Young people who used drugs or surgery to change their gender but later regretted their procedures and sought to reverse them are warning of worsening abuse from the transgender community they’ve walked away from.
De-transitioners, as they are known, speak of online abuse, doxxing, harassment, and death threats after they made the tough decisions to exit what they describe as inward-looking and even ‘cult-like’ trans groups.
Tensions between trans activists and de-transitioners spiked this month at a Florida medical board meeting, where sex change interventions for children were restricted. Insults were hurled, and bomb threats were posted online.
Trans rights activists shouted over their opponents at the hearings, called out ‘bigot’ and ‘shame on all of you, and vowed to dox board members by publishing their private phone numbers and other details online.
The stakes are high. Trans activists face discrimination, and many see themselves in a life-or-death civil rights struggle. By turning against that lifestyle and decrying puberty blockers for young people, de-transitioners undermine their cause.
A trans rights campaigner shouts ‘shame on you while pointing at a row of de-transitioners seated in the bottom left at a hearing of Florida’s medical board on treatments for trans youth.
Cat Cattinson, 30, a singer and musician from northern California, transitioned from female to male but later regretted her procedures and detransitioned. Trans campaigners harass those who exit the community and call detransitioners ‘liars and grifters and try to invalidate everything we say,’ she says.
Cat Cattinson transitioned from female to male and went by the name Tony, but experienced medical problems and stopped taking the male hormone testosterone to detransition and reverse the procedure.
Trans people eschew de-transitioners for ‘invalidating their narrative,’ Cat Cattinson, a de-transitioner from northern California, told DailyMail.com.
‘I’ve seen the level of hate escalate to the point that any time a new de-transitioner shares their story online, they get dogpiled by thousands of trans activists, bullied, ridiculed, and of course death threats,’ said Cattinson.
‘For every de-transitioner with a public platform, the new trend has been to call us liars and grifters and just try to invalidate everything we say.’
Cattinson, 30, a singer and musician, grew up as female but identified as male from age 13. She took testosterone, went by the name of Tony, and made plans for breast-removal surgery.
But the drugs started negatively affecting her heart and deepened her cherished singing voice. She decided in 2020 to stop the injections and begin her de-transition back to being a woman.
She was among a group of de-transitioners that addressed hearings of Florida’s medical board, which on November 4 voted to forbid the state’s doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and hormones or performing surgeries until transgender patients are 18.
Republican politicians in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, and Oklahoma have taken steps to restrict such treatments for children. Still, the decision in Florida was the first time limits were imposed by a U.S. medical board, albeit one aligned with Gov. Ron DeSantis.
A spokesman for the board said they had to draft extra law enforcers and hire a private security firm for the controversial hearings, as various social media users threatened to ‘mail pipe bombs’ to the 14-member panel.
‘We had a lot of reason to be concerned,’ the spokesman told DailyMail.com.
‘It wasn’t just this last meeting. It’s been every meeting we’ve conducted on this issue.’
Many doctors, mental health specialists, and medical groups argue that treatments for transgender youth are safe and beneficial. Some say they are necessary to prevent teen suicides, though rigorous, long-term research is lacking.
Definitive data are hard to come by. According to Pew Research Center, some 5.1 percent of adults younger than 30 are trans or nonbinary. Somewhere between 8 and 13 percent of them revert to their gender at birth, according to various estimates.
A Reddit group called ‘detrans’ has 41,500 members who share their experiences about dodgy doctors, stigma, and other issues, including ever more ‘hateful, angry’ online posts in transgender forums.
Cattinson says the growing number of outspoken detransitioners has changed the conversation.
‘We’re at a critical time right now, where we have the opportunity to safeguard kids from making irreversible decisions they’ll regret,’ she added.
‘Public awareness has helped us get to this turning point, where people realize what’s going on and agree with us detransitioners.’
A detransitioner who goes by the name Shape Shifter also spoke in Florida. The 32-year-old from Massachusetts says he was ‘brainwashed’ into believing he was female and undergoing chest surgery, a penis removal, and the creation of a ‘neo-vagina.’
He soon regretted the procedures, which led to a fistula and other devastating consequences. He says he realized he was simply a gay man who liked showing his feminine side and began to detransition.
He told DailyMail.com he was ‘still in shock from the vitriol he experienced in Florida, where trans activists called him a ‘Nazi,’ ‘fascist’ and a DeSantis lackey who was paving the way for the ‘genocide of trans kids.’
‘I’m already a high anxiety person — this is making me feel uneasy,’ said Shape Shifter, who keeps his real name private for professional reasons.
A Massachusetts-based detransitioner named Shape Shifter transitioned from male to female but encountered appalling medical issues. He has since detransitioned, identifying as a gay man with a feminine look. He has faced intimidation and harassment after publically criticizing transgender ideology. He was branded a lackey of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for testifying at the Florida hearing and is now considering whether to buy a gun for self-defense.
‘If somebody comes to my house, I don’t know if I’ll be able to defend myself, and I want to buy a gun now and learn how to shoot so that I can defend myself. This is ridiculous.’
Vera Lindner tackles the issue in her soon-to-be-released documentary, Affirmation Generation, which profiles six detransitioners after what she calls an ‘uncontrolled medical experiment carried out on the backs of vulnerable youth.’
The way Lindner tells it, Planned Parenthood, drug firms, and other backers of the trans movement ‘have invested millions in propagating this ideology’ which makes the ‘failed experiments — detransitioners — extremely inconvenient for them.’
Though transgender issues have gained particular significance in the U.S. and frequently feature in ferocious ‘culture war’ rows between liberals and conservatives, they also stoke European divisions.
Sinéad Watson, from Scotland, began her female-to-male medical transition in 2015 at age 24 but regretted her total mastectomy and other procedures within three years. She stopped taking testosterone in 2019 as she detransitioned.
This week she told her 45,000 Twitter followers about how her public statements about reverting to female were met with claims that she was a ‘liar, fake, shill and (funniest of all) a right-wing Christian sock.’
‘I was sent rape and death threats,’ she posted.
‘I was called a hideous freakshow. Hundreds of accounts with anime and furry PFPS told me it was a shame that my last suicide attempt failed. I deserved to suffer.’
Sinead Watson, from Glasgow, Scotland, lived as a man from the age of 23 and had a double mastectomy, but realized at age 27 that she had made a terrible mistake and detransitioned at 28. She spoke out on social media this week about widespread harassment from the transgender community she was leaving: ‘I was sent rape and death threats,’ posted Watson, pictured earlier this year. ‘I was called a hideous freak show.’
To live as a man, Watson took the male hormone testosterone for years, which has left her with a gruff voice and facial hair she removes every two days.
De-transitioner Camille Kiefel, 32, spoke in Tallahassee about regretting her double mastectomy. Trans campaigners crowded around her as an ‘unnerving intimidation tactic’ as she left the hours-long session, she says.
Camille Kiefel, 32, from Oregon, now regrets her double mastectomy and is suing the therapists who recommended it.
Another detransitioner, Camille Kiefel, 32, from Oregon, also spoke in Tallahassee about her regrets over her double mastectomy. She describes pro-trans campaigners crowding around her as an ‘unnerving intimidation tactic’ as she left the hours-long session.
‘They wanted to make it clear that we weren’t welcome,’ she told DailyMail.com.
Kiefel recently launched a legal case against the therapists who in 2020 green-lighted her breast surgery, saying they should never have approved the procedure for a young woman with her mental health conditions when alternative non-invasive treatments were available.
She calls it an ‘abhorrent misdiagnosis’ that left her ‘mutilated,’ unable to breastfeed, and unlikely to find love.
The world of transgender activism is ‘cult-like and very dogmatic,’ Kiefel says, and ‘de-transitioners challenge that belief system.’ She adds that they want her silenced in case her story has negative consequences for trans people.
‘A lot of it is just talking, but there are many scary people out there,’ she said. ‘Being doxed is a concern. There are things I’m doing to try and keep myself and my family safe. It’s just concerning.’
Putting numbers on the explosion of children seeking gender care
The U.S. has seen an explosion in recent years in the number of children who identify as a gender different from what they were designated at birth. Thousands of families are weighing profound choices in an emerging field of medicine as they pursue gender-affirming care for their children.
The spotlight fell on trans-identifying Sunny Bryant, 8, earlier this year when Texas lawmakers declared illegal the hormone treatments she was planning to take upon reaching adolescence.
In 2021, about 42,000 children and teens across the United States received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, nearly triple the number in 2017, according to data Komodo Health, a technology company, compiled for Reuters. Gender dysphoria is defined as the distress caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and the one assigned to them at birth.
The analysis found that at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021. Reuters found similar trends when it requested state-level data on diagnoses among children covered by Medicaid, the public insurance program for lower-income families.
Gender-affirming care covers a spectrum of interventions. It can entail adopting a child’s preferred name and pronouns and letting them dress in alignment with their gender identity — called social transitioning.
It can incorporate therapy or other forms of psychological treatment. And from around the start of adolescence, it can include medical interventions such as puberty blockers, hormones, and, in some cases, surgery. In all of it, the aim is to support and affirm the child’s gender identity.
These medical treatments don’t begin until puberty, typically around age 10 or 11.
But families that go the medical route venture onto the uncertain ground, where science has yet to catch up with practice. While the number of gender clinics treating children in the U.S. has grown from zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years — and waiting lists are long — strong evidence of that treatment’s efficacy and possible long-term consequences remain scant.
Puberty blockers and sex hormones do not have U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for children’s gender care. No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear.
New Yorkers took to the streets of Manhattan to participate in the Reclaim Pride Coalition’s (RPC) fourth annual Queer Liberation March, which focused on transgender rights, among other issues, in June.
And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them.
More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning. The same lack of clarity holds true for the contentious issue of detransitioning when a patient stops or reverses the transition process.
The National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government agency responsible for medical and public health research, told Reuters that ‘the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.’
The NIH has funded a comprehensive study to examine mental health and other outcomes for about 400 transgender youths treated at four U.S. children’s hospitals. However, long-term results are years away and may not address fertility or cognitive development concerns.
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