FTM and Back Again
A Detransitioner Describes The New Cohort of Transitioners and Why We Can Expect Vastly Higher Desistance Rates Than in the Past
Gender nonconformity has always existed. So have a tiny minority of young people for whom the pain of being born their sex into their sex is so intense that psychiatric attention of some sort is warranted. Roughly 80 percent of these sufferers of what was until recently called “Gender Identity Disorder” would desist of their own accord. A majority of those would end up gay and comfortable in their intact bodies. In 2006, some researchers in the Netherlands tested an experimental treatment that would stop the development of sexed characteristics at puberty. A single study of 55 of these patients is the entire basis for the practice of what has come to be known as “gender affirming care.”
That cohort of patients bears scant resemblance to the cohort that emerged in the 2010’s. Boys used to outnumber girls by 2 to 1 in seeking treatment for what later came to be known as “gender dysphoria”; today the ratio has reversed. The 4,000 percent increase in trans-identifying children and adolescents largely consists of a wave of girls who want to be boys. Are they “really” boys because they were wrongly “assigned female at birth” by doctors who had yet to be initiated into the noble truth of gender identity that Western institutional culture adopted en masse sometime around 2019? No, of course not. They were ordinary girls like Cat Cattinson afflicted by the typical pains and insecurities of adolescence who were encouraged by cult-like online influencers and followers to reinterpret their body anxieties, their depression, their disordered eating through the lens of gender identity. They were ordinary girls looking for a way out of a pornified culture. They were ordinary girls attracted to the latest craze that was not just a peer to peer online phenomena but increasingly one supported by every teacher, librarian, social worker, psychologist, and doctor they were likely to meet — all the way up the hierarchy of the therapeutic state that was one of the chief constituencies of the Democratic party, whose mantras its leading politicians would chant in unison at an ever-escalating rate of adoption without regard for whether they made sense or would help or harm their supposed beneficiaries. So long as a long chain of activists, doctors, politicians and moral entrepreneurs could milk the ensuing cultural churn for personal gain in money, prestige, and clout, the girls whose development they stopped, and bodies they were slicing up, were an easy sacrifice.
Cat Cattinson is both a very ordinary girl afflicted by the very ordinary pains and insecurities endemic to teenaged girls and an unusually poised, polished, and articulate spokeswoman for a group of people who by virtue of their very existence wound and frustrate those who cheered on their transition and who therefore revile them as traitors. They are a group of people who believed they “knew who they were” in accordance with the noble truths of gender identity and who came to understand that they had been deceived, deceived themselves, and deceived others — but who could continue with the deceit no longer. After her speech to the crowd at the Do No Harm protest we sat down for a conversation. What follows is a transcript of the video remarks above followed by audio and a transcript of our edited conversation.
Cat Cattinson remarks at Do No Harm Protest, October 8, 2022 in Anaheim California
When I was thirteen, I didn’t want to be a girl.
My body rapidly morphed into something I didn’t recognize. Weight gain, growth of hips and breasts, and stretch marks made me feel like I was wearing a costume I couldn’t take off.
Boys now ogled my chest or told sex jokes in front of me. Girls I was once friends with ostracized me. Adults made comments about my body and how it had “developed.” To escape the discomfort, I turned to watching anime and perusing online forums. I also developed an eating disorder, which I continued to struggle with for the next decade.
I thought that if my body was slim, strong and muscular rather than soft and curvy, I would be worthy of respect. My true self was hiding somewhere inside this disgusting shell.
It was around this time that I was first introduced to gender ideology when I came across a website for “female-to-male”transgender people.
I learned about gender dysphoria, described as the uncomfortable feeling of incongruence between one’s biological sex and her “gender identity”.
After reading this, I had an epiphany. “Gender dysphoria! That’s what I have.” I now knew of a legitimate medical condition that explained why I hated my body so much.
The website included photos of bearded “transmen” with prominent scars on their chests. I learned that if a person had gender dysphoria, it meant he was transgender, and the only treatment was to transition. There were links to buy binders and packers, find out where to obtain testosterone, and access legal name change information. Basically a one-stop shop for transitioning.
This easily accessible website had sections completely inappropriate for a 13-year-old, like how to have sex as a transman and the various types of “bottom surgeries”: phalloplasty, metoidioplasty, hysterectomy. Someone in the forum boasted that her phalloplasty result was identical to male genitalia in appearance and function, leading me to believe that complete sex change was possible: I could be a man.
I had been right – my body was the problem. It wasn’t aligned with my male brain, and I couldn’t be happy until I transformed myself with hormones and surgery. I decided that as soon as I was able to, I would take all the measures I could to transition. This was back in the early-2000’s so it wasn’t easy. I was not affirmed by my parents, teachers, peers, or my pediatrician. But I never stopped longing for life as a man.
If I was a California teenager today, my delusion and self-hatred would have been affirmed. I would have been told that yes, my body was the problem. I would have been offered puberty blockers, which could have led to permanent effects like osteoporosis, stunted brain development, infertility, and lifelong sexual disfunction. I may have had my breasts removed before they were finished growing. I could even have had a hysterectomy, greatly increasing my risk of heart disease and leaving me dependent on testosterone injections for the rest of my life.
After years of obsessive rumination, I began medically transitioning. Testosterone did not prove to be a magic elixir as I had hoped. It caused health issues and the loss of my singing voice. I was a semi-professional singer, so this impacted me financially as well as physically and emotionally. I made the difficult, but worthwhile decision to detransition.
While I have to work through continuous vocal discomfort and pain, I survived adolescence and early adulthood with my body intact. I still have the option to have children, breastfeed, and have intimate relationships. Tragically, a rapidly growing number of detransitioners cannot say the same. Here today are people of all ages who have suffered irreversible physical and psychological damage due to being ushered down the trans path. Our stories are only the beginning.
Today, gender identity ideology is being taught in schools, promoted on social media, and even featured in kid’s TV shows. Children are being groomed to believe they could be in the wrong body, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to reject the reality of their biological sex and seek surgery to change it. The number of youths identifying as transgender in the U.S. doubled between 2017 and 2020, recorded at 300,000 as of 2020, and is likely much higher now.
WPATH, which proposes guidelines by which the AAP abides, recently removed the age requirement for gender affirming procedures, removing any safeguards. From WPATH’s self-described Standards of Care, Version 8, Appendix D: “[an adolescent must demonstrate] the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.” Let’s be real, no adolescent can consent to this.
Consent laws exist because we are aware that the human brain does not fully develop until approximately age 25. If a minor cannot consent to sex before age 18, drinking alcohol before age 21, or renting a car before age 25, why does WPATH and the AAP consider them capable of consenting to experimental drugs or disfiguring surgeries?
Is this truly what’s in the best interest of children? Or is medicalizing 300,000 minors simply in the financial interest of pharmaceutical companies and plastic surgeons?
“Gender affirming care” may sound nice, but it is a dangerous treatment model based on low quality, biased “evidence.” Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, despite WPATH’s attempt to rebrand it as “gender incongruence”, and pediatricians should never affirm mental illness. Young people deserve proper psychological care, not medical experimentation.
As a detransitioned woman, I now know my body was never the problem. I am grateful to my parents, teachers, and pediatrician for not affirming my delusion or allowing me to destroy my health. We must prevent this nightmare from happening to any more young people. Let’s remind the AAP of the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.
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