Portrait 17

Sarah Vaci is painting detransitioners

“When I was 17 and first discovered trans ideology in 2009, it gave me a way to channel all of the things I thought were “wrong” with me into a simple solution. Back then, women being diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder was still considered rare, and I was therefore able to convince myself that I uniquely and mysteriously had developed a “male” brain inside of a female skull. It all seems so absurd to me now: how could I have a male brain?

Could I have a male kidney? Male lungs? What I actually had was an eating disorder, a toxic perception of masculine women, and deeply internalized homophobia. But it was easier to blame my body rather than turn the blame onto my beliefs and my environment: that kind of introspection doesn’t afford anyone instant gratification. 

After an extremely shoddy year-long evaluation with a psychologist who was friends with my father (complete with past-life regressions) she determined at 21 that I was of sound enough mind to pay a surgeon to remove my breasts so I could walk through life looking slightly more like a man. What an obvious oxymoron that was, but one our culture has accepted. Shock therapy for lesbians and lobotomies for depressed women used to make sense to us too, and the psychiatric community always seems to be finding new cures for incorrect femaleness. 

Mastectomy didn’t bring me the joy I thought it would (it gave me permanent nerve damage), nor did testosterone (which destroyed my singing voice and eventually led to vaginal atrophy.) Transition didn’t give me the ability to heal from the underlying problems that caused my dysphoria in the first place. It fractured my brain and locked me in a state of cognitive dissonance that I’m still recovering from. When you treat dysphoria like destiny rather than a diagnosis, that leaves no room for healing the trauma that caused it in the first place.   I still don’t understand why I didn’t stop sooner. I tried many times but didn’t realize that testosterone can have an addictive quality in the female body. When I tried to stop I felt physically awful, and my old story of “male brain female body” would seem reinforced. I’m sure a sunk cost fallacy was also at play: years of my life, my health, my breasts, my voice, my sanity, all traded for what? Authenticity? 

It was through my first psilocybin experience that it finally occurred to me : every cell in my body is female, no matter what I call myself: therefore, any way I happened to be was a normal way to be female. In my youth and ignorance I didn’t understand  that every woman in history (especially lesbians) have hated their bodies at some point: not because there was something wrong with their brains, but because of how their cultures treated their bodies. 

When I woke up I felt like Persephone coming out of the underworld. How long had I been asleep? How had I done this to myself? How had I ever believed something so objectively nonsensical? How was I ever going to come back from this? Stopping testosterone left me grey and numb for three months: and while my mind was possibly the clearest  it had been since childhood, the horrific reality of what I had participated in and sacrificed 10 years of my youth to was crushing me. I felt like I’d escaped from a cult, woken up from a coma, and become an amputee after a car wreck: all rolled into one.

I’m beyond grateful that I had my wife to help me. She held space for my breakdown, my anger, my endless waves of grief. As a professional herbalist she’s helped to heal my body, but it’s taken much longer to heal my mind. I came to hate the surgeons in the 50’s who invented a way to make gender non confirming people look more “appropriate” through surgery and hormones. I hated that this idea was being sold to young people for a profit: justifying it with the anecdotal evidence of some very unwell people collected back in the 90s or earlier. Most of all I hated myself for damaging my body rather than loving myself.

Time and distance are great healers, and I have shifted away from the belief that self-acceptance is only possible with the right product. I realize that I’m tired of waiting to give myself permission to love myself until I finally match an idealized image. I’m grateful that I have grown so much and can still step into my femaleness with minimal damage compared to what others have experienced. Many young women are not so lucky. 

Many of them have deeply masculinized voices. Some have lost their hair. “Hormone blockers” have given others early onset osteoporosis. Undergoing phalloplasty or metoidioplasy have left the majority of recipients fighting constant fistulas and chronic urinary infections. Others have undergone 8+ surgeries and ended up with long term catheters or colostomy bags.

Some girls have had vaginectomies prior to their awakening: their vaginas cauterized shut with lasers before they’ve ever had sex.  I’m grateful for my healing, but it’s hard for the wound to completely close as I watch more and more girls running towards my fate. They’re like dark mirrors of my own youth and don’t yet recognize the self-hatred that I also mistook for self-care.

Sometimes it makes me think of the hysterical girls during the Salem Witch Trails: their numbers growing and their illusions becoming more and more real as the adults around them encourage and reinforce their unlikely visions. 

As a detransitioner, I hope that you can celebrate our healing. But I also hope that you won’t continue to be desensitized to the medical horror we experienced just because it’s becoming common.

A generation of young women with broken voices and mastectomy scars has already been created and is growing by the day. I wonder how it will feel to look at another women 30 years from now with all the telltale signs and ask her, “So, you’re from that era too?”