"I realized that no matter what I would have done -- had I got into full surgery on my face, removal of my genitals -- (I already had breast implants by then), I would have never been a woman."

Abel Garcia's search for self-acceptance -- from a Mexican brothel to a gender surgeon's table, to acceptance of the man he always was

Detransitioner Abel Garcia addresses protesters at the First Do No Harm rally of groups calling on the American Academy of Pediatrics to reverse course on its embrace of pediatric gender affirming care. 

Abel Garcia received a prescription for estrogen at his very first visit to a gender clinician at the age of 19. He is one of a growing chorus of detransitioners who describe a protocol of transgender "medicine" that eschews gatekeeping entirely on principle -- swapping out the normative medical practice of "diagnosis" for the distinctly non-medical practice of "affirmation." Affirming clinicians have manufactured a cohort of young people many multiples in size larger than any before it aided by an online social contagion driven by social media influencers, some of whom have tens of millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok, selling a dream of magical transformation to confused and impressionable children around the world. 

A cohort that has expanded so dramatically by stripping out the safeguards once relied upon to ensure that invasive medical procedures once carefully controlled to ensure that only those for whom the benefits would outweigh the myriads risks would be granted access tot hem must by necessity see the rate of regret and detransition expand equally dramatically. Garcia and other transitioners profiled here are the first flecks of spray from a coming wave. Their stories will all share many features in common, but each of them is as fascinating and representative of the age of ideological succession as ex-Communists were in the 1930's. 

I wrote a feature-length profile of Garcia last month and can now at last make good on an idle fancy I had several years ago, which is to provide the complete source materials for my feature reporting to paid subscribers of my own private platform. Paid subscriptions are my sole means of subsistence, and this semi-private content will subvent what I except to be the far more impactful series on the Queer Normative future that I am writing now and other series of its kind. The video will also be repurposed into some larger work of greater impact than these complete videos, which are nonetheless, for those with an interest in the subject, compulsively fascinating and affecting in their own way. For now, it will allow those who want to walk with me on my journey through the Twilight-Zone like unreality into which the ideological succession has plunged the Western world to accompany me every step along the way.  Full transcript follows.

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Year Zero
Year Zero
Authors
Wesley Yang