Episodes

Trans 101: What Detransitioners Want You to Know

If you support trans people, you probably believe that detransition almost never happens and when it does, it’s only due to discrimination. But new research shows that’s not the full picture—and avoiding the conversation isn’t protecting anyone. This episode explores the largest study ever designed to understand detransition, featuring two people with completely opposite experiences. One transitioned in her twenties and later regretted it, losing her entire friend group not when she detransitioned but when she admitted the regret. The other was blocked from hormones by a gatekeeping therapist and spent 13 years forced to live as the wrong gender before finally retransitioning. One needed more scrutiny before accessing care, the other needed fewer barriers—yet both were failed by the system. Researcher Kinnon MacKinnon breaks down what the data actually shows and why preventing detransition might be the wrong goal entirely. This isn’t ammunition for either side of the political battle. It’s about what happens when we’re too afraid to acknowledge complexity.

More from Kinnon MacKinnon:

Citations and further reading:

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Ashley: This podcast is all about answering the questions you’re not allowed to ask. And if you support trans people, here’s a doozy of a question for you.

[00:00:27] Ashley: Can people transition and then change their minds? I know. Just hearing the question, just seeing the title of this episode is probably enough to make you tense up. Because right now conservative lawmakers are pointing to people who change course in their gender transition, commonly known as detransitioners, and saying, see, gender transition is dangerous. We need to ban trans healthcare.

[00:00:55] Ashley: If that’s not what you want, then the instinct is just to shut down the conversation entirely. To say detransition is so rare as to not even matter, and when it does happen, it’s only because of discrimination. If we don’t talk about it, then we won’t give them ammunition to hurt trans people.

[00:01:15] Ashley: I get that impulse. This episode was not on my list when I first imagined a podcast season aimed at helping trans people. But I learned enough to have some nuance. And from talking to researchers and detransition themselves, I’ve realized that we’re not protecting anyone by staying silent.

[00:01:39] Ashley: We’re just creating more shame.

[00:02:01] Ashley: Because people do detransition. New research suggests the numbers are higher than what you’ve heard in pro-trans circles, and it’s not all because of discrimination. Some of it is. Trans discrimination is hard to bear and some people are left with no choice but to go back into the closet.

[00:02:20] Ashley: But others have a genuine identity shift. Some regret it deeply. Others don’t regret it at all, even though they changed their mind. And some detransitioners spend years knowing they made the right choice, only to quietly retransition when they can’t deny who they are anymore.

[00:02:39] Ashley: The problem is that we’ve turned detransition into a political tug of war, and the people who actually live this experience are getting pulled in every direction. Detransitioners who express regret get weaponized by the right and abandoned by the left.

[00:02:51] Ashley: They lose their community precisely when they need it most. And meanwhile, the conversation never makes any progress because we’re too busy using their lives as debate points to actually listen to what they’re saying.

[00:03:00] Ashley: So in this episode we’re gonna do some listening. You’ll hear from the researcher who conducted the largest study on detransition ever, and from two people with completely different experiences of detransition. You’ll learn what the data actually shows, what most detransitioners have in common, and why preventing detransition might be the wrong goal.

[00:03:12] Ashley: I’m Ashley Hamer Pritchard, and this is Taboo Science. The podcast that answers the questions you are not allowed to ask.

[00:03:44] Ashley: The popular understanding of detransition is a simple one. I was trans. Now I’m not, and I regret ever transitioning. That is some people’s experience, but it’s not the only one.

[00:04:00] Ashley: The scientific definition of detransition is not quite nailed down. Different researchers use different definitions.

[00:04:04] Kinnon MacKinnon: Myself and some other colleagues who are studying this phenomenon generally look at stopping or reversing medical treatments in connection with a change in how someone conceptualizes their sex, gender, or sexual orientation.

[00:04:19] Kinnon MacKinnon: So that may include, for example, moving from a binary trans identity and realizing a more fluid or non-binary identity, and then stopping hormonal treatments or maybe even, uh, pursuing surgical reconstruction procedures. Or it may include shifting from say, a, you know, binary trans man or trans woman identity to shifting to more of a primary queer identity.

[00:04:46] Kinnon MacKinnon: So, you know, gay man or lesbian. So you see those kind of shifting patterns around people’s identity, around their sex, gender, and sexuality.

[00:05:00] Kinnon MacKinnon: My name’s Kinnon McKinnon. I use, uh, he or they pronouns. I’m an assistant professor in the school of social work at York University in Toronto.

[00:05:07] Ashley: Kinnon studies gender affirming healthcare, and most recently he’s really dug into understanding detransition. In November, he and his team published the DARE study, which is the largest ever study specifically designed to understand detransition. They surveyed 957 people who self-identified with an experience of stopping, shifting, or reversing their gender transition for any reason, and then did individual interviews with 42 of them.

[00:05:34] Ashley: Importantly, this study was also community led. Ken and himself is trans, and his team is majority L-G-B-T-Q, including some with their own experiences of detransition. When Kinon started this research, the trans community supported it specifically because it was being studied by people from within rather than by outsiders who might have anti-trans agendas.

[00:05:57] Ashley: So how common is detransition? It’s hard to pin down because of those varied definitions. Past studies have defined detransition as anything from stopping hormonal treatments to reversing a change in gender markers on government documents to someone just wishing they’d made a different decision.

[00:06:15] Ashley: Some required regret for it to count, others didn’t. That’s one reason you’ll hear a lot of different numbers when you’re talking about detransition rates. But in Kinnon’s definition, which only requires a shift in identity and stopping medical treatments…

[00:06:30] Kinnon MacKinnon: Is estimated anywhere between one. And, some studies showed 10%.

[00:06:35] Kinnon MacKinnon: So while historically, regret was estimated to be, uh, quite rare, infrequent, between one and, you know, four or 5% were the estimates, historically, those studies were looking largely at adults. 60 to 65% were trans women in these samples. And very few young adults, um, in these samples. So those studies may actually not be useful, uh, and generalizable to the very heterogeneous sample of youth in young people who are accessing treatments today. So that may be one explanation for why we see, an increase in prevalence of Detransition.

[00:07:14] Ashley: In earlier generations, trans people often had to get sterilized and have full genital surgery just to legally change their gender. It was much harder to detransition when you’d gone through all that.

[00:07:29] Ashley: Today, our understanding of gender is more fluid. The medical requirements are less rigid and non-binary identities are more widely recognized. So it makes sense that more people might shift their identity or stop treatments.

[00:07:44] Ashley: But here’s the key thing. Not everyone who detransition feels regret.

[00:07:57] Kinnon MacKinnon: Anywhere between a third to over 60% of people who detransition do report decisional regret with regards to their medical transition or treatments that they had access for part of the initial transition.

[00:08:21] Ashley: That’s important. In past studies of detransition, many have simply used the fact that someone detransitioned as evidence of regret. But you can detransition without regretting your original decision. You can even detransition with some negative feelings about your transition experience and still not regret your original decision.

[00:08:43] Ashley: why do people detransition? On that question, Kinnon’s research found detransitioners split roughly in half. About half detransition because of internal reasons, their identity shifted, they had health concerns, or they realized transition wasn’t right for them. The other half had external pressures, discrimination, lack of family support, or financial barriers.

[00:08:52] Ashley: I talked to two detransitioners that represent each of those groups. Maddie represents the first. She detransitioned for internal reasons.

[00:09:00] Maddie: My name is Maddie. Um, I’m not particular about pronouns and for about two years I was working as a research assistant on the DARE study studying detransition.

[00:09:13] Ashley: Remember how I said the DARE study had detransitioners on the research team? Yep. Maddie was one of them.

[00:09:23] Ashley: Maddie learned about trans identities on Tumblr when she was 14.

[00:09:27] Maddie: So I started to interpret, uh, a lot of my feelings through that lens, and it started to feel like it made a lot of sense for me. So when I was 15, I, I came up to my family as a trans man.

[00:09:41] Maddie: I was very lucky. My family is very supportive of me. Um, I think they were maybe privately a bit confused and surprised. ’cause I was like not a very gender non-conforming child. Um, I, I didn’t have that kind of classic trans story of like telling my parents my body was wrong since I was, like, could talk. Um, I, I had always been gender conforming friends with girls, happy to wear like girl clothes, and do girl activities.

[00:10:00] Maddie: So I think they were surprised.

[00:10:08] Maddie: I’d been very uncomfortable with my body basically since puberty. I felt without ever connecting it to gender, like very, very uncomfortable and very upset and like, kind of betrayed when, when I started developing like a chest.

[00:10:27] Maddie: And so finding out that other people had experienced that, it made me feel like maybe I felt like that for a reason. Because my body wasn’t supposed to be like that. The kind of psychological piece was I was feeling very disconnected from other, other girls, uh, my age. I was not into the same sort of things. I was very, very shy kid. and I just felt sort of isolated and I, I interpreted that at the time as gender dysphoria.

[00:10:47] Ashley: So she came out to her supportive family at 15 and socially transitioned. At 21, she went through informed consent to start testosterone and get top surgery, and for about two years she was happy.

[00:11:00] Maddie: I’d always learned that regret and detransition were just like, basically not things that happened at all. And in the very rare cases that they did happen, it wasn’t about regret, it was about, like discrimination. It was people who, who would still identify as trans, who would like to continue down that path, but they were forced to stop. So this was kind of a very foreign concept to me, and it, it was very scary to think about.

[00:11:25] Maddie: I was, 23 when I started to feel just this thing inside me that was like, I made a mistake. And that really freaked me out.

[00:11:37] Maddie: so I kind of shoved that aside for maybe six months, but it kept popping up again and again and again. So eventually I was forced to kind of sit with that. And one day I did my testosterone shot. I did them every every week. And I just felt like I made a huge mistake and I started to panic about it.

[00:11:56] Ashley: Her doctor was on vacation and she didn’t know what else to do, so she just stopped taking testosterone cold turkey. And then she went to therapy. She’d been dealing with selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that prevents you from talking in certain situations. And at 19, she was diagnosed with autism.

[00:12:00] Maddie: What transition allowed me to do this is my opinion now, I certainly, I wouldn’t have have said this at the time. What it allowed me to do, I feel is kind of adopt a character that I was playing that wasn’t me. I had a lot of shame about who I was.

[00:12:29] Maddie: I did not feel like who I was, was like a person who could successfully live in the world, who was accepted by the world. And it just allowed me to present myself differently in a way that, uh, it, it did work to allow me at least a little bit of freedom, just to kind of inhabit someone who felt like they could do a little bit more.

[00:12:33] Ashley: So does she regret transitioning? It’s complicated.

[00:12:49] Maddie: I regret medically transitioning for sure. I fully regret testosterone. If I could undo that, I absolutely would. I have much more complicated feelings about my mastectomy. I don’t feel like I suffer from having a flat chest. Aesthetically, I kind of like it. I regret having surgery about it, or maybe I regret having surgery that I went into with the mindset I did, but I don’t feel like distress about that.

[00:13:04] Ashley: And it wasn’t the detransition, but the regret that made her lose friends during this process.

[00:13:23] Maddie: My friends were actually, like, mostly cool with like the kind of no regrets version of it. 

[00:13:31] Maddie: They started to struggle with the like, I wish I got therapy instead. That was perceived by them as like pro-conversion therapy, I guess. 

[00:13:43] Maddie: I, I was kind of seeing it as exploratory therapy, which I understand some people also consider conversion therapy. I was just really in grief and they had a hard time dealing with that.

[00:13:54] Ashley: So Maddie is an example of someone who went through an internally driven detransition. Externally driven detransition looks completely different.

[00:14:00] Ashley: Eri is 36 a mother, and uses it its pronouns. Before we get into the story, I’m gonna let it explain those pronouns because a lot of people aren’t used to them. And anyway, I’m kind of obsessed with its explanation.

[00:14:20] Eri: I use it/its pronouns as kind of like a, a philosophical thing. It like a grand idea. It like something majestic. It like, the moment your breath gets taken away, when you see, uh, the sunrise, it like this thing that leaves you with wonder because my life that I live is one of wonder. My gender is the, the sense of awe that you feel when the snow is falling on a late December morning and you look out and everything is kind of glittering in the, in the sky. That’s my gender. My gender is like, laying in the park on a, on a July afternoon as the sun begins to set and the sky is like faintly orange with twinges of blue running through it like streaks.

[00:14:52] Eri: Like that’s what my gender is. My gender is not just woman. My gender is more than that. My gender is a feeling that I have that fills me with joy every day.

[00:15:00] Ashley: I forgot to mention that Eriis also a poet, but you gathered that right?

[00:15:12] Ashley: Eri realized it was trans at 14 at a high school panel for the Gay Straight Alliance, where they explained the acronym LGBT. When they explained what transgender meant, something shifted in Eri.

[00:15:27] Eri: Immediately just something in my brain clicked.

[00:15:37] Eri: I was like, oh, that’s me. Okay. I have, I have a name for that now. I, I understand that. It was immediate. And this was 2004, so it was a very different time for transness. What little exposure I had had to, to trans people in the media, in the wider landscape was, it was very limited and it was all like, ACE Ventura pet detective.

[00:16:00] Ashley: I’ve gotta pop in here because this movie has come up in multiple interviews. Basically, there’s a scene at the end of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, when Jim Carrey’s character reacts with horror and disgust. After kissing a trans woman. He uses a toilet plunger on his mouth and every onlooker vomits. The scene has been really harmful to the trans community and nobody has really apologized for it.

[00:16:20] Ashley: Anyway, that was the kind of thing that was normalized around the time Eri came out. Even still, the response from people close to it was mostly positive.

[00:16:29] Eri: As I started to like slowly talk to people about it, the response was curiosity. Like what is it, what is it kind of doing? And so during my first transition, things were like socially around me, much more accepting generally than now.

[00:16:52] Ashley: Eri started socially transitioning in 2005 and in 2006 it started seeing a therapist. In order to get the documentation it would need to start on hormones at 18.

[00:17:00] Eri: This was a different time for medical standards and this doctor put me through months and months of, asking me questions, which ultimately culminated in a deeply humiliating and really awful and very long Scantron test on like, are you actually trans enough? There were like questions like, what do you think about when you masturbate? What do you think about when you touch yourself? How do you see and envision yourself when you’re masturbating? And like, as a 17-year-old, these were really weird and difficult questions. Um, and they were, not questions I was really comfortable talking about.

[00:17:36] Eri: Even with the therapist. And, uh, ultimately I answered some of those questions wrong given the, the guidance of the science of the day.

[00:17:52] Ashley: The doctor diagnosed Eri as an autogynephile. This is a theory from psychologist Ray Blanchard that claims some trans women, specifically those attracted to women, aren’t really trans at all. Instead, they supposedly have a sexual fetish.

[00:18:18] Ashley: They’re aroused by the idea of being female. The theory has been thoroughly debunked. Multiple studies showed that over half of cisgender women also have these same sexual fantasies. For trans women who have these fantasies, they only tend to start after they’ve experienced gender dysphoria and they typically decrease after transition, neither of which would make sense if they were a load-bearing piece of their identities.

[00:18:41] Ashley: And Blanchard’s own data had so many exceptions, it couldn’t support his claims. But for anti-trans activists, it serves a purpose. It reduces trans women to sexual motivation, which makes them seem less than human. Which is why people are still talking about this discredited theory.

[00:18:57] Ashley: And for Eri, the diagnosis did real damage.

[00:19:00] Eri: Being told, you know, here’s a medical professional who works with trans people and this medical professional said, you’re not the right type of trans. And so that ultimately led in, uh, early 2008 to me, detransitioning. And going back to using my dead name and, using he, him pronouns.

[00:19:22] Ashley: That lasted for 13 long years. But eventually there were cracks in the facade.

[00:19:27] Eri: The idea that I was cis, I couldn’t hold that internal monologue for very long. And then I started like identifying as more like genderqueer at first and then gender fluid.

[00:19:40] Ashley: Eri would go through cycles, a few months presenting masculine, a few months presenting feminine.

[00:19:46] Eri: I just had a day. I was like in one of those like femme cycles and I, I remember coming home from work, I was taking my jacket off. And uh, I was just like, I don’t want to go back to presenting masculine. And then I was like, I don’t have to. And then it was like, ah, shit.

[00:20:03] Eri: There it is. There’s, there’s the, there’s the light switch flipping. I was like, okay. Yeah, I, I, I don’t have to, you know, keep doing something that, that makes me numb and dissociative.

[00:20:14] Ashley: That was in 2021. Eri retransitioned and has been living authentically ever since. But it carries that 13 year gap like a scar.

[00:20:22] Eri: I’m very fortunate and very lucky to have been able to suffer through the very long stretch of time that it took for me to be able to get back into my transition. We know what happens to people who want to transition, who try to transition and who aren’t able to, who are institutionally blocked from it. We know what happens to them and there are a lot of my sisters who aren’t here today,

[00:21:00] Ashley: Maddie and Eri represent what feels like an impossible dilemma. Eri faced the extreme gatekeeping that was common in the early two thousands and was forced to detransition because of that, leaving it numb and dissociative until it retransitioned 13 years later. Maddie went through the more modern informed consent model, where doctors give you the risks and benefits and trust you to make your own decision. And as a result, no one caught the mental health issues at the root of her discomfort with her body.

[00:21:29] Ashley: How can we possibly fix this for both of them?

[00:21:32] Maddie: I felt that the way the system was set up, and I still do feel this way, that it’s just very skewed towards a particular person who will have a particular outcome.

[00:21:53] Maddie: And there’s really kind of no regard or very little regard for people who, who won’t benefit through the informed consent system. Of course, there are also other systems that are extremely gatekeepery and that’s a completely different story, but the one I went through was like that. And then suddenly I had all this regret which could be maybe perceived as kind of like reverse gender dysphoria.

[00:22:19] Maddie: And that was kind of getting framed by, you know, clinicians I would talk to as like body dysmorphia, um, in this very different, much less sympathetic lens. I found that very upsetting that the regret was kind of no big deal, but the dysphoria was like, oh, of course that’s important to you.

[00:22:25] Eri: I think that sometimes, like a journey of self discovery involves making wrong decisions, and that’s something that I’ve struggled a lot with because like if I had fought harder to get on HRT back in 2007, 2008, how different would my life be? You know, all of the, the time that I lost all of the, you know, I’m developmentally way off from where I could have been if I had started HRT back then.

[00:22:57] Ashley: Here’s Kinnon again.

[00:23:00] Kinnon MacKinnon: My aim in doing this research is not to necessarily minimize, uh, detransition as an outcome. I do think minimizing this kind of profound feeling of being failed by the healthcare system and detransition with like strong regret over one’s changes that one made to their body should be minimized just because, if you’ve ever interviewed or talked to people who have this experience, to not try to minimize that kind of pain and suffering, I think is unethical. Many people are actually taking this very seriously and are conducting further research in order to minimize this kind of pain and suffering that can coincide with detransition.

[00:23:38] Kinnon MacKinnon: I think we need to think about improving healthcare delivery for all gender diverse people overall. And so that includes access to affirming psychosocial supports, community inclusion, mental healthcare. There’s a, a lot of time and energy and resources, really spent on, you know, thinking about supporting trans youth in the moment. But, you know, how, how do we create a healthcare system and really a society that supports trans people into adulthood as well, because the need for support doesn’t end, you know, when you hit 18 or, you know, 25 or however we define youth as researchers.

[00:24:24] Ashley: On top of the pain and suffering of a regretful medical experience, though, is kind of a cruel irony. The taboo we place on detransition in order to protect trans people ends up leaving detransitioners without support or community when they need it most.

[00:24:47] Ashley: You’ve already heard from Maddie whose friends were accepting of her detransition up to the point when she said she’d regretted her decision and wished that she’d had therapy instead. Eri closed itself off from friend groups because of the shame. Eri remembered the one other trans girl in its town who it had lost touch with since high school.

[00:25:00] Ashley: It thought about reaching out many times over the years, but the detransition stopped it.

[00:25:04] Eri Kapling: Never even wanted to look her up because she would be so ashamed that I detransitioned she would, she would, she would hate me. She would loathe me because I wasn’t really trans like she was.

[00:25:16] Ashley: In a very weird twist of fate, the exact same thing had been happening to her. She also had a detransition period and retransitioned later.

[00:25:25] Eri Kapling: She never looked me up for the same reason. You know, we both had so much shame around the detransition. And then when we were able to, to reconnect and, and find that we were both actually like on the same page about things.

[00:25:37] Eri Kapling: It was great. It was really nice. It was like, oh my gosh. What a wild journey that, that our lives ended up mirroring in, in such interesting ways.

[00:26:00] Kinnon MacKinnon: For the people who feel strong regret and actually their detransition is really identity focused. So it’s, it can be profoundly destabilizing and distressing to kind of realize your identity is kind of shifting, you feel regret over your body. This is a very acutely distressing time and to lose access to peer supports, your friends lgbtq plus community organizations and so forth, it’s extremely risky. And this is actually a time when we probably need to actually offer a lot of supports to people. But instead what we’ve seen is detransitioners forming these kind of outcast peer, very hidden peer support networks, you know, on, on Reddit, Discord groups, Facebook groups. Um, and these are actually quite, uh, available for political manipulation, cultural critics to kind of screenshot and, uh, make comments on people’s regret. And there are, you know, networks that have formed around political advocacy against gender affirming healthcare.

[00:27:14] Ashley: People lose support for identity shifts, whether they’re transitioning or detransitioning, and that’s precisely when they need support the most.

[00:27:19] Ashley: So is there any way to predict who will detransition?

[00:27:32] Kinnon MacKinnon: I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in being highly confident about whose identity will remain, stable or they’ll remain in a trans identity, uh, over the long term. I think that’s difficult to presume for clinicians. That said, you know, we do have research on, uh, people who detransition and, you know, we can look at some differences across those populations of people of a general trans population versus people who detransition. And we do see some differences in those populations.

[00:28:00] Ashley: For example, 79% of the detransitioners in Kinnon’s study were assigned female at birth or AFAB, and they were much more likely to have internal reasons for their detransition and to regret their transition than detransitioners is assigned male at birth.

[00:28:10] Ashley: Other studies find the same thing.

[00:28:12] Ashley: Why might this be? One likely reason is that there have just been more AFAB people transitioning. A huge portion of the rise in trans identities in the last decade has been made up of young white AFAB transmasculine people.

[00:28:33] Ashley: Part of this may be that there’s more acceptance of gender non-conformity from AFAB people so there aren’t as many societal hurdles to overcome in their transition. Kinnon’s study also found that of AFAB people who had internal reasons for their detransition and experienced regret, 42% reported a gay or lesbian orientation. While gender non-conforming “tomboys” generations ago might be labeled gay. These days, many might suggest their transgender. It’s possible that some gay AFAB people are misinterpreting their gender non-conformity as a sign they should transition, and then they do, and they realize it was a mistake.

[00:29:02] Ashley: Other findings in the detransition research suggest that mental health issues may play a role as well, like they did with Maddie.

[00:29:09] Kinnon MacKinnon: Borderline personality disorder is a condition that has come up in historic literature as well as more recently. So in samples of people who detransition, you may see a borderline diagnosis in somewhere between, uh, 20 and 30% of people who detransition.

[00:29:31] Ashley: Kinnon was careful to note that you also see higher rates of borderline personality disorder in the general trans population too, which may be due to early exposure to trauma. It’s just that in detransitioners, the rates are even higher.

[00:29:44] Kinnon MacKinnon: Psychosis is another experience where some people may feel that they were perhaps misdiagnosed or later they had a pretty profound change in their identity and desire for gender expression.

[00:29:59] Kinnon MacKinnon: One of the diagnoses that’s very contentious, but also doesn’t have compelling evidence around it is, is autism. So within, uh, broader public debates around, um, autism people on, you know, the people who really oppose pediatric gender affirming healthcare will say that actually, many, if not all trans youth are autistic.

[00:30:24] Kinnon MacKinnon: And therefore that’s who they authentically are. So myself and many other colleagues have really been exploring this. And we have not found at this point any compelling evidence that autistic trans people are likelier to detransition. But that said, many of the people who detransition are also autistic.

[00:30:43] Ashley: According to Kinnon, that’s probably because many trans people are autistic in the first place.

[00:31:00] Kinnon MacKinnon: The estimates of autism amongst, uh, trans and gender diverse populations are anywhere between eight and some studies show, you know, over 30, 35%. So yeah, there’s absolutely a co-occurrence. And in fact, there are some trans people, usually trans, younger people who actually identify as autigender.

[00:31:22] Kinnon MacKinnon: And so that’s actually like recognizing the co-occurrence between autism and gender and that, and they kind of acknowledge that their, their experience of gender in the world is actually very wrapped up in, in autism and, and neurodiversity.

[00:31:25] Ashley: Maddie totally sees this perspective.

[00:31:41] Maddie: As an autistic person, a lot of things don’t make sense and a lot of social norms don’t make sense. And in my perspective, gender norms are just another set of these things that it seem very important to a lot of people and, and really don’t make a lot of sense to me. My guess would be it just makes it easier for people to sort of start that line of questioning.

[00:31:45] Ashley: And this relates to the way Maddie identifies now. She doesn’t identify as cisgender.

[00:31:51] Maddie: I identify, I guess as kind of none.

[00:32:03] Maddie: I have chosen to sort of see, and this is kind of a, just like a philosophical position that I’ve taken for my mental health. That I don’t care. And, um, my identity is not something that I want to put out there for other people to affirm or deny or question. And so I would say that in my view, gender is a social construct. I can acknowledge that like I’m physically female and otherwise I, I make the choice to not care, personally.

[00:32:27] Ashley: So what do we do with all of this? I asked Maddie and Eri what they’d say to someone going through what they did.

[00:32:33] Maddie: I would say that they don’t owe anyone anything. They don’t have to talk about their experience. They don’t have to feel a certain way. They don’t have to feel guilty about feeling a certain way. You know, if they regret, they can feel that. And, don’t get obsessed with it and don’t like engage too much with it because it’s not always productive.

[00:33:00] Eri: Just don’t pull the ladder up behind you. That’s where I think a lot of frustration, anger, negative feelings comes from. Would you want the barriers that you are suggesting putting up for people who are trying to transition, placed on yourself when you were trying to detransition? Live your true self and if you are happy with your detransition, then I support that a hundred percent.

[00:33:13] Eri: The easiest way to spread joy into the world is being authentic to yourself. The world needs more encouragement to just be true to yourself. And any sort of institutional safeguarding that’s gonna like, close that off from people, any, any gatekeeping that’s gonna close that off from people is making the world a darker and more dreary place.

[00:33:43] Ashley: Here’s what I think the answer is. We talk about it. I know that sounds too simple, maybe even dangerous. But the silence, the fear of giving ammunition to people who wanna ban trans healthcare, that’s dangerous too. That’s why Maddie lost her friends when she expressed regret.

[00:34:00] Ashley: That’s why Eri spent 13 years in isolation thinking other trans people would hate it. That’s why detransitioners end up in hidden Reddit groups where they’re vulnerable to political manipulation. When we’re too scared to talk about detransition, we’re not protecting trans people. We’re just creating more shame. And shame doesn’t help anyone make better decisions or get better care. It just makes people suffer alone.

[00:34:36] Ashley: So yeah, this conversation is scary. Admitting the trans healthcare system has flaws feels dangerous when that system is under attack. But we can’t fix problems we won’t acknowledge, and the people living these experiences deserve better than being flattened into political talking points.

[00:35:00] Ashley: This whole podcast is built on one idea: That the questions we’re afraid to ask are exactly the ones we need to talk about.

[00:35:04] Ashley: Because when we shine a light on taboo topics, when we listen to real people’s messy, complicated stories without trying to weaponize them, that’s when we actually make progress.

[00:35:25] Ashley: Maddie and Eri both deserve support. And the only way to build a world where they both get it is to stop being afraid of the conversation.

[00:35:47] Ashley: Thanks for listening. If you’re a paid Patreon member, stick around to the end of the credits for some bonus content. If you’re not, head to patreon.com/taboo science to join. For as little as $5 a month, you’ll get ad free episodes and bonus clips that you won’t find in the main feed. Thank you so much to Maddie and Eri for trusting me with their stories.

[00:36:10] Ashley: And huge thanks to Kinnon MacKinnon. He was one of my first interviews way back when I started this project, completely naive about what was ahead of me, and he shared so many resources and guest connections that made this show better and stronger. If you’re interested in the science of detransition and in trans science in general, I highly recommend subscribing to his substack, The One Percent. It’s at substack.com/at symbol, TheOnePercentDetrans, or just click the link in the show notes.

[00:36:30] Ashley: Taboo Science is written and produced by me, Ashley Hamer Pritchard. Our sensitivity reader is Newton Schottelkotte. The theme was by Danny Lopatka of DLC Music. Episode music is from Epidemic Sound.

[00:36:52] Ashley: There is one more episode in this season. I can hardly believe it. For the final episode, we’re exploring how to be a trans ally, the right way.

[00:37:00] Ashley: I hope you tune in. I won’t tell anyone.