Thread by @Bernard_Lane

"Regret after surgery: hard to describe the pain"--frontpage story online today from Norway's mass circulation newspaper VG.
"The last thing Aleksander thinks before the anaesthetic makes him pass out is: 'Help me, I don't want to do this'." #Detransition #GenderClinics

Shortly before his interview with VG, Aleksander had uploaded to YouTube his story explaining how "bullying and exclusion made him start taking medication to become a woman."
vg.no/nyheter/innenr…

" 'I'm the elephant in the room,' he says, smiling gently from the sofa. 'I am the uncomfortable truth about how bad things can go'. 'Focusing on gender and identity has become a pandemic in our society'."

VG: "In secondary school, he was an ambitious student, with shoulder-length hair, inspired by metal music. His main interests were astrophysics and space... other boys were into football and hip hop. He preferred to watch old black and white films on TV."

He recalls boys & girls at school saying he could "never become a real man or get a girlfriend. To avoid the teasing, he sometimes went into the woods alone instead of being at school." Aleksander recalls: 'A lot of the light I had inside me disappeared.'

He discovered a trans forum online. He posed about hating his body and got a reply that he definitely sounded trans. He was enticed by the idea. "When I wasn't accepted as who I was, I had to become someone other than who I am."

What made him think of himself as female? "First and foremost, the feeling of being a failed man. I thought life would be easier as a woman." Today he calls it obsessive thinking.

At age 19, he got prescriptions for puberty blockers & oestrogen from a Warsaw sexologist. In 2013, he saw sexology professor Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad in Grimstad, Norway.
More on Benestad here

https://twitter.com/Bernard_Lane/status/1629750441251844096?s=20

At their third appointment, Benestad wrote him a reference to a Bangkok surgeon, saying Aleksander "fulfils all the criteria and there is every reason to believe that SRS [sex-reassignment surgery] represents a medical necessity to make her gender congruent".

After surgery, Aleksander reporting feeling "cut open with shards of glass" when defecating. He leaked urine, saw blood in the toilet bowel for years & came to see his neo-vagina as a wound. "There was something about the whole of me that felt fake."

"I can never become a woman, I just bought into a lie. At best, I could become an imitation of a woman." When he stopped taking hormones, it felt "like being hit by a truck". A deep depression, painkillers & anti-psychotic medication followed.

"I can never have my own children, and that is perhaps my biggest regret."

Then, one day, lying on the sofa, he saw Canadian psychologist @jordanbpeterson on TV offering the advice: clean up your room, that's a good start. Aleksander started showering again, brushing his teeth and tidying up the student flat he rents in Nydalen in Oslo.

VG: "It's slow going at first, but now Aleksander is off and running. And as Peterson said to him from TV: 'It's always important to try to move forward, even if it's only one metre'."

"A new year passes. The depression eases. He makes new friends. One Sunday at the end of May this year, Aleksander presses 'publish' and shares the YouTube video he has titled: 'The dark truth behind gender dysphoria and transition regret'."

"I'm at peace with myself now," says Aleksander. "I've learnt to accept who I am. I am a man and I can never change that."

When VG tells sexology prof. Benestad that Aleksander regrets the surgery in Thailand, Benestad says: "I really feel sorry for him, and it comes from my heart - but at the same time I can say that we could not have foreseen it."

VG: "Is it difficult to detect whether people will regret it?"
Benestad: "It's absolutely impossible. It's as impossible as when a woman says she wants to abort a foetus. We know some people will regret it, but we haven't stopped self-determined abortion in Norway after all."

Told of Benestad's response, Aleksander notes that the sexology prof. had previously claimed to have never received a complaint from a patient.