Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Identity Cult
By Mary Margaret Olohan
(Regnery, 288 pages, $33)
The transgender movement is, at its core, a quest for happiness. Daily Signal senior reporter Mary Margaret Olohan begins her new book, Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Identity Cult, by observing that every trans-identifying individual felt the “same driving force: the desperate desire to know who you are and to be happy.”
Throughout Detrans, Olohan weaves together the stories of five detransitioners — individuals who once identified as transgender, underwent social and/or medical transitions to resemble the opposite sex, came to regret the decisions, and reverted to presenting in accord with their biological sex. Following their detransitions, these individuals, four of whom are women, have started to speak out against the abuse they endured at the hands of doctors, therapists, and school employees.
Their psychologists and doctors spoke about a “gender journey” and rapidly eliminated all safeguards that stood as barriers on the path to self-discovery. School therapists hid one girl’s transition from her parents, who were initially skeptical of their daughter’s claim that she was a boy. Planned Parenthood employees prescribed a three-month supply of testosterone to another girl after a 20-minute consultation. Doctors approved cosmetic surgeries — double mastectomies — for teenage girls in the middle of puberty. (READ MORE: England Bans Puberty Blockers, American Activists Double Down)
The women in Detrans all began to question their identities because being feminine seemed uncomfortable, unattainable, or downright terrifying. Battling intense gender dysphoria in conjunction with — and, perhaps, in response to — various mental illnesses and sexual traumas, all four individuals identified what seemed to be a solution: stop being a girl.
Wracked with dysphoria, the girls searched for the elusive “gender euphoria” heralded by transgender activists. If their bodies finally aligned with their perceived gender identities, they would be free. For these teenagers, it started with changing their pronouns and names. Shortly after, doctors, therapists, and activists — though the line that separates them is increasingly blurred — foisted testosterone prescriptions upon them. In the blink of an eye, these teenage girls had scars in place of breasts. Their metamorphosis was supposedly complete, but gender euphoria — the “joy caused when one’s gendered experience aligns with their gender identity, rather than with the gender they were assigned at birth” — remained elusive.
“As she moved forward with her transition and continued taking testosterone, Prisha noticed that she was still suicidal and struggling with her mental health,” Olohan writes. “But she attributed that to the fact that she hadn’t had top surgery yet, or that she hadn’t been on hormones long enough, or that she hadn’t had a hysterectomy yet. ‘I was like, I have to keep chasing, and chasing, and chasing, and then I’ll be happy and then I’ll be aligned, and then I’ll be in the right body,’ she said.”
Prisha underwent a double mastectomy, referred to as “top surgery” by the trans community, and immediately experienced what she called “surgery euphoria.” Severely anorexic throughout her medical transition, Prisha was thrilled that the procedure had lowered her weight by eight pounds. Olohan notes:
Prisha had also tried to convince her team to let her get a liposuction. But they had refused, Prisha told me, claiming that Prisha wasn’t able to consent to this type of surgery because of her anorexia. Her desire for liposuction was attached to her body dysmorphia and eating disorder.
No such caution was exercised with her gender dysmorphia–generated desire to remove her breasts.
Nevertheless, Prisha was happy with the operation’s results — for a while, at least. Soon, she found herself in familiar territory. The next step of transitioning always beckoned, promising the euphoria that always seemed just out of reach. (RELATED: The Trans Reckoning Is Not Yet Here — But It’s Coming Soon)
Prisha was far from alone. Every person Olohan interviewed expressed a similar unfulfilled hope that the next step could deliver the desired relief. The beginnings of the transition had been rocky, though reversible. But asking parents and peers to use different pronouns or a new nickname soon spiraled into puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones, then irreversible surgeries. Giving up on the pursuit of gender euphoria and becoming “detrans” meant admitting to an error, facing the scrutiny of family and friends, and bearing the scars of medical transition throughout the rest of life.
Over time, Prisha, Chloe, Luka, and Helena realized that their social and medical transitions had not alleviated their persistent unhappiness. And though a coterie of concerned professionals had coaxed them along the path to transition, no one was willing to help them reverse course.
The unhealed wounds from her mastectomy gave Chloe pause, and she realized at the age of 15 that she wanted to be a mother. Dealing with painful complications from testosterone injections, Luka weaned herself off of the hormone. Helena’s girlfriend created a timeline of their photos together throughout the years. Seeing her face and body change — “‘from so young, hopeful, and most of all, recognizable, to weary, deadpan, and foreign,’” she told Olohan — filled Helena with regret.
Prisha’s first revelation came through therapy. As she began resolving trauma, Olohan writes, “She found the ‘healing’ that she had so desperately sought through transition.” If transitioning was hard, detransitioning proved even harder. Olohan explains:
Though [Prisha] initially ‘medically detransitioned’ by stopping her testosterone injections … she continued to live, act, and dress like a man for a while. She also had a bit of a beard at this point, and she wasn’t shaving. ‘I was too deep in the shame and the lie,’ she said. ‘I was like, well, I’ve uprooted my entire life and everybody else’s for this. I have to live with it.
Prisha began dating a man who had a three-year-old daughter. She attributes her social detransition to the girl. “Despite all that stuff I said about living as a man and literally having a beard, she started to call me ‘Mommy,’” Prisha told Olohan. “She looked at me and she said it with her arms extended towards me … And then I was like, ‘That’s it. I know exactly what I want. Anything is worth getting that which I have just had a taste of.” Prisha fully detransitioned. Earlier this week, she gave birth to a child of her own.
Detrans offers a powerful, step-by-step account of what transgender liberation theory actually looks like in practice. It’s a hard and haunting — but necessary — book to read. Olohan’s compassionate approach gives a voice to those who the LGBTQ community would rather ignore: the individuals who questioned the movement’s veracity as their lives fell apart under its influence.
Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.
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