🧵NEW: BigTech has been censoring our @IWF Identity Crisis video series. Our videos have been slapped with unwarranted community guideline roadblocks every step of the way. They won’t like today’s release either. Meet CAT, a detransitioner from California.
Cat began questioning her “gender identity” at five years old. When she asked her parents if she could be a boy, they told her it wasn’t possible. At 13 she came across FTM “transitioners” online. She wanted to do it but worried about being “a five-foot-two man with a vagina.”
Throughout her teenage years and early 20s, Cat continued to feel uncomfortable in her body. She brushed these feelings aside until she turned 28, when the narrative from trans activists and medical providers became too overwhelming to ignore.
They told her that if she did not conform with her “gender identity,” she would face significant mental health problems and be at high risk for suicide. Cat already struggled with mental health and thought medically “transitioning” was her only choice.
Cat began by calling Planned Parenthood, which she heard provided “gender-affirming services.” After a 30-minute phone call with a @PPFA doctor whom she never met, Cat was prescribed testosterone, a Schedule III controlled substance.
Cat told the doctor that she wanted to start with a low dose because she was a semi-professional singer and didn’t want to risk compromising her singing voice. But she later found out that Planned Parenthood prescribed her double that of other female-to-male “transitioners.”
Three months later, Cat experienced a sudden, dramatic drop in her vocal cords. She no longer recognized her own voice and it became uncomfortable, even painful to project. Her natural singing voice was permanently changed. "No one warned me that was a possibility," Cat said.
Cat had already scheduled an elective double mastectomy to appear more like a man. To do this, she talked to a different doctor at Planned Parenthood who, also without meeting her in person, wrote a recommendation letter for “top surgery.” She also filed for a legal name change.
But Cat was had concerns about the effects testosterone was having on her body. In addition to losing her natural singing voice, she was experiencing a slew of other negative side effects: heart palpitations, nausea, and a pain in her right side.
She didn’t want to raise these concerns out of fear of upsetting or damaging the transgender community. But eventually, the pain and the gravity of what she’d done to her body and to her voice—that she'd never have her natural singing voice ever again—became impossible to deny.
To prevent causing more permanent damage to her body and voice, Cat stopped testosterone cold turkey. She cancelled her elective double mastectomy and withdrew her legal name change.
As she withdrew from the hormones, Cat began looking into studies about “gender transitions” and questioning whether “affirmative care” is appropriate for most people.
“I realized I'd been in an echo chamber and I'd been told some really harmful things by trans activists that totally distorted my view of the world and my gender,” Cat said.
Now, she’s sharing her story to save others from making her same mistakes.
Now, she’s sharing her story to save others from making her same mistakes.
"I don't believe that people should just be uncritically thinking that loving yourself is getting surgery and altering your body." In the future, Cat warns, “we're going to see a lot of children who have detransitioned being angry with their parents and feeling betrayed by them.”
Had her parents had allowed her to “medically transition” as a child, Cat said, “I think I would be looking back and I would be thinking, ‘How could you enable this? How could you have gone along with this when I was too young to consent?”
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