PragerU Pushes Detrans Doc Ad on All of Twitter
Whoever’s still using Twitter will see an ad for a new detransition documentary by PragerU.
by Evan Urquhart
The conservative propaganda nonprofit PragerU is taking over Twitter today with a 20-minute video featuring the story of a handful of detransitioners and anti-trans activists. Everyone who logs on to the microblogging site will see the promotional hashtag “#DETRANS (although the rapidly decreasing relevance of Twitter makes this far less culturally impactful than it would have been only a year ago).
The documentary itself is quite thin gruel. It features the stories of a small handful of people who have detransitioned as well as the worn talking points of anti-trans activists such as Leor Sapir. Detransitioner Daisy Strongin’s story starts things off, and Strongin’s interview is woven through the remainder of the short doc. Strongin describes experiencing deep depression and eventually developing a trans alter ego online. She says that stories of trans people who found transition to greatly improve their quality of life convinced her that it might work for her. She detransitioned after “looking in the mirror… getting these really scary thoughts” of how she was “incomplete” and would never really be a man.
When you carefully examine the stories of detransitioners, few if any claim to have been a cisgender person who wrongly believed themselves to have gender dysphoria. Instead, like Strongin, they seem to have experienced gender dysphoria very strongly indeed. Some, including Chloe Cole, have publicly admitted that they continue to suffer with gender dysphoria to this day.
The existence of people for whom a treatment doesn’t seem to work as well as it does for most patients wouldn’t normally be used as a rationale for banning the treatment. But in the PragerU documentary and other similar propagandistic efforts, false narratives undermining the robust medical evidence for transition, combined with the sad stories of people whose severe gender dysphoria apparently remained even after they transitioned, is used to justify such bans. It would be laughable for any other treatment, but anti-trans sentiments make the ridiculous seem reasonable in some cis people’s minds.
The good news is these narratives are starting to feel incredibly played out. There’s absolutely nothing new, interesting, or shocking in PragerU’s Detrans doc. In fact, Strongin’s story itself could easily be taken by young people as a reason to think transition is worth trying. Strongin presents the euphoria and the experience of fully passing as a boy as having given her false hope, but for most trans youth that hope is real. While activists desperately try to goose the numbers, detransition remains a relatively rare outcome for those who transition, and one which for many people isn’t even experienced as a negative. Conservative outlets like PragerU may try to suppress the truth about transition, but the reason it’s so powerful is because, for most trans people, it simply works.