A Story Of Detransitioning | Michael Knowles

From the media, from the schools, from the politicians, all we ever hear these days is how important it is to encourage people to transition their gender when they feel the inkling that they ought to transition their gender. Doesn't matter what age they are, doesn't matter what other issues are going on in their lives, doesn't matter if the children are children, are really little children. If a little boy says, I am really a little girl, or a little girl says, I am really a little boy, the new prevailing consensus is we must put them on chemicals, possibly put them through surgery, stop puberty, try to reverse puberty. There is no stopping that. As a result, some people who have had these kinds of procedures pushed upon them or who have engaged in them, apparently willingly, have wanted to reverse them. You're seeing this trend spike up now, even as the laws in some places make it illegal to prevent kids from going through these processes. One of the people who has transitioned and detransitioned is Helena Kirshner. Helena Kirshner is a 23-year-old detransitioned woman. She began to transition shortly after her 18th birthday and has now transitioned back. Quite an odyssey. Helena, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. We don't have a ton of time. I wish we could speak for four or five hours. I have about 1,000 questions for you. We'll start at the very beginning. What was it right after your 18th birthday, or I imagine in the years before that, that made you think that you were a boy? Or is it the case that you thought you were a boy or you thought that you were a trans boy? Not quite a boy, but something different, and certainly not a woman. Yeah, absolutely. So for me, it wasn't just one moment where I woke up and I said I'm a boy. Actually, as a child, I wasn't very atypical in like a gender sense. I liked girly clothes. I had no problem with it. I had no problem with girl toys. So it was never an issue for me. But what really kind of changed that for me was around the time I was 15 years old, I was going through a period in my life where I just didn't have a lot of friends. I was having body insecurities that were just really kind of tormenting me. And this led me to go online a lot. I kind of stopped having friends in the real world. I stopped really engaging in school. And I turned to internet communities that allowed me to discuss some of my interests and my passions with other young girls. And in these internet communities, for me, that was a website called Tumblr. The gender ideology is very prominent there. And as kind of a prerequisite to being able to participate in those social communities, you have to really agree with the gender ideology. And there's a lot of social incentives to do something like change your pronouns from a she, her to a they, them. That's a very small step that isn't an instant commitment to becoming a boy or transitioning. So that's how it started for me. I felt that kind of social pressure. And so I did start to change my pronouns. And it took two or three years before I actually reached that place where I was like, I'm a boy. And it was this feedback loop of getting that positive response from the other people online every time I would do something that was moving towards changing my gender that led me to, over the course of those years, kind of self indoctrinate into thinking that I was a boy. It's so frightening because what you're describing, you were 15 years old, you felt socially awkward, you had body issues. I think that describes every single 15-year-old, certainly every 15-year-old girl. And so you've got this totally common issue. And it wasn't even that you were indoctrinated into this ideology at the mall with your friends or in the classroom even, it was the Internet. It was this, there was this portal in your room or on your phone. And in order to be accepted in these communities and to participate in these communities, you had to participate in this ideology. Absolutely, the ideology is so prevalent. And something that I think a lot of older generations don't quite understand is that in the perspective of that 15-year-old girl who has had a falling out with her friends, she feels lonely, she feels insecure. Those Internet communities that they then find that feel so accepting to them, they feel like the be all and end all. It's not just something you're casually browsing to get updates about your favorite show or celebrity. It's like these Internet communities are, they're what makes you feel accepted and they're where you want to fit in. So you're willing to do almost anything to conform to that social group. And it's not necessarily a conscious thing where you're saying, I'm going to change my gender so that I'll fit in. But it's like you have all of these kind of subconscious motivations that are saying, and also things that are very overt. I mean, there are people in these communities who will say, if you don't like your body, that's a sign of gender dysphoria. If you don't fit in with other girls, that's a sign of gender dysphoria. If you don't like the way your voice sounds in a recording, that's a sign of gender dysphoria. Hold on, I have to pause you there. If you don't like the way- That's real. Not one single person on Earth likes the way their voice sounds in a recording. That's a universal experience. Exactly. So you have these messages that as a teenager, you don't really realize how universal it is. But you have these people in these posts and everything telling you that these are all signs of gender dysphoria. And so you have these subconscious motivations and you also have that overt kind of brainwashing that happens that encourages you to reinterpret everything in your life as a sign of gender dysphoria. So the reinterpretation I think is really interesting. Did you grow up with a particularly solid worldview? Were you raised Christian or were you raised with some particular political view or not? So I wasn't really raised Christian, although I did attend a Catholic school. My parents kind of leaned conservative and they were always suspicious of public schools. So I did start out going to a Catholic school, though we weren't really practicing in any way. And as for any kind of political view, I think I vaguely just tried to copy what my parents were talking about. But obviously, as a child, you're not the one really having those views. So then I really didn't have any kind of stable value system. So then when I was able to go into these online communities unsupervised without the adults in my life kind of checking in, like, what is it you're doing on your computer for all those hours? Then I was just really vulnerable to internalizing these messages and these political views that are in these online spaces. And one of the things that's so alluring about them is, you know, I think every teenager goes through a period where they want to kind of differentiate from their parents. They want to say, oh, mom and dad are old fashioned, they're outdated, blah, blah, blah. That's pretty natural. But this kind of political worldview that you find in these online communities, it turns that feeling that you have of, oh, my parents suck into a radical political thing. It makes it feel so validated, so important. So that's also another reason why it just really appealed to me to adopt beliefs about gender and race and sexuality that my family didn't have. Right. So you're in this world for two years, three years. At a certain point you say, I am a boy and I'm going to transition to be a boy. I'm not even sure that you would have been conscious of this really or aware of it. But what did that look like? I mean, no matter how gradual the process is, to actually come out one day and say, I am a boy, what was going on in your mind to make you think that you were a boy? It's a lot to unpack. I mean, it's something that's very heavily influenced by fantasy, by being constantly plugged into this kind of alternate reality that doesn't have a lot of world. So it's a lot of talking to other peers who are very creative. They're imagining these ideas. They're imagining what their future is going to look like and just not really having any pushback against that from any of your peers. And so that just very easily, I feel, spirals out of control. And there's also this element of when you are using social media and you're constantly scrolling it all day, you're just getting message after message, after picture, after idea kind of seeping into your mind. And when you don't have those good, stable relationships outside of the Internet, it's really easy for that to all go unquestioned. So you can begin to form beliefs that don't stand up to scrutiny and would easily kind of fall apart if you were to verbalize them to someone who is actually critical of those ideas, but engaging you in a compassionate way. You're able to just carry those ideas with you and make decisions based off of them, when in reality, the ideas themselves, they don't make sense. They're not founded in reality. So for me, it was a lot of stuff just based on fantasy, based on literally just pictures that I was seeing all the time of cute boys, and then these messages that were saying, you know, your life is going to be so much better if you transition, you are trans. The reason you don't fit in with other girls is because you're trans. So it's really this stew, this big complicated stew of unreality that young people fall into when they're just scrolling all day on social media and don't have pushback, really. That technological point had not totally occurred to me. That is such an insightful point. When kids go outside and they play superheroes, and you're going to be Superman, and you're going to be Batman, and you play around, but you never fly. You can't fly, because when you're playing around outside, you are tethered to the physical world. But when you're scrolling, when you're online, there is basically no connection to the physical world. Now we're talking about the metaverse. You know, Facebook is creating this true virtual reality that people are going to live in. There is no reason why a boy couldn't be a girl and a girl couldn't be a boy. The physical doesn't really matter. That's a really, really insightful point. So you go into Tumblr. You spend your whole day scrolling. You're being inundated with these messages and these images telling you your life's going to be better if you're a boy. You decide, okay, I'm going to transition. You're 18 years old, 18 in a couple of days. What is the reaction? From people in my life? Your family, any friends? You said you didn't have really friends outside of the internet, but the reaction online? Yeah, I had a small group of friends, but they were all also using this website, Tumblr. So it was still like our friendship was very mediated, weirdly, through the social media that we were using. But yeah, my parents definitely, I told my mom about my intention to transition, and she understandably did not take it well. But our relationship was already a bit strained at that point. So I just don't feel like we were communicating very effectively. And her response, which was really a lot of anger, that actually made me a little bit more resistant. It made me more steadfast in my conviction that being trans was the right thing. So yes, about two weeks after my 18th birthday, I did make an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic, because at the time, there wasn't as many clinics as there are now. So I had to actually travel to another state to go to a Planned Parenthood, because they were one of the only ones offering this informed consent model, which is really the easiest way to get hormones. So you went into Planned Parenthood. You said, I am identifying as a boy. I think that I'm a boy. Did they say, okay, well, you've got to go talk to some therapists for some period of months or years? Or did they say, here are the pills, lady. Here are the pills, sir. Go have a good day. Pretty much here, it's not even pills, it's injections. Here are the injections, sir. So yeah, my appointment took about an hour. The first maybe 20 minutes or so was a short back and forth between the social worker that I met at the Planned Parenthood. And actually, if you read my wrote a substack piece about basically my whole journey. I show these questions that the social worker asked me in there. It's not deep psychological work to say the least. So I had this short interview intake process with the social worker. And then she came back in and said, you're the perfect candidate for testosterone. Let's get you started. And so I moved on to the nurse practitioner. And the nurse practitioner went over a very short list of risks with me that were very understated. It said things like you may have mood issues, which is like, that's not a way to properly convey the possibilities of hormonal treatment. But anyway, so I looked over this short list. And then we started talking about the dosage. And typically when you start a regimen of anything, they start you on a lower dosage. And then if it's decided that you need to go on a higher dosage, then you will gradually move up. And so that's what she suggested to me. And I, being my very confused teenage self, I told her that I think I'm going to need a higher dose because I think I have more estrogen because I have wider hips. And the nurse practitioner just did not question this at all. And she said, okay, so how much would you like? And to this I said- It's like when you go to a drug dealer. Some of my more derelict friends, they'll go to their drug dealer. You see this with really, kind of like this woman, I guess, questionable, dubious psychiatrists where they'll say, okay, I'm going to give you X amount of Adderall. And then a junkie will say, no, I'd like three times that actually. And they say, okay, no big deal. So this woman just goes along with an 18-year-old girl confused about her sex, says, yeah, okay, how many milligrams do you want? And I say, what's the highest we can go? And she says, 100 milligrams is usually the highest we do. And if you look at kind of the guidelines, various universities and health systems, they have guidelines. And 100 milligrams is usually the maximum dosage. And so that's what I started on right out the gate as an 18-year-old girl was 100 milligrams of testosterone as an injection. So you start taking the testosterone. What does it do? I mean, what does that feel like? So at first, the biggest changes were kind of what you would expect. Although being myself and in my mind at the time, I didn't make the connection. I just didn't understand what was happening to me. It was very disorienting. But the first kind of symptoms was just more irritability. I just felt kind of antsy, like little things would bother me, things people would say would just kind of set me off. I noticed that my temper was a little bit more out of control. I would snap at people more easily. I didn't really want to be around people all that much because I just didn't feel like myself. Again, I felt so disoriented. So I started isolating a lot more. And then obviously the other obvious effect is like that higher sex drive, which for me as a young girl who I feel like before testosterone, I had a fairly average female sex drive experience. It just really went through the roof. And it was I felt really out of control. I felt really overwhelmed. It was not a pleasant experience. So that's kind of where it started out, which I think is somewhat to be expected. But my experience took maybe an unexpected turn, possibly because I was on such a high dose, although there's no answers. I still have never really been able to get answers for some of these things where that anger would get so intense. I would have like such overwhelming rage attacks that I actually would end up hurting myself instead of hurting others because I was just so out of control. I couldn't control myself. I felt like a monster. And so that was definitely the the biggest consequence for me. And I kind of I dealt with that maybe once or twice a week or a little bit less at some times for a few months. And it eventually got so bad where I had to be hospitalized. Well, and when you say you were hurting yourself, you're not saying you went into a fit of rage and fell off the bed. You're saying you were actively taking a conscious sort of decision to harm. Yeah, it was. It's a very difficult experience to describe. But I guess before I was on testosterone, when I would have a really strong emotion, it might move me to tears and I would just cry and sob. But while I was on testosterone, I lost the ability to cry very easily. So I would get that intense emotion, but there would be no outlet. And then for one reason or another, that would trigger anger. I would get so angry and frustrated. And that anger was just so overwhelming. And I got the urge to really externalize it. I got the urge to hit things or or throw things. I just didn't want to do that. I felt so out of control that I would just kind of take it out on myself to calm myself down and to be an outlet for that rage because I didn't know how else to handle it. I was completely overwhelmed. And so during this period, I no need to answer if you feel I'm prying too much. But as you were transitioning your sex, did you did you feel you had a transition of your sexual desire? I mean, were you you say you had this very high sex drive. Were you were you attracted to boys or girls? I've always like, you know, primarily been attracted to boys. But honestly, like one of the things that was so overwhelming about like this like increased sex drive was the fact that just like visual things were more easily arousing. So I might see like a photo of a provocatively dressed woman and my brain would almost like register that as like, oh, that's a sexual thing. You're going to interpret that as sexual. But I wasn't really seeking out relationships with women or anything. But yeah, it was that was a really interesting experience ever since quitting testosterone. I've lost all that. I just am attracted to men now. But yeah. So so you're in this. This sounds really like hell. You're already a confused teenager. You now are hyper sexualized, hyper filled with rage. And this goes on for this goes on for how long before you decide, hey, maybe I'm not actually a boy. So that went on for a few months. And I talk about in my piece about how I actually need to be hospitalized twice due to this. And sometime after and just as a side note, not once in either of my hospitalizations or any of my mental health treatment that I was receiving because of these extreme symptoms was the testosterone ever mentioned. That was never brought up like I would write down, you know, I'm a biological female F and I'm on one hundred milligrams a week of testosterone. But none of these psychiatrists and none of these nurses and none of these doctors ever mentioned that testosterone as possibly a reason for my experience. I was just diagnosed with a bunch of different things and prescribed a bunch of different psych meds and just kind of sent on my way. So it took me kind of skipping testosterone doses because I was developing an anxiety of the needle. So I started skipping my doses. And as I started taking the testosterone less, my crazy, insane symptoms started going away. And so that was one of the things that kind of clued me into like, huh, OK, well, maybe I'm not just like a mentally ill, crazy person. Maybe it's the testosterone. So I started kind of scaling back on that. And then around this time, I was doing a lot of reflecting on, you know, this is not matching up to that fantasy I had as a teenager. As a teenager, I was kind of promised, you know, like this is going to save your life. This is going to make you feel authentic. This is going to make you your true self. This is going to make you so happy. You see all this stuff like, you know, it's trans joy, like all this kind of like really frilly, happy, positive language. That's not what happened to me. So I really started to kind of comparing my reality versus my expectations before I transitioned. And eventually that led me to just fully realize that it was all a total mistake. And I realized very quickly that I was just really confused. And this whole trans thing was not real for me. I just can't get over the medical malpractice of you get a patient like you comes into the doctor. The doctor says, okay, well, this young girl is taking an insane amount of testosterone, injecting it into her every single day. Yeah, maybe cut back on the Coca-Cola's and you'll feel better. Maybe we should apply her with more drugs. That'll fix it. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with this totally unnatural experimental medical procedure that we've only been doing for like five minutes. That is so insanely irresponsible that if you weren't saying it to my face right now, I wouldn't believe it. I know. And it's almost hard for me to believe, but it's like, think about it. It's not just one doctor who did that either. It's multiple doctors, multiple nurses, multiple therapists that I met throughout two hospitalizations and just multiple mental health programs. And none of them ever brought up the testosterone or questioned my trans status whatsoever. That's truly insane. Probably they fear they'd lose their license if they ever made any mention of this. It's so politically incorrect. So you on your own with no help from these useless doctors, you on your own realize, huh, when I inject the testosterone less and less, the symptoms abate. How old are you at this point? So at that point, I was about 19, 19 and a half. Okay. So do you then come to the conclusion, okay, I've got to stop this. The fantasy isn't matching up. I've got to go back to being a girl. So that this would have been little before you turned 20. Yeah, about six months before I turned 20, I just had this breakthrough moment of holy cow, this is insane. It's really weird. When I think back to it, it's like one moment I was kind of under the spell in this delusion. And then the next moment it was like the dormant rational me inside of me woke up and was like, holy cow, this is totally insane. Why am I trying to be a boy? Yeah, right, right. It seems so simple, but if you're in the throes of it, maybe it's not. So at that point, you just throw out the testosterone or do you go to a doctor and sort of change your classification or what happens? Yeah, I mostly just stopped taking the testosterone. I threw it all out. I was really disgusted by it. I just wanted it out of my sight. I wanted it out of my living space. And I went to this clinic that I had been going to and I did tell them that I had stopped the testosterone, but they didn't ask why. And I felt too ashamed and embarrassed to tell them because at that point, I really thought that I was the only person on earth who had ever regretted transitioning. That was never a concept in my mind. All I thought was trans is awesome. Trans is amazing. Life is going to be awesome. And so I just I felt so embarrassed. So I didn't say anything to those clinicians because I knew that there I mean, this was a clinic in Chicago with like Black Lives Matter and trans rights are human rights splattered all over their clinic where all the clinicians were transgender, too. So I was I was very scared to say anything about my regrets to them because I knew how people had treated the idea of regret in the trans community, which is not in a nice way. Is it denial that people really do have regret or is it just outright hostility? It can be both. So it's denial that regret ever happens. You know, you see these like kind of statistics thrown around that are really they're not relevant to the situation at hand where it's only zero zero zero like point zero zero zero one percent of people regret transitioning. No. So you see that kind of denial and then you also get that hostility where it's like, oh, you're just stupid. You're just you know, everyone else is trans, but you're just an idiot where it's like they really turn on you, where it's like when you are that 15 year old, 16 year old saying that, oh, does this mean I'm trans? Like, yes, that means you're trans. You're so trans. You need to like you need to question yourself more. You need to change your pronouns. You need to get a binder. You need to do this. I'll buy you a binder, all these people. And then as soon as you regret it, they're like, oh, you're an idiot. Could you forgive my what is a binder? Oh, it's a chest compression thing. So when I was on Tumblr, some and actually an older adult person on Tumblr bought me a chest compressor when I was about 15 or 16. Man. So, OK, so you you go, you say, OK, I'm not doing this anymore. I put I put the testosterone away. You seem you seem great. You seem sort of back to normal. Have you had long lasting effects from these years? I guess luckily it was only a couple of years or so on this testosterone. It doesn't sound like you did any further procedures that might have been harder to are you dealing with long long term effects? I have been really fortunate in that I haven't had any long term health effects, which is not something that many people can say. Many people, even after maybe only two years on testosterone, like they're still dealing with very permanent effects and sometimes it can be dangerous health effects, too. But I have been really fortunate for me. The hardest part has been kind of the psychological aspect of feeling like like I was really indoctrinated and I was really led down a bad path by just people that that I didn't know and that didn't know me and were just encouraging me to make these decisions and telling me that life would be so amazing. And that's been really hard to kind of come back from. And also just other than the the transitioning in and of itself, I made a lot of decisions at that young age chasing this fantasy that were really not good for my life. And so kind of it's been just like digging myself out of this hole that I dug for myself at a really young age. But now, thankfully, you know, some years after, I'm really like doing a lot better. And I'm just kind of focusing on telling my story so that people can understand better what's going on, because a lot of people just really aren't aware about so many of these things that we're talking about today. What do you mean you sort of made decisions for your life that you're digging out of now beyond that? Obviously, the physical you're shooting yourself up with testosterone. What what other if you don't mind sharing, what what other sort of Yeah, there's kind of this common dynamic in the trans community where it's like, if your parents don't completely agree with your being trans and you're transitioning, that they're evil and they're horrible and you need to cut them out of your life. And so I actually did do that for a period of time where I just completely stopped talking to my family. And on the one hand, I feel like I really hurt my brother in that way. I have a little brother. And I think like he really needed his sister during some of those periods. And I just wasn't there because I was chasing this pipe dream. And then on the other hand, while I was kind of disengaged with my family, my grandma developed Alzheimer's. And by the time I was able to reconnect with them, she was basically gone. So that's been one of the most difficult things to cope with. Just just in my in this like haze of chasing this false identity and this ideological thing, I gave up one of these really important relationships in my life. So, yeah, that's been really difficult. So that's that's that is that is hard. And it's it is a reminder, everybody, not just people who go down this kind of crazy rabbit hole, which you're describing as being quite cultish, right? Cut off all your family, you know, pursue this very sort of radical view of human nature and fantasy. But but everyone, to some degree, you know, does deals with these things where if I had not been so focused on this one thing, I could have I should have done this differently. I could you know, this this really set me back a number of years. So now that this is being debated, not just for 18 year olds, by the way, but for eight year olds, for five year olds, there's a big fight over a law in Florida that says you can't talk about transgenderism in a kindergarten classroom. And the White House is saying this is horrible and abusive. And of course we need to talk about transgenderism to toddlers. What is your advice for parents who who might be now or in the very near future? So for parents who aren't dealing with it quite yet, I think one really important thing is to, you know, recognize that social media is very dangerous. And these devices that kids are using are very dangerous because they don't have, you know, adult level, rational, cognitive faculties. And even many adults are not really able to moderate and think critically when interacting with some of these platforms. So one thing I kind of ask parents to think about is when your child wants to go for a sleepover, you ask them, who is this friend? How did you meet? Who is their mom? Where do they live? What is her phone number? You maybe even want to meet the parents and go to coffee with them and get to know them. But when your child's been sitting on their phone for six hours straight, you have no idea where they are and who they're talking to. And kind of going with that, I think a lot of parents, you know, reflexively think that the solution is to just ban all social media. And while I think that's really well intended, these kids are more intuitively able to get around that. They're better at using social media than you are. They will get around it. So just like to protect your kids from someone in the real world, you wouldn't ban them from ever talking to anybody, period. You would talk to them about who their friends are and get to know what they're doing and what they're thinking about and who they're friends with. You should approach social media in a similar way. Get to know, like, especially if they're still young, just get to know what they're doing, what they're interested in. Learn about how they're spending their time. Because when they are on these devices, like, that's still time spent. That's still information learned. That's still conversations had with people who you don't know who they are. So I really encourage parents to focus on that communication and really understanding what their kids are doing on their devices. As for parents who may be going through a child who already is identifying as trans, and, you know, you know in your gut that it's just not the right thing, I would recommend checking out an organization that I'm a part of. It's called Genspect. That's G-E-N-S-P-E-C-T. It's basically an organization that advocates for parents and has all sorts of groups where parents can talk and be advised on how best to navigate your relationship with this kind of crisis that is fomenting. So, yeah, I highly recommend Genspect and getting involved in parent communities and learning about the better ways to manage this because it's always better to be informed. That analogy you just made of the sleepover, I haven't heard that before. That's such an apt analogy because obviously you wouldn't send your kid to a sleepover where you have no idea who the kid's sleeping with. You have no idea where the kid is going. And yet when you send your kid up to his room and he's got his smartphone or a laptop or a tablet or something at 10 o'clock at night and he's scrolling on Tumblr or whatever social media device talking to God knows who, you are sending your kid to a sleepover. There is really no difference. It's just one is taking place in virtual reality, which can indoctrinate them into ideologies that are virtual reality. Like imagine if your 12 year old child asked if they could go to a meet up with people from China. It's like, would you just let them board that plane and go without asking anything about it? Or would you really try to understand what was going on? Yeah. Wow. An amazing story. Helena, thank you so much for coming on. Where else can people find you? I am on Twitter and Substack. Both are under the same name. It's pronounced LaCroix, like the drink. But the last three letters instead of an X are a C S Z. That's a little bit difficult. Maybe you can put it in the show notes or something. But yeah, you can find me on Twitter and on Substack. Wonderful. I really encourage people to head over there. I loved that that essay you put up on Substack. I'll have to take a look at other writing as well. Really wonderful stuff. Helena Kirshner, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much.