319. Detransition: The Wounds that Won't Heal | Chloe Cole

[0] Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and on the Daily Wire Platform Associated podcast.

[1] We have a rough one today, so buckle up.

[2] I'm speaking with Chloe Cole, an 18 -year -old, so -called detransitioner from the Central Valley of California.

[3] She started her transition at 12 years old, puberty blockers and testosterone at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15 years old.

[4] She is now a strong advocate against gender ideology and seeks legally to hold those propelling it forward accountable.

[5] Hello, Chloe.

[6] Merry Christmas.

[7] Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today and to everybody who's watching and listening.

[8] You've been through quite a complicated experience to say the released for the last five or six years, and you've decided in recent months to go public with your story, and also to initiate some legal proceedings against the medical professionals who, what would you say, aided you in your exciting journey.

[9] And so do you want to tell us exactly, tell us the situation you're in now and tell us about what's happened to you since you were, well, since you emerged from childhood?

[10] Yeah, so at the age of 12, I started I started experiencing some gender dysphoria, and I started seeing a therapist, and I got the diagnosis, and I started going on the path of medical transition at the age of 13, starting with blockers, and then moving on to hormones, and at 15, I got a double mastectomy, but it turned out that it wasn't the best decision for me, and I stopped transitioning at the age of 16.

[11] Okay, so let's go back to when you were, let's go back to when you were 12.

[12] About when did you hit puberty?

[13] I had a fairly early puberty actually started, I started developing at around the age of nine, if not a little bit earlier.

[14] Okay, okay.

[15] And so, so at nine, did that, do you remember if that changed you emotionally?

[16] Yeah, it did.

[17] It was really difficult for me, actually.

[18] Okay.

[19] So let me give you a little background.

[20] You tell me if anybody's ever told you this before, okay?

[21] So boys and girls experience, before puberty, experience approximately the same levels of negative emotion.

[22] So that would be primarily anxiety and emotional pain or even sometimes susceptibility to physical pain.

[23] and emotions like frustration and disappointment and shame and guilt and self -consciousness are all part of that, what would you call it, network of negative emotion.

[24] Now what happens to girls when they hit puberty, and no one knows exactly why this is, is that their negative emotion levels go up.

[25] And so that on average, women, biologically mature women, are more sensitive to negative emotion than biologically mature men.

[26] And that kicks in at puberty.

[27] Now there's a variety of explanations for that, but no one knows for certain, and here's some of them.

[28] Okay, so first of all, sexual dimorphism in physical strength really emerges at puberty.

[29] So boys and girls are pretty evenly matched physically, but once puberty kicks in, boys are taller, stronger, heavier, and they're much stronger in terms of upper body strength.

[30] So women are at a disadvantage physically in relation to, to anything that might have to do with physical combat.

[31] And so on those grounds, it makes sense for women to be somewhat more sensitive to threat.

[32] Okay, so then another explanation is that women are more vulnerably sexually than men because they bear a much higher cost for reproduction, obviously, with pregnancy and protracted dependence of infants.

[33] And so it makes, so they're more vulnerable on the sexual front, so it makes sense for them to be more sensitive to any threat that's associated with sexual activity.

[34] And then the third explanation, and there may be more, is that women are charged, generally speaking, with the primary responsibility for infants.

[35] And infants are extremely dependent and vulnerable.

[36] And so you could make a case that adult women's nervous systems are actually adapted for the mother -child diad and not for the, say, emotional well -being of the individual woman.

[37] And a woman needs to be threat -sensitive because she's going to be taking care of infants and extremely dependent children.

[38] And it makes sense for her to be more cognizant of threats as a consequence, even though the negative consequence of that for women and all of this is that women are much more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than men.

[39] Cross -culturally, it's between three to one.

[40] and five to one.

[41] Now, men have their associated pathologies.

[42] Men are more likely to be antisocial, for example, and to abuse alcohol.

[43] But women predominate on the negative emotion side.

[44] And then I would say that's exacerbated, you know, if you hit puberty early, because you have to deal with these complexities of physiological transformation at a very young age.

[45] And so that's a difficult thing to handle emotionally.

[46] And then there's the additional consequence.

[47] of whatever hormonal turbulence might emerge as a consequence of the onset of puberty.

[48] So it's very common for young women to experience high levels of negative emotion and for those emotions to be focused on their body because another thing that's characteristic of female negative emotion is that the self -consciousness associated with that tends to focus very particularly on body, shame, and self -consciousness.

[49] And that might be because women are evaluated more rigorously on the basis of their physical appearance than men.

[50] Men are evaluated more harshly, sexually, let's say, on the performance side, you know, with regard to socioeconomic status and so forth.

[51] But women are definitely evaluated more harshly by men and by each other in terms of their physical attractiveness.

[52] So that makes quite a complicated situation for girls who are making the turn.

[53] transition into puberty, and a lot of them are depressed and anxious and develop an intense focus on their body.

[54] So I don't know how much of that was explained to you by your therapists or the medical professionals, but that's all well, that's all well documented, psychological and medical information.

[55] Yeah, none of that was really explained to me by therapists or even growing up.

[56] I mean, even so, that all, every single part of what you said actually played a role in a lot of my childhood distress and my transition and eventually my detransition actually, you know.

[57] Growing up, I was a bit of a tomboy and also on the spectrum.

[58] And I didn't know this until I was diagnosed just last year, but it did play a role in my socialization and my difficulty getting along with other girls growing up.

[59] And I found that I fit in more with the boys.

[60] And when I hit puberty, it was a bit earlier than most of my peers and I got taller than them and oh yeah you know i i could keep up with the boys then and i had a lot of pride in that but as the years went on they started to get taller than me and outmatched me physically and this did bring on a bit of distress for me and um you know as i got older um socialization began to become more sex oriented and i found it even harder to fit in with girls my age and but at the same time I was also starting to notice there was a divide between me and boys in several ways.

[61] And there was a lot of loneliness for me because on one hand, I didn't really feel like I was one of the girls.

[62] But on the other hand, I was losing my connection with some of my friends who I was close with and really cared about.

[63] And I also had some body image issues growing up as well.

[64] I often talk about how social media played a role in it.

[65] But really, it started from a very young age, actually.

[66] I mean, I grew up.

[67] I was born into a very image -oriented, very sex -oriented society.

[68] And, you know, before I hit puberty, I was looking forward to having a developed body and eventually going breasts.

[69] And, you know, once I hit puberty, and once I hit puberty, I was, it wasn't what I expected.

[70] And I was really quite disappointed how I looked.

[71] I was very, very skinny.

[72] I was on the smaller chested side.

[73] And, you know, I grew up in an age where we kind of glorified bodies that are very, very voluptuous, lots of curves.

[74] People often use a phrase, like, body heavy, I mean, bottom heavy or hourglass, hair shape, things like that.

[75] And I didn't look like that at all.

[76] I was, you know, I was quite thin, a little on the muscular side.

[77] And if anything, my shoulders were probably the widest point in my body.

[78] And I kind of had a complex over this.

[79] I also liked having my hair short.

[80] And because of all this, I felt like, if anything, I didn't really look like a girl at all.

[81] I didn't look like the other girls my age.

[82] And I felt like I just wasn't pretty and that I would never really have any worth as a woman.

[83] It's a very rare adolescent and probably.

[84] a particularly rare female adolescent who feels attractive in the early stages of puberty.

[85] So everything that you experienced, although you may have experienced it in an exaggerated manner for some of the reasons you laid out, but everything you experienced is in some real sense par for the course for a few years, for the vast majority of people.

[86] Now, you did add one additional issue, which we could delve into a little bit, which I think is relevant.

[87] So you said that you're on the spectrum and that you had an easier time communicating with boys than with girls.

[88] And so here's something to know about that.

[89] So the biggest reliable difference that's being documented between males and females, and this becomes even larger in egalitarian societies, by the way, is orientation of interest.

[90] So women are higher in negative emotion and they're more agreeable.

[91] And agreeableness is both compassion and politeness.

[92] And although the difference between men and women isn't massive.

[93] It's significant, and it also maximizes in egalitarian society, so it looks like it's biological.

[94] But the biggest difference is in interest, and boys, males, are more reliably interested in things, and girls, females, are more reliably interested in people.

[95] But people on the autistic spectrum are also more reliably interested in things.

[96] And so, for example, If you're extremely autistic, the psychological phrase for descriptive purposes is lacking theory of mind.

[97] And so extremely autistic people have a hard time understanding what's going on in someone else's mind at all.

[98] They tend to be almost entirely thing -oriented.

[99] And there's a much higher preponderance of autistic symptoms among engineers.

[100] And then if engineers in Silicon Valley, for example, male engineers and female engineers, often, by statistical comparison, often marry, and their children are disproportionately likely to be autistic.

[101] And so the fact that you are tilted towards the autistic end of the spectrum, first of all, that might just be an indication of neurological wiring that tilts you towards interest in things, just so you know that.

[102] So that's not necessarily autistic in and of itself.

[103] It's just part of the normal variation in, what would you call it, well, in attentional orientation.

[104] But the fact that you were on the spectrum, let's say, and more interested in things is going to make it more difficult for you to communicate with girls because girls are reliably more interested in people.

[105] And so, and then on the image front, you know, this ties in with the idea of self -consciousness.

[106] So if you're on stage and you're talking to people and you become aware, yourself tends to make you nervous and sweat and to become uncomfortable, to experience high levels of negative emotion.

[107] And self -consciousness itself looks like a manifestation of negative emotion.

[108] They're incredibly tightly linked statistically, almost indistinguishable from one another.

[109] And so what you see happening very often in girls, because girls are self -conscious in relationship to their body, because that's one of the primary ways they're assessed, let's say, for attractiveness and for social status is that that self -consciousness tends to take the form of intense preoccupation with body and with image.

[110] And so that can be exacerbated by whatever social trends happen to be in place, but it's a very deep -seated problem.

[111] And so that's part of, and also the fact that you hit puberty earlier is going to make that, obviously, is going to make that more complicated because it means you're not as neurologically or practically mature when you have to contend with all these issues.

[112] So everything that you described in some sense could have been attributed to the difficulties of normative development, just so you know.

[113] And this proclivity of teenagers to develop depression and anxiety, I want to take that apart for a minute too for everybody who's listening.

[114] So imagine gender dysphoria.

[115] Okay, so 10 years ago it was comparatively rare.

[116] but not unheard of.

[117] But imagine it has two components, okay?

[118] One is a tendency towards negative emotion.

[119] So suffering, anxiety, depression, frustration, disappointment, pain, shame, guilt, self -consciousness, all of that.

[120] And then imagine there's a second part of it that's more specifically focused on discomfort with the body.

[121] Okay, the first part of that is the bulk of it.

[122] So if you look across forms of psychopathology, like mental illness, the major segment is high levels of negative emotion like depression and anxiety.

[123] And a secondary segment is the particular manifestation of that, in your case in body dysmorphia.

[124] And then the claims that uninformed mental health professionals make that you're at elevated risk for suicide if you're gender dysphoric is erroneous because the elevated risk for suicide is actually a consequence of the general proclivity for depression and anxiety and not a specific consequence of the gender dysphoria or at least that's only a small subcomponent of it.

[125] And so that's another thing to know is that the main clump of psychopathological manifestation mental illness is centered on heightened levels of negative emotion.

[126] And of course, that spikes for adolescent girls.

[127] Now, you may have been told this, but perhaps you weren't.

[128] So there are good long -term studies of children with gender dysphoria.

[129] Most of them were conducted in Toronto, where I happened to be by a man named Ken Zucker.

[130] And Zucker ran a clinic for gender dysphoric kids way before this became part of the culture war, let's say.

[131] and he was a very straight and honest scientist, a very good researcher, not a political person, and what he showed was, what his clinic showed, many peer -reviewed studies, was that gender dysphoria of the type that you described is relatively rare, but if you leave kids alone till they're 19 or 18, 80 to 90 % of them settle into their biological identity, although about 80 % of them are also homosexual in their orientation.

[132] And so the pathway for him, before this was all politicized, was you'd have a child who was gender non -conforming temperamentally, somewhat like you were, you didn't have a pattern of female interests, let's say.

[133] And then prone to depression and anxiety, and then that combination would produce this gender dysphoria, and that would become quite intense around the dawn of puberty.

[134] But if you just backed the hell off and waited, those kids would settle into their body, but generally I'd adopt a homosexual orientation.

[135] And so that was, as far as I could tell, that was the best research.

[136] Now, Zucker got slaughtered for this once it became politicized.

[137] He lost his job.

[138] He was pilloried by the Toronto Star of the newspaper here.

[139] He went a lawsuit against them just a couple of years ago, but they demolished his career.

[140] And his guideline medically was, don't do any harm, right?

[141] Back the hell off.

[142] You can provide these kids with support and you can walk them through their emotional problems, but you should certainly not rush into anything more dramatic.

[143] Now, you said, you started therapy when you were 12.

[144] What were you told about what was plaguing you?

[145] I think before I get into that, there's some things that I should bring up before that.

[146] I mentioned that I did have a late diagnosis for autism, and this is because in preschool in my elementary school years, my teachers often told my parents, actually, that I had some symptoms indicative of autism, and they suggested that they get me diagnosed, but when they brought me to my doctor as a kid, They were told, oh, she's too smart to be autistic.

[147] She's too socially developed to be autistic.

[148] And so I kind of miss the best opportunity window, the best ages, I guess you would say, to get the diagnosis.

[149] It wasn't until after I stopped transitioning that I got the diagnosis, actually.

[150] And I find that that played a stronger role in the development of my gender dysphoria than my sexual orientation did.

[151] I'm mostly heterosexual.

[152] I'm mostly attracted to men.

[153] I mean, I do have a very marginal attraction to other women, but it's mostly sexual nature.

[154] I don't really have any emotional attraction to them, and it's not something that I really ever care about because, I mean, it's not like, I do want to have a family one day.

[155] I do want to have children, and I can't really do that naturally with a woman, so I just don't really see a point in it.

[156] Yeah, well, there is some evidence by the way, too.

[157] And I would say this evidence is less compelling, but I think it's worth contemplating is that the distribution of sexual attraction in men looks like it's more bimodal than it is in women.

[158] And so there seem to be homosexual men and heterosexual men and not much in between.

[159] But on the female side, there's some evidence that women are more broadly attracted to what obviously most women are heterosexual in their orientation, but a higher proportion of women report a co -attraction to other women than men who report a co -attraction to other men.

[160] And so why that is, again, isn't exactly obvious.

[161] And I wouldn't say that research is incontrovertible, but it's also worth knowing because one of the things that young women who are confused about their sexual identity and their body might be wondering is, well, now and then I feel an attraction to another girl, what does that mean?

[162] Does that mean that I'm not female in my essence, not female physiologically, I'm not female psychologically.

[163] And I would say, no, it doesn't mean that at all.

[164] It's pretty damn common.

[165] It might even be the norm.

[166] And I think most women would, when put, would make the same statement that you just made about their relative sexual attraction.

[167] So that's a good thing to know too.

[168] Okay, so back when you were 12, so you were diagnosed a little bit with autism when you were young, but you were told by your medical professionals that you were too intelligent for that diagnosis to be relevant.

[169] And so, well, part of that's this distinction, right?

[170] It's complicated because what symptoms did you have of autism when you were.

[171] kid?

[172] It was mainly social and emotional.

[173] I was very prone to emotional outbursts and mainly getting along with and maintaining friendships.

[174] And also, I did also have some sensory difficulties, like with certain textures of fabrics or certain smells, certain foods.

[175] I wouldn't eat.

[176] Uh -huh.

[177] Uh -huh.

[178] So, okay, so it was mostly in the social realm.

[179] And what about your language development?

[180] Was it normal?

[181] Do you know?

[182] I was advanced, actually.

[183] I had taught myself to read and write, and I was further ahead of my peers in that area.

[184] Okay, okay.

[185] So, yeah, you'd be a complicated case to assess as a child, given your retrospective report, because another one of the stellar, what would you say, cardinal characteristics of autism is delayed language development And so that might have been partly what the physicians were referring to when they said, you know, that you were too smart to be autistic.

[186] But then it's also difficult to parse apart the fact that it is a distribution and the mere fact that you had difficulties in social communication.

[187] And were you interested in things?

[188] Yeah.

[189] Like, were you interested in building?

[190] You were.

[191] What about mathematically?

[192] What do you mean by that?

[193] Do you, well, are you interested in, are you more, Are you interested in mathematics, or are you more literary in your orientation?

[194] Definitely more literary, and I'm also a bit of an artist.

[195] I've always like drawing from a pretty young age, as far back as I can remember.

[196] And so what do you do on the hobby side?

[197] Like if you're just left to your own devices, what kind of activities would you engage in?

[198] Usually either illustration or video games.

[199] And so would you regard yourself as a creative person?

[200] Yeah.

[201] Okay, see, that's relevant too, A, because so creativity is associated with this personality trait, openness.

[202] And open people have pretty mutable identities.

[203] It's sort of the hallmark of being creative, right?

[204] Is a creative person isn't that stable in their identity.

[205] And I don't mean in the negative emotion sense.

[206] I mean they can be one person.

[207] or another, they're changing.

[208] That mutability is part of being creative.

[209] And so in your situation, if you had social difficulties, if you had high levels of negative emotion, if you were characterized by bodily self -consciousness, and you were creative, then you're a pretty good candidate for the idea that your gender might not be properly aligned with your physiology.

[210] You know, you've got all the risk factors, so to speak, that would put someone in that category.

[211] Okay, so when you were 12, you started therapy, and why was that and what happened?

[212] So I was about 11 when I got my first phone, and I started using social media.

[213] The main platform I would use was Instagram, so very image -oriented, very image -oriented.

[214] Right, right.

[215] Yeah, it further reinforced and worsened my body image issues and I was just force -fed a lot of content that was just very difficult to take in.

[216] Okay, so tell me about that in some detail.

[217] So you're using Instagram, it's a very image -oriented platform, and you said that was really hard on you.

[218] You alluded to earlier, you alluded to the fact that you were looking at socially approved images of women, let's say, voluptuous women, and you were drawing a negative conclusion in relationship to yourself.

[219] And so exactly how did that play out day to day?

[220] I started comparing myself a lot to, like, my family and the other girls around me. I mean, a lot of my female family members are larger -chested, but I got the smaller breasted genes, and I was really quite insecure about this.

[221] And even though I hit puberty earlier than my other peers, a lot of them were outgrowing me. and I felt like I just couldn't keep up with other women.

[222] And also, in a lot of my conversations, or like the conversations I would overhear between other girls and women, they often spoke very negatively of being a woman in general, like about how difficult puberty is and periods and how scary it is to be pregnant and then give birth and then have all these expectations placed on you.

[223] as a mother and then start aging, start having these bodily changes, and then eventually go through menopause.

[224] And it was all painted in a very negative light.

[225] I never really heard about the blessings that came with any of these parts of being a woman.

[226] And so naturally, I mean, I wouldn't want to grow into one.

[227] So you're starting to get afraid of that.

[228] Yeah.

[229] Right, right.

[230] Yeah, well, you know, when my, go ahead.

[231] I would also start seeing a lot of feminist content at this time.

[232] which kind of reinforced those same ideas while also saying things that were pretty scared to me at the time.

[233] Like, oh, we live under a patriarchy.

[234] We're being controlled by men and they don't care about us.

[235] They're taking away our rights.

[236] And, you know, I don't believe that now, of course.

[237] But I kind of fell into that line of thinking.

[238] And I wanted, I mean, with all this, I just wanted absolutely nothing to do with being a woman.

[239] I didn't want to grow into a woman.

[240] Why would I?

[241] Okay, so two things were happening to you.

[242] You said, on the one hand, individually, you were suffering from the consequences of your felt inadequacy in relationship to these more voluptuous and clearly, markedly, feminine women in relationship to their physiology.

[243] And so you felt that that wasn't a domain that you could necessarily compete in.

[244] And then also at the same time, you were being exposed to social and educational material that suggested to you that not only was this a game that you couldn't play very well, let's say, in terms of your physical appearance or maybe your temperament, but also that even if you did play it well, it wasn't necessarily a game worth winning, that there wasn't anything positive on the female front.

[245] You know, when my wife was pregnant with our kids, One of the things that really struck me, and I never really forgot it, was that so many people would tell her horror stories about pregnancy, sometimes their own or sometimes the pregnancy of other people that they had known, and really do what they could to terrify her.

[246] And that always used to irritate me because my wife actually really enjoyed being pregnant.

[247] I mean, my daughter got quite ill when she was pregnant, so I know there's a huge variation there.

[248] I saw that with my clinical clients, but it's not like there's nothing positive about being female.

[249] There's plenty of positive about it, but it's easy to fall into a situation where all you hear is that, well, it's oppression, it's suffering, it's vulnerability, it's victimization.

[250] There's nothing about it that's positive at all.

[251] And, you know, I think part of that's a consequence of the higher levels of negative emotion, right?

[252] a necessary consequence of that because women are more susceptible to threat and punishment.

[253] But that doesn't seem really to have all that much to do in any real sense with women's actual place in the social hierarchy.

[254] And the reason I say that is because you see, as I mentioned earlier, there are societies that have become more egalitarian and so where women clearly have far more opportunity on the socioeconomic front than they've ever had in the past.

[255] And those countries, the countries that have gone farthest down that route are probably the Scandinavian countries.

[256] And the consequence of that is that the difference between men and women in negative emotion is actually higher than it is in traditional societies.

[257] Women have higher levels of negative emotion in Scandinavia than they do in more traditional societies.

[258] And so it doesn't look like the higher levels of negative emotion that are carrying.

[259] characteristic of femininity are a consequence, let's say, of patriarchal oppression.

[260] So there's no evidence to support that hypothesis at all, as far as I can tell.

[261] I mean, obviously there are individual women who are in abusive relationships and who are genuinely being victimized by, you know, psychopaths and sadists.

[262] But as a sociological explanation, doesn't seem to hold water.

[263] In fact, quite the contrary is true.

[264] In any case, you were worried about how you could compete physically.

[265] And that's sad, too, you know, because men are actually much less choosy, so to speak, than women are when it comes to evaluating physical attractiveness.

[266] So, for example, virtually every woman can find a sexual partner, and usually very quickly.

[267] It's certainly not true for men.

[268] Men rate 50 % of women as above average in attractiveness, whereas women rate 20 % percent.

[269] of men above average in attractiveness.

[270] And so, you know, this variation in body type that you suffered so much from might not have been an impediment at all to your ability to manifest yourself as an attractive person in a reasonable society.

[271] You know, I can understand, because Instagram is a very heavy image -laden platform, and I can understand why you might have been under a misapprehension.

[272] But one of the things that a therapist might have done, for you is to help you explore the full range of, say, body types that are classified as attractive and to show you that, you know, it's not, you don't have to be J. Lowe to be attractive.

[273] And that's definitely the case.

[274] And then there's multiple dimensions to attractiveness, too, that aren't only body focused as well.

[275] You know, I mean, men do evaluate women on the basis of their physical attractiveness.

[276] But that's not the only dimension of evaluation.

[277] There's There's more to the story than that by a lot.

[278] So, okay, so you fell into Instagram and you also started to become susceptible to this, what would you say, negative propagandization about the female role.

[279] So you couldn't see anything positive in that for you, eh?

[280] Yeah, and a lot of these feminists would kind of downplay, I guess you could say like the traditional role of a woman and the importance of motherhood or even just fulfilling a maternal role.

[281] you know, I didn't really value that a lot growing up because I was the youngest of five kids and I never really had to take care of anybody.

[282] I didn't really know what that felt like.

[283] And so I never really thought that I wanted to have kids until a few years later, after I stopped transitioning, actually I realized that I did have a maternal instinct and I really did want to be a mother and have blood children.

[284] And that was an instinct that wasn't really fostered, wasn't really allowed to grow at all because I was playing the role of a boy and also taking testosterone on top of that.

[285] But, you know, at the same, at roughly the same time, but I started using social media, started seeing feminist content and just held that as Instagram.

[286] I would also see a lot of, like, LGBT -focused content.

[287] and a lot of it was like teenagers and young adults who identified as transgender or non -binary and it was primarily young women and I would often see they a lot of them had the same struggles as I did socially and many of them weren't exactly the closest with their families and, you know, I would see them go from struggling to changing their expression and then eventually becoming more accepted by their families.

[288] And it seemed like people really supported them and had their backs and that they had this sense of community around them.

[289] And that was something that really touched me because that was, I didn't really realize that at the time.

[290] But that was something that I wished that I had.

[291] Okay, so you wish that you had what?

[292] Do you mean a peer community?

[293] Like, when you were feeling lonesome and isolated, what is it that you were lacking and what is it that you were wishing for?

[294] I think mainly I really wish that I had friends around me who I knew I could depend on and would love me. Okay, did you have any friends at that period?

[295] Did you have any friends at that period of time?

[296] I did, but I wouldn't say that I was particularly close to them or that I had very many at school.

[297] I mean, I didn't really fit in in middle school.

[298] I didn't have a whole lot of friends.

[299] And I found that there was kind of a favoritism amongst students by staff.

[300] And I, you know, I was like a new kid and, you know, I wasn't like really involved in any sports or.

[301] clubs or activities or anything like that.

[302] And I was kind of a difficult student and I found that I was being bullied by both students and staff.

[303] Right.

[304] And I also wasn't, I wasn't like being abused by my family or anything, but I just wasn't very close to anybody really.

[305] I mean, my siblings are all older than me. There's about like a seven -year age gap between me and rest of them.

[306] And I mean, from a young age, yeah.

[307] Yeah, they, you know, they became, they got older.

[308] They started like hitting puberty and becoming teenagers and they didn't always want to be around me. They want to do their own things.

[309] So.

[310] Okay.

[311] So you, you're having difficulties on the body image front and that's exacerbated by your temperament and by early puberty, let's say.

[312] You're not as popular with your peers as you might be.

[313] You're somewhat isolated.

[314] in relationship to your siblings because they're older than you.

[315] You're having a bit of a difficult time socially in middle school.

[316] And now you're seeing on Instagram the emergence of this explanation for your problems that's generated by people who sound like they have the same issues that you do.

[317] And what you see is that when they adopt this new non or gender fluid identity, that, well, what do you see?

[318] What happens?

[319] They have a community all of a sudden.

[320] and people are supportive of them?

[321] Like, why did that become attractive to you?

[322] I think I saw the similarities between me and them in a lot of ways.

[323] And, I mean, when I was younger, I was often compared to a boy, and I, um, and, you know, I liked, I liked hearing things like, oh, you're being such a boy or, wow, you're such a boy from, like, my older sister and mom and stuff.

[324] It just made me, I don't know, I don't, I don't really know why at the time, but it just made me proud to peer things like that.

[325] I guess it just felt like kind of an achievement because, you know, I didn't particularly like other girls and I didn't really like the fact that I was a girl either.

[326] And especially as I got older, I really wanted a way out.

[327] And when I started seeing this content, it taught me that there was and that I didn't have to be a woman.

[328] Right.

[329] Well, there is something complimentary, let's say, in some sense about having those masculine attributes, those masculine qualities attributed to you when you're a young girl, because they're often associated when they're positive with something like courageousness and the willingness to explore and the ability to sort of stand on your own two feet.

[330] And so you can imagine how that might be attractive.

[331] And then you also were presented with a solution to your problems in some sense, right?

[332] you had quite a complex series of issues that were besetting you, and all of a sudden there's a pathway forward, and the pathway forward is something like, and correct me if I'm wrong, I do not want to put words in your mouth, is that while you have a non -standard gender identity, let's say, and that means maybe you're born in the wrong body, something like that.

[333] Now, it's interesting in your case, because you actually, your basic core fantasy was that you wanted to be a fully developed, and, let's say, voluptuous woman.

[334] I mean, so that was really driving this, from what I understand, but you were worried that wouldn't happen, and then you started to become concerned about the adoption of a female identity, and then there was this alternative pathway that was laid forward before you.

[335] What was happening to you in therapy at this time?

[336] Was all this making itself manifest while you were in therapy, and what role was your therapist playing in this?

[337] Yeah, so around the age of 12, I decided that I wasn't actually a girl after some period of time questioning my sexuality and eventually my gender identity.

[338] I switched between labels before I finally settled on, you know, I think I'm just actually a boy.

[339] And I started cutting my hair shorter gradually, wearing more boys' clothing.

[340] And I came out to my older sister, some friends that I was closer to at school and some people online as well.

[341] And then after a few months, I decided that I wanted to tell my parents about this and also start the path of medical transition.

[342] And so I wrote a letter explaining to them that I wanted to be their son and that I wanted them to refer to me by a new name.

[343] And they were beyond shocked.

[344] I don't really know how as a parent you could expect to hear something.

[345] something like this.

[346] And I knew at the time even that it would be kind of a, it would be, it would be pretty, pretty shocking to them.

[347] And so I wanted to allow them some time to think it over and think of their response.

[348] I was also scared of how they would react.

[349] So that was why I wrote a letter instead of bringing it up to them face to face.

[350] They wanted to support me, but they weren't exactly sure of what they should do, and so they wanted to seek the help of somebody who may be an expert in this, who was more knowledgeable in this, and they thought of it as like a psychological issue, and they wanted to get to the root of it, and so they sent me to a therapist.

[351] And...

[352] And do you remember what specialization was your therapist?

[353] Did you see a psychologist or a psychiatrist, the social worker.

[354] Do you know, do you remember?

[355] I don't remember the, I don't remember his title.

[356] I think he was just a generic pediatric therapist.

[357] And he, the first one I saw actually wasn't very thorough.

[358] He didn't really, he didn't even give me a diagnosis.

[359] I don't think.

[360] He didn't really go into the reasons why I was feeling this way.

[361] I was just kind of like, oh, so your boy, okay.

[362] And then he just never really went into anything, which was a problem.

[363] Let me tell you for a second what should have happened, just so you know and so that everybody listening knows.

[364] So when somebody comes to see you as a therapist, you kind of have three questions that are paramount.

[365] The first question is, well, why is this person here?

[366] And you don't know.

[367] Now, what you assume is something generically, is something like, well, this person is suffering and confused, for some reason, to the point where that's become unbearable enough that they want to seek outside help.

[368] And that's not trivial, because people generally don't seek outside help unless they're pretty desperate.

[369] So the first question is, well, this person is suffering, why?

[370] And then the next question is, well, is that something, it goes along with why?

[371] Is that something that's intrinsic to them?

[372] So is there something wrong with them, say, in relationship to a mental illness or a physical illness, or is there something about their situation that would make anybody miserable if they were in the same situation?

[373] And then the third thing is, well, having sorted out that the person is miserable and why they're miserable, what could be done about it?

[374] And all of that should be open for discussion, right?

[375] So if you came to see me as a therapist, the first thing I would do is kind of what I'm doing in this interview today is I'd try to figure out, well, what exactly is going on with you?

[376] And you see, that's different than affirming your identity, right?

[377] Because you could come to me as a client and say, well, I think I'm a boy.

[378] And the proper response for me as a therapist is, okay, well, you know, you've said that.

[379] And I want to find out why that is, but I'm not going to take that as gospel.

[380] I'm going to find out because we're trying to solve a complicated problem here, which is, well, you're suffering.

[381] And it isn't exactly obvious why.

[382] In fact, it's not obvious at all.

[383] and it's not up to me as a therapist to leap to a conclusion it's up to me to talk to you and maybe for hundreds of hours to find out exactly what it is that's going on because I found out already look your initial fantasy was that you wanted to be female but you felt that in some ways your body was failing you on that front and then you looked for and then you found out that being a female wasn't maybe had some downsides and maybe all downsides and so then you were looking for an alternative and you found one that also explains some of the difficulties you were having socially.

[384] That's what you've told me so far.

[385] Okay, but that doesn't mean we know what to do about it yet, right?

[386] We've laid out the problem landscape.

[387] But the logical conclusion of that isn't, you're a boy and you should go on puberty blockers and then move towards surgery, right?

[388] We're nowhere near that.

[389] We're dozens of hours or hundreds of hours away from any decision like that.

[390] And so, well, so that's what you're.

[391] should have happened to you when you went for therapy.

[392] You should have had the time to lay out the whole problem and then to have the space to explore this really deeply so that you could come to terms with what it was that you need, how you needed to move forward.

[393] Okay, so you said that, as far as I can tell so far, you said your therapist accepted the idea that you should be a boy pretty damn rapidly.

[394] I should also point out to everyone who's listening.

[395] That's actually now mandatory by law.

[396] so any in many jurisdictions so now because of standards of gender affirming care therapists are required if you say something like you're a girl you say something like well i'm a boy the therapist is now required to agree with you on pain of license loss so beware everyone listening and watching because that's now the law in many places and so to me that's the end of psychotherapy because all psychotherapy is is a questioning approach fundamentally, you know, to find out what the problem is and then to try to work towards, well, first of all, non -harmful solutions.

[397] You know, so I would have, with you, for example, I would have explored some of the realm of alternative forms of beauty.

[398] That would have been a nice thing to walk you through to some degree.

[399] So you could see more of what the range was of acceptable and admirable physiological types.

[400] Because that, you know, I don't know for sure that we would have done that, but we might have, because that would have been good for you to get a broader picture of attractiveness, right?

[401] And then also to tell you about the fact that a lot of the misery that you were experiencing was, well, par for the course for females at puberty, but also exacerbated by your temperamental proclivities.

[402] And so that might have helped you calm down a bit, right?

[403] Because you get a bit of an explanation for your misery that way.

[404] And also some hope that you'd kind of grow out of it with time.

[405] So, okay, so you went to the therapist and he more or less agreed with your prognosis and diagnosis, that you were a boy, okay?

[406] So was the therapeutic process of any utility to you?

[407] No, he didn't really do anything, actually.

[408] I was actually pretty dissatisfied with him.

[409] I did have some stuff going on at home and at school that he just never went into the full picture my mental health wasn't really explored at all, actually, throughout the course of my transition.

[410] And a lot of what I mentioned, I didn't even know it was a problem until recently, until well after I stopped transitioning.

[411] And I was, you know, I was old enough to really be able to introspect well enough to figure out where it all stemmed from.

[412] But it was never explored by the adults who put me on this path.

[413] Okay.

[414] So, well, so what did they?

[415] Okay, how often did you go see your therapist and what actually happened during the so -called therapeutic process?

[416] I was seeing maybe about like once a week to once every two weeks and you know I would talk about it's hard to remember so far back but I remember nothing really ever came out of the appointments like I would tell them like oh like my phone got taken away and I don't really have like any contact with the outside world for example and you would just be like, oh, okay, how are you dealing with that?

[417] And I'd be like, um, you know, not very well.

[418] And he would just, he would just say, okay, and not really do anything about it, not really offer me anything at all.

[419] And eventually, I'd say after maybe like a month or so, he maybe got like, maybe got fired or he transferred somewhere else because he wasn't, he wasn't there anymore.

[420] And then I got sent to another therapist.

[421] And roughly around that time I expressed to my parents that, you know, I'm not always satisfied.

[422] I want to go through with a medical transition.

[423] I want to go on hormones.

[424] And they actually pushed back on this at first.

[425] They were, they were, they were very cautious of this.

[426] They didn't know why I was pushing for it so much.

[427] And they, they wanted me to wait a little bit because at this point in time, I was only 13 years old.

[428] I was quite young to be doing such a thing.

[429] And they stay that way.

[430] And so I got my gender dysphoria diagnosis and during one of the appointments that they were that they were very far um they um i can't remember who exactly it was i it was either a therapist or a nurse i think um somebody who was involved in my transition um they told them that like oh this is the only pretty much the only means of treating dysphoria there was like no regards to any alternative treatments um you know they my dad asked like about the regret rates and they said like oh they didn't even i don't think they even use the word detransition they said like oh it's there's less than a one to two percent regret rate and um yeah they also told my parents that if i wasn't allowed to go through with this then i would be at risk of suicide okay so i want to i want to take all of that part, okay?

[431] Because every single one of those statements is a lie.

[432] So first of all, the American Psychological Association in their Guidelines for Gender Affirming Treatment makes the case that, and because of prejudice, that there are no good long -term follow -up studies of transgender individuals.

[433] Okay, and they attribute that to prejudice against transgender individuals, which is not the reason, by the way.

[434] The reason is that there's a very low base rate or there was of transgender dysphoria, and the follow -up studies haven't been done in large part because the surgical and hormonal treatment regimen is relatively new.

[435] But there are no good long -term follow -up studies, and they actually complain about that.

[436] And then a couple pages later in the same document, they say that, well, it's necessary to affirm an alternate gender identity because otherwise the client or patient is at heightened risk of suicide.

[437] Okay, so first of all, both of those things can't be true.

[438] There's no way that people can know that suicide risk is elevated if gender transition is delayed unless the long -term studies are in place.

[439] And they're already stated that the bloody long -term studies aren't in place.

[440] So that's all just a lie, but it's worse than that.

[441] It's way worse than that.

[442] You see, gender dysphoria is a variant of the suffering that's associated with negative emotion, depression and anxiety.

[443] Now, depression and anxiety are the primary drivers of suicidal ideation, not gender dysphoria per se.

[444] And so they're confusing the source.

[445] Now, you were, and then there is no evidence whatsoever that transition of the medical sort actually has a salutary effect on mental health, partly because the long -term study simply haven't been done.

[446] And the idea that we actually know from a research perspective that a child is much safer if they start transition than they are if they don't.

[447] That's just, again, that's simply not true.

[448] Ken Zucker's work has showed quite clearly that if you just leave the kids alone, then by the time they're 18 or 19, most of them settle into their biological identities.

[449] Now, so the reason I'm stressing this is because your parents, like many parents, in this situation, we're put in a very, very difficult position.

[450] And I would say it's corrupt to the point of malevolence what the medical professionals are doing on this front.

[451] And that is the insistence, well, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child?

[452] Which is, I don't think there's anything more toxic you can say to a parent than that.

[453] Because that backs them into a corner.

[454] Because their alternatives are then, well, you can let your child go ahead with this absolutely life -altering hormonal and then surgical treatment or your child can die and it's your fault because you don't care enough and parents like they're accustomed to trusting their medical professionals at least to some degree and accustomed to assuming that they the knowledge they put forward is valid and reliable and the information that your family was given was none of those in fact it's pathological to a degree that's almost imaginable it's criminal in my estimation what you were told Because there is simply no evidence that any of that is the case.

[455] There's no evidence that transitioning kids are less likely to be suicidal.

[456] There's no evidence that that's the only treatment path that works.

[457] And there's certainly no evidence that there's no alternative to transition or suicide.

[458] It's so pathological, I can't believe it.

[459] But it's no wonder your parents were pushed into a corner, you know, because that's a dreadful choice for a parent to have to make.

[460] yeah they were definitely coerced into it and after that they obviously were more open to the idea of me being medicalized and my gender specialist decided to refer me to an endocrinologist the first one who I saw actually was the only person who really pushed back on this after the appointment he said you know you are you're very young you're 13 and this could have some negative implications for your brain development going forward so i think it's that that's something that should that should wait i'm not going to prescribe these to you and after that i was just referred to another underchronologist who after about two or three appointments gave me the consent forms for blockers.

[461] I started about a month after that, and then I had another appointment to sign off on the forms for testosterone.

[462] And my mom also had to sign off on them.

[463] This was around late 2017, early 2018.

[464] And I don't know if it's still true now that you need your parents to, if you're a minor, to sign off on forms for hormones or anything like that because they're trying to push for kids being able to independently make that choice.

[465] But, you know, when I started, when I was reading these forums, you know, it lists a few side effects for either of them, but I was a perfectly healthy kid before I started transitioning.

[466] So, you know, it was kind of hard to determine which of those I might experience.

[467] and I was also, I was barely a teenager.

[468] You know, kids kind of tend to think that they're invincible, that nothing could get them.

[469] But I started experiencing some complications that affect me to this day.

[470] Okay, so three questions.

[471] What were you experiencing socially at this time?

[472] like how broadly had you made your transition known and what was the consequence socially?

[473] And then what were you fantasizing about your life being like if you were, if you successfully transitioned to a boy, so to speak?

[474] And then what were the consequences of the hormonal treatment?

[475] So let's go through those one by one.

[476] What was happening to you on the social front at this point?

[477] So I was in eighth grade at this point and I wasn't really like out to anybody other than family.

[478] and a few people at school.

[479] But my other peers, who I didn't necessarily speak to you about this, did notice my change in presentation that I started to look more like a boy, and they weren't necessarily the nicest to me about it.

[480] If I was kind of ostracized amongst my peers, they would call me names, and there was one boy who would harass me over the course of the school year.

[481] And he, there was an incident with him that I will bring up later, but I wasn't, my peers weren't necessarily the most support of me at this time.

[482] But once I started on the hormones and I started having the physical changes, I'll get into that later, actually.

[483] Okay, so, and what were you hoping for?

[484] Now, I'm presuming your fantasy life switched to some degree.

[485] Now, you told me earlier that in the earliest stages of your transformation into adulthood, you were thinking about this voluptuous female ideal and then bemoaning your distance from that.

[486] But now you've decided to change sexes, essentially.

[487] And so you have a new vision of who you could be and what life would be like, I presume, that would be going along with that.

[488] What were you expecting slash hoping for and why did you believe it?

[489] You know, I wanted to be by this idea of myself in my head that, you know, I wanted to be more like a man. I wanted to be strong, both physically and mentally and independent and not really have to, worry about how other people felt about me. And I also wanted to be, I guess, just more confident in general.

[490] And myself as a person and also my body, and once I start on testosterone, I started seeing all the physical changes.

[491] You know, my hair, my eyebrows got thicker.

[492] I started developing more muscle.

[493] My face and my body became more squareish.

[494] And I felt good about myself.

[495] I felt like looked good for pretty much the first time in my life, and I felt like I had some control over how I looked.

[496] And initially, it felt great.

[497] Yeah, well, testosterone can have that effect directly pharmacologically as well.

[498] Well, okay, so we can take that apart a little bit.

[499] Look, there was nothing wrong with you wanting to have those things, right?

[500] I mean, why wouldn't you want to be more confident?

[501] Why wouldn't you want to be more comfortable in your body?

[502] And, you know, those are perfectly reasonable goals, the problem comes in making the assumption that the only pathway to those goals is physiological transformation, right?

[503] Because there's an idea there that, well, if you're female, those goals are obviously impossible.

[504] It's like, well, no, they're not.

[505] There's lots of women who are confident and who can stand up for themselves and who are courageous and forthright.

[506] And like, that's perfectly within the realm of the full range of feminine behavior.

[507] And so a therapist who had any sense would have helped you.

[508] at that point, understand that there were practical steps that you could have taken to bolster yourself on all those temperamental dimensions that wouldn't have required anything radical, right?

[509] They would have required, well, first of all, a vision and then a strategy and then some diligent practice.

[510] You know, and you could have made a fair bit of progress on that, I would think, within six months to a year, with a bit of alteration in your social behavior.

[511] So the idea that the only pathway to this was through, you know, radical, hormonal and physiological transformation.

[512] It's just, it's preposterous.

[513] And then, of course, there's the additional complication, which would be, well, you were enticed, let's say, into the idea that you would be better off being a man, but that's really not a pathway that's open to you in some fundamental sense either, because there are physiological impediments to that that aren't, they can't be overcome.

[514] I mean, I've done a reasonable amount of research into, like, penile construction, for example, and to call that a primitive science is to give it far more credit than it's due.

[515] And so that's a huge technical problem.

[516] And then there's a problem, of course, that lurks underneath that, which is even if you do manage that, which is highly unlikely and extremely invasive and unbelievably dangerous and very experimental.

[517] and there's no long -term studies whatsoever done on the consequences, you're still not going to be fully physiologically functional as a man. You're not going to be able to procreate as a man. And you're going to sacrifice your ability to have children as a woman.

[518] I mean, this is a big, bloody sacrifice.

[519] And so were you led through contemplation of those sorts of things by your therapists?

[520] Not really.

[521] they never really went in depth.

[522] I mean, they would talk about, like, the, to me, about, like, the, they would talk about, like, the side effects and also basically give propaganda to my parents that this was going to make me better.

[523] This is going to improve my distress and make me happier.

[524] And I felt the same way.

[525] I thought, you know, the things I heard from both the physicians and from the research I did online and basically gave me this idea that I was going to become my real self, that I would become a whole person in doing this.

[526] And it didn't, it fractured my sense of self even further.

[527] Okay, and this is something that...

[528] Why did it fracture your sense of self further?

[529] What do you mean by that?

[530] There's a lot to that, actually.

[531] I mean, I was basically living alive for a few years.

[532] That was very stressful, and I was trying to uphold this idea.

[533] I had myself in my head that was false.

[534] It was a delusion.

[535] I genuinely believed that I was somehow a man, despite being a biological female.

[536] And in a lot of ways, I missed out on a lot of, on certain developments, mostly social.

[537] I'm still, you know, I didn't really go through the crucial social female socialization that goes on throughout late middle school and high school.

[538] My dating pool was also affected by this.

[539] You know, I was mostly attracted to men.

[540] I didn't really have much of an interest in women, but most of the people who were interested in me in high school were women.

[541] And the few men who, the few guys who admitted attraction to me, it was very, it seemed very sexual in nature.

[542] And it felt like if anything, I was just like a fetish to them almost.

[543] And I didn't really, I didn't want to, I didn't want to have anything to do with that.

[544] Mm -hmm.

[545] Yeah, that sounds extremely complicated.

[546] And there was.

[547] There is also another element to it that I haven't really spoken on before, but I feel like it does have to be, it does need to be said.

[548] It is kind of uncomfortable because I was, just because of my age at the time, and it's also a very sensitive topic, but I think I did also have some sexual motivations in doing this.

[549] I like the idea of, like, the changes that testosterone would bring on to my body.

[550] And, you know, I guess, I mean, people, People, a lot of feminists and activists who speak about transgender people and detransitioners, they often talk about AGP or autogynophilia, which is like a, I don't know if you're familiar with.

[551] Yeah, it's like a man. So autogynophilia is the fantasy.

[552] It's a sexual fantasy generally.

[553] and then it often characterizes men who become transsexual and start cross -dressing later in life and they develop a sexual...

[554] They develop sexual arousal from picturing themselves or acting out being the opposite sex.

[555] And so I think some of that, by the way, you know, you talked about the fact that you wanted to have some of the classic male attributes, masculine attributes, right?

[556] Like self -confidence and courage and so forth and that you were complimented when you were referred to in that manner.

[557] I think a lot of what happens to these men who develop these sexual fetishes later in life is that there is a part of them that's crying out for exploration of and development of their feminine side.

[558] Right, but instead of having that happen psychologically and starting to integrate, let's say, compassion and care and concern for people rather than things, instead of integrating those cross -sexual proclivities, they start to act it out as if it's a concrete reality, right?

[559] And you were definitely enticed into doing that.

[560] But you also said, and don't let me delve into this more than you're comfortable with, but you also said that there was a sexual element specifically.

[561] So was there something in your fantasies about what was that?

[562] Was that about you being a boy?

[563] You said you were still attracted to women.

[564] so what we brought this up we might as well clarify it what was the nature of the interaction with sexuality it's obviously relevant it was fantasies about like yeah about being a man about being about being about being male and having like masculine attributes to my body and also a lot of it did involve like having like a female partner which I never really explored in real life because I didn't have any emotional attraction to women I didn't want to like have I didn't want to like have a relationship with another woman and so I never really cared to actually act it out but you know this is I guess you could say that I did have like a female analog of auto gonadophilia if there's a word for I guess it would be auto androphilia but I didn't really understand this at the time because I was I was so young Yeah, well, look, I mean, in adolescence, the range of sexual fantasy can be extremely broad.

[565] You know, and there is a difference between fantasy and real life.

[566] I mean, people will fantasize about things that they won't do in their real life.

[567] And the fact of the fantasies, it can become pathological if people dwell on it, but the fact that the fantasy covers a wider range than behavior would is actually more an indication of the creative capacity of fantasy, right?

[568] I mean, we'll do things in our dreams, for example, or play out scenarios in our dreams that would never occur in real life.

[569] And it's because part of the human capacity for ingenuity is the capacity to imagine multiple different scenarios.

[570] And some of those can be extreme.

[571] You know, like I'll find, for example, that if I'm angry with something, you know, I can have quite violent fantasies.

[572] And I think, oh, my God, you know, where did that come from?

[573] But that doesn't mean that I would act them out, or at least I hope it means that I wouldn't act them out.

[574] You know, so our fantasy life is broader than our actual life.

[575] And you border the acting out of your fantasies by, well, by social necessity in some sense.

[576] So the mere fact that you were having those fantasies, that's not an indication of anything that's in and of itself pathological.

[577] That's still well within the realm of normative adolescent sexual fantasy, I would say.

[578] You know, maybe it was a little more exaggerated in your case because of the testosterone and maybe even to some degree because of your more masculine temperament, but it's still well within the range of normality.

[579] So what happened to you when you started taking the hormones?

[580] And how did you react to that?

[581] You know, I started having some physical changes like with my appearance and also some behavioral changes.

[582] Like I felt more confident.

[583] I started to develop kind of a competitive shriek with, especially with boys my age.

[584] And I started socialized just a little bit more like they did.

[585] And I also, obviously because I was taking androgens, I also started experiencing a very strong increase in my libido.

[586] And it was very difficult to keep up with.

[587] And it started to become a problem with me without me even realizing it.

[588] I did, unfortunately, develop an addiction to porn.

[589] And I also just had a very unhealthy relationship with my body.

[590] and sexuality, and I still do to this day.

[591] So on the porn front, was that female images or male?

[592] It was mostly.

[593] Mostly female.

[594] Mostly female.

[595] Okay, so it was mostly female, but you had no interest in establishing a relationship with females, and on the dating front, you still wanted to, at least in principle, you still wanted to be with boys.

[596] Jesus, that's quite a confusing message.

[597] to walk through.

[598] So, yeah, no kidding.

[599] You must have really been going in five directions at the same time during that period.

[600] Yeah.

[601] There's no clear pathway forward through that.

[602] So how in the world did you orient yourself?

[603] You know, I didn't, I really couldn't because I couldn't, I didn't really have, like, any dating opportunities.

[604] And I just couldn't really explore that kind of thing.

[605] You know, I had a lot of, this did become, a bit of a source of distress for me in high school.

[606] You know, I was frustrated.

[607] I had urges that I couldn't really fulfill.

[608] And on top of that, I was watching all my other peers get into romantic and sexual relationships and have that kind of development.

[609] Well, I was just, at least I felt like I was just completely behind.

[610] Right, okay, okay.

[611] So, all right, so now, and what kind of, well, those are complex effects of testosterone.

[612] what would you say and the upside was you had more confidence and more self -assurance you were more competitive there was a heightened sex drive which is a mixed blessing what were the negative consequences for you of the hormonal treatment um sorry I also forgot to mention that like um because I couldn't find a partner in real life I eventually turned to dating online, which only made me more stressed because, you know, I had these feelings for somebody that was, that I couldn't even see or touch.

[613] And it just added on to my stress, if anything.

[614] And I found that if anything, I just, more often than not, I would just get used by other people, either emotionally for support or for more intimate images of me. But it was the closest I could get to real intimacy, and I was quite lonely throughout high school.

[615] I did end up developing depression, and this was a big thing driving that, definitely.

[616] As for the more negative effects of testosterone, you know, at first, And it made me feel great.

[617] Like, it was kind of comparable to stimulant almost.

[618] You know, I find I, while I was on the blockers, I'd say there was about like a month -long period between starting those and the testosterone.

[619] And during that period of time, because I had no sex hormones in my body, I often felt very lethargic, a little bit depressed.

[620] And, you know, once I had like the hormones back in my body, so is my energy.

[621] My energy came back.

[622] And so there was, there is, you can say that there was like a little bit of a honeymoon period that lasted for maybe no more than about a year and a half.

[623] But I found that I was more prone to anxiety.

[624] And I also about, I'd say about like a year or so on testosterone, I started experiencing.

[625] some difficulties with my urinary tract.

[626] I was, I started, I think I got my first UTI and then eventually it devolved to me having like a, like being unable to fully empty my bladder or having to urinate frequently or even getting like blood in my urine.

[627] And none of this was listed on my consent forms.

[628] I didn't even know that it was a problem that arose from taking testosterone until after I stopped taking it.

[629] and it got worse.

[630] All right, so now while all this is happening, you're also marching down the transition pathway, right?

[631] So you went from blockers to testosterone, and then what?

[632] This is when you're about 14, now we're about where you're 14?

[633] Yeah.

[634] Jesus, that's awful.

[635] Yeah, at the end of eighth grade, at the end of eighth grade, the bully that I mentioned earlier actually sexually assaulted me. you know, before this point.

[636] But I was about several months on testosterone.

[637] I was very confident in myself.

[638] And, you know, I never really cared to, like, try to hide my chest or anything because I was maybe about like a B cup or less.

[639] And I was quite thin.

[640] I would often wear, like, baggy shirts.

[641] And so I never really thought it would be a problem.

[642] But he had groped me in the middle of a classroom.

[643] And before this, I had.

[644] actually had a fear, a very strong fear of being sexually assaulted.

[645] A lot of my female peers and some of the older women I knew had been either assaulted or raped or sexually abused.

[646] And hearing these accounts growing up made me fear the same thing eventually happened to myself.

[647] And then it did.

[648] And, you know, in that moment, it was like, it was like glass shattering.

[649] It was, it felt like I was the only person in the room because it was as if nobody even noticed or cared that this happened to me. And I ended up downplaying it in my head.

[650] It was like, well, nobody noticed and nobody saw.

[651] So maybe it just doesn't matter.

[652] What exactly happened?

[653] What exactly happened to you if you don't mind?

[654] So that he walked up to me. You were in class?

[655] Yeah.

[656] No, it was, yeah, this was in class.

[657] he just walked up to me he often would do things to intimidate me and then he took a step further by squeezing one of my breasts uh -huh i see and you know at the time it was just like oh maybe it's just boys being boys so i'll just i'll just play it off and be a man about it and i won't be bothered by it no there's definitely there's definitely malevolent intent behind that i i knew i knew that even if it did bother me that I wouldn't really have a chance to speak up because if I brought it up to the school office then they would just leave the kid with a slap on the wrist and he would come back maybe like a maybe after like a two -day suspension and then potentially do something worse to me so I didn't bother right right right right so that made you feel more isolated yeah that's what you said it made you feel right that nobody cared yeah yeah well that's a real uh you know a lot of people get traumatized by malevolence, say, like, it's not even exactly the physical act, although it's obviously also that.

[658] It's the fact that someone is doing something literally designed to hurt you and subjugate you and make you miserable.

[659] And so you get contact with that intent, and that's really hard on people to encounter malevolence like that.

[660] So it's no wonder it bothered you.

[661] You know, and you can think, well, what did it really mean physically?

[662] You know, it really didn't damage me. It's like, that's not the point.

[663] The point is the intent of the person who did it.

[664] And this was a bully who was, what would you say, accelerating his bullying cycle.

[665] And, you know, God only knows where that would have gone.

[666] Because someone like that who doesn't have enough internal constraint, there's no limit in some sense to what they might eventually do.

[667] So you had reason to be afraid and to be, you know, set back on your heels.

[668] So that's really too bad.

[669] So, okay, So that threw you for a loop.

[670] How did that play into your next decision?

[671] So very soon after that was when I decided to start binding my chest.

[672] I asked my mom to buy me a binder, buy me some binders online.

[673] I don't know if you know what they are, but they're like a compression device to cover part of the torso and in the chest area, they basically like squeeze the breasts to make them look flatter.

[674] And, you know, I wore those for about, I'd say, two years before getting a mastectomy, and I got sick of it.

[675] Like, I would work out, I would swim, I would walk home in super hot weather in these things.

[676] And I just wanted to be done with it.

[677] Like, I wanted to be free of wearing this thing about the same time.

[678] I didn't want my chest to be visible.

[679] I was afraid of the attention that would bring me. And also, like, I genuinely believed myself to be a boy.

[680] I wanted to look like a boy and be able to take my shirt off without any cares.

[681] And so about halfway through my sophomore year, I told my therapist that I was seeking a mastectomy.

[682] And through a gender specialist, I was referred to a surgeon.

[683] And I had an appointment with him.

[684] And so what did your therapist say?

[685] Okay, so what's happening with your therapist during all this time?

[686] I mean, so you're a physiologically healthy young woman, and you've just announced that you want to undergo a form of radical surgery that's generally reserved for advanced stage cancer survivors, and the upshot of that is you're hustled off to a specialist who can facilitate that.

[687] There's no investigation into all the background issues that we've been talking about instead.

[688] Well, it was just seen as it was part of the process, like there is really no psychological evaluation before.

[689] Yeah.

[690] That's utterly appalled.

[691] You know, I'm so, I've been embarrassed for years to be a member of the intellectual academy under the current conditions that universities, what would you say, have put themselves into, and I'm equally embarrassed to be part of the therapeutic community to hear a story like yours.

[692] It's absolutely appalling what has.

[693] happened to you.

[694] There's no excuse whatsoever for it.

[695] It's so, it's such a dereliction of responsibility that it's almost, it's almost unimaginable.

[696] So it's really too bad that, that you weren't listened to in a lot more detail and with a lot more care, you know, because what you went through, it's not that abnormal.

[697] You know, everything you told me about, your unhappiness is a teenager, the fact that you were isolated in middle school, the fact that you had some doubts about your developing identity.

[698] It's like, yeah, that's pretty much part for the course for adolescents.

[699] Some kids get through it with a little less scarring than others, but most adolescents have a pretty damn miserable time for about three years.

[700] And so the fact that that led you down a path to hormonal transformation and then surgery, and that adults aided and abetted this, you know, I have some sympathy for your parents because when parents are told, you better support your child or it'll be suicide, It's like, well, that backs them into a corner.

[701] But the medical professionals and the counselors who dealt with you, there are negligence borders.

[702] Their negligence, it doesn't just border on the criminal.

[703] It crosses the boundary as far as I'm concerned.

[704] Okay, so now you're set.

[705] You go off to see a specialist.

[706] Who's the specialist, and how do they treat?

[707] It's important to note that, I mean, it absolutely was negligence, because not only was I given surgery for a problem that was second, psychological in nature.

[708] In the months before that, that was when I had been diagnosed with depression and social anxiety.

[709] And when my suicidal ideation started happening, you know, at the beginning, they told my parents, like, your child will be at risk of suicide if you don't affirm her at ND.

[710] But it wasn't until after I started the treatments that I started feeling like committing suicide.

[711] Yeah.

[712] Did you have a plan?

[713] No, I never really had a plan, but the feeling was prevalent enough to that.

[714] It affected my day -to -day life.

[715] Right, right.

[716] So when you assess people for suicidality, essentially what you do is you investigate the structures of their fantasies and their wishes.

[717] And the more developed the plan they have, the higher the probability is that they'll actually commit suicide, right?

[718] If it's a fully developed plan, place, location, implement all of that, then the person's really at risk.

[719] Otherwise, and it sounds like this was the case in your case, it's more a marker of generalized depression and anxiety because that will often spin off, you know, quasi -suicidal thoughts like, well, maybe it would be better for everyone else if I wasn't here or life is too difficult.

[720] And so, you know, it would be simpler all things considered just to bring it to an end.

[721] And, you know, that's bad, and it's also associated with a fair bit of suffering, but those thoughts in and of themselves are not associated with a spectacular, a high risk of, you know, imminent suicide.

[722] So, okay, but in any case, you were miserable enough at this point.

[723] Well, obviously, then you'd be looking for, what, further alleviation of your psychological symptoms.

[724] And you said the binding was very uncomfortable and troublesome.

[725] And so for some, so that also led you to conclude.

[726] that it just might be simpler, all things considered, since you were already on the pathway to being a boy just to go down the surgical route.

[727] Yeah.

[728] So you were 14 when that happened?

[729] I was 15 at this time.

[730] I was in my sophomore year of high school.

[731] They also started, to treat my depression, they put me, they decided to medicate me for it.

[732] And, you know, I, from what little I knew about medicating depression, I often heard that SSRIs have all these terrible side effects, so I asked that they put me on something with as few side effects as possible, and they decided to put me on wellbutrin, which I didn't know until after I stopped doing it, but it actually has a huge black box label warning on it for use in children and adolescents, and it actually made me feel more suicidal over time.

[733] Okay, okay, all right.

[734] So now you're 15, and you're 15, and you, you go see a specialist in relationship to surgery.

[735] How were you evaluated at that point when you actually moved forward for the surgery?

[736] I don't remember much of it, but it was, I mean, obviously they didn't really do an evaluation of my mental health.

[737] It was just like, oh, so you're transitioning, you're, you identify as a boy, and you've been on hormones for such and such amount of time.

[738] So that was, I was eligible.

[739] And after my first appointment, I was, that was, the, the surgeon told me about a top surgery classroom that was taking place in the hospital building and encouraged me and my parents to attend it.

[740] And I went and it was, I learned basically the same things that I learned in the surgeon's office, you know, about like the different types of incisions and how it benefits gender dysphoria, basically just propaganda.

[741] there were maybe about like 15, 12 to 15 or so other families in there.

[742] I noticed right away that all the other kids in there looked to be either younger than me or like they hadn't even started on hormones yet.

[743] And I was shocked that they were already seeking surgery.

[744] But it kind of, I didn't really question it much of the time.

[745] They were just like, oh, So I guess this is just normal, and I'm not the only one going through this.

[746] Right, right, right.

[747] Well, and you were already a long way down the road, and so I guess you checked off the boxes as far as the medical practitioners were concerned.

[748] But at that point, it's also for you, it's going to be increasingly difficult to reverse your decision.

[749] You're already in a couple of years, you know, and that's a long time.

[750] when you're only 14.

[751] And so it was on to the next step.

[752] So that happened when you were 15.

[753] And so what was the consequence of the double mastectomy for you?

[754] What's been the consequence?

[755] By this point in time, you know, I was two years, two or three years on testosterone.

[756] And I'd been binding for roughly the same amount of time.

[757] And my breasts had lost their shape.

[758] They didn't look like they used to be before.

[759] they didn't really have, you know, they didn't, they didn't, to me, they, it just looked strange.

[760] And I actually just started developing more, more insecurities with my body as, as I went through my transition, you know, like I had like these masculine features pop up, but it was all still on a female body.

[761] And there is like an incongruence between different features on my body and especially my breasts.

[762] Like it was this masculine looking body with quite a bit of muscle.

[763] And yet these things were there, and they weren't really in the best shape.

[764] And it became a source of insecurity for me. And, you know, I thought that even if I wanted to, I would, they would, my chest would never be the same again.

[765] And so there was not really any point in keeping it.

[766] And before I went under the knife, they did tell me that I was going to lose my ability to breastfeed.

[767] But it was like, I'm going to be a man, and men don't do that.

[768] I also wasn't really thinking about being a parent at all because I was kid.

[769] Actually, this is kind of reminiscent of one of the appointments for getting the testosterone.

[770] My endocrinologist asked me some questions that were very adult in nature.

[771] I was basically being sexualized by my doctors.

[772] And it was like, are you aware that you may experience vaginal atrophy, or are you aware that this may affect your ability to have children as an adult?

[773] And I just went along with it.

[774] It was like, oh, yeah, I know that.

[775] I don't plan on having kids.

[776] And I also hadn't had, I never had sex by that point.

[777] So I didn't know just what, what effect any of that would have on my body.

[778] But I was being treated as if I were an adult with the men.

[779] mental faculties to be able to consent to all this and understand what I was consenting to.

[780] But I wasn't.

[781] I was just a kid.

[782] Okay, and so what happened in the aftermath of the surgery?

[783] What was that like for you?

[784] You know, when I woke up and I was fully conscious, all the meds had worn off, and I realized what just happened.

[785] But I was actually quite happy.

[786] You know, it was like, wow, I just, this is a huge accomplishment.

[787] This is a huge step.

[788] and, you know, I can finally be myself when I was looking forward to being healed and eventually being able to go out and swim and work out and just hang out without a shirt and look like all the other boys and not have to worry about wearing this uncomfortable, restrictive thing.

[789] And, you know, I got, it was an outpatient surgery.

[790] Got sent home pretty soon after that, and I had a comfy, I guess you'd say a few weeks after that because my mom had to take some time off work to just help me around the house.

[791] It was a major surgery in my upper body and I lost a considerable amount of my range of motion.

[792] I couldn't even lift up my arms over my head until maybe about like three or four months afterward.

[793] So I wasn't really in a state to be going out all my own.

[794] But after about a week or something, so was when reality started to hit.

[795] I had to get my stitches taken out a few days afterward, and the sensation was just insane.

[796] They had to cut and rearrange some newer endings, so it was like it was numb, but I could also feel everything that they were doing when they were taking out the stitches.

[797] And I was, it felt so disgusting.

[798] And once I went home and I was able to finally bathe again, that was when I started having to, that's when I had to take off the surgical binder and the dressings and look down at what was left of my chest.

[799] You know, I had these big scars and all these markings from, from a surgical marker, and on top of that, I will, just a warning, I will get into graphic detail here, but the type of incision that I got was called a, was called double incision with nipple grafts, meaning that they would not only take out the breast tissue and contour the chest to look more masculine, they would also remove, like, the way it was explained to me, I guess, because I was young and they were trying to make it more digestible to a 15 -year -old, was that they would leave like a deep scrape, deep scrapes on both sides of my chest, kind of like a deep knee scrape, but more controlled, and they would remove my nipoles and then place.

[800] them in that area of scraped skin and they called it a more masculine positioning and shape it's barbaric to say the least and when I took the dressings off when I looked down they were the graphs they were black because you know they during the surgery during the operation the blood supply was cut off and so the outer layer of skin had died and they said that that was how it was supposed to be that was just part of the process, but I couldn't bear to see that part of my body.

[801] And I had to see that every night.

[802] I had to change my, I had to, that was what I had to look at every single night after every bath, after every shower.

[803] What happened to you in relationship to sensation?

[804] Because that's a long -term, you know, physiological and sexual consequence.

[805] And so you lose the ability to breastfeed, obviously, and there's a profound physiological alteration in your appearance, but what happens to you on the sensation side?

[806] What has happened?

[807] It's certainly not the same.

[808] It's gotten a lot better with the years.

[809] I mean, initially, I would get, like, a lot of, it felt like sparks electricity as, like, the nerve ending grew back, but it's, it's strange.

[810] Like, I can move like a hand over a certain area in my chest and it'll feel like it's in my arm or something.

[811] And I have basically no erogenous sensation in the graphs.

[812] Yeah, okay, okay.

[813] So it wasn't long after this that you started to have doubts about what you were doing.

[814] Now, you told me earlier in this discussion that at some point, you started thinking about having children.

[815] and so, but then also that you decided to stop your transition when you were 16.

[816] So how did that lay itself out after you had the surgery?

[817] And how did you come to the decision that the decision you had made was not a good one?

[818] Not long after, I'd say maybe about a month or two, I started realizing that, you know, I miss looking pretty and having softer features, in a more feminine form.

[819] But this was something that I kind of repressed for a while.

[820] It was, I mean, I was about three years on testosterone by this point, and I didn't even look like a woman anymore.

[821] I thought there was no going back, and there would be no point.

[822] But at the same time, I would also buy makeup and skirts and dresses and just wear it in the comfort of my room or when nobody was home to see it.

[823] And this caused a great deal of distress.

[824] for me. And after the surgery, I just kept getting worse.

[825] I just kept justifying it in my head as it being part of the post -stop process.

[826] But I never really got any better.

[827] And it wasn't until maybe about 11 months after the surgery that I realized what the problem was.

[828] And, you know, I was taking a psychology class at this point.

[829] I had a, I had a lesson.

[830] I had a chapter on on child development and parenting and one of the lessons was about the Harlow experiments with the rhesus monkeys the ones exploring the relationship between mother and her child how things like physical affection and breastfeeding affect that and I realized that my breasts were so much more than just sexual organs I mean they're a means of not only feeding my kid, but also I lost so much more than that.

[831] Of providing them with love and attention, yeah, well, look, you know, there's a woman named Tiffany Fields.

[832] She studied under, she studied the work of a man named Riyak Panksep.

[833] And Panksep showed that in order for rat pups to develop properly, they had to be physically stimulated.

[834] Touch, lick, loved.

[835] The experimenters can duplicate that by massaging them with the end of a pencil eraser.

[836] Anyways, Tiffany Fields showed that if you took premature kids that were in an incubator and you massage them three times a day for 10 minutes, that they developed as fast physically as children in utero.

[837] There's a huge body of research showing that that skin -to -skin contact is crucial.

[838] That's physical love.

[839] That skin -to -skin contact is a crucial part of establishing the, what would you call it, the domain of love that's necessary for children to flourish.

[840] food, shelter, you know, the provision of adequate water, et cetera.

[841] Those basics are necessary, but that physical contact and love is equally necessary.

[842] And so it's definitely the case that, well, breastfed children tend to thrive more thoroughly, right?

[843] And that's partly a nutritional issue, but it's also partly an issue of, well, of the fact that a lot of the love that's maternal love that entices children into life is a consequence of physical contact.

[844] And so, yeah, well, that's a hell of a realization.

[845] So that started to dawn on you in high school after you had the surgery.

[846] Yeah, I felt like a monster.

[847] And you were starting to think about having kids at that point.

[848] And so why?

[849] Do you think that was triggered by the surgery?

[850] Like, what switched you?

[851] I think it was most of that class.

[852] I mean, I was learning a lot about myself and also about parenting.

[853] and about children.

[854] And that was when I realized, like, I think I wouldn't have kids someday.

[855] And, you know, I started to really think about it, like, not only about how it relates to having lost my breasts, but also, you know, my fertility might be affected by having to start testosterone so young.

[856] And do you know whether that is the case now?

[857] Have you been tested in any manner that it?

[858] indicates whether the blockers and the testosterone have interfered with your fertility?

[859] I don't know.

[860] I mean, by the time that I started, I was, I did start having periods, but they were, I was so young by that, but at that point, I, they weren't, they weren't regular.

[861] I was only having about three to four per year.

[862] That was also another source of stress for me about being a woman.

[863] I felt, yeah, it was, it was scary.

[864] Like all the other girls my age, we talked about, like, how, you know, they had.

[865] they got theirs every month or every two months.

[866] And, you know, I learned it's a myth now, but they would talk about how, like, their cycles would supposedly sync with, like, family members or friends.

[867] And I was, like, that, why isn't that happening to me?

[868] And so I, it was just, it was just a thing, another thing in the pile that made me feel like I was broken.

[869] Luckily, after stopping.

[870] Right, right, right.

[871] Luckily after stopping, about two months later, I got my period back, and it's been surprisingly quite regular since.

[872] I don't know if I went through some development.

[873] Well, that's a good sign.

[874] It is a good sign.

[875] Right.

[876] Well, that's a good sign.

[877] That must be a relief, so to speak.

[878] But, I mean, there's so many other factors that play into that.

[879] I just, it's, I haven't been able to get tested, and I'm just not really sure of what's to come.

[880] But I'm hopeful.

[881] Right, right, right.

[882] Right, right.

[883] Okay, so when did you stop taking the testosterone and when did you announce this to your parents?

[884] Well, when did you announce this to yourself and then to your parents and all the other people around you who knew?

[885] I think after my junior year wrapped up one night, I just kind of broke down crying and I realized that I regretted my transition and I called a friend and I texted my mom.

[886] I couldn't call her or talk to her about in person because, you know, I had a lot of guilt, I had a lot of shame, and I didn't want to let her and dad and the rest of the family down after so many years of doing this.

[887] And they invested their time and their money into doing this, and it was pretty much for nothing.

[888] And I hated that.

[889] It was also just shameful to admit that I was wrong after so much time, especially since I didn't even look like a girl anymore by that point.

[890] Right.

[891] Yeah, well, it's quite remarkable in some sense that you did reverse your decision.

[892] And you seem to be indicating to me that it was the realization that you wanted to have children.

[893] That was that the real, that was the real telling moment of transformation, was it?

[894] It was definitely one of the biggest catalysts.

[895] And how do you think you figured that out?

[896] Because it's actually pretty young to figure that out.

[897] I mean, I've met many women now who, you know, there's lots of women your age who are absolutely hell -bent and convinced that they're never going to have kids, that the only pathway forward to them that's valid is the career pathway.

[898] But I'll tell you that, you know, I'm 60 years old now, and I've worked with women in female -dominated businesses my whole life because I'm in the psychological profession, and so that's female -dominated.

[899] And virtually every woman I've ever met, with almost no exceptions, and this includes extremely high -achieving women on the career front, pretty much by the time they're in their late 20s, their primary goal is to have a child.

[900] And that's even the case.

[901] Now, sometimes that kicks in for women later than that.

[902] I've seen that as well.

[903] but it's an extremely rare woman who goes through her entire young life without being seized by the desire to have a child.

[904] But it's early in your case.

[905] And it's strange, right, in some ways, because you'd fought against this so hard.

[906] Why the hell do you think it made itself manifest as a desire when you were 16?

[907] Like, did you think you knew that you were really like on the cutting edge in some sense, you know, that if you kept pushing this, you were really going to sacrifice your ability to have kids?

[908] Or what do you think produced the realization?

[909] I think, you know, I already had my guard down by that point because this was around when COVID hit and all, there were all the restrictions put in the place.

[910] And I was basically doing online school only.

[911] And I had a lot of isolation from the outside world.

[912] And this caused me a significant amount of stress.

[913] but it also allowed for a lot more time to be alone and reflect.

[914] And so it opened up my mind a little bit.

[915] So what were you fantasizing about on the family front when you were looking forward into the future?

[916] You were thinking about having, did you have some idea of how many kids you wanted to have?

[917] Did you have some idea about the marriage or the family structure?

[918] What was making itself manifest in your fantasy?

[919] I mean, when I started, I was so young that I wasn't even thinking about all that yet.

[920] But as the years passed, and I started to think about, like, my adulthood, what I wanted to do as an adult, that thought started to pop into my head a little bit more.

[921] I never really thought about it very much until I learned about child psychology and just being a parent.

[922] I think I would have naturally had that that realization, I guess if I knew more about parenting and family.

[923] Hey, do you know, when you were a kid, when you were a kid, do you know if you played with dolls?

[924] Yeah, I did.

[925] You did?

[926] Okay, so that was there.

[927] Can you remember whether or not you enjoyed that?

[928] I know that's a long time.

[929] Yeah, I did.

[930] And were they baby dolls or were they Barbies?

[931] They were Barbies and brats.

[932] Okay, so they were teenage dolls.

[933] Did you have any baby dolls?

[934] Not that I can remember.

[935] Okay, okay.

[936] See, that's interesting.

[937] You know, even among chimpanzees, if you allow chimpanzee juvenile's free toy choice, the males will pick trucks and wield things and gadgets and the females will pick dolls.

[938] And the female chimps will carry the dolls around, teddy bears and so forth for months and develop a very deep attachment to them.

[939] And, you know, one of the things, it's really necessary for young girls and perhaps for young boys, but certainly for young girls to play with baby dolls.

[940] It's really necessary because that's all part of that practicing, that deep female role.

[941] And, you know, without that, well, you don't have a chance.

[942] That's how kids think, hey, they think by playing.

[943] And if they don't have a chance to play that out, then, well, they don't explore that.

[944] And so it didn't even make it manifest in your own life until you were like 16 and had gone through all this bloody misery.

[945] All right.

[946] So when did you start thinking about taking?

[947] and legal action, and why do you think that's justifiable?

[948] That was quite a bit further down the line.

[949] I should probably go into first about the detransition process for me and what led up to me eventually starting to speak out and just doing that, yeah.

[950] When I had this realization, I mean, that night when I broke down and I talked to my friend and my mom and my dad about it.

[951] But that was the night.

[952] that I stopped taking testosterone and I decided that I would just grow my hair out and buy new clothes and just figure things out from there.

[953] I went for about a week just not really doing anything.

[954] I was just kind of at rock bottom at that point and I didn't always see a reason to do anything anymore.

[955] I just stayed in my bed or in my bedroom all day.

[956] Didn't really go out except to use the restroom or get some food.

[957] But mom and dad would come and check and on me and it was it was comforting and that that kept me going um and then i had to figure out all the figure out everything from there pretty much on my own um i i told my endocrinologist i told my therapist my endocrinologist and my gender specialist that i regretted my transition very deeply that i was going to stop and i didn't really get a whole lot of guidance on it I guess they really couldn't because it would be against the law to suggest anything other than...

[958] Well, that's a tricky one, right?

[959] Because, well, hypothetically, once you announced that, they're also legally bound to go along with that.

[960] Right?

[961] So they could have, they could have agreed with you.

[962] I mean, look, I have a certain amount of sympathy for counselors and medical practitioners because they're facing supreme hell on their regulatory college front.

[963] But having said that, I would also say that their fundamental duty of care is to the individual and not to the bloody regulating colleges.

[964] But they could have taken your regrets seriously.

[965] You said that did you face opposition, or was it just a matter of lack of guidance?

[966] It was mostly a lack of guidance.

[967] Nobody really opposed it.

[968] But, you know, I started requesting blood tests from my endocrinologist.

[969] And when I got the, I specifically told her that I no longer identify as male, and I want the guidelines for a female my age.

[970] And when I got the results back, they were sent with the guidelines for the average sex hormone levels for a teenage boy.

[971] So that was kind of the first, that was one of the first moments that really woke me up to, the fact that these people weren't going to help me. Well, you know, it's weird, eh?

[972] Because if your medical people were so convinced that you were 100 % right when you decided to transition to begin with and you were right enough to take the hormones and have the surgery, you'd think that there'd be some resistance to your sudden change of heart.

[973] But it sounds like you basically encountered the same lackadaisical response to the second decision that you did to the first decision.

[974] So, which it's not surprising, although it's horrible.

[975] Yeah, I was basically entirely patient -led.

[976] Right, right.

[977] Okay, so, all right, so you decided to take legal action.

[978] And so walk us through that.

[979] Yeah, earlier this year, I started to start speaking out publicly about my experience with transitioning and then stopping transition.

[980] Before that, I actually had lost a lot of friends, both from school and online over it, over the course of my detransition, because a lot of them, I had a pretty strong change and a lot of my views, and a lot of them disagreed with me heavily, and they were very upset with me. There was one person who kept harassing me just because I regretted it and said that I deserve to feel that way, that I didn't deserve to have parents who loved me enough to let me go through this.

[981] And there were a lot of others who said that I was just making them uncomfortable and that I shouldn't be voicing any of this because it would be harming other real transgender people who needed this treatment.

[982] And I did, yeah.

[983] The real ones, I see, I see.

[984] I gave into this pressure, and I did stop talking about it for a while.

[985] but I also got involved in communities online of people who regretted their transitions and I realized that that wasn't the case at all and that I just couldn't shut up because this is something that's happening more often than even I thought was happening.

[986] I didn't even know that detransition was a thing until after, until it happened to me. And, you know, I knew that there's got to be so many other people in the situation, especially kids who are being pressured by their friends to stay silent about their pain.

[987] And somebody, it's not necessarily that I want to speak out about it, but I feel called to.

[988] And so I started this year.

[989] What do you think is the core of your claim that you fell prey to, say, medical and counseling, counseling malpractice.

[990] What do you think was done wrong with you?

[991] Quite a lot, actually.

[992] The most immediate thing I can think of would be the fact that the consent forms didn't, they weren't really comprehensive.

[993] They were very vague.

[994] They didn't list, they didn't have nearly enough information on them.

[995] And I was also just too young to really fathom what any of this meant.

[996] and they, you know, you can make the argument that.

[997] My parents...

[998] Well, you know, consent has to be...

[999] Well, consent has to be documented, but it also has to be informed.

[1000] And informed means you have to understand what you're consenting to.

[1001] And so from my perspective, like, especially when you were really young, say around 12, and you first went into therapy, there should have been a very deep investigation into your background and then a laying out of a whole comprehensive range of options and a lengthy discussion of the consequence of all of those options.

[1002] And your parents, after the discussion had taken place with you, your parents should have been brought into that and they should have been walked through the same range of options.

[1003] And then you all should have been offered, what would I say, the opportunity or the necessity to take a fair amount of time to really think it through on the fundamental basis that, well, we won't do anything precipitous, until it's necessary, right?

[1004] And that harkens back to the idea that if you leave most kids with gender dysphoria B, most of them identify as homosexual, as I said eventually, but most of them, the vast majority of them, accept their biological status.

[1005] And so the consent issue, it isn't only that the forms were vague and didn't detail out the full range of consequences, it's that you needed to be walked through in great detail.

[1006] all of the issues that were relevant to you on the psychological and medical front, all the options that were available to you and the pros and cons of all those options.

[1007] And that should have been something that took, I would think that I can't see in any possible way that that could have been done with any degree of thoroughness in something under six months of weekly therapy.

[1008] And I would say that's an absolute minimum to walk anyone through something as complicated, as what you laid out.

[1009] So that's on the informed.

[1010] Yeah.

[1011] Yeah, they really presented this as basically the only option to both me and my parents.

[1012] And I also, the problem with me starting it so young was not only that I couldn't consent, I couldn't really fathom just the full picture of things.

[1013] I've also experienced, I'm still experiencing a wide range of conversations.

[1014] complications to the stay, you know, from the surgery, you know, I'll never be able to breastfeed.

[1015] I'll never have that erogenous sensation in my chest back.

[1016] I'll never have my breast back.

[1017] A reconstruction will do nothing for me, and it might make things worse, actually, because I'm, I've had some complications pop up this year with the graphs.

[1018] I have to cover them up with bandages or else they'll, I don't know what's going on with them.

[1019] I tried to consult my surgeon about it, and she didn't really investigate.

[1020] He gave me advice that made the complications worse even and actually temporarily gave me an affection, but I have to wear, I have to bandage up every day so that it doesn't leak all over my clothing or bedding.

[1021] And from the hormones and blockers, I've been experiencing some joint pains, mainly in my arms, my legs and my back.

[1022] And I still have issues with my urinary tract.

[1023] I have to use the restroom pretty frequently.

[1024] And I didn't even know that this was possible.

[1025] This is like a pretty huge quality of life issue that I'm experiencing.

[1026] and I'm just not really getting any help for it.

[1027] And on top of that, I do hate to speak about it, but I'm experiencing sexual dysfunction at the age of 18.

[1028] That's something that women usually go through when they're in their 40s to 50s.

[1029] Right, right.

[1030] How is I supposed to know?

[1031] So let's talk for a moment about how you, got your lawyers, and where you are on the legal battlefront?

[1032] So, not only is what's happened to me completely unethical, completely wrong.

[1033] It's caused me a lot of physical damage and emotional damage as well.

[1034] I'm still picking up the pieces of my life to this day, and I often find myself feeling like a broken woman all because of a choice that I made that I was allowed to make as a kid.

[1035] And I think it's very clear just how wrong all this is.

[1036] None of this should have been allowed to happen.

[1037] What has happened legally?

[1038] Have you served a set of people with notice that you're taking legal proceedings?

[1039] Or are you still in the planning stages of that?

[1040] So we've filed a letter of intent to sue against Kaiser, my health care provider, as well as the hospital that I underwent the surgery at.

[1041] And the surgeon who did it, the gender specialist who referred me to that surgeon and the endocrinologist who had put me on hormones.

[1042] We're still in the 90 -day period.

[1043] Right.

[1044] So this is all just unfolding now.

[1045] So you're going to end up with a pretty damn thorough medical and legal education by the time you're done all of this.

[1046] And a media education as well.

[1047] That's for sure.

[1048] so look we should wrap this part up for everyone who's watching and listening i'm going to talk to chloe for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform i think what i'm going to do i often walk people through the development of their career but that's not relevant in her situation what i'm going to do instead is talk to chloe about she was recently at an event with matt walsh and i want to talk to her about that and i want to talk to her about the response she's got from the gender, let's say, ideologues and activists in relationship to going public with her decision to detransition.

[1049] So we're going to delve into that for about half an hour.

[1050] And so if those of you who are watching and listening found this interesting and you're inclined, switch over to the Daily Wire Plus platform and we'll fill in the political end of this, at least to some degree.

[1051] And Chloe, thank you very much for talking to me today.

[1052] And I'm really, it's really, what happened to you is really unforgivable in my estimation.

[1053] You know, it's, you were very badly mishandled by the people who should have been taken care of you on the professional front.

[1054] And you were, you were, you know, offered a pathway forward that I can see to be highly tempting for someone in your situation.

[1055] but there are many, many, many other options available to you on the therapeutic front that would have resolved the problems that you've had to the degree that human problems can ever be resolved without having to wander through this bloody catastrophic labyrinth of pain and suffering and confusion that you've been subject to for the last five years.

[1056] And so I hope that you can get yourself back on proper footing and move forward and I wish you all the luck there is on the legal front.

[1057] I hope your damn legal system in the United States isn't so corrupted already by all this woke nonsense so that it'll be impossible for you to proceed.

[1058] But I suspect that the medical community who's been complicit in this kind of butchery has an awful shock waiting for them on the legal front.

[1059] That certainly started to manifest itself in the UK with the closing of the Tavistock Clinic.

[1060] And I think there's a thousand lawsuits right now pending in relationship to the Tavistock Clinic.

[1061] So the tide is beginning to turn, and when it turns, there's going to be an awful lot of reparations made on the part of culpable medical professionals and their counseling acolytes.

[1062] So good luck with that, eh?

[1063] And keep your head up.

[1064] And we'll flip over to the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[1065] For all those you watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

[1066] And thanks again, Chloe, for being willing to wander through this, you know, relatively painful personal territory.

[1067] Thank you so much.

[1068] Hello, everyone.

[1069] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on Dailywireplus .com.