DETRANSITIONING.

I remember going on a road trip with my family and a colleague of my father’s and her husband and they decided to determine our itinerary. When we were between two country towns, the colleague’s husband got onto the CB radio and asked dad if he wanted to go in front for a while. This amazed dad, and the colleague’s husband was nearly crying because he refused to pull over to give an oncoming driver some space on a narrow road, and the car flicked up a stone and it caused a bullseye crack in his windscreen, down near the wipers. Had he decided to call a windscreen repair company when we went to the second town, he could have had the bullseye crack repaired with some resin. Instead, he ignored it and when we reached a cold town and his windscreen frosted over, it split lengthwise across the bottom. For the next two years that we knew him, he was driving around with a cracked windscreen. I saw him two years later, and I’m not sure if he had it replaced, and my father said, some years later, when I recounted it, “Well, while we knew him, he didn’t. Eventually, he would have had to.”

Just like the windscreen that cracked under abuse and neglect (okay, granted, he kept his car clean, and he always had really clean windows, and cleaned them with methylated spirits and old newspaper) for trans folk, when they reach their a-ha moment, their egg is said to have cracked. My egg cracked after reading a book by an autistic, queer non-binary and after having a colonoscopy where I was told that I had a large polyp that was fortuitous that I had it removed, that I had a reprieve from bowel cancer and therefore, a second chance at life.

What some who celebrate de-transitioning forget is, some de-transitioners retransition later in life. I had considered transitioning and was looking for an organic or biological cause as to why I felt the way I did, but at 48, I finally had the courage to decide that it was what I wanted to do and pursued it. And the number of people who de-transition is small. And for many who retransition, the pain of living in a way that we are not intended to is so great that we want to change.

So rather than celebrating de-transitioners, consider the fact that they are a minority within a minority that is still valid, but transitioners should not be denied the right by the government or any other body. And don’t use de-transitioners as an argument against transitioning.