De-Transitioner: Here’s What Her Doctors Didn’t Tell Her

At the age of 12 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. Okay so let's go back to when you were let's go back to when you were 12 about when did you hit puberty? I had a fairly early puberty actually started I started developing at around the age of nine if not a little bit earlier. Okay okay and so at nine did that do you remember if that changed you emotionally? Yeah it did I it was really difficult for me actually. Okay so let me give you a little background you tell me if anybody's ever told you this before okay so boys and girls experience before puberty experience approximately the same levels of negative emotion so that would be primarily anxiety and emotional pain or even sometimes susceptibility to physical pain 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. 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 and so that on average women biologically mature women are more sensitive to negative emotion than biologically mature men and that kicks in at puberty. Now there's a variety of explanations for that but no one knows for certain and here's some of them okay so first of all sexual dimorphism in physical strength really emerges at puberty 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 so women are at a disadvantage physically in relationship to anything that might have to do with physical combat and so on those grounds it makes sense for women to be somewhat more sensitive to threat. Okay so then the 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 and so it makes so they're they're more vulnerable on the sexual front so it makes it makes sense for them to be more sensitive to any threat that's associated with sexual activity and then the third explanation and there may be more is that women are charged generally speaking with the primary responsibility for infants and infants are extremely dependent and vulnerable and so you could make a case that adult women's nervous systems are actually adapted for the mother-child dyad and not for the say emotional well-being of the individual woman and a woman needs to be threat sensitive because she's going to be taking care of infants and and extremely dependent children 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 cross-culturally it's between three to one and five to one now men have their associated pathologies men are more likely to be anti-social for example and to abuse alcohol but women predominate on the negative emotion side and so 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 and so that's a difficult thing to handle emotionally and then there's the additional consequence of whatever hormonal turbulence might emerge as a consequence of the onset of puberty 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 and that might be because women are evaluated more rigorously on the basis of their physical appearance than men men are evaluated more harshly sexually let's say on the performance side you know with regard to socioeconomic status and so forth but women are definitely evaluated more harshly by men and by each other in terms of their physical attractiveness so that makes quite a complicated situation for girls who are making the transition into puberty and a lot of them are depressed and anxious and that and develop an intense focus on their body 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 yeah none of that was really explained to me by therapists or even growing up 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 um growing up I was a bit of a tomboy and also on the spectrum 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 and I found that I fit in more with the boys and when I hit puberty um it was a bit earlier than most of my peers and I got taller than them and oh yeah you know I had 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 um in several ways and there was there was a lot of loneliness for me because on one hand I didn't really feel like I was I was one of the girls but on the other hand I was losing my connection with some of my friends who I was close with and really really cared about and I also had some body image issues growing up as well um I often talk about how social media played a role in it but really it started from a very young age actually I mean I grew up I was born into a very image-oriented very sex-oriented society and you know before I hit puberty I was looking forward to having a developed body and eventually going breast and you know once I hit puberty and once I hit puberty I was it wasn't what I expected and I was really quite disappointed how I looked I was very very skinny I was on the smaller chested side and you know I grew up in an age where we kind of glorified bodies that are very um very voluptuous um lots of curves people often use a phrase like body heavy I mean bottom heavy or hourglass pear-shaped things like that and I didn't look like that at all I was you know I was I was quite thin a little on the muscular side and if anything my shoulders were probably the widest point in my body and I kind of had a complex over this I I also liked having my hair short and because of all this I felt like if anything I didn't really look like a girl at all I didn't like the other I didn't look like the other girls my age and I felt like I just wasn't pretty and that I would never really have any worth as a woman it's it's a very rare adolescent and probably a particularly rare female adolescent who feels attractive in the early stages of puberty you know so everything that you experienced although you may have experienced it you know 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 for a few years for the vast majority of people now you did add one additional issue which we could delve into a little bit which I think is relevant so you said that you're on the spectrum and that you had an easier time communicating with boys than with girls and so here's something to know about that 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 so women are higher in negative emotion and they're more agreeable and agreeableness is both compassion and politeness and although the difference between men and women isn't massive it's significant and it also maximizes in egalitarian society so it looks like it's biological 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 but people on the autistic spectrum are also more reliably interested in things and so for example if you're extremely autistic the psychological phrase for for descriptive purposes is lacking theory of mind and so extremely autistic people have a hard time understanding what's going on in someone else's mind at all they they tend to be almost entirely thing oriented and there's a much higher preponderance of autistic symptoms among engineers 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 and so the fact that you are tilted towards the 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 so that's not necessarily autistic in and of itself it's just part of the normal variation in in what would you call it well in attentional orientation 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 and so and then on the image front you know this this ties in with the idea of self-consciousness so if you're on stage and you're talking to people and you become aware of yourself tends to make you nervous and sweat and to become uncomfortable to experience high levels of negative emotion and self-consciousness itself looks like a manifestation of negative emotion they're incredibly tightly linked statistically almost indistinguishable from one another 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 and so that can be exacerbated by whatever social trends happen to be in place but it's it's a very deep-seated problem 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 so everything that you described in some sense could have been attributed to the difficulties of normative development just just so you know and this this proclivity of teenagers to develop depression and anxiety I want to take that apart for a minute too for everybody who's listening so imagine gender dysphoria okay so 10 years ago it was comparatively rare but not unheard of but imagine it has two components okay one is a tendency towards negative emotion so suffering anxiety depression frustration disappointment pain shame guilt self-consciousness all of that and then imagine there's a second part of it that's more specifically focused on discomfort with the body okay the first part of that is the bulk of it so if you look across forms of psychopathology like mental illness the major segment is high levels of negative emotion like depression and anxiety and a secondary segment is the particular manifestation of that in your case in body dysmorphia and so and then the 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 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 sub-component of it 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 and of course that spikes for adolescent girls now you you may have been told this but perhaps you weren't so there are good long-term studies of children with gender dysphoria most of them were conducted in Toronto where I happen to be by a man named Ken Zucker and Zucker ran a a clinic for gender dysphoric kids way before this became part of the culture war let's say 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 percent of them settle into their biological identity although about 80 of them also are also homosexual in their orientation 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 and so 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 but if you just backed the hell off and waited those kids would settle into their body but generally I adopted homosexual orientation