Are Detransitioners “A Real Thing?”
There are real people who detransition. Ideological anti-trans detransitioners do not speak for them.
by Evan Urquhart
Right wing propagandists, including the conservative anti-trans activist group Independent Women’s Forum today, have been attempting to make hay out of a remark made to the US House of Representatives during a hearing about violence targeting LGBTQ+ people in the wake of a shooting that killed 5 at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Jessi Pocock, the executive director of Inside Out Youth Services in Colorado Springs said, in response to a question by a Republican congressman about detransition, “I’ve just never heard of a case of anyone detransitioning, so I honestly don’t think it’s a real thing.”
Let’s put aside the fact that transphobes have taken a comment from the director of a Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ support organization, in the wake of a hate crime that terrorized the Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ community, and have attempted to make it into a scandal. That is hateful nonsense from bad faith actors who are continuing to stoke the fires of moral panic even in the wake of multiple deaths. But let’s ignore all that and look a bit more deeply into the question of whether detransition is “a real thing” or not.
Certainly, there are people who begin a medical transition and then, at some point in the process, decide to halt or reverse medical steps they previously took. That isn’t in doubt, such people certainly exist. How common detransition is has been contested, and it’s difficult to be precise because the number depends on how strictly you define transitioning and detransitioning. It’s perhaps intuitively obvious that there will always be more people who change their social presentation (for instance by wearing different clothing), and then revert to more cisnormative dress, than there are who undergo surgery, then later seek to have the surgery reversed. Regretting hormone therapy likely falls somewhere in the middle, being far easier and less expensive to access than surgery, but harder and more expensive than cutting one’s hair or asking to be called by a new name. But the devil is in the details: Does a person who takes a single dose of hormones, then backtracks without having experienced any physical changes count as having detransitioned? Does someone on the waiting list for surgery who decides not to go through with it? It’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line, so studies will inevitably find slightly different numbers based on how they define their terms.
A range of 1-3 percent regret represents a high estimate. It’s based on numerous studies which found rates below 1 percent for surgery regret, and a few studies which found numbers slightly higher when an expansive definition of detransition is used. No mainstream study we’re aware of has found a rate of even 5 percent. (One, which looked at trans people who left treatment in the UK, was represented by some as having found an unusually high 6.9 percent detransition rate, but showed a 4.5 percent rate when you accounted for those who had already resumed their transition by the end of the study period.)
Whatever the real number of detransitioners is, it’s clear some people detransition. Does this mean that detransitioning is “a real thing.”
Only someone using a bad faith interpretation of the colloquial phrase “not a thing” would interpret it as “has never happened even once.” In slang terms something is “a thing” when it is popular. “Not a thing” typically refers to something somebody is claiming is popular, but doesn’t actually exist as an organic phenomenon or trend. A good faith reading of Pocock’s statement would take “not a real thing” in the colloquial sense, rather than taking it as a statement that no person has ever detransitioned in the entire world. Pocock is really just saying it is rare.
Detransition is rare, but not that rare. 1-3 percent isn’t a high enough rate of regret to make anyone question whether a treatment is broadly successful, but it’s far from unheard of. Ideological detransition, the sort of detransition that leads a person to reject all trans people and become allied to transphobes, on the other hand, is what opponents of trans rights are trying so desperately to make “a thing.” THAT is incredibly rare, vanishingly so even among people who detransition. This is why you see specific detransitioners flown in from out of state to address a medical board in Florida or make an appearance in Idaho. Anti-trans ideologues are unable to find locals who have detransitioned who want anything to do with anti-trans activism. That’s not because no such detransitioned people exist, but because most people who do continue to consider themselves trans and/or remain close allies of trans folks.
Individuals detransition for many reasons, including the social stigma and pressure they faced as a trans person, or feeling like they’d been pressured make a binary medical transition when, in reality, a non-binary identity is a better fit. The pressure that leads some people to return to the closet after coming out as transgender, and the pressure that leads other people to seek a binary, cis-passing, heteronormative appearance they don’t really want has a name: It’s transphobia. Transphobia hurts detransitioners every bit as much as it hurts trans folks. That’s why most people who detransition want nothing to do with anti-trans activists. Many continue to identify as trans or a trans ally throughout their detransition, others recant the toxic transphobic ideology they once espoused.
At Assigned, we would probably not use the phrase “detransitioners are not a real thing,” because our allies who have detransitioned would find it hurtful. Detransitioned folks deserve a place in the trans community if they wish to have one. They are our siblings, and an us vs. them attitude is unnecessary, unfruitful, and unkind. However, ideological detransition is, well… it’s just not a real thing.