Most people I know who also left the detrans rad fem community and/or retransitioned are just getting on with their lives, which I fully support. No one is obligated to engage in activism & most people in those communities aren't activists anyways, they're trying to find support.
Most people in the detrans rad fem community just want help detransitioning, dealing with gender dysphoria, are trying to heal from trauma, etc and many are being hurt by abusive members of that community, including many of its leaders. People who get out need support & healing.
I feel much more of a responsibility to hold myself accountable because of my past anti-trans activism and how I helped to create a high demand group that claims to offer support but actually promotes anti-trans conversion practices. I was active in ways others typically weren't.
Working to make up for the harm I committed in the past just seems like the right thing to do because I care about how my actions impact others and I know I have the skills to make a difference. I've also been an activist weirdo for most of my life, that's just how I am.
But I think it's fine for other people who got out of transphobic detrans communities to focus on healing/recovery and getting their life back together. I just wish there were more resources and supports available for them and other survivors of anti-trans conversion practices.
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#DetransAwarenessDay I no longer identify as detransitioned because I associate that term/identity with a very painful time in my life, when I was stuck in an anti-trans political cult and doing conversion practices on myself. I hurt myself and other people and have many regrets.
Still, I could technically count as a “detransitioner” because I took t and then stopped. I didn’t start calling myself detransitioned until after I converted to transphobic feminism. Before that, I saw taking t temporarily as part of a genderqueer transition.
Detransitioning for me was all about trying to “de-trans” myself, trying to dismantle and dissect my transness and retrain my mind to see myself only as a woman/lesbian. So I associate being detransitioned with being an “ex-trans” person.
Herzog fails to mention that one of people she interviewed, that being myself, has since retransitioned and denounced my past activism and the detrans rad fem community for promoting anti-trans conversion practices and being part of an anti-trans hate movement.
Anyways, here’s an article I wrote about what my life was like when I was interviewed for that article, including how I was presenting a public persona to advance a transphobic political agenda rather than being open and honest about my actual experiences. reclaimingtrans.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/the…
Because in truth, when Herzog interviewed me, I was still struggling with gender dysphoria and having a lot of doubts about my detransition. It wasn’t working for me but I felt like I had to represent myself as if it was “for the good of the community.”
Let's be real, "Listen to detransitioners" is really just "listen to ex-trans people". The people who say that don't care about people who've been hurt by detransitioning, who had to detransition due to transphobia or other external hardships. No, they just want end transition.
They don't care about trans people's experiences with detransition and they don't actually want more resources for people who stop medical transition for whatever reason or who are hurt by transitioning. They just want a reason to restrict or get rid of trans healthcare.
They don't give a shit about detrans people as people with real lives and needs, only about finding ways to use them. As soon as you stop being useful to them, they turn on you and stop telling people to listen to you. They want detrans people to be their pet ex-trans people.
I used to believe that I transitioned because I was a lesbian suffering from internalized homophobia, a belief I picked up from transphobic lesbian feminist propaganda that TERFs have been spreading for decades at this point.
Transphobic lesbians use the idea that transition is kind of "medicalized homophobia" to gaslight and psychologically abuse transmasculine people and try to keep us in transphobic lesbian communities. We're encouraged to see our transness as something harmful to be overcome.
This hurts not only trans men but transmasculine and genderqueer dykes. We're told that to accept and express our dykeness we have to reject & work to overcome being trans/genderqueer. I ended up in deep conflict w/ myself, thinking I had to kill a part of myself to become whole.
Back when I was still detrans, I watched the Miseducation of Cameron Post with another detrans TERF, which is a movie about a teenage lesbian in the US who's sent to a Christian ex-gay camp. Part of what they do at the camp is look for "root causes" of being gay, try to find...
..."what's behind" their feelings, what kind of trauma or other experiences supposedly caused their "same-sex attraction disorder". The gay kids have to fill out a worksheet with an iceberg on it, the tip of the iceberg is their gayness, the part underneath the water...
...is supposed to be their real underlying problem. Their gayness is supposed to be a "symptom" of this larger problem, unresolved trauma or whatever. So after we watch this movie, the other detrans TERF tells me, "This is like how I talk to people about their gender dysphoria...
An ecofascist antisemitic anti-trans conspiracy theorist is now calling for violence against clinics that help trans youth and is praising the fascist trucker convey in Canada for being "willing to die". This kind of talk doesn't end well.
This comes soon after she attacked a more "moderate" group of transphobic parents and conversion therapists who are trying to infiltrate and change trans healthcare to restrict and eventually abolish pediatric transition. Their crime? Being willing to work with GC trans people.
Hardline GCs refuse to work w/ any trans people, even those who embrace GC ideology. For them, working for more gatekeeping or promoting conversion therapy doesn't go far enough. They want to destroy the "gender industry" because they see it as part of a larger conspiracy.