This thread examining a detrans story puts me in mind of so…

This thread examining a detrans story puts me in mind of something that shocked me to the core fifteen years ago in early 2004. I’ve not often told this so there follows a mini thread of my own.

Found a podcast by Keira Bell talking about her reasons for detransitioning

Listened to it so you don't have to
Wherein, at the 24-30 min mark, keira talks about her reasons for detransition and admits she did it for her ideology alone.

Thread:
— Lux \U0001f3f3\ufe0f\u200d\U0001f308 (@Lux_fae) February 2, 2021

This time in 2004 was very sensitive. Our little team at Press for Change was carefully helping to support the government to get the Gender Recognition Bill through its parliamentary stages. It had already started in the Lords and faced a committee stage with evangelical-backed..

..opposition facing the government’s Bill minister Lord Filkin and and others from all parties supporting him. The heavy lifting of daily liaison work was handled on our side by my colleague Claire @2legged whose back room lobby efforts should never go unacknowledged in any..

..account of events. Our political backdrop was a small but determined effort by two evangelical groups touting very familiar lies about trans people and, perhaps more worrying, a couple of contemporary journalists (one a Guardian staffer and one a freelance) determined to tout..

..detransition scare stories as a way to perhaps cast doubt over formalising a legal recognition process. The thing that was obvious at the time was that their stories relied on constant recycling of the same 10-12 case stories, which they had discovered because they were the..

..evidence against the private gender specialist Russell Reid in a case before the General Medical Council a few weeks previously. Those cases hadn’t seemingly come forward autonomously, they had been dredged out of the Charing Cross GIC archive by clinicians with a long-held..

..grouse with their former NHS colleague Reid. In practice the GMC dismissed several of these cases as unreliable witnesses and some definitely were equivocal about being asked to duff up a doctor who had, after all, listened to them. Some acknowledged their unhappiness was..

..related to poor surgical outcomes; some just found the grind of discrimination and a lack of social support wearing them down. Reasons for thinking about detransition are complex — some who do revert acknowledge still having renewed gender dysphoria and transition again..

..later when circumstances give them a better chance of hacking the ordeal that society throws at them. This is a sensitive area and nobody is helped by being zoomed in upon by strangers — journalists or GCs — seeing a handy poster case for the point they’re looking to make. ..

All this — and particularly the press fascination with a rich Walter Mitty car crash case — led me to wondering about whether the lack of any other detrans cases coming forward was indicative of the simple truth that these dozen or so were all there were. After all, this was a..

..national press obsession and you would have thought that if there were other cases out there then they would be seeking out those journalists to scream Me Too! That didn’t seem to be happening. That fed the suspicion that this press attempt at a moral panic was really built..

..on just a dozen unhappy people found by dubious use of a medical archive by rival clinicians, and who weren’t always the open and shut cases of lifetime regret they were painted to be. I decided to research. First, having access to about a thousand trans people via our networks

.. I did some basic questionnaire work to find out people’s own long term assessments of whether they were happy and how those feelings were perhaps mediated by things in their surgical outcome or lives that would, if anything, drive tinges of regret. The answer that came back..

..was essentially what we already knew. Hard lives, some botched surgeries but people who nevertheless looked forward rather than ever seriously considering going back. Then I tried another tack: I figured that although we didn’t know any detrans people in our networks there..

..might be some that others might have heard about through more informal circles of support. And that’s how I found the only case I’ve ever managed to dig up and get to know independently. This was the case of someone who had transitioned but had felt the lack of support..

..afterwards very hard. They had gravitated towards an evangelical Christian group who, just like a cult, had lovebombed and gaslit her until — entirely through their encouragement — she had sought to detransition. That was a mistake for her — plainly obvious almost straight..

..away and she eventually retransitioned, free of the vultures who had harmed her. It shocked me at the time — still does — but it underlines how people in vulnerable positions can so easily fall prey to wicked people who just see them as a poster case to use and abuse..

..for their cynical and manipulative ends. As we are seeing, that is at the root of what is going on now in some cases, only with GCs taking the place of ‘Christians’ with a terribly literal but selective reading of the Bible and what ‘love’ means. /Ends

This thread examining a detrans story puts me in mind of something that shocked me to the core fifteen years ago in early 2004. I’ve not often told this so there follows a mini thread of my own.

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