Hysterectomy, Double Mastectomy, and Deep Trans Regret at 24 | Katie Anderson

Hello everybody, I'm Chloe Cole and today I'm here with Katie who is a 27 year old detransitioner who transitioned between the ages of 18 and 26. I'm glad to have you here today. Thank you, thanks for having me. So if you don't mind, would you mind, could you give like a basic outline of the timeline of your transition? Yeah, so when I was 18 I started identifying as male. I'm a biological female. I started identifying as male when I was 18 and I found that identity on YouTube. So I would watch a lot of YouTube videos and I found that there were a lot of girls around my age who started feeling like they were boys and started identifying as boys. So what I did was I asked everybody in my life to call me by a male name and use male pronouns to refer to me, which they all did and that's what's known as a social transition. So I went through a social transition from female to male when I was 18 and by the time I turned 19, so it was a pretty quick turnaround, I started taking testosterone and then about a year after that I had a double mastectomy. I had top surgery and I had my breasts removed and then a couple more years after that I had a hysterectomy. I had my uterus, ovaries, cervix and fallopian tubes all removed and that surgery actually didn't go well at all. Something went seriously wrong during that surgery and they left one of my arteries open is what I understand about it and after the surgery I wasn't recovering well so they kept me at the hospital and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me but later that same night they did an ultrasound and found that I'd been bleeding out for a few hours and so they rushed me back into emergency surgery that that night, fixed whatever was going wrong and then I had three blood transfusions before I was able to leave the hospital. Wow, I'm very sorry you went through that. That sounds like a lot but before we get to the full picture of your medical transition, I'm curious what was your childhood like? What was your relationship with your parents and how was your relationship with your peers and how did you do at school? My childhood was really good. I have no history of trauma or anything and both of my parents were married together in the picture and I had a little sister. We had a really good home life, really good school life. Sometimes I was very socially awkward but for the most part from elementary school, I did have friends. Middle school was a little bit harder but overall I was a good student. I did have friends growing up and then into high school, I was kind of becoming myself. I was more comfortable making friends. I was more comfortable being around people. I played sports and I, you know, identified with my biological sex the whole time though I was a tomboy. I was very sporty, very into sports and I played sports in middle school and in high school and I really enjoyed it. At no point did I think that I was a boy while I was still in school but I did start identifying myself as a lesbian during my junior year of high school and I think that's where a lot of confusion started because I don't think that I was necessarily attracted to women. I just felt like I fit into the category of lesbian better than anything else. Right. Did you find as a tomboy that it was difficult to fit in with other women? Yes, especially in middle school because I went to a Catholic school and so we wore uniforms and I fully refused to wear the dress or the skirt and I would just wear the pants for the uniform and it kind of made me look more like one of the boys and especially I cut my hair kind of short back then so it made me look more like one of the boys but I wanted to fit in with the girls to a certain extent because, you know, we were all going through puberty and it was so awkward so you just kind of wanted to be with your own crowd but in middle school I didn't really feel like I had my own crowd so that was confusing and in high school because I played sports and I was friends with other female athletes, being a tomboy wasn't necessarily hard though I did wear boys clothing and men's clothing more than the other girls did. So you felt like that kind of separated you from the other women? Yeah and just not being so interested in dating boys, not being interested in having a sexual relationship with any boys, that really made me feel disconnected from the other girls my age because everybody was starting birth control, talking about, you know, sex with their boyfriends and that wasn't something that I was, that was in my head at all at that time. Yeah, growing up did you ever hear, like, talk from other women and other girls about how scary it was to grow into a woman, to be a woman as an adult? Not necessarily about how scary it was but it seems like there were a lot of expectations around it, like you would have to act a certain way, you'd have to act like a proper lady and that did feel overwhelming but it wasn't necessarily scary for me to think about those things. So when did you start to feel like you actually weren't a woman, when you started feeling, experiencing gender dysphoria? There came a point when I was 18 years old, it was right after I had turned 18, that I just felt like I only wanted to wear boys clothes and before I kind of had a mix of both men's and women's clothing and I was thinking, no, I only want to wear men's clothing and I just had this overwhelming feeling that I had to cut my hair, that I just couldn't stand my hair anymore and I wanted it short again. So I went off and I cut my hair and I was wearing the boys clothing and once in a while a stranger would mistake me as male, usually a younger boy than what I, like, I was 18 but I probably looked like I was about 12. So, you know, people would call me buddy and they would mistake me for that and that made me feel good. So I was looking online, you know, why do I feel like this and that's when I came across all the YouTube videos of girls who are transitioning to male and they said that they had the same feelings, they had some overwhelming dysphoria. That euphoria that comes with being called like sir, buddy. Yeah and they said that they had the negative feelings of dysphoria and then when they would call it when they were affirmed as male, then they felt euphoria, which is the opposite. You feel great, you feel like you're on top of the world and that was the feeling that I was kind of chasing with my outward appearance and so when all these girls on YouTube were talking about starting on testosterone and having a deep voice and having more masculine features, it really made me want that because I was just, I was chasing that euphoric feeling. Was that something that you felt from a young age or was it? No, it's not something that I felt from a young age, but when I was watching the videos and going through the transition, every time that I would reflect back on my childhood, I would kind of see the memories differently. So where I was a tomboy growing up and I always was from the time I was probably three years old, I was always a tomboy. I would look back at that not as, oh, I just was a little girl, but I liked Spider-Man or Batman. I would look back at that and think, yep, see, there it is. There's the dysphoria. See how I was, how uncomfortable I was wearing dresses and that's not how I felt at the time. I was uncomfortable wearing dresses, but I didn't feel like I was supposed to be a boy back then, but I just kept reading those emotions into my childhood. Yeah, so you had that sort of retrospective bias. Exactly, yep. So you started pursuing social transition. How did that present itself for you and how did your family members, your peers react to that? So the social transition was pretty easy because I'd already been wearing men's clothes for a little while and I had the short hair. The only thing that I really did differently was I bought a binder from online, which is, you know, to bind my chest, and I asked everyone around me to call me Kaden rather than Katie and to use male pronouns to refer to me, and everybody did. Everyone was on board with it. I mean, that was back in 2014, so there wasn't much out there about the negative effects of transitioning. So everybody in my life affirmed me. Most of them were just supportive of it. They didn't really know any better. Some people just kind of went along with it so that it wouldn't cause any issues within the family or friend groups, but that constant affirmation solidified my belief that I was actually supposed to be a boy. Before that, I was like, okay, yeah, I'm a girl, but I feel like a boy, and so I should transition and live a certain way, but the constant affirmation made me really believe that, no, I'm a boy and there's only one way to fix this. So did you get any pushback or any negative interactions? No, there was no pushback from anybody. Nobody really knew to push back, so I don't blame anyone for not knowing at the time that this could be harmful, and I was 18 when I started socially transitioning, so I told them this is what I want to do, and I think a lot of them were like, well, okay, you're an adult. You can make the decision, and that was kind of it for their reaction. So when did you start deciding that you wanted to go through with a medical transition, and where did you go for that? That was right after I started the social transition when I felt that euphoria from being affirmed by everybody in my life. Immediately after that, I wanted to medically transition to continue feeling that because I was feeling like I was getting to the point where, yeah, sure, everybody's calling me a male name and using male pronouns to refer to me, but I still look like a girl, and sometimes people will still get it wrong, so I felt that I should medically transition and start on testosterone. So you were almost unintentionally chasing a high. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was chasing the high of euphoria. So I went to the gender clinic that's in Massachusetts. That's where I'm from, and I went to them to get started on testosterone, which was very easy. So usually, you're supposed to be a patient with somebody for six months, but they made it really easy because instead of making me go out and get my own therapist, they had one in their office who was able to sign off on everything. They signed off on the testosterone for me and the top surgery for me, and there was a point in my medical transition right at the beginning when I was getting mood swings from being on testosterone that I felt that this isn't what I want to do, that I wanted there to be to kind of fix the dysphoria. But on the papers, on the letters from the therapist in the gender clinic's office, she wrote that the only known treatment for gender dysphoria is medical transition. So because of that, I really believed that this was the only option, and even though I was feeling like I was destroying my body, I thought that there would be another side to it, once I was on that other side of medical transition, then I would feel much better, and it would just be done. So they told you that there's no other known treatment for this? You weren't told at all that 30 years ago, we would be triggering gender dysphoria with psychotherapy? That's right, and it was actually because I was 18, I think it was my last appointment with my pediatrician, my last physical, before I moved on to another doctor, that when I told her initially what was going on, that was the first option, was to send me to the gender clinic. The very first option? Yeah. Yeah, and because I didn't push back on that, because I didn't know that there was any other option, and from what I'd seen on YouTube, I just really believed that that was the answer, that I just went with it, and I was like, yep, that sounds right, and there was no other options given. Not from any other doctor? No. So did you ever have like an actual diagnosis for gender dysphoria? Yeah, the doctor, the therapist at the gender clinic told me that I was a textbook case of gender dysphoria, because I'd been a tomboy growing up, and because I was sort of reading dysphoria into all my tomboy memories, and I was telling her this, and I said, yep, and look how uncomfortable I was wearing dresses, and I really liked Spider-Man and superheroes and all this kind of stuff, that she was like, yep, that's textbook gender dysphoria, and she just kind of took my word for everything. Which is really just based on stereotypes? Yes, yeah, it was completely based on stereotypes. How was the screening for gender dysphoria? Do you remember it all? That was it. It was just that one 45-minute appointment, just to determine that I wasn't a stereotypical little girl. They never like went into any possible comorbidities, like any traumas or any underlying issues? No. And there was a question when I was a little bit younger, whether or not I had like high-functioning autism, whether or not I was on the spectrum somewhere, and we never explored that, but that was a question, you know, in my life at one point, and that was never discussed. So was it after that diagnosis that you started seeking the testosterone? Yeah, after the gender dysphoria. How long afterward was that? That I got testosterone? Yeah. I'm not 100% sure, because it was close to finals. I was in college, and I think what I did was I pushed off the testosterone appointment a couple weeks, but I don't remember exactly how long that I pushed it off. But that was just to get through finals, and then I would make my way back to Boston to be able to start on the testosterone officially. So not very long? No, not very long. And I probably could have done it that same day, because I had everything that I needed. I just had to go to another location to do it. How did you take it? Was it like, did you take the pill, or did you have to do injections? How was it like on testosterone, like both emotionally and physically? When did you start to see the effects come in? I saw the effects right away within maybe the first or second month of being on testosterone, and it started off with mood swings. I've never been an angry person. I've never been quick to get angry, but when I started on the testosterone, I would just get so angry at everything. It was like, if something set me off, the first emotion that I would feel would be anger, and it was just overwhelming. I felt like I wanted to punch the wall or something, which I didn't do. I didn't want to dent the wall. But the first emotion that I would experience, no matter what happens, was anger. And that was really hard for me, because that had never happened before. And it affected my family, because a couple of times, I would end up yelling at my mom or my sister, and that's not something that I'd ever done before. I felt really guilty, but I also felt like I wasn't in control of my emotions, and so I didn't know how to handle it. The physical effects of testosterone also started right away. I noticed it with my voice. My voice started deepening within maybe six weeks of being on testosterone, and that gave me that gender euphoria. That gave me that high of feeling really good about my voice, that now when I go out and I introduce myself to people, I won't sound like a girl. I'll just sound like a boy, and that's exactly how I wanted to sound. Did they give you consent forms for the testosterone? Did they list off all the potential side effects? Yes, they did. So I had the informed consent with the nurse, and when she was going through everything that the testosterone could do, one of her comments was, if you've been watching this on YouTube, then you probably already know. She still went through the list the way that she was supposed to, but I just kind of breezed through it, because I said, yep, I know that. I'm expecting it. I've seen it on YouTube. I'm all set with it, so I just signed off really quickly, and there was no more conversation to it than just that, and there were some things that we just breezed past that weren't really explained, like the higher cholesterol, things like that, the actual medical risks of being on testosterone as a woman. We just kind of breezed right past it, because I had already seen it on YouTube. So they just expected you to know what you wanted, what all this meant? Yeah, and it was very rushed. It was like, yep, now we just have to do the informed consent. Okay, there you go. Next step. Right. I mean, that seems like a pretty common theme with a lot of these other detransitioners that I've spoken to. You often hear from these trans activists that it's actually quite difficult for somebody, especially at the age that you and I were at, to get on these treatments, but from both the transgender people and detransitioners that I've spoken to, this doesn't seem to be the case. No, it's very easy, and you know this too. It's very easy to begin transition, because the gender clinics are set up for that reason. It's not like the gender clinics are set up so that you can go there and get a diagnosis, and they'll turn you away if you're not actually gender dysphoric. Right. You go there expecting medical transition. So when was it that you decided that you wanted to go through with the surgery and get a double mastectomy? Top surgery had always been in the cards for me when I first started testosterone. That's something that I was looking to, and I fully decided on it less than a year after I started testosterone, but by the time I had the surgery, it was almost exactly a year from starting testosterone to top surgery, and that was really easy, because the gender clinic just, they have a whole list of doctors that are covered by certain insurances that you just go to them, and they'll write your referral letter, you set up a consultation, and then you're good to go for surgery, and that's exactly what they did for me. So was it fully covered by insurance, or did you have to pay for part of it? I had to pay for part of it, but it wasn't much. It came out to maybe $500. Everything else was covered. So I would imagine the consultation process was pretty similar, like they would lay out all the side effects and maybe... Did you have to get like a letter of referral from like a gender specialist or anything like that? Yeah, but the clinic that I went to just signed off on that, so I didn't have to do anything special. I didn't have a therapist at the time, like my own personal therapist to be able to work through anything. I didn't have that. So I was just going to the gender clinic, and they were giving me whatever documents I needed to move forward with the transition. So what did they tell you before you went under? Did they give you like a rundown of like how this... They told me exactly what the surgery was, what the procedure was, what results I could expect, and everything was exactly how they described it. Nothing went wrong with that particular surgery with the double mastectomy. So it was a fairly easy procedure, and the recovery wasn't even that hard. Did you start to experience any doubts by this point in time? No, because that procedure gave me that euphoria again, and I felt like I was just high on that feeling of euphoria, and my dysphoria was gone, and now I could wear t-shirts without a binder. Right, it's a nice feeling. Yeah, and have that flat chest, and that flat appearance, and so I really liked that, and I had no regrets at that point. So you felt there was like a bit of a honeymoon period by the time that that went away? Was that when you started, was that when you went on to the next procedure? Yeah, so the hysterectomy I wasn't sure about, but what was happening was the testosterone was causing some issues with my whole reproductive system, and I was getting a lot of pain, a lot of cramping, and I asked my doctor at the gender clinic what that could be, and he told me that sometimes, you know, what happens when you're taking testosterone is that your reproductive, all of your reproductive organs, they'll atrophy and kind of dry up, and so it causes a lot of pain inside, so they recommend a hysterectomy. Wait, did they not tell you about the atrophy before you were put on testosterone? No, I didn't know about that before, only after. That was one of the first things that I was informed of, and they just completely glossed over that. See, I mean, if they tried to tell me, I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure that that wasn't part of it. Right, I mean, part of what makes this so difficult is that they, even if they do give you all the list of some of the more important side effects that you could experience from these treatments, it's such a long list with all these complicated things that could happen, and if you're like a perfectly healthy person before, how are you supposed to know which of these you're going to experience? Right, so it was causing me a lot of pain, and so when he recommended the hysterectomy, and I didn't even think twice about it, I just thought, okay, doctor's recommending that I get a hysterectomy, so I just should, and they gave me the information for a who would do it, and a hysterectomy is a fairly common procedure, so I'm not surprised that they had a whole list of doctors who would do it, but it was strange that doctors would do it for that reason. So flippantly. Yeah, and it was, you know, a gender-affirming procedure, and even though it seemed like it was medically necessary because of the pain that I was experiencing, it wasn't, because stopping the hormone treatment would have stopped the pain. So anyway, I scheduled the hysterectomy, and that was in 2020, so everything else, you know, all the other surgeries are on hold, but they're still doing the gender procedures, and I had the surgery in 2020, and that's the surgery that went very wrong, and they opened one of my arteries, didn't close it back up, and I bled out and needed emergency surgery and three blood transfusions afterward, and the whole time that that's happening, and my parents didn't know what was wrong with me, but I had given the hospital permission to talk to my mom to tell her how I'm doing. She didn't know if I was going to survive it. She was waiting for a phone call to tell her that her kids did. So they, this was presented as the first option to treat the atrophy and the pain from the atrophy rather than simply stopping the hormones. Yes. They never suggested stopping hormones. No. And they operated on you during, was this during 2020, during the quarantine? Yeah. I remember during that time, they were barring people from getting any surgeries that were deemed elective, even if they were of great benefit to a person's quality of life, but I actually had my surgery at roughly the same time, and for some reason, these surgeries weren't considered as elective, even though they were on perfectly healthy functioning organs. Yeah. It was seen as completely medically necessary and covered by insurance. I really can't think of any other course of treatment where they're using physical interventions to treat a psychiatric condition. Right. I don't think that there are any. Was that the final step in your transition? Were you at any point considering to get like a phalloplasty or any other form of bottom surgery? No, I actually wasn't considering bottom surgery at that time. I never was because I detransitioned before that point, but I wasn't considering it. The thing that felt really weird coming out of the hysterectomy was that my uterus never caused me dysphoria, except for if I had a period, which had stopped from the testosterone. Right. Which is a pretty normal feeling when you're a woman. Right. And my uterus never caused me dysphoria. So coming out of that surgery, I didn't have the euphoric feeling. I just felt like I'm recovering from surgery and that was it. And I didn't know where to go to where to go to like chase the next high. And I didn't want bottom surgery because of the complications that come with it. But the surgeons that did the hysterectomy actually told me about surgeons that will do bottom surgeries if I decided on like which route I wanted to take for that. So they jumped on that right away, even though you never suggested it. They even gave me the contact information for different doctors who did different procedures in the same hospital. And I was not ready for it. I wasn't even considering it. So you just went through this bloody battle, this pretty gnarly recovery. And they suggest this to you right after you wake up from surgery, pretty much. Yeah, it was at the follow up appointment after the surgery. So whatever it was, a week or two later. Was this when the regret started to come in? Yeah, it hit. So that was August of 2020, August into September of 2020. And I started to rethink everything when I saw one, what my family had gone through, waiting to hear if I recovered well from the surgery or not. And to everything that I'd been through, it kind of scared me out of ever having surgery again. And when I realized that if I was afraid to have surgery because I didn't want to scare my family again and I didn't want to possibly die from it, that I would never have that high feeling of euphoria again. And that's what made me start thinking, you know, maybe I'm on the wrong track. And instead of caving to dysphoria, so what I was doing my whole transition was if I would feel dysphoria about something, I felt dysphoria about my voice. I started on testosterone and I just kept giving into it and giving into it. When I started to feel the dysphoria, I thought, OK, well, what if I stand up to it and I say, you know, I can feel this way and I can feel really uncomfortable about a certain part of my body, but I'm not going to go out and change that to make myself feel better. What if I just train myself to be OK with it? I don't have to feel euphoria over my body, but I have to just be content with the way that things are. And so when I started challenging that, things felt a little bit better here and there. It was still that was that was one of the hardest things that I'd ever done, you know, trying to challenge the dysphoria. But I continued doing it and I started to detransition the summer of 2021. But I just started to feel so overwhelmed with it that I stopped and I said, you know what? I'm not going to go any further with transition, but I'm not ready to fully detransition and live as a woman. I didn't make the decision to completely detransition until December of 2022. And I mean, December of 2021. And then all of 2022, I spent really fighting back against the dysphoria, against all the feelings that were that were coming at me, all these negative emotions about my body and just challenging myself. And I would wear women's clothing, even though I hated women's clothing. I felt so uncomfortable in them. I thought if I can just get myself to wear this and go out in public, no matter how silly I feel, that dysphoria is going to stop controlling me. That's amazing. And that's how I stood up to it. And I joined a church and the pastor at my church recommended that I use my birth name, which is Katie. He didn't push me into it. He was really careful not to, but he just recommended that I use my birth name. And so I told him I'd go forward and use my birth name. And he started calling me Katie. He was the first one to start calling me Katie. And I hated every second of it. It's a hard adjustment. Yeah, I did not want him to call me Katie, but I didn't tell him that. So I just let him do it. And eventually, it felt a lot more natural. Were you always Christian? Or was that a development that happened during or after your transition? I was raised in the Catholic church. So I was baptized Catholic, made my first communion. And then we kind of fell away from the church when I was a teenager. So during my transition, there were some points. It wasn't like an overarching theme or anything, but there were some points in my transition that I felt like maybe I was separating myself from God by doing this. But I was also fully convinced that this was the only thing that I could do. And if that's the case, then how could it possibly be bad? So when I did start to detransition, and it was so overwhelming for me that I gave up on it, I knew that I couldn't just rely on myself to be able to move forward with an entire detransition. So I ended up joining a church. And that's when I was talking to the pastor about everything. And he's really helped me. So it's a Lutheran church. And so it's not a Catholic church anymore. But he's really helped me to solidify myself in the faith and in my identity and really embrace the roles that I have in the world and in my communities as a woman and be able to define myself however I want to define myself. But, you know, within the boundaries of being a woman. And really, at the same time, without being focused on that. Is that right? What do you mean? Like being focused on being a woman, but while at the same time accepting that that's how you were, that's what you're dealing with. Yeah. So are you still dealing with complications to this day? Well, not so much from surgeries. I think I'm fully healed from the surgeries. Sometimes I still get a little bit of abdominal pain. But besides that, there's no surgical complications that are still lasting. But the effects from testosterone, like my deep voice, and I think that my face is just permanently masculinized in certain ways. That will never heal. I'll never be able to have children or breastfeed or anything like that. And sometimes underneath my chin, I'll still have to shave my beard. So there are a lot of effects that I'm still dealing with from the testosterone and from the surgeries. But as far as complications from the procedures that I asked for, there's nothing serious. Do you feel like detransitioning has improved your health at all? Yeah, I think that it's helped me mentally just be able to stand up to my emotions. And if I'm saying, you know, I can feel negative in this moment, but that's not going to define me. I'm not just going to cave under the pressure. It's helped me to really build myself up and to have the confidence to stand up to my own thoughts. I just say, no, that's not true. This is what I'm going to do. And by doing that, I think it's made me more courageous, more confident. And just overall, it's improved my life a lot. And it doesn't seem like that's something that should, that you go through so much and you're suffering, you're in pain, but you can still turn around and say, yeah, but look, it really helped me to grow and develop as a person. But it did. And I mean, you're not, by transitioning, you're effectively living a lie. You have to maintain yourself by taking these shots every week and telling everybody that you're trying to present yourself as the opposite sex, as something that you're not. Right, and if somebody uses the wrong pronoun, immediately it feels like, oh, I'm not doing enough to be a man. But if I just live as my biological sex and I find freedom within the boundaries of being a woman, then people can make a mistake when they're talking to me or call me by the wrong name or something. My whole world doesn't come crashing down. I just think, oh, OK, that was just a silly mistake. Right. You didn't mean anything by that. But during transition, it's the opposite because you have to try so hard to be the opposite sex because it's something that you're not. But I don't have to do anything to be a woman. That's just what I am. I was a woman going into surgery. I was a woman coming out of surgery. And I fully realize that now. So having been through the whole process of transitioning and then going back, how do you feel now about transitioning? I think it's dangerous. I think it's a dangerous solution. And all it does is really mask symptoms of a deeper problem. From my experience, I think that people with gender dysphoria have underlying psychological illnesses and it needs to be dealt with because those are those are serious things. And as a society, we need to be more able to tell people, you know, there's nothing wrong with your body. We can help you get to a point where you can really love yourself and embrace your body and your role in your community and your family. But transitioning and, you know, carving them up and putting them on cross-sex hormones, it's not the answer, especially not for young children who have no idea what they're getting themselves into. And do you ever feel like it's ever appropriate under any circumstances like for adults? No, I don't think so. I think that it's harmful for everybody. And if somebody gets wrapped up in gender ideology, you know, at 12 years old versus at 19 years old, it's still going to have the same devastating effects. Because even if somebody is, you know, they might say that they're happy with their transition, which for six or seven years, I would have said that I was happy with my transition. But even the people saying that, they are being harmed. They're actively being harmed because they're taking hormones that don't belong in their body. They're poisoning themselves. They're destroying their reproductive systems. And they're having major surgeries that are not actually changing their sex. They're just constantly being lied to. So I think no matter what age somebody gets wrapped up in all of the gender stuff, it's still just harmful to them. And, you know, you have a certain role in your society, in your community, your family, to be somebody that people around you need. So if you're a father, you can't be somebody's mother. And, you know, like your children need a father. You can't transition to be anything else. So my sister, you know, she had a sister growing up. And then I tried to tell her that I was her brother. No matter how old I am, no matter how old she is, that's harmful to her. To tell her, no, all of your memories with your sister don't mean anything because I was never actually your sister. Do you ever feel any guilt over that? Like around how transitioning affected your family? Yeah, that's where I feel most guilty. Like I can deal with the physical and emotional scars of it. But what I put my family through, that's what really hurts me. I understand. So while you were transitioning, did you ever like have to deal with the politics within the community? Yeah, a little bit. So I was transitioning, you know, and I was old enough to vote. And then came the 2016 election. That was my first presidential election. So I was interested in politics to begin with because it was just a new thing in my life that I was able to participate in. But what I noticed that because I leaned more conservative when I started transition, the LGBT community really did not support any of my beliefs. They didn't even really think that I belonged as part of their community. And I went to a group for LGBT teens and nobody there ever wanted to have a conversation with me because I wasn't just fully on board with everything that the left had to say. Right. Did you ever get called things like transmedicalist? Yeah, transphobe. Yeah, transmedicalist. That was a big one. And transphobic. I've been called transphobic, which never made sense because at the time I was identifying as transgender. But yeah, I got called all sorts of names by them. The same thing happened for me. I think that's a lot more common than we think. It's a lot of inviting in the community. Yes. So while detransitioning has brought you closer to your actual self and you become healthier in doing it, have there any been any negative effects from it? Yeah, one thing that I'm really afraid of is that the people around me won't trust me to make decisions because I made such a horrible decision that has lifelong consequences. It's still affecting me to this day, even though I've been detransitioning for over a year now. I'm still afraid that people will think, oh, well, you know, you're not really equipped to make big decisions. And that's something that really scares me. While you were transitioning, were you interacting a whole lot with the trans community? Did you have that layer of support around you? Not so much. I went to that group, but I kind of attended sporadically. I just didn't really want to be there. So when you stopped transitioning, did you lose any support from people around you? Did you lose friends or any family? I didn't lose anybody close to me, but I did know that I could never go back to the trans community for anything after that. If I needed support for anything, that was never going to be an option for me like it was before. But there was nobody specific in my life who just dropped me because I was detransitioning. Did you find that to strain your relationship at all, though, in the way that transitioning did? Not really. The only thing is sometimes I'm slower to tell some people in my family if I'm, you know, supporting conservative bills or things like that. There are people in my family who, you know, I didn't tell them that I'm interviewing with you today because I was a little bit nervous that they would want to stop me from doing it. But I guess they'll find out now. I mean, it's not an easy thing to tell your family or your friends that this life-changing decision that you made, you're wrong about this whole time. Were your parents the first people that you told about it? No, the church was the first that I told because that's the whole reason that I went there was to talk to a pastor. Well, actually, I told a Catholic priest first. I went to a confession with a Catholic priest and I told him initially, but eventually I ended up at the Protestant church and I told my pastor. And then I told a few of my friends and then I told my parents. How did they react? They were asking me more like, oh, are you sure that's what you want to do? Are you sure you want to detransition? Which they didn't really ask me for my transition, just my detransition. And I think because they realized at that time, you know, maybe I'm not so great at making long-term decisions for myself. So they just wanted to double check that I was sure about everything. How are you doing today? Today, I feel good about everything today. I feel like I'm ready to share my story with people to really be able to help young people who are in my position, even people older than me who find themselves in my position, either with transition or detransition. And the one thing that I just like to be careful of is even though I'm detransitioning and I'm not pro-transition, and I'm on the conservative side of everything, I understand what the trans people are going through. Everyone who identifies themselves as transgender and wants to transition and is currently transitioning and fighting on the other side of the battle that I'm on, I understand what they're going through. And I'd like them to just listen. You know, they don't have to agree with everything I say, but one day it's very possible that they'll find themselves in this position. And I just want them to know that this is a safe place. The detransitioners are not going to turn you away. I'm never going to tell you, well, because at one point you were a radical leftist, you can never come and talk to me if something's wrong. So, yeah, that's where I am today. That's beautiful. Thank you for choosing to speak up. Thank you. Thanks for having me.