Is There a Transition “Honeymoon Phase?”
An ad-hoc explanation seeks to explain why transition improves outcomes, by introducing the vague possibility that maybe somehow all the improvements are a mirage?
by Evan Urquhart
The elephant in the room for opponents of trans rights is that transition has long ago been shown to work as a medical treatment for gender dysphoria. In the past, anti-trans activists often flatly lied about this, asserting that there is no evidence to support transition, or even that transition causes harm. More recently, the mainstream has begun to show a bit more interest in fact-checking these lies, which makes them more difficult to sustain. A viral moment from The Problem with Jon Stewart last fall, in which Stewart confronted the lies of Arkansas Attorney-General Leslie Ruttlege with facts, helped with this, by making the public a little harder to lie to. In response, some activists on the right are shifting their story. They’re claiming that starting a gender transition commences a honeymoon period, which will later be followed by disillusion and detransition after an unspecified (and often very extended) time frame.
This line of argument recently surfaced from Vernadette Boyles, who is representing Jamie Reed. Reed’s wild claims about a clinic in St. Louis have largely fallen apart after local reporters spoke with patients, parents, and a former co-worker of Reed’s. Broyles, who is associated with multiple lawsuits attacking trans rights, has been described as a strong supporter of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law by the New York Post. She used the idea of a honeymoon period to deflect questions about the inaccuracy of Reed’s claims in her comments to the Missouri Independent.
screenshot from the Missouri Independent
Like other claims from the anti-trans side, there’s no evidence for a honeymoon period in the scientific research on gender affirming care. That’s the really clever part of the approach: By suggesting that existing studies have all taken place within a hypothesized honeymoon period, opponents of transition can acknowledge the current research without accepting findings that transition improves outcomes and detransition is rare. The need to ensure that all findings can handwaved away at times leads to downright comical outcomes, such as a post on the anti-trans website SEGM, dedicated to pseudoscientific obfuscation of the medical evidence, claiming a typical honeymoon period lasts 5 to 10 years.
screenshot from SEGM
Ten years is a lot longer than any honeymoon I’ve ever heard of. But if your goal is to avoid engaging with evidence in support of gender affirming care, it’s useful to choose a very long time frame indeed. While you can find plenty of examples of trans people who have spent decades happily post transition, most long term follow up studies don’t look nearly that far out. In addition, if one of your key claims is that social contagion has polluted the minds of female-assigned people during the past 10 years or so, a long time frame allows you to keep your theory on life support a few years longer, despite a lack of evidence that regret has increased. It might even buy enough time to ban gender-affirming care outright, at which point it won’t really matter what the evidence shows, or fails to show.
Not everyone who talks of a honeymoon period sets its duration at 5-10 years. In a subreddit devoted to ideological detransition, some posters said they never had a honeymoon period, some described a period lasting a few months, others described having been happily transitioned for five years or more. A detransitioned butch lesbian writing on the anti-trans website 4thWaveNow claimed the honeymoon period lasts anywhere from 3 months to 6 years. Some people who believe there’s a honemoon period describe it as being like a high like a drug user would feel, others describe feeling more calm than before, others describe their excitement at seeing changes to their body as the honeymoon’s source.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a group of people using shared language to talk about their detransition experiences. Among ourselves, transgender people often speak of a time we call “early transition” in a similar way. It can be a time of great excitement, joy, and self-discovery, but also a period of high stress, instability, and fear. It’s a time when very few of us pass as the gender we hope others will come to see us as, which makes us particularly vulnerable to discrimination and bigotry. Trans people who experience rejection from family and friends generally do so during early transition, which means that many in early transition are searching for new connections to replace those they’ve lost.
There’s very little about any of this that resembles a honeymoon. To the contrary, it’s a time when many trans people are particularly in need of support to help stave off despair. That even despite this instability and bias we have better outcomes than we do if we don’t transition at all is a testament to just how powerful medical transition really is.
The idea of a honeymoon may ring true for ideological detransitioners, but as an explanation for positive improvements following medical transition it falls far short. Opponents of medical transition rely on bias against trans people to allow them to get away with these sorts of preposterous, uncheckable claims. They throw out random ideas that could be true, safe in the knowledge that they will never be asked to provide evidence that they actually are.