The transgender community publicly heaps scorn on people who insist biological sex is immutable.
Lawmakers in California have even adopted statutes banning counseling for people who wish to overcome same-sex attractions, and a bill classified such counseling as consumer fraud.
But now a video titled “Detransition Q&A” released by Pique Resilience Project features four women formerly identified as males.
Helena, Jesse, Dagney and Chiara speak at length, reports Christian Today, about the “confusion that surrounded their transition into men in their teen years and their perceived lack of support from the trans community when they started to question their trans identity.”
Jesse explains she was encouraged to take testosterone for about 18 months until the age of 19.
“I completely regret jumping into it, I should have just chilled out,” she said.
Christian Today said the “experience of the girls in desiring to be men is similar – from begging their parents to let them start on testosterone, the conviction that they wouldn’t regret it, to feelings of isolation and confusion around their sexuality and self-identity.”
“They also agreed that in hindsight, it would have been better to take things more slowly rather than rushing into medically and socially transitioning,” the report said.
Dagny said she didn’t want to “back out” after insisting on hormone shots, and the adults in her life didn’t put on the brakes.
“I think that if I had been made to wait until I was 18 when I was just on the verge of going to college I would not have started hormones, so I think that just having that sort of go ahead from my parents, that parental support to go into HRT (hormone replacement therapy) just sort of solidified this feeling of like, ok this is happening, like this is going down,” she told the publication.
Helena said she was unable to find a sympathetic ear when she found herself with doubts about the transition.
It was “so hard for me to think outside of transitioning and so hard for me to consider any other path,” she told Christian Today.
Chiara, the report said, told of the opposition faced by those who want to backtrack from being transgender.
“As soon as you start to maybe move away from a trans identity or start to voice things, they call you a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) or they instantly ostracize you and call you a traitor and fake, so it’s very hard to voice doubts and that contributes to not allowing you to voice that or realize that about yourself,” she said in the report.
Their experiences, they reported, were “overwhelmingly negative.”
In a commentary in USA Today, Walt Heyer, who spent eight years as a transgender woman – “Time I can’t get back” – recalled that when he was 4, his grandmother “repeatedly, over several years, cross-dressed me in a full-length purple dress she made especially for me and told me how pretty I was as a girl.”
“This planted the seed of gender confusion and led to my transitioning at age 42 to transgender female,” he said, explaining the purple dress was followed by “sexual abuse” by a teen relative.
“That abuse caused me to not want to be male any longer. Cross-dressing gave me an escape. I lay awake at night, secretly begging God to change me into a girl. In my childlike thinking, if I could only be a girl, then I would be accepted and affirmed by the adults in my life. I would be safe,” he said.
As an adult, beset by conflicting feelings, he said: “I sought out the top gender specialist at the time, Dr. Paul Walker, who had co-authored the 1979 standards of care for transgender health. He diagnosed me with gender identity disorder (now gender dysphoria) and recommended cross-sex hormones and sex change genital surgery. He told me that the childhood events were not related to my current gender distress, and that sex change was the only solution.”
But he said he found that hidden beneath “the makeup and female clothing was the little boy hurt by childhood trauma.”
“I was once again experiencing gender dysphoria, but this time I felt like a male inside a body refashioned to look like a woman.”
He now counsels people who are troubled by similar issues.
“Had I not been misled by media stories of sex change ‘success’ and by medical practitioners who said transitioning was the answer to my problems, I wouldn’t have suffered as I have. Genetics can’t be changed. Feelings, however, can and do change. Underlying issues often drive the desire to escape one’s life into another, and they need to be addressed before taking the radical step of transition,” he said.
