A Detransitioner’s Revelation

The following excerpt is from Detrans: True Stories Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, a new book authored by Daily Signal’s senior reporter Mary Margaret Olohan. The excerpt has been edited for brevity.

Helena’s lonely late-night shifts working at the cookie shop were giving her plenty of time to think about the choices she had made. “In some ways, it was a bit maddening, but dispersed within the general neuroticism were moments of clarity,” she writes.

“I remember deciding to take my chest binder off at work for the first time, because it was just me and one other worker who always sat in the back, and that f****** thing hurt. It felt so much more natural not to have anything constricting my chest underneath my work shirt.”

And she started skipping testosterone injections, mostly because of how anxious they made her. At this point, she says, she was only injecting herself with testosterone once or twice a month.

And as a result, the frequency of her “episodes” dramatically decreased.

She started wondering what this meant. Why was she feeling better, not worse, when she took less “T”? And what if transitioning wasn’t, in fact, helping her mental health?

That’s a forbidden question in transgender circles, she quickly found. “I remember browsing trans subreddits in hopes I would get some answers for what to do if transitioning wasn’t improving my mental health,” Helena said. “There were many posts asking this question, and by far the most common answer was to ‘just keep going’ and that one day, when you passed well enough, it would all be worth it.”

Helena began questioning her life choices up to this point. All these things she had done thinking they would “save” her had not done anything of the sort. “The only thing I didn’t outright question was my choice to be transgender,” she writes. “That would require a more up-front reality check.”

Helena started thinking about the comfortable clothing she used to wear before she started her transition process, back when she didn’t have to worry about whether or not her feminine clothes would make people doubt whether she was transgender. She thought about how much she hated the way she looked in men’s clothing (and “the way masculine styles looked on me in general”).

“I also wished I ‘wasn’t trans,’ and even recall making a reddit post to this effect, lamenting how even though ‘being trans’ was making me miserable, I knew it was who I really was and after I got surgeries it would be right for me,” she wrote. “This kind of thinking, I now realize after talking to so many detransitioners, is common in the weeks or months leading up to detransition,” she shared.

Helena’s “a-ha” moment happened in February of 2018. Her friend Jamie, a biological woman who also identified as transgender at the time and with whom Helena was then in a romantic relationship, made a video montage with pictures of Jamie and Helena showing the progression of their relationship since the day they had met — which was two days after Helena started testosterone.

“As I watched the video, I saw the way my face changed from so young, hopeful, and most of all, recognizable, to weary, deadpan, and foreign,” Helena said. “I began to sob uncontrollably,” she recounts.

“At first, Jamie thought I was crying because I loved the video so much, but I quickly informed her it was something else, but I wouldn’t say what. I cried, and cried, and cried. Every memory those photos evoked was flashing before my eyes, all the pain I knew was behind my eyes was emerging vividly. I saw innocence turn to anguish and I knew I had been on the wrong path for a long, long time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would be this way. I was just a kid,” she wrote.

“How could I have been so stupid?”

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Copyright © 2024 Mary Margaret Olohan. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing Inc.

Note: A portion of this article comes from Helena Kerschner’s Substack, “By Any Other Name,” prude posting, February 19, 2022, https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name.

Mary Margaret Olohan is a senior reporter for The Daily Signal and the author of “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.” She previously reported for both The Daily Caller and The Daily Wire.

The views expressed in this book excerpt are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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