Death Before Detransition

Freaky Friday, Videodrome and how I ain't ever going back.

I love a “kid suddenly becomes and adult” trope. Freaky Friday? Big? Suddenly 30? I love the initial confusion and fear giving way to unbridled joy. The childlike celebration of life! Stunning! But that means I hate the emotional turn in these films when the plucky heroine realises some difficulty and then suddenly no, this transformation is wrong, it’s against the natural order of things. And they run through the streets, chasing the magical, haunted McGuffin of a plot device so they can change back. Everyone understands the fear. They change back. Kid reunites with their old life having grown wiser. Credits roll. Black.

People love this shit.

It’s the same with the horror version of this. The mad surgeon carving up their victims and forcing them into new bodies, the strange eldritch power of a pirate TV station causing a dripping orifice to form in your chest that accepts Betamax cassettes to control your mind? Same thing really. It’s all about having your body changed and the horror, the distress, the fear of not being able to return to what you are.

They always want to de-transition.

Everyone understands it. You sit and you watch the whole movie about the plucky heroine or the oblivious victim of the mad surgeon… your experience the world through their eyes. You feel their fear, sometimes viscerally, sometimes as gentle comedy, but you understand their want because that’s how the story works. So, I’m not surprised that people view what I’m doing to my body as some horror, as something against the natural order. They put themselves in my shoes and they think “My god, if my body changed so dramatically, I’d be horrified and want it to stop. I would beg the magic cabinet at the fairground, I’d threaten the mad surgeon with his own dirty scalpel to make sure my body, my flesh was put right, transformed into what it is supposed to be!”

Problem with trying to imagine being trans is that you’re thinking of the wrong chronology. You’re imagining yourself in your “first form” as you are now, then imagining your “second form” and your desire to return to your first. I cannot speak for every trans person, but that is not the case for us. I’ve already been locked into my “second form”. Locked in since birth. transformed into a shape that I am not since when I was an embryo and a certain combination of hormones set my body on a path that wasn’t mine. What I am doing now, it isn’t the initial joys of discovering I’m suddenly changed right before I regret it all and wish to go back. Nor is it some act of violence being perpetrated against me by a crazed doctor with a radical agenda. What’s happening right now is I am begging to be changed into my true self. This version of me that you’ve known for years? This “man’s body”? It isn’t my “first form”. It is my “second form”. It is the aberration I have lived with for decades and I am pleading to be what I truly am.

I suppose this is the tragedy of being a transperson? I’ve never had the chance to tangibly know this true version and I must stumble through the world, running through the streets searching for the magic fortunate-telling machine to discover it.

It’s why detransition is such a hot topic. There’s a huge conversation about this that I won’t drone on about. So, let’s skip some steps. Let’s skip the bit where I tell you about how levels of “reported regret” for knee reconstructions are orders of magnitude more than transition surgeries. Let’s skip all the stats about marriages failing and the massive proportion of parents who, when asked through the veil of anonymity, say they wouldn’t have chosen to have kids. Let’s even skip the bit where we talk about how people who do undergo detransition resoundingly do so because of the difficulties they face in the world for being trans and not because their dysphoria has evaporated.

Let’s skip all that and jump to the point where I get to say “you are not trans, so you have no idea what it feels like. You picture yourself at the wrong point in this narrative.”

Of course, people worry I’ll detransition and thus want to legislate ways to make it harder to start. Cause in their imagination, if their body was suddenly changed as quickly as mine has, they would want to go back. They think that for me right now this is the first act of the film when really, I’m much closer to the end than they realise. I am not in the initial stages of shock, or joy, I am in the part of the film where the plucky heroine or the torture victim fights back. I have been living in the body that causes me revulsion for decades and no amount of counselling will change that. I’m at the stage in the story where I would rather die than continue to be the thing that I am not.

I’d lay down my life rather than detransition. It’s something that policy makers and pundits, who don’t have the depth of imagination to see that they are blessed with already being in the body that is “them”, can’t seem to grasp.

So yeah. Death before Detransition.

–S