Thread by @wesyang

At Detransition Awareness Day, Forrest Smith describes running away to Portland after dropping out of college and availing himself of a network of homeless youth services that allowed him to reinvent himself as a transgender woman and participate in street political militancy.

During covid he was rushed through for an emergency orchiectomy despite closure of the hospital for elective procedures with the aid of a referral specialist whose job was to manipulate billing codes for gender procedures. Received a letter from a psychiatrist testifying that testicle removal was urgent and lifesaving; eight days later the surgery was done.

When he began to question his transition, no therapist would speak to him, and insurance that paid to remove his testicles while he was homeless and drug addicted would not cover removal of his breast implants.

Smith described fetish porn first encountered as a child at Deviant Art consuming him in a world of squalid obsessions and that gender transition offered the promised of transforming those desires into something clean.

Mirrors the motives of many older AGP’s seeking to launder their paraphilias into a valid identity by propagating a new cohort of child transitioner who can model for the public the cleanliness and innocence they yearn for after allowing their transvestic fetishism to swallow them whole

In an earlier panel, Smith described serving in the role of a confessor to some gender surgeons.

"He went on to tell me 'many of my patients, many of my trans female patients who come in on public insurance are making a mistake.'

And he described being able to count their ribs because he was telling me how emaciated they were, because he was literally operating on homeless people.

And in Portland, some of the situation with the homelessness is the homeless aren't like native Oregonians, right? They're not from Oregon. They are getting shipped there from all over the country.

So these people are totally, totally homeless and destitute -- and then they're being operated on.

And they're having these vaginoplasties, which -- it's hard to call them vaginoplasty, because it's just this gross mutilation.

And so I was talking to a surgeon, and she's showing me picture after picture of patients and -- they're horrible pictures to look at. They're just horrible mutilation.

And that's when her eyes are watering as she's presenting this to me, and she's kind of trying to tell me it might not turn out right.

And at that point, I was also so thoroughly into the identity and the comorbidities. I was struggling with addiction. So I it was during COVID. I was wearing a little mask. I had no eyebrows, wearing a soggy hat. I also was a waif.

And I told her what I had heard from some of my transgender friends.

I said that I realize I am a guinea pig. Because she was telling me, we don't have enough data.

I said, I realize I'm a guinea pig.

And then she told me, 'that's very insightful of you.'"

Stories like this never surprise or phase other detransitioners. They know this world intimately and are totally inured to its normal practices. Neither does it surprise anyone who has perused the writings and statements of gender clinicians. It’s all out in the open, not at all hidden, overtly proselytized as good.