Soren's Story: How One Detransitioner Found Peace Outside of Medicalizati

I could not have wrapped my head around what it would be like for them to cut my incisions back open and manually drain blood clots from my chest cavity until I lived through that, until I was on that hospital bed having it happen to me. At the time I thought I was going to die. The wound was getting infected and no one seemed to really care. I think that nobody will understand the complications that come with these procedures and these treatments until you experience them. I began identifying as transgender at age 11, started hormone replacement therapy at age 17, and by age 19 I had a double mastectomy. Next month I will be 21 years old. I had a little girlfriend at the time who also began identifying as transgender. She was three years older than me. We were both, you know, tomboys. We felt very different from other girls. So when I heard that feelings of wrongness associated with being a girl had a name, it was very attractive to me that I felt very understood for the first time in my life. I suddenly had something to build my identity around. My mom was a single mom for the first five years of my life and my stepdad was pretty severely disabled. So I came from a home life where I was on my own for a lot of things. Like my parents loved me very much, they cared, but they didn't really know how to parent very well. Around ninth and tenth grade, I met my father for the first time. I actually reached out to him on Facebook and was sort of like, hey, I think you're my dad. I found out I had a five-year-old little sister who is now 10 years old and one of the biggest joys of my life and a pretty cool stepmom and them being very open-minded and open-hearted. They saw my distress at home and felt like maybe supporting me in this identity was the best thing they could do. We hear a lot, would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son? And that was the sort of mindset that they were exposed to and, you know, they acted from. We started going to a support group not too long after. My mom did not like it. In this group, they had a subgroup for transgender youth. In the subgroup for youth, we mostly talked about who was starting hormones next, who was getting the next surgery, what big relationship mishaps had happened that week, who was struggling with self-harm. When I was feeling very heavy stuff in my personal life and, you know, I was relating to these other kids, I began to think, oh, this really is the right path for me. I got sort of envy for the fact that they were getting all these procedures, all of these modes of affirmation that I was not. There was also a nurse practitioner in the group whose child was transgender and I ended up going to see him. Within my very first visit, he gave me a prescription for testosterone. I was on 11 different prescription medications and all of these were maintained by the same nurse practitioner, not even a doctor, but a nurse practitioner who prescribed me testosterone and estrogen blockers. The beginning of my social transition and the beginning of my medical transition involved me being in a relationship with another trans person. We're highly impressionable as humans. My relationship with said partner was not too great. And then when we finally broke up within a few months, I was undergoing surgery. So this was during a pretty traumatic point in my life. I mean, right off the backs of the pandemic, right off the backs of a pretty tumultuous relationship. And of course, my surgeon had given me a checklist of here's everything you need. Here's some recommendations of things to say. It was just sort of spoon fed to me. Afterwards, I began to suffer major complications. We noticed the bruising almost right away. And despite sending photos to the physician line that we were given on my discharge, we weren't taken seriously at all. I ended up going to the ER after being dismissed three times on June 23rd, 2021. That was pretty horrific. I spent eight hours in the ER by myself. They had to cut my scars back open. They had to sew drains in. I remember they stuck a Q-tip in the hole that they cut open and had to sort of aggressively knock out the blood clots. I just remember being on zero pain meds at the time. My surgeons didn't think it was that big of a deal. But at the same time, I knew that I had been gaslit. Like, this was not normal. I, as a 19-year-old, should not have been going through that. I mean, after that, I continued to live as a man for six months. But when I moved down to Austin for school, I ended up taking a sociology class where I learned about how we develop a sense of self. And we actually develop a sense of self primarily through taking on the role of other, through role model. My little sister is my pride and my joy. I think I really took a step back and I thought, what if she came up to me and said the things that I say to myself? What if she told me that she felt her body was wrong, when I know for a fact that she is perfect? That there is not a single thing about her that she needs to change. It's so hard to talk about her. I love her so much. I felt like for the first time in my life, I had a key to unlocking me, to maybe healing some of those parts of me that I thought were going to be broken for the rest of my life. And I sort of gave myself the chance to accept myself for who I was without the drugs, without the obsessive need to police myself. I began medically detransitioning before that ideological detransition because vaginal atrophy, the hormone fluctuations that were not just monthly, but weekly, were just too much for me. I'm not sure whether or not I'm fertile because when I went to the gynecologist after I stopped taking cross-sex hormones, she said, we're going to have to wait for you to basically go through puberty 3.0 to know what's up. I definitely know that while I did not really ever want to have biological children, when I was going through these treatments and these procedures, it's certainly a possibility and something that I would strongly consider when I am financially and emotionally stable in the future. And I have pretty significant parts of that that I'll never be able to participate in now, like breastfeeding. A child, I don't think, is capable of knowing whether or not their future lifestyle is going to be aligned with motherhood or fatherhood or parenthood in general. And these children who shouldn't be concerned about sex at that age, but who might be concerned about sex 10 years down the line, we don't really know what that's going to look like for them. Some of them may never be able to orgasm. Some of them may have intense discomfort due to surgical complications because we know that the rate of complication for sex reassignment surgery is uncomfortably high. Sometimes the compassionate response is one which sets firm boundaries. At the end of the day, you need to be able to discern between enabling and helping. That you giving me access to certain drugs, that you just giving me referrals to whomever I asked for, didn't actually help me heal. It affirmed me in my delusion. Knowing what I know about my story and what I know about the stories of other women my age, of other detransitioners, I honestly think that we might see another Me Too-esque movement in the next 10 years of people coming out about their experiences. I'm still far from perfect. I mean, I think all of us are. I still struggle with my mental health when I get stressed out, but a lot of how I got to be so at peace with what happened to me and how I navigate those difficult feelings today is through mindfulness. And now when I feel a negative emotion like depression or anxiety or dysphoria, I lean into it a little bit. I say, this is really hard, and I give myself that compassion that I craved growing up, that I thought I was getting from being affirmed in my gender identity. I realize now I can give that to me and that I need to, in fact, to not suffer as, you know, I did for so long.