery on the one hand, and disowning or otherwise invalidating their interest in exploring their identity and nonconformity on the other. The Atlantic editors’ choice to remove 4thWaveNow from the discussion in effect denied parents access to important analysis that offers a balanced and middle ground.

The Atlantic photo editor had to dig deep in the several photos we provided to find the pensive one they chose for their article. Here’s one my daughter likes better; she suggested it be included with this post.

Part of my agreeing to contribute to this important debate is helping to create a platform. This website is such a platform. In talking with Jesse, I was upfront about my beliefs, which in part have been informed by 4thWaveNow and the great many array of voices shared here. It isn’t a monolith. Some of us are very liberal, left-leaning people in liberal left-leaning parts of the country, doing liberal left-leaning activities. Some of us are middle-of-the road, a minority of us are conservative, some of us are doctors, therapists, professors, and teachers. Some of us have allowed full social transition to give space to figure things out while still not agreeing to medical transitioning, and some have not. Excluding mention of 4thWaveNow, a site that gets 60K hits a month, fails to tell the whole story. Why do that? Why leave out one of my main sources of information and the ways that information helped me help my child?

Two of the most important aspects of my family’s experience that are not adequately addressed in the Atlantic article, are: 1) my daughter was given a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, so she was just as “truly trans” as the next kid, and 2) it was my insistence that my child wait to medically transition, not her therapist’s. My teen’s therapist, Laura Edwards-Leeper, listened to me and agreed. We were lucky. While there are some cautious, thoughtful providers, the current situation in the US is that there is also no oversight. The most vocal professionals are firmly in the affirmation camp which believes, without any long-term data to validate, that withholding hormonal interventions is tantamount to abuse.

I didn’t know, going into Delta’s first appointment, what the outcome would be. That’s how difficult this is for parents; we have no idea what the outcome will be when we have very “insistent, consistent, and persistent” children requesting immediate medical interventions. It’s a matter of luck to find a therapist who respects parents’ knowledge of their children, who takes parental concerns and insights seriously, and who are not afraid to support slow, cautious progression.

While many transgender activists argue that they understand our children better than we do, there is no evidence to support their claim. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is seen primarily, although not exclusively, in natal females during puberty. It is important to understand that what separates my daughter and many of the kids of 4thWaveNow parents, is this: None of these kids experienced distress over their sexed bodies until they came into contact with the idea that there might be something wrong with them. In other words, the dysphoria is what was “rapid onset,” not necessarily their gender atypicality. These are not kids with “early-onset,” nor do they resemble later in life transitioning people who frequently claim to have always “felt like” a girl but were too afraid or oppressed by family dynamics to admit their feelings. Then, making wide sweeping projections of their own experiences, they mark our children as being in need of the help they believe they should have had. With our kids, as with the group of young people described in Lisa Littman’s survey where ROGD was first named, their dysphoria set in quickly during puberty, often after spending hours online watching/reading others discuss their distress.

Another outlandish claim (made repeatedly by some activists and “affirming” clinicians) is that we simply missed all the signs our children were suffering earlier. I can assure you that, as a homeschooling mom who spent all day every day with my daughter, she never thought she was or wanted to be a boy prior to encountering the idea from transgender kids in her social circle. In fact, between ages 9-11, she was often “misgendered” (referred to as “he” or “him”) and hated it. It saddens me that these activists experienced such awful childhoods. However, their childhoods seem to have been negatively influenced by the religious fundamentalism and/or abusiveness of their parents; their childhoods do not remotely resemble the experiences of my daughter or the many other young people experiencing ROGD whom I’ve met.

Teens and tweens with ROGD often meet all the clinical diagnostic criteria for transitioning. They are often “insistent, persistent, and consistent” for more than six months, or in our case, for two years. Teens with ROGD also typically meet the clinical threshold for gender dysphoria, as mine did. It’s in her medical file. That’s correct, my “never really trans kid” had a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria under the DSM-V. This is what we hope others understand: our kids are suffering, they hate their bodies, they want and need help. In many cases, our kids had trouble making friends, experienced some form of earlier trauma, and struggle in other important ways, completely unrelated to gender, that should not be overlooked or seen as secondary to their dysphoria.

I know, because I was in pro-transitioning parent support groups, that parents are going to “gender specialists” and demanding medical interventions for their children without thoroughly considering why their children feel the way they do. I know, because I’ve heard from parents, that some therapists will give the green light to medical pathways without addressing any mental health issues. Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who treats 900 youth at her LA clinic, is quoted in Singal’s article as saying that she “believes that therapy can be helpful for many TGNC young people, but she opposes mandating mental-health assessments for all kids seeking to transition.” As many 4thWaveNow parents and teens will tell you, this attitude denies young people the opportunity to deeply explore why they want to alter their bodies and shuts down learning about other non-medical means of managing their distress.

When I was approached to do an interview, I needed to carefully consider my motivation for doing so, and if I should agree to discuss my family’s situation at all. Ultimately, I agreed because people need to hear that there are other ways to support trans-identifying kids. Gender dysphoria is very real and it hurts. My child’s life wasn’t easy because of the intense pain of GD. I knew there had to be answers other than what I saw everywhere around me, that suggested agreeing to medical interventions was the loving and kind thing to do, and that these interventions were harmless and helpful. I agreed to be interviewed because I wanted to highlight for other parents that there are other choices: most notably, offering support (buying clothing, getting haircuts, using a new name, finding a decent therapist) while also saying “I don’t think there is anything incongruent about your body/feelings.” The Atlantic axed this part of our story, the part where parents can offer tremendous support for their children without ever setting foot in a gender clinic in search of medical interventions.

I used to be a lot more open to the idea of transitioning children, in part because I know and like many transgender people. It wasn’t until I found that in the US, girls as young as 13 are getting mastectomies, that I began to question gender affirming medicine. In the new genderist language it’s called “chest,” “top,” or “confirmation” surgery. It sounds so much nicer than a double mastectomy, almost positive and pleasant. Cutting healthy body parts off of children should not be a thing. Ever. That was the moment I decided I would never stop talking about this.

My part of the interview with Jesse Singal–although about my daughter–was really more about how to support, in general, a child going through this very difficult experience. It is challenging, if not impossible, to find places to discuss supporting teens as they explore their identity in non-medical ways. 4thWaveNow is the only US-based resource that allows this. We need to talk about how to support gender non-conforming kids; things like buying clothing from the boys’ department if you have a daughter, or buying girl clothing if you have a son. My part of the interview wasn’t aimed at kids, but at parents who really need more and better tools for helping their distressed children than the “transition or die” option. Without choices, how can people really make one? Pick one of the two? No thanks.

Someone asked me the other day why I care. Why can’t I just let people do what they want? The answer is really simple. As humans we are guided to protect our young. If our culture fails to do so, each of us have failed to protect our children. This is why there are laws against abusing children, laws preventing minors from smoking or drinking, laws to keep kids from driving, laws for educating children. We can argue against any one of those things, but the cultural “we” have agreed that this is for the good of protecting children from harm, and for promoting welfare. In the US, unlike in other countries, there are no laws or regulations about transitioning children. Until there are, this is up for debate and I’m weighing in.

The fact that so many parents are left with this narrative that there is only one right way to help a confused kid, is what drives a wedge between the parent and child, leaving children vulnerable to self-proclaimed internet “experts”, like Zinnia Jones, who are more than willing to validate their feelings, further dividing parent and child.

Look, I understand that there are some truly not-very-nice parents out there, but we should not be making policy around them. That’s the sort of thing that creates bad case law. Let’s assume that the vast majority of parents want what’s best for their children, even if they have no idea what that looks like.

I was even more puzzled about the Atlantic‘s last-minute editorial decisions when I saw that, not only was any mention of 4thwavenow scrubbed in the final version of the article, but a statement by Jones and reference to Jones’ website were included. Jones has written multiple screeds denying the existence of the rapid-onset dysphoria in adolescent girls that more and more people (including clinicians) are noticing. Further, Jones recommends (on Twitter) that young people secretly obtain puberty blockers online if their parents aren’t onboard.

Unfortunately, many therapists, and others invested in the transgender narrative, seem to be heavily influenced by activists like Zack Ford, an opinion writer for the website Think Progress who, in response to Singal’s article, enunciates the activist-notion that parental concern and insight is irrelevant to the discussion. He writes,

“Whether a parent doubts the legitimacy of a child’s transition has zero relevance to whether transitioning is best for their child. Humoring this doubt is exactly what makes the story so harmful.”

Read that quote again. Read it several times to see just how dismissive it is of parents, the very people transgender and gender non-conforming kids rely on for support. You know–the people who would be signing the informed consent paperwork at the doctor’s office, agreeing to allow doctors to prescribe permanent, sometimes sterilizing, experimental off-label use of medications, and body-altering irreversible surgeries.

The collective, cultural “we” cannot dismiss parents as trivial when we are discussing our children, whom we will protect with our lives. This protective mechanism is the prime role of parents and an important part of being human and all the moral and ethical things that come with it. This is not a divide between liberal and conservative. There are too many divisions in this world, and this country, as it is. This is about whether “we” have an ethical imperative to protect our children. Yes, we need to listen to kids. We also need to listen to parents who are not interested in stifling their children’s interests or gender presentation, but who also know their children better than any therapist ever will.

I hated her guts at the time: A trans-desister and her mom tell their story

Posted on January 18, 2018 by 4thwavenow

Sarah R. is 19-year old lesbian from the US Midwest. She says: “From ages 14 to 16 I believed that because I was gender non-conforming, I was a transgender man. Gender critical theory saved me from potentially mutilating my body irrevocably. Today, I share my story in hopes that other young women can also overcome the hatred we are told to have towards our bodies, and to remain unapologetic about being gender nonconforming females.”

This post originally appeared in a different form on her blog, here. For 4thWaveNow, she expanded some sections, particularly to do with her thoughts about her mother’s role in her temporary identification as a trans man (and her eventual abandonment of that idea). We also invited Sarah’s mother to contribute her own views, which you’ll find in in this updated article. Sarah openly acknowledges how much she detested her mother when she refused to agree to transition, but things are different now.

Sarah R can be found on Twitter here.

by Sarah R.

Tumblr is a cool place: writers, artists, activists. Lots of people find solace there. I tried to, when I first made an account in 2013, when I was still in middle school. Actually, it wasn’t so cool back then. Hordes of young girls like me, with their newfound platform, curated ‘Black-and-white’ blogs (just check out some of the usernames), impressive collections of grey-scaled gifs, a smorgasbord of para-suicidal images: self-harm, handfuls of pills…

Thankfully, vices on Tumblr quickly find themselves replaced by new fads; gone are the days of glamorized self-mutilation– hello, fandom! (My own guilty pleasure was House MD, if anyone’s curious. Dark, dark days.) But like black-and-white blogs before them, these profiles were also quickly replaced. This time? by SJW blogs.

Now, granted, not everything about the new justice craze sucked. For one, it’s where most of my peers and I found Feminism 101, even if it got some things quite wrong (e.g. feminism is for men, too; makeup is empowering; kinky is progressive, etc.), and the general atmosphere of tolerance allowed for young gay teens like me the freedom of expression that wasn’t as safe on Twitter or Facebook at the time. Still, a lot of crazy shit came out of SJW tumblr.

When things like otherkin, fictionkin, and aesthetigender (for full effect, I’m going to have to ask you to go through the pain of scrolling through the whole list on that last one), are accepted as anywhere even near the realm of reality, it’s no wonder that ‘Woman’ has become distorted, conflated, and commandeered.

My own personal attraction to the booming trans trend is obvious in retrospect. Teen girls are taught to hate everything about themselves. None of us can win. Even the thinnest, most clear-skinned, prettiest of girls find an enemy in the mirror. Imagine my horror to look at my reflection and see a fat, short-haired, lesbian staring back. In a world where my style, my interests, and my attractions weren’t fit for a girl, transgenderism offered the perfect solution: Be a boy.

It wouldn’t work, of course. How could it, when all of my problems–the struggle to meet the expectations that society had for me, my depression, my anxiety, my dysphoria, and my dysmorphia, all of my unhappiness–had nothing to do with how I identified and everything to do with what I was: female. Of course, as a 14-year-old, this didn’t occur to me quickly. My transition to ‘boy’ was my ticket out of Self-hatred-Ville, and you’d better believe I was going to take it.

To exactly nobody’s surprise, Tumblr was ecstatic at my ‘realization’. A plethora of congratulations, encouragement, and support was sent my way–something that girl-me never got for being exactly the same as boy-me, save having a different name and pronouns. So of course my new identity felt right. How couldn’t it, when my mannerisms and appearance, which had previously othered me, were now suddenly in congruence with my gender, and my ‘bravery’ was being applauded by all the people I looked up to– both bloggers online and friends in real life.

Something that I feel like a lot of adults get wrong about this phenomenon is that people like me were bullied into identifying as trans, but I don’t think this is the most accurate way to put it. There’s a very specific kind of mental mind-fuck that went on on Tumblr during this time that cultivated the perfect atmosphere for confused, self-hating teens (which is like, all of them) to somehow come to the realization that they’re transgender. First came a kind of twisted rewriting of history, women like Joan of Arc or Christina, Queen of Sweden (who once wrote she was “neither Male nor Hermaphrodite, as some People in the World have pass’d me for.” Interesting… maybe society has always been telling GNC (gender nonconforming) women that they aren’t true women…) now became ‘trans men who didn’t know at the time, because it wasn’t accepted’. By telling GNC women, who weren’t around to ‘defend’ their womanhood, that they were men, is it any wonder those of us who were around started to think we must be men, too? Another thing was the constant validation of trans people. In order for me to become instantly ‘valid,’ all I had to do was be a man. How could I do that? By feeling like one.

What did that feel like? I don’t know, since I didn’t feel like a woman, which I now realize is because I can’t; woman isn’t a feeling. The most harmful message to come out of the cultist ideology of trans rights is that you are x because you feel like x. But in the same way that I didn’t feel working class, or feel like a white person, or feel like a Midwesterner, I didn’t feel like a woman, which according to trans ideology, meant I wasn’t ‘cisgender’, and so from that the leap was easy for me to make: I must be a man. What’s glaringly obvious to me now though is that feeling didn’t play any factor into my status as any of the aforementioned descriptors. I simply was those things, and reality didn’t give a shit whether my feelings aligned or not.

It at the time all seemed very progressive: by ignoring history and biology, we could rewrite reality, and anyone could be anything they wanted (might I remind you of this list once more). What was really going on though was the complete opposite.

First of all, words didn’t have meaning anymore. According to new gender logic, even male and female were fluid. A trans woman was now female by virtue of identifying as ‘woman’. All attempts at any kind of discussion about gender and sex were rendered impossible, because 1. Any disagreement labeled you a transphobe and a TERF, and you were quite literally ostracized, and 2. gender didn’t mean anything anymore (save some mysterious, cryptic feeling that refuses to be defined, apparently).

By the time my mother figured out what was going on with me, I was in deep. Female-to-Male transition videos filled my Youtube suggestions, and I had already decided I would want a metoidioplasty over a phalloplasty (a decision that I now recognize as a desire for my maleness to be real, not a section of skin from my arm or leg, an impossible desire that could never be fulfilled, I know now, because I’m not male). I decided to take my first physical ‘transition’ step by getting a binder. Just one problem– being 14 meant I had no job, and no money. So, I improvised. As a blogger with several thousand followers (nope, I’m not going to link myself, as I would be chased off and/or doxxed in approximately .00023 seconds), I put out a quick plea for help in buying a binder. Within a few hours, a well-meaning follower asked my size and told me it would arrive in a few short days. Unfortunately, or so I thought at the time, I was unable to intercept the package before my mom did.

Accidentally being outed sucks. I remember getting a text from my mom while in school which said something along the lines of ‘We have something important to talk about when you get home,’ which, to nearly any teen, could mean a multitude of terrible things, and exactly zero good things. Throughout this whole story, my mom approached things really well, but I see that in retrospect only. I hated her guts at the time. She picked me up from school and let me marinate in the soul-crushing silence until we were about half-way home. She got straight to the point and told me that she had opened my package and found my binder. I immediately went into panic mode, so I don’t exactly remember how she coaxed a confession of transgender out of me, but it involved a lot of blubbering. She let me know from the get-go that she thought my ‘felt like boy’ spiel was all a load of crap, though to be fair, put it much less insensitively, but asked me to show her videos and literature about it. I did.

She wasn’t impressed.

I remember being afraid that this meant she was now going to make me grow out my short hair, or–god forbid– start wearing dresses, in an attempt to stifle my ‘transness’, but that wasn’t the case. It was hurtful to me that she wouldn’t use my new name or pronouns, but I was allowed to continue to be as GNC as I saw fit, something that I know helped my self-acceptance as a woman today. She made it clear that medical transition was not going to happen, which felt like the end of the world to me. In the same way you wouldn’t tell a schizophrenic that their delusions are real, she took no interest in pretending that male was something that I was, or ever could be. But most importantly, she let me know that that was okay. That I could be masculine, that I could like women, and that I could exist as myself, in my body and that pumping myself full of hormones and cutting off my flesh would change my appearance, but not me. My mom helped me understand that if I was ever going to be happy, it had nothing to do with my pronouns, or my genitals, I had to accept the female, and the woman, that I was.

As I was writing this piece, I asked Mom what she had to say about our journey together:

“When you first told me, I was really lost. I didn’t really even have any idea what [being transgender] meant. I mean, like if it had to do with you being gay or what. Of course the first thing I did afterwards was research it heavily. That scared me even more! The videos [of FTM transitions] you sent me were nice and the people in them seemed happy, but the first thing I thought was ‘what if I lost my daughter’s voice like those mothers did?’

I know at the time you thought I was prejudiced and that’s why I made the choices I did, but I didn’t have anything against transgender people, I just wanted to do the right thing as a parent, and letting you do things to yourself that you could never change even if you felt differently down the road was not the right thing for me to do. But your happiness was the only thing behind my decisions. If you ended up being genuinely transgender and that was the only way you could be happy then I would’ve been able to live with that. I just knew you were too young to be sure about something like that. If by the time you turned 18 and could do what you wanted [medically] you still wanted to get testosterone I wouldn’t have stopped loving you. Of course. I’m glad to still love my daughter more than you could know.

It still keeps me up some nights thinking about ‘what if I had given in?’. The only important thing though is that you are happy now.”

And her advice for parents in similar situations:

“I can’t tell anyone what is the right thing for their child. But it was hard to stay strong in my decision against what other people thought. It was made out like I hated transgender, or that I was abusing my child by not letting her make decisions to cut off her breasts. Stay strong. Wanting what is best for your babies isn’t prejudice. Also, be prepared to be hated by your kid too. Any teenager doesn’t like her mom. Not letting her go to a friend’s house that you know is bad news is enough to make her hate you. Not letting her change her entire body is even bigger.”

Our relationship is wonderful now, but Mom’s right about me hating her back then. And yeah, maybe I would’ve hated her anyways, at least according to her theory that all teens hate their parents, but in my situation, I could name directly and specifically why, and that gave it a lot of power. I remember posting all the time online about how abusive she was for deadnaming me, or not letting me bind, which I now feel terrible about. I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about anything (especially gender things) because I had made up in my mind that she thought my very existence (as a trans person) was invalid. Her resolve was beyond admirable, though, as well as her patience for my angsty bullshit.

Not everyone was so hesitant to accept my identity as my mom, though. As I mentioned, the internet was enthralled, but my friends in real life ate it up, too. Whether intentional or not, most young gay people are in social circles comprised of other gay people. Not all of my friends were necessarily gay, but even the ones who weren’t were into the same SJW ideology as I was. They readily accepted my new trendy name, and did their best to use my pronouns. Even though they messed them up a lot, I wasn’t accosted like when my mom didn’t use the right ones, because I knew that they still thought of my identity as real. In retrospect, their support didn’t help my journey of desisting, but I don’t think they hindered it much either. They were being good friends, and for that I’m grateful.

Almost immediately after my coming out, I was put in therapy. Despite my own desperate requests to go to a therapist who specialized in gender issues, so that I might acquire that coveted letter of recommendation for HRT, I instead was taken to the general therapist I had visited sometime earlier for self-harm issues. At the time, like so many other decisions my mother made, it felt invalidating, and upset me, but also like all of her decisions, I’m now grateful for it. Going to someone who would try to get to the root of my identity and dysphoria and resolving that cause itself instead of validating my mental illness and okaying a lifetime of hormones, mutilation, and sterilization was paramount.

For the first few sessions I was still angry about the therapist choice, but once I began to open up, I was surprised to find the doctor wasn’t dismissive of my feelings like I had thought she would be, but seemed to understand and coaxed a lot of more out of me about my transness than I had thought about myself. The most helpful thing she did for me was make me examine why I identified as a boy, and what that meant. By being asked to define what being a boy felt like without using anything that I already knew was only a stereotype about boys, and my subsequent failure to do so, I eventually came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t be one.

Freeing yourself from the task of climbing a mountain whose peak can never be summited is your only chance of ever actually being happy.

One of the biggest problems I think with being transgender is it comes out of an unhappiness, and that the impossibility of the accepted solution amplifies the unhappiness. Having short hair doesn’t give you an adam’s apple, testosterone injections won’t change your bone structure, a phalloplasty won’t let you produce sperm. The closer you get to the real thing, the bigger the gap between you and being a real male grows. Freeing yourself from the task of climbing a mountain whose peak can never be summited is your only chance of ever actually being happy.

I eventually stopped looking for validation as something I would never be, and started the process of loving myself. There’s no real how-to I can give for overcoming gender dysphoria and accepting your given gender, but there are some tips I can spare.

Firstly, be patient. Whether it’s you or someone you love who is trans, one conversation, experience, or epiphany is not going to change anyone’s mind. Secondly, and this is geared towards trans-identified females: Get into gender critical theory. Liberal feminism tells us that women are oppressed because of their gender, but that isn’t true. We’re oppressed because of our sex, by means of gender. It was hard for me to give up the imaginary solution to my oppression before I understood this. Thirdly, think long and hard about why you feel trans. What is the feeling? What would it feel like to be ‘cis’? If your answer is ‘comfortable with your sex/body’ then hardly a single woman falls under that category. Is it to feel comfortable with the expectations, limitations, and stereotypes of your gender? Once again, nary a single female applies. The hardest and final push for me to ‘detransing’ was realizing and accepting that whatever I was ‘feeling’, it wasn’t ‘boy’. It was dissatisfaction with the constraints of womanhood, as in the stereotypes, expectations, and roles that it accorded me. Understanding that is the most important step in becoming happy with your femaleness.

For a long time, I’ve been hesitant to talk about my experience with trans. I was embarrassed, for one, into being duped by an agenda that wanted to convince me I was something I’m not, nor would ever be. I was afraid, too, of backlash. The climate among my peers these days is such that disagreement of nearly any variance means public ridicule, and being shunned. I thought people might try to tell me that I wasn’t really, truly trans (though no one has seemed to come up with what that means), or that I was just unable to come to accept my transness. I’ve decided I have to cast these doubts aside, though, because there’s something more important at stake: young women learning to love themselves. If I can convince even just one girl to love her body for what it is, and to know that no amount of dissatisfaction with stereotypes, or love for suits and sports, or short hair, or discomfort with her anatomy makes her less of a woman, then any shit cast my way is worth it.

Top gender doc dismisses 203 detransitioned women as “not regretters per se”

Posted on September 3, 2016 by 4thwavenow

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Note: All screenshots in this post were taken from the publicly accessible WPATH Facebook page on 9/3/2016. Please visit the thread in question for full context and to see any edits and/or additions that have been made since this post was published.

UPDATE 9/4/16: Several allegations have been leveled at the writers of 4thWaveNow and Cari in the most recent comments on the WPATH Facebook page. We invite you to read our post, Cari’s survey results, and the WPATH thread, then decide for yourself whether there are any distortions of fact in our reporting.

4thWaveNow would like to address the fact that the parents who create and manage this blog use pseudonyms; we also protect the anonymity of our commenters. All of us are keenly aware that we have no right to expose our children–some of whom have a social media presence–to the harsh light of public scrutiny. Our primary concern is protecting their privacy. And in this age of the Internet, compromising our privacy will compromise theirs. One has only to look at the history of what trans activists have done in their attempts to silence critics in the past, which have included vicious attacks on not only the adults who have spoken out, but at times upon their minor children. We are simply not willing to expose our children to this risk.

If it were possible to have an “honest dialogue” with the activists and public figures who are having such a huge (and in many cases, deleterious) impact on the lives of our children, we would welcome that. If we saw, even once, professionals acknowledging that there is indeed a social contagion going on amongst teenagers; if we heard any of the points we make being honestly engaged, it would be different. Instead, what we get are unceasing ad hominem attacks, professionals and journalists who should know better yelling “TERF!”, and constant accusations that unless we get behind the medical transition of our own children, we are driving them to suicide. This is not an atmosphere for reasoned dialogue. And that is why this blog came to be in the first place.

We will continue to provide a platform for people like Cari and others who have been frozen out of the public discussion on the issue of pediatric transition. Until mainstream journalists are willing to present a more balanced picture of this very serious and increasing trend in Western society, that work will be left to bloggers like us.

Two weeks ago, Cari, a 22-year-old former teen client of TransActive Gender Center in Portland, OR, announced an online survey designed to better understand the experiences of detransitioned women. She has completed work on this phase of her project, and today posted the survey results, with a detailed interpretation, on her blog.

I won’t be going into exhaustive detail about everything the survey revealed; Cari’s blog post provides an excellent write-up and analysis. What I will be doing, instead, is reporting on the reaction (posted on the public WPATH page) of Dan Karasic, MD, top gender specialist and UCSF psychiatrist—which amounts mostly to minimizing the significance of Cari’s work and attempting to discredit several of her most important findings.

Cari’s survey ran for only two weeks, from August 16 – 31. Most surveys recruit participants for months or even years. That over 200 women responded in such a short timeframe should put to rest any notion that “desistance is a myth.” And the fact that the survey was shared on social media means that it likely reached a demographic that most trans activists deny exists: young women who became interested in medical transition due, in part, to social contagion (a phenomenon currently being studied by a researcher at Mt. Sinai). As Cari notes,

“Leaving aside all the other data this provides, the sheer number of responses is pretty amazing. Given that the survey was open for 2 weeks and was shared through a couple of Facebook groups, most of which were private, and Tumblr, I think we can safely say that detransitioners are not quite as rare as some would like to have us think.”

In his Facebook post, Karasic attempts to dismiss the 62% of respondents who said that “political/ideological concerns” were a factor in their decision to detransition– by implying that these concerns are on par with people who reject their own homosexuality due to religious beliefs!

To be fair, Karasic does say that “some exploration” of negative reactions to hormones is appropriate (albeit in the no-gatekeeping, informed consent model). But comparing these women’s thought processes to evangelical Christianity? This is an astounding leap. “Political/ideological” concerns could mean any number of things, including that these women began to think more critically; that they began to question some of the rhetoric of transgender ideology and came to realize that they were, in fact, women–no matter how fervently they once believed otherwise. In fact, this is rather the opposite of someone going back in the closet because their religion told them they were evil sinners.

But that’s not even the worst thing about Karasic’s opening volley: He fails to mention that respondents could choose more than one reason for deciding to detransition. It’s either a willful or clueless misinterpretation of the data to imply that the only–or even the main— reason these women detransitioned was because of ideological concerns.

Of at least equal significance is the fact that 59.4% of respondents found alternative ways to cope with their dysphoria. For any other situation involving drastic medical interventions, the possibility of an alternate solution or “cure” would be of great interest. But no one on that WPATH Facebook thread is celebrating; in fact, they don’t even mention this key finding.

Karasic also dismisses the survey as “skewed” because it was posted in forums where people critical of transition could easily find it. This is rich. The few studies we are beginning to see of trans children and teens are being conducted by researchers using their own patients—children who have been socially and medically transitioned by parents and clinicians heavily invested (ideologically and financially) in the business of pediatric transition. And Cari’s survey looked at detransitioned people who, by definition, are rather more likely to be critical of transition in general; such an obvious point seems to be lost on Karasic and the other commenters who pile on to say the sample is “unrepresentative.” Unrepresentative of what?

In a followup comment, Karasic plays the well-worn “they weren’t really trans” card with another misread of the survey’s data.

What? A whopping 48% of the women in Cari’s survey formerly identified as trans man/FTM—nearly half.

It’s odd to see how easily Karasic discounts this group of women, given that “informed consent” based on self-reported identity is the standard of care he and others at WPATH increasingly support.

But here’s where Karasic’s reaction gets really interesting. Cari’s survey found that 42% formerly identified as nonbinary or genderqueer. So that’s 90% who did not identify as female. Just from reading Karasic’s comment, we might think he would not support transition for those 42%. Yet only a few months ago, he argued that medical transition should be freely available, via informed consent, to people who identify outside the binary.

Which is it, then? These detransitioned women weren’t really trans, so they goofed—but how can they have goofed, when Karasic actively promotes medical transition for anyone who wants it? Because who could possibly be excluded from self-identifying as “nonbinary”?

One of the most important findings in Cari’s survey (utterly ignored by Karasic and the other commenters) is that the majority of respondents not only had very limited therapy (aka “gatekeeping” in current trans activist lingo), but also believed, after the fact, that the counseling they received prior to transition was inadequate—as Cari herself has said about her experiences at TransActive Gender Center. Cari writes:

“117 of the individuals surveyed had medically transitioned. Of these, only 41 received therapy beforehand. The average length of counseling for those who did attend was 9 months, with a median and mode of 3, minimum of 1, and a maximum of 60. I’d like to have something cool to say here, but I’m honestly just stunned at the fact that 65% of these women had no therapy at all before transition.”

Why is it that Karasic and the others on the thread have nothing to say about this key finding? Given that this is a survey of people who chose to detransition—many of whom were quite unhappy about their transitions and the services they received from gender specialists—wouldn’t it be worth exploring the idea that some were perhaps too easily granted the opportunity?

What’s more, these women have, by and large, a very negative view of their transitions.

But Dan Karasic, like most activist-clinicians, is not really a believer in gatekeeping. As he said in another post just a few days ago, easy access to medical transition and cross-sex hormones is something to be desired—hopefully at the first follow up visit.

Presumably, the young clients at Dimensions seek medical transition to relieve their dysphoria. Interestingly, Cari’s survey found that the majority of detransitioned women saw improvement in their dysphoric symptoms after beginning to detransition:

“…cumulatively, 88% of the individuals surveyed experienced physical sex dysphoria. Individuals who experienced only social dysphoria were more likely to report that their dysphoria was improved by detransition (91%, versus 73% for individuals with sex dysphoria), and none of these individuals indicated a worsening of dysphoria, however even among those with sex dysphoria, only 9% reported that their dysphoria had increased since detransitioning.”

The implications of this are profound. If 59% of the sample found “other ways to deal with their dysphoria” which led them to detransition—and then, having detransitioned, found their symptoms improving still more—one would think this data would keenly interest Dan Karasic and his followers. What if there are cheaper and less drastic ways to deal with gender dysphoria?

To Karasic’s credit, he does concede—while stopping short of admitting that “real” trans people might actually regret their transitions– that some formerly trans-identified women do end up feeling their medical transition “wasn’t right for them.” But he manages to minimize even that.

It’s apparent that that Dr. Karasic, along with other WPATH members (in the comment below, “liked” by Dr. Karasic), don’t really see what the big deal is if some women change their minds about the hormones and surgeries that have forever altered their bodies.

They can just change back or quit hormones—what’s the worry? It’s all just an experiment anyway, kind of like tattoos and piercings.

These people seem not to be familiar with the growing number of detransitioned women who have their own blogs and websites, wherein they speak of their sadness at the irreversible changes wrought upon their voices; the body hair; the loss of their breasts; some have gynecological difficulties.

Activist-clinicians are invested in the idea that regret rates are low—even though this generation of young people is the first to experience medical transition. There is no data on long-term regret rates for these young people, and Karasic knows it, as do most other gender doctors. They don’t know. No one does. Cari deserves enormous credit for sticking her neck out to do this survey, because the gender doctors sure as heck aren’t going to do it for her and the other women who are in the same boat.

One wonders: How many of these women will it take for doctors like Dan Karasic to take them seriously? 500? 1000? Will there need to be 5, 10, 20, replicated studies, conducted over decades, thousands of women, before these gender specialists take their needs seriously, once they have detransitioned? (I will note that most of the studies utilized by trans activists and gender specialists to support what they’re doing consist of very small cohorts, with “low quality evidence,” as recently pointed out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it’s convenient to dismiss data that doesn’t fit one’s narrative.)

So, what would constitute regretters “per se”? How many? What percentage? What criterion will satisfy Karasic and the other activists and clinicians piling on the Facebook thread to essentially say that Cari’s data (and Cari’s own experiences, presumably) are bunk?

Update 9/5/16: One very telling answer to the “How many?” question comes from a WPATH commenter who pontificates:

Increase your sample size to 12,000 and follow the subjects for 20 years, then report back to me with your findings. Maybe then, I might value your study.

Cari (who has joined the conversation on the Facebook page) replies,

And who is writing NIH grants to study thousands of detransitioned trans men? Who has in the past? It’s easy to sit on a high horse and shoot down the efforts of a 22-year-old who suffered medical harms and is interested in delving more deeply into the experiences of women like her. Easier still to tell her those harms won’t be worth taking seriously for 20 years, until there are thousands of regretters “per se.” In the meantime? Business as usual.

It’s predictable that trans activists are loathe to admit that detransitioners may be more common than they they think. But medical doctors? Wouldn’t one think that MDs, psychiatrists, and other gender specialists would demonstrate appropriate concern about people who went through medical transition but expressed profound regrets later on? Even more importantly: Why don’t people like Dan Karasic see it as a good thing that the women in Cari’s survey found other ways to deal with their dysphoria besides drastically altering themselves with hormones and surgeries?

How about showing some respect for this one detransitioner, Cari, who cares so much about this issue that she has created and written a fine analysis of a survey about detransitioned women? Rather than glibly dismissing her work as just another worthless TERF thing that can be safely ignored, wouldn’t it behoove Karasic and his followers to take her seriously? Why would a 22-year-old woman who had undergone years of testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and who is now speaking out publicly via YouTube go to this much trouble if there weren’t a real issue here?

Why doesn’t WPATH as a whole start earnestly figuring out how to provide services for people who regret their transitions, or who need help and support for re-identifying with their natal sex? After all, the gender specialists got these people into it; do they feel no responsibility whatsoever to help them get out of it? Is the “care” provided by gender doctors a one-way-street? Apparently, if you ever decide to get off the trans bus, you’ll have to find your own way home.

The activists and clinicians piling on the Discredit the Detransitioner Survey thread seem a lot more interested in denigrating and dismissing the reality of detransition than attending to the medical and psychiatric needs of people harmed by medical transition. Activists pushing an agenda? Yeah—don’t want to talk about this. But doctors? Where is their commitment to learning the truth, however inconvenient that truth might be?

But then, the line between activists and clinicians seems to be rather blurred. I’m not sure there is much of a difference anymore.

Announcing a new online survey for detransitioned women

Posted on August 16, 2016 by 4thwavenow

Cari is a 22-year-old detransitioned woman who was interviewed recently on 4thWaveNow about her experiences as a former teen client of Transactive Gender Center in Portland, OR. Cari wrote to us today to announce an online survey she has created for women who are reclaiming themselves as female. I’ll let her introduce her work in her own words shortly. But first, if you have not had a chance to watch Cari’s very powerful YouTube video, please do so. In it, she deftly takes apart a post on trans youth, desistance, and detransition by trans activist MtoF Julia Serano.

A real live 22-year-old detransitioned woman

Cari is not the only detransitioner talking back to Serano. Several other women have come forward in recent days to eloquently and incisively describe the many facets of the female detransitioned experience, including Maria Catt and crashchaoscats. Transgender Trend also posted an excellent response to Serano.

Now I’ll let Cari introduce her Survey of female detransition and reidentification. Please share widely!

This survey is for anyone female/AFAB who formerly self-described as transgender. This includes women who transitioned, whether socially and/or medically, and have subsequently detransitioned, as well as individuals who still identify as nonbinary or genderfluid, but have desisted from medical or social transition. The purpose of this survey is to provide information about the demographics of those who detransition and reidentification, motivations of individuals to detransition, and survey general attitudes of female detransitioners towards transition.

I’m posting this as a way of getting some data about detransitioned women where none seems to exist, particularly regarding motivation to detransition and the efficacy of managing dysphoria without transition. This survey is short due to surveymonkey’s question limit, and not very scientific, however I may create a longer and more controlled one in the future, should there be interest in that.

Please share this survey widely

Jenn Burleton, director of youth transition org, dismisses ex-client’s complaints as “TERF infestation”

Posted on June 12, 2016 by 4thwavenow

This is an update to Friday’s post. Please read it first for background.

UPDATE June 14, 2016: TransActive Gender Center and director Jenn Burleton have issued public statements on their Facebook pages. TransActive has labeled 4thWaveNow an “anti-trans hate site” because we have provided a platform for Cari to tell her story.

It’s a common tactic of trans-activist organizations, which can tolerate no dissent, to dismiss critics of pediatric transition as “transphobic” or “hating trans children.” We at 4thWaveNow–the majority of us being concerned parents of gender nonconforming youth–invite all readers to investigate the posts, interviews, and research-based information on our site and decide for yourselves whether 4thWaveNow “dispenses anti-trans youth rhetoric.”

Cari, a detransitioning 22-year-old ex-client of TransActive Gender Center, has written on her Tumblr blog about her dissatisfaction with the services provided by that organization when she was a gender-dysphoric teenager.

Jenn Burleton, director and founder of TransActive, chose to respond indirectly to Cari via a public Facebook post. When reading Burleton’s screed, bear in mind that Burleton runs an organization which has considerable influence over the lives of gender-defiant youth. In addition, Burleton is an advocate for lowering the age of medical consent nationwide, and was instrumental in changing Oregon law to allow teens as young as 15 to obtain surgeries (including mastectomy and “bottom” surgeries) without parental consent. Burleton also believes (and has stated on the WPATH public Facebook page) that TransActive’s no-questions-asked youth transition program disproves decades of peer-reviewed research demonstrating that most gender-dysphoric youth desist. In the linked post, Burleton claims a 0% desistance rate for clients seen at TransActive. Clearly, Cari’s case calls for–at the very least–some soul searching and re-evaluation of TransActive’s policies and public statements.

Burleton’s public Facebook response—aimed at a 22-year-old who was only 16 years old when she was encouraged and enabled by TransActive to medically transition–refers to Cari’s Tumblr posts as a “TERF infestation” and a “harassment campaign.” Decide for yourself, after reading Burleton’s Facebook post and Cari’s response (which Burleton has not made public), who is the injured party in this situation.

Cari told 4thWaveNow that she is grateful for any support readers can offer in publicizing her former and now current experiences with representatives of TransActive Gender Center. At her request, we are reproducing screenshots Cari posted on her Tumblr blog yesterday.