When I was a woman, men had a problem
with me.
When I was a trans guy, trans and queer people had a problem with me.
Now that I'm detransitioned, Christians men, and a lot of radical feminists all have a problem with me.
Growing up in Cleveland was interesting
because it was such an underdog city.
I think it maybe gives you a little bit of
a complex.
So this is the house I was born in on West 54th Street. I was born at home so this is actually where Ianded.
My first memory of gender was
that my parents got me a mini tool set.
I think that was the first time I felt
like oh I'm a tomboy and the tomboys are cool.
Right before I went to high
school I got my breasts pretty much.
So my high school's uniform was a polo
shirt and a kilt.
Going to and getting home from high school was just a lot of dealing with men.
Men's reactions to me and men wanting to talk to me and men trying to get my phone number and stuff.
Once I said to a friend of mine that I
hated wearing the uniform that it made me feel like,
disrespected and my friend was like, 'oh that's weird that makes me feel like studious'.
It felt so unfair to me that I had to
wear this ridiculous outfit.
After I went tohigh school I went to Ohio State.
My sophomore year I was sexually assaulted.
It absolutely contributed to just this
feeling that I wanted to take my body off.
After college I moved to Chicago.
It was partly about doing stand-up and it was partly about being away from my hometown
So I could date women.
Hey everybody, how is everyone doing tonight?
I’m doing awesome. I moved to Chicago from Cleveland in September. It's a big thrill for me. Clap it up for the move.
And when I moved to Chicago trans guys were kind of all around.
The first trans person I met, my first emotion when meeting him was like intense jealousy.
I was just so jealous that he got to get a mastectomy.
I found a therapist who like advertised
that she specifically wrote letters to
get hormones and I got my hormone letter
like by the third or fourth session.
When I got the letter I was just like so
relieved, so excited, thrilled.
It felt like everything was beginning.
I started testosterone October of 2012
I would inject every other Wednesday.
People tend to inject in either the thigh or like the butt you just want like a big muscle to get it in.
Very quickly after I started testosterone I was like this is obviously what I needed.
Testosterone made me like exclusively
attracted to biological men,
and I was like, if I'm going to be a gay trans dude, I have to be in a place where that's a thing.
I moved to San Francisco in March of
2013.
Things in California were going badly like pretty immediately.
The fact is that like lots of people will not hire you being a trans person.
and it is like true that when trans guys pass they get
to see an even darker side of men
I was hearing a lot of rape jokes, the worst thing that happened to me is intensely funny to some guys.
It's a weird and dark thing to learn about the world.
I had kind of like gotten to a point where I was very very like desperate and low.
For a couple months been like thinking about suicide every day and stuff.
And I was like like, I think that I just got this wrong,
like this is not a trans thing this is a trauma thing.
I felt like it was time to to throw in the towel.
I moved back to Cleveland when I decided
to detransition.
I use the word regret, I regret it. I
regret it. It was a waste of my money.
It was a waste of my time. it was more time that I didn't do what I needed,
which was like address my dissociative symptoms. So I regret it.
Maybe that sounds like me whining since
my irreversible effects are like pretty minimal.
But if I had to do it over again I would not.
I started writing to process the experience and make it make sense.
A pretty prominent trans writer wrote an
essay about how rare detransition is,
and I was incredibly pissed off.
I made a YouTube video pretty much coming out.
My response and other detransitioned women's responses it kind of
the community got a lot more public.
I know one of the presenters Carey Callahan, she is a very talented compassionate and insightful person.
These women are very important.
It's important to remember though that detransition isn't just a controversial subject people argue about online.
Detransition is something some people live through, people who often suffer and face
difficulties accessing resources because
our very existence gets politicized.
You know. I just know like how much work
Crash puts in to all the content she
puts out there and
there are repercussions in your real life to posting this stuff online
I get attacked on a pretty regular basis.
Two camps that give me a lot of trouble it's kind of like fundamentalist
Christians
Who think that my story proves that no one's gender dysphoria can be alleviated through medical
transition and people thus should not
have the ability to medically transition.
I also get people in the trans community
who believe that me being public with my
story is like unethical because it gives
the fundamentalist Christians the
material to say that.
On my Twitter feed someone linked to a book review and it
was a review of this book by Ryan
Anderson who it works for the Heritage Foundation.
That initial YouTube video I
made,
he pulled quotes from it to argue that
people should not medically transition.
So what I do in the book is I tell
stories of several people who found that
transitioning, while it went well
as a cosmetic matter it might have
brought immediate sense of relief it
didn't actually bring the peace and the
wholeness that they were looking for but
it only brought new problems.
Here we go, Crisis Magazine.
This is the first way that I found out
that I was in the Heritage Foundation
book.
I felt like violated on such a deep level.
The complexity of our viewpoint is pretty inconvenient to people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Yeah, why am i actively participating in
this?
Maybe there is a sense that like, if you tell the story and it gets misused
and you tell the story and misused again ...
then you just like keep telling it until
people hear the story.
I think the end goal is that other
gender dysphoric female people
know that we're out here and we're doing okay.
so, yeah.
