Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
Detransitioners and gender clinicians face a similar challenge: confront reality or look away?
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 15 March 2022 – gender:hacked
The ways gender clinicians talk about detransition are so illuminating. They’ll stick “detransition” in scare quotes, they’ll say detransitioners are “transitioning to” their “assigned gender at birth.” They talk about gender journeys where patients transition and transition back, on a quest to discover their true selves—never mind that those “journeys” may include sterilizing pharmaceutical regimens and surgeries. In short, gender clinicians will do and say anything to avoid confronting the reality of harm and regret that it was their responsibility to prevent.
To avoid this reckoning, clinicians must trap detransitioners in the ideological framework that legitimizes transition. Sometimes, this trap is quite a literal one: requiring patients to demonstrate gender dysphoria and live in as their “desired gender” (read: actual sex) before they can change their legal documents and access medical procedures to reverse the effects of transition. Mostly, clinicians do this rhetorically, refusing to recognize detransition for what it is: a rejection of the belief system that justified transition. Clinicians tell detransitioners that they might just be genderfluid or nonbinary, or warn them that they need to work on their “internalized transphobia.” The patient isn’t allowed to say “I’m just female,” and that means the patient isn’t allowed to break up with gender identity and a way of thinking about gender and sex that harmed the patient in the first place.
So to detransition medically, legally, and (in many settings) socially, detransitioners are forced to keep playing the same mind game. Is it any wonder many detransitioners don’t go back to the medical providers who harmed them in the first place and who refuse to open their eyes to the reality of what they’re doing?
This shows up in this week’s episode of Gender: A Wider Lens, where two Dutch clinicians who developed the protocol for child medical transition fail again and again to openly and seriously evaluate their beliefs, actions, and the consequences. Rather than take on detransition and regret with the seriousness these topics deserve, Thomas Steensma and Annelou de Vries repeatedly attempt to “queer” negative outcomes instead. (Maybe we just need to ‘queer’ our ideas of what a good medical outcome is?) Gender clinicians like Steensma and de Vries hate talking about regret (the question of regretting or not regretting is too “binary”). They’d rather talk about fluidity, gender journeys, ‘transitioning’ to your assigned gender at birth.
When a teenager says she’s trans, it’s all very simple: believe [her], affirm [her]. When she says transition was a mistake, it’s suddenly more complicated. Is she sure? Was she unduly influenced? Has she considered she might just be non-binary?..