This article has been sitting in my drafts since April 2023. I did not go looking for this subject. I accidentally stumbled into a part of YouTube where people were talking about detransitioning. These were people who had transitioned, sometimes medically and socially, lived that way for a period of time, and eventually decided transition was no longer right for them. My mind was blown, not because I had never considered that someone could change their mind, but because I had barely heard these stories discussed at all. The number of detransitioning stories I came across was also overwhelming.
I started asking questions, then I started writing, and over the next few years I rewrote this article several times because every version felt wrong. This is one of those subjects where even asking a reasonable question the wrong way can turn the entire conversation into something it was never intended to be. Honestly, I am not making time for any bullshit intellectual sparring match with anybody either. I am asking questions because I genuinely think they are worth asking.
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Then this past week, artist and producer D. Smith brought me back to the subject. After living publicly as a transgender woman for approximately twelve years, Smith announced that he is now living as a man again and using he/him pronouns. What stood out to me was that he did not describe those years as some horrible mistake. He spoke about those twelve years as part of his life while also acknowledging that something about how he now understands himself has changed. That is exactly why detransition deserves an honest conversation. People should be allowed to talk about changing their understanding of themselves without immediately being turned into proof for somebody else’s argument.
Detransitioners should not be used as evidence against every transgender person because one person’s experience cannot define everybody else’s. At the same time, refusing to talk about detransition does not protect anyone either. Some people transition and remain satisfied with that decision, while others later realize transitioning was not right for them. Those experiences can coexist, and acknowledging one does not erase the other. What interests me most is why someone who once felt certain enough about their identity to transition can eventually feel differently. I cannot help but wonder whether there were things happening beneath the surface that were not fully understood at the time.
Those questions keep bringing me back to mental health because I cannot shake the feeling that we may be skipping over something important. When somebody is deeply uncomfortable with their body, identity, or the sex they were born into, I naturally want to know what else is happening underneath that discomfort. I want to know about trauma, depression, anxiety, body image, abuse, isolation, sexuality, childhood experiences, neurodevelopmental differences, and anything else that may have shaped the way that person sees themselves. Asking those questions does not automatically mean somebody’s experience is fake. I think the mind is complicated enough that we should be willing to explore every possibility before assuming we already understand what is happening.
I know even saying that will make some people angry, but I do not understand why gender should become the one area where mental health suddenly feels off-limits. Mental illness can affect the way people experience their bodies, relationships, identity, self-worth, and reality itself. We accept that in almost every other area of psychology, so I think it is fair to ask how much of a role it may sometimes play here as well. I am not saying every transgender person has the same story or the same diagnosis because I cannot know that. What I am saying is that mental health deserves a much larger place in this conversation, especially when someone is considering decisions that could have long-term consequences for their body.
Children are where I become especially uncomfortable in conversations about transition. I struggle with children making medical decisions that may affect their bodies, sexual development, fertility, or future lives in ways they cannot completely anticipate. I have even struggled with whether eighteen is old enough. Personally, I would be more comfortable seeing certain decisions delayed further into adulthood because young people are still developing emotionally, psychologically, socially, and neurologically while also trying to figure out who they are. That does not mean a young person experiencing gender dysphoria should be mocked, ignored, or forced to suffer. It means I want them to have real support and real mental-health care that is not afraid to ask difficult questions before major decisions are made.
History is another reason I am cautious. John Money became enormously influential in twentieth-century thinking about gender and sexuality, and one of the cases associated with his work involved David Reimer, a boy whose penis was severely damaged during a botched circumcision. Money recommended that Reimer be raised as a girl, and the case was initially presented as a success. Reimer eventually rejected the female identity that had been imposed on him and lived as a man. His experience is not the same as a transgender person voluntarily seeking transition, and I am not pretending that it is. The lesson I take from his story is about medical certainty and how dangerous it can become when professionals become too confident in what they think they understand about another human being.
Doctors can be wrong, psychologists can be wrong, researchers can be wrong, and entire systems can become convinced that they understand something when they do not. That should make us more careful, especially when children are involved. It should also make us more willing to ask questions instead of treating uncertainty like failure. Medicine is supposed to investigate, psychology is supposed to explore, and neither field benefits when certain subjects become too uncomfortable to question.
There is another part of this conversation that matters to me personally, and that is the way womanhood gets reduced to femininity. This is not trans women versus women. I am talking about the idea that performing femininity somehow makes somebody more of a woman than another woman. Being a woman is deeper to me than makeup, dresses, heels, eyelashes, hairstyles, softness, mannerisms, or desirability. Those things can be beautiful and fun, but they are expressions of femininity, not the entirety of womanhood.
There are masculine women and feminine women. There are women who wear makeup every day and women who never touch it. Some women have given birth and some never will. Women’s experiences with menstruation, pregnancy, sexuality, menopause, and their bodies can look completely different from one another. Womanhood is too broad and too lived-in to be reduced to aesthetics or turned into some competition over who performs femininity best. That is part of why this larger conversation about gender makes me think so much about what identity actually means and how often people confuse appearance, expression, and experience.
Detransitioning raises questions because it reminds us that identity does not always move in a straight line. Some people transition and never look back. Some detransition because something about their understanding of themselves changes. Some may discover that transition never addressed what they were actually struggling with in the first place. Instead of treating those stories like threats, I think we should study them and listen to what people say about their own experiences. We should ask what helped, what hurt, what was missed, what they wish their doctors or therapists had asked them, and what they understand differently now.
I started this article three years ago because detransitioning confused me. It still raises questions for me, but I no longer think every question needs to come packaged with an apology. Some subjects are complicated, some answers are uncomfortable, and sometimes the most responsible thing we can do is admit that we do not know everything yet. If detransitioning forces us to ask harder questions about mental health, medical care, identity, age, informed consent, and what it means to truly understand ourselves, then those questions are worth asking.