Editor note: This report is paired with a catalog of email communications between julie graham, a gender therapist with the San Francisco Health Department, and a small network of anti-trans detransitioned radical feminists that developed around 2013. Using the liberal, more moderate presentation of another detransitioned woman, the network built a strategy on how to covertly influence discussion on trans health care and informed consent while hiding their true motivations. The communications resulted in a laundered presentation of their anti-trans politics into the first USPATH conference, unknown to many of the practitioners there. Over the past decade this strategy has been used to extend the network’s reach, including into liberal mass media.
Full emails: (PDF, raw text transcript)
Powerpoint presentation: Link
From 2013 to at least 2017, detransitioned radical feminists worked with a gender therapist in WPATH named julie graham. Both parties were attempting to use the other to reshape trans healthcare. graham was concerned about the numbers of young transmasculine people transitioning, believed it was too high and wanted to use detransitioned people to advocate for more caution and develop assessments that would supposedly help distinguish between those who would benefit from medical transition and those who would regret it and/or detransition. She wanted to use detransition as many medical professionals in favor of gatekeeping have used it over the decades. Detrans radical feminists oppose medical transition and ultimately want to replace it with “alternative treatments” for gender dysphoria. We were willing to work with graham in order to increase restrictions on who could access transition and influence how medical professionals understand and treat gender dysphoria, hoping to normalize “psychological treatments”, i.e. conversion practices, with the hopes that those would one day replace medical transition as the standard treatment for gender dysphoria. We were deceptive and manipulative towards graham but some who spoke with her directly made their opposition to transition and transphobic views clear. graham was not totally ignorant our of overall political agenda, though she might not have been aware of how extreme our views were or our ultimate aims in working with her.
More recently, some of the same detransitioned radical feminists formed Are You Asking Why? which testified against a pediatric transition ban in Ohio, HB 68, in December 2023. Carey Callahan, a more liberal detrans woman who previously worked with detrans radical feminists and julie graham also testified against the ban. Callahan likely encouraged Are You Asking Why? to testify in Ohio since she’d already been working with some members of the group for close to a decade. This doesn’t mark a change in detrans radical feminists’ opposition to transition as much as it expresses their hostility to conservative politicians and organizations and rejection of legal bans as a strategy. Much of their testimony still expressed negativity towards transition and a desire for alternatives or praised extensive assessments and other forms of gatekeeping already in place in Ohio. More background knowledge of members of Are You Asking Why? and Carey’s prior actions cast doubt on whether their true intentions and goals ultimately align with those of trans people, especially those who seek maximum bodily autonomy and control over our healthcare.
The following is an account of my old detrans radical feminist group’s interactions with julie graham, from when she first contacted me in 2013 to when she helped organize a detransition panel at the 2017 USPATH conference, where a member of our group Carey Callahan presented and showed short videos made by three other members of our group, two of whom had undergone religious conversion practices. I also include information about my old group’s involvement with lesbian feminist and feminist neopagan communities and how this led to our views becoming more extreme and anti-trans over time. Noting this influence is in no way meant to imply that we weren’t responsible for our actions. If anything engaging in reactionary neopagan feminism made us feel more entitled to act in selfish ways that harmed others. It also gives a sense of what kind of “alternative treatments” we wanted to replace transition with.
Throughout the article I will refer to my old group as detransitioned radical feminists or TERFs even though technically not every member considered themselves a radical feminist or believed deeply in that ideology. Everyone who participated in the group had to at least be sympathetic to our version of radical feminism and radical feminists dominated the group overall. Most notably, Carey Callahan never called herself a radical feminist and held more liberal/moderate political views overall. However, she attended various radical feminist events and worked closely with detrans radical feminists who viewed her public liberal persona as an asset for getting us access to people, spaces and events. Like other reactionaries, we generally had no problem working with liberals when it helped us extend our power and we quickly realized the benefits of having a token liberal sitting at our table.
Table of Contents
First contact, plotting and scheming
In 2013 I started my blog CrashChaosCats to talk about my experience of detransitioning from a genderqueer trans man to a butch lesbian. I believed I had transitioned due to internalized misogyny and trauma but I still believed some people were trans and benefited from transitioning. On the other hand, I was willing to talk to and befriend detrans radical feminists who believed all trans people were suffering from false consciousness or a sexual fetish. My views weren’t as extreme as they would become in the coming years. I was in the beginning stages of converting fully to anti-trans lesbian feminist ideology. I was reading a lot of radical feminist and lesbian separatist blogs and books and blogs by other detransitioned women who were either radical feminists or sympathetic to radical feminism. The detrans woman I was closest to was encouraging me to get deeper into radical feminism, suggesting I read books like Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, and that I withdraw further and further from the radical queer community I’d been part of since my youth. We both keep our views hidden from most queer and trans people we knew.
In August 2013, just about three months after I starting blogging about my detransition, I wrote a post titled Socialized Trans in which I described how I believed other people’s responses to my masculine gender presentation lead me to believe I was a trans man and pushed me towards pursuing medical transition. This was the first time one of my blog posts got a lot of attention, much of it from radical feminist lesbians who seized on it as proof that butch dykes were indeed being pressured to identify as trans and transition. They weren’t the only people to take notice though. A gender therapist named julie graham left the following comment on my blog:
“I am wondering if you would be willing to email with me regarding gender issues. I am a gender specialist. My goal is to figure out how to support people to be themselves and not have to physically transition unless they truly are transgender & nothing else works. I am trying to do education about detransition and transition and the responsibilities of therapists and medical providers since we do gender related assessments for medical interventions.”
After emailing her, I learned that graham worked as Gender Services Coordinator for the San Francisco Health Department. Later I would find out that she was member of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. She had contacted me after reading my blog both because she wanted to develop more support for people who detransition but also because the “number of young female bodied people transitioning feels way too high”. She believed that there was pressure in the trans community to transition. She told me that her “interest is in decreasing the number of female bodied folks transitioning when they are not truly male” and wanted to talk to detransitioned women to “understand if there is some way to identify people who are transitioning for the wrong reasons”. She stated that she believed that “[t]ranssexualism is rare. Gender non-conformity is not rare” and that she was concerned that some people confuse being gender nonconforming with being trans. She thought some people were transitioning because of this and also due to “internalized and external oppression from sexism. The effects of patriarchy and women being taught to despise themselves and their bodies is profound”. While she did indeed believe that some people were truly trans and benefited from transitioning, when she said things like “[w]e have a social problem that is being treated medically for some people” she didn’t sound all that different from the TERFs showing up in my comments.
At the time, hearing a therapist who worked with the San Francisco Health Department express these views reinforced my own perception that butch lesbians and other gender non-conforming female-assigned people were transitioning in response to internalized sexism. As I told another detrans woman soon afterwards:
“it was also just crazy to hear from someone who’s probably worked with a large and varied population of people with “gender issues” that she’s really concerned about the number of women transitioning. i had really intense emotion reaction to it. first, i got kinda excited because it affirmed that this social problem i see is real, i’m not just making it up. since detransitioners are often disconnected from one another, sometimes i still worry that i’m overestimating the problem.”
Now I would say that she was reinforcing beliefs that both contributed to my own psychological distress and led me to project my feelings onto to other trans people and feel justified in trying to manipulate them “for their own good”. While I’m responsible for my own harmful actions, it still didn’t help to have other people encourage that bad behavior, including a medical authority figure.
While I didn’t trust therapists having had some bad experiences with them as a teenager and young adult, I was excited about the chance to influence a therapist who could in turn influence trans healthcare on a larger scale. I immediately emailed Devorah Zahav, a detransitioned radical feminist I’d been corresponding with for around six months. She was the first detrans woman I’d met and had encouraged my belief that I’d transitioned due to unresolved trauma and internalized misogyny.
I summarized what graham had told me, telling Devorah that graham was concerned about the number female-assigned people transitioning and wanted to decrease that number, as well as how she wanted to create more resources for people who detransition. I made sure to tell Devorah about how graham “said that there’s a social problem being treated as a medical problem and that’s she’s been worried about the number of females transitioning for years now.”
I expressed my willingness to work with someone who wanted to decrease the number of people transitioning. Though I said I was “skeptical about therapists and doctors in general” I was willing to work with graham because we had enough in common and “she sounds like she’s in a position of influence where she could effect how people have access to hormones and how “gender dysphoria” is viewed and treated in general. a shift in gender therapy could make at least a small difference”. This illustrates a common perspective among detrans radical feminists. Though many are disillusioned and distrustful towards therapists and other medical professionals and may view the medical system as a whole as part of the larger patriarchy, they’re still very willing to influence it in whatever way they can, especially if they think it will lead to less people transitioning. Many did had negative experiences with medical providers during their transitions but instead of working to improve care they believe that medical transition or even the whole medical system is irredeemable and needs to be shut down and replaced with some kind of alternative healthcare. They’re similar to other people who had negative experiences with healthcare who end up in alt-health cults, who also often end up believing in conspiracy theories and/or reactionary ideologies.
Devorah lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and told me she was willing to talk to and meet up with julie graham. I told graham about how I knew a detransitioned woman living in the Bay area, asked if she was interested in meeting her and if so, should I pass her contact info onto her. graham replied that she was interested and so I put her in touch with Devorah. I also shared graham’s blog with Devorah but didn’t share Devorah’s blog with graham. Devorah didn’t particularly care for graham’s blog, since graham believed that some people benefited from transitioning while Devorah was completely opposed to it. Devorah referred to another detrans woman we both knew, 23xx, telling me she wished graham would read her blog so she would see that “that the “true transsexuals” are not always helped by the “transition” model either”. 23xx was one of several detrans women in our community whose experience of gender dysphoria was that of a so-called “classic” or “true transsexual”, meaning that it had started in childhood and persisted into adulthood, was focused on the body, particularly secondary and primary sex characteristics, involved experiencing a “phantom male body” despite being assigned female and so on. Such dysphoria was historically taken as a sign that the person was truly transsexual, would benefit from medical transition and be very unlikely to regret it or detransition in the future. Clearly, we didn’t believe that there were reliable signs that a person would detransition if we thought even “true transsexuals” could detransition after being turned on to radical feminism. We didn’t believe that more effective screening was possible and were only interested in reducing the number of people transitioning.
I later ended up telling julie graham that “I’m not sure what could have been done differently in my case nor do I know how to dissuade someone who’s really intent on transitioning” and that I was “pessimistic about being able to spot or dissuade people who shouldn’t be transitioning”. I told her that “[l]ike you, I believe transsexuality to be very rare. I think a lot, perhaps even most people who are presently transitioning don’t need to change their bodies and have other issues driving their desires to do so.”
One thing that stands out to me now is that I told graham I had to “retrain myself to make being a woman/female acceptable”. This was a reference to how I still experienced gender dysphoria and felt like more that one gender. I believed that when I felt like a man or genderqueer, I was dealing with a trauma response, dissociation or internalized misogyny and tried to suppress or eliminate those feelings. It’s not so much that I realized I wasn’t actually trans as that I decided my transness was a symptom of unhealed trauma and internalized sexism.
Opening the door to WPATH through “common ground”
During our correspondence, graham told me about how she was “talking with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health about regret and detransition” and how she was training providers working with trans children, adolescents and adults. While she expressed desires to find ways to provide better healthcare and support for people who detransitioned, she also stressed her desire to change how informed consent is practiced because of her belief that too many people were transitioning “for the wrong reasons”.
When I heard graham had connections to WPATH, I excitedly emailed Devorah telling her “this therapist is talking to wpath about detransition. fucking wpath. we need to figure out how to exploit this connection as much a [sic] possible.” I told her about how graham wanted to train and educate more “gender professionals” about detransition and develop better screening practices, saying that “it seems like treating detransitioners and cutting down on the number of people transitioning are sort of a cause of hers.” After summarizing my email conversation with graham, I told Devorah that “it sounds like this woman has the potential to influence a lot of people in the ‘gender industry’” and expressed hope that this could lead to more resources into detransition and medical professionals taking it more seriously.
Devorah was likewise excited at the prospect of influencing a therapist with connections to WPATH, agreeing with me that graham “does sound like a mover and shaker.” By this point Devorah was planning to email and meet up with graham. She told me that “I think I will take the approach of meeting with her and listening first–like you did; this is a good strategy to build rapport and trust. I don’t want her to be able to “box” me and make me easier to dismiss. I want to approach with an ostensible “how can i help you” agenda. If she is for real about starting to screen and limit access, then I am totally genuine in wanting to help her.”
Devorah asked me if I had told graham about her blog, redressalert, where she openly expressed her radical feminist views and opposition to transition. I told her that I hadn’t, that graham had “no idea that you have a blog or anything about you other than that you’re a [sic] another person that i know who detransitioned and that you’re interested in talking to her. i figured you’d want to let her get to know you on your own terms.” I wanted to give Devorah the option of hiding her views from graham or only sharing parts of them. I was already becoming accustomed to deceiving people or sharing information selectively with people outside of our group. It was a mode of interacting with people that became second-nature pretty quickly. This was a key tactic we used to influence people, figuring out how to present ourselves in ways that were most likely to get us what we wanted.
One of the things Devorah and I were most interested in was using our connection with graham to get more research on detransitioning and also research into the effect of testosterone on female-assigned bodies, both what the effects of taking it long-term are and starting and then stopping t. I told graham I was curious if she “could encourage more professional research on detransitioning, what the actual rate of it are, why does it happen and so on” telling her that “A lot of detransitioners are curious about how widespread this phenomena is and if there are patterns among the populations that transition and then decide it’s not for them. All we really have at the moment is anecdotal information. It’d be cool to learn more from a broader sample of people.” Getting more research into detransition seemed to be among the more realistic goals we thought we could achieve. We also discussed whether we could help graham change the evaluation and informed consent process.
I ended up deciding that I didn’t think we could achieve much by imposing more gatekeeping. I told Devorah “that trying to limit the supply side of things isn’t enough, the demand itself and what causes it needs to be targeted. transitioning itself is a symptom of larger scale societal misogyny and that link needs to be made clear to more people.” I talked about feeling conflicted about trying to control what other people did with their bodies saying that I felt “weird about working with doctors to regulate other people’s bodies. i don’t trust those doctors to actually work with people’s best interests. they haven’t in the past, why should they now? they’re not the ones who can solve this problem, especially since they’re some of the main people who created it in the first place”. Instead I was interested in “plotting cultural revolution.” Despite that I was still interested in working with graham to change how informed consent was done if it could reduce the number of people transitioning. In the end though I wanted to “decrease transition rates” not only by making it harder for people to start HRT but by “actually cut[ting] down the demand for it”. This did become my main strategy for reducing the rates of transition, focusing more on convincing trans people to pursue “alternative treatments” than trying to influence providers and therapists working in trans healthcare. During my time as a detrans radical feminist, I spent most of my energy trying to influence trans men, transmasculine people and other female-assigned trans people, encouraging them to desist or detransition, convert to radical feminism, join radical feminist lesbian communities and engage in conversion practices to manage their dysphoria.
Devorah emailed graham, telling her “I am really interested to hear about your perspective on ftm transition and especially your concerns with the current “treatments,” as well as what your ideas are for changing things”. graham clearly sensed Devorah’s hostility towards medical transition because she replied “I’m afraid I will disappoint you, here. I’m not against treating people who will benefit from treatment.” making it clear that she wanted to change how transition was currently administered instead of replacing it with something else entirely.
graham immediately went onto to say “There are way too many FTM’s in the Bay Area” and expressed concerns about YouTube influencing people towards transitioning by presenting an overly rosy view of it. She told Devorah that she “believe[s] some people try to solve a cultural problem with a medical solution. They don’t know that is what they are doing. They just don’t feel okay as who they are and we have this society that wants to medicate discomfort away and numb political expression”. She said she believed there was pressure to transition among transmasculine people, that taking testosterone could make ADHD symptoms worse, that transmasculine people were more likely to be autistic, and that “[p]retty much everyone I see has trauma”.
She said she wanted more screening and psychological assessments prior to medical transition while admitting that she was “perceived as creating barriers to care”. In this and other emails, she referred to people being critical of her as “activists” and stated that she believed the current model of informed consent was created to suit the desires of activists instead of what was best for trans people. She talked about how she needed “to get some other folks over onto my side and I think that’s possible. I simply need to figure out how. What will be a tipping point”. She believed that “hormones are a bigger deal for female bodied people and surgery is a bigger deal for male bodied people. We have one system for both genders and that is clinically wrong. Testosterone effects [sic] a female body much more powerfully than estrogen and an anti androgen effects a male body.” graham talked about how in her quest to change trans healthcare she been “talking with the head of WPATH about this. She is one of the reasons that the SOC follows the European protocols for children rather than the newly developing American ones.” she later said she could try to arrange for detransitioned people to meet with the head of WPATH, who at the time was Lin Fraser.
She then talked about how she wanted to use detransitioned people’s experiences to help change how informed consent was practiced, including recording a conversation, transcribing it and then publishing it in WPATH’s journal, the International Journal of Transgenderism, and/or conducting an online survey of detransitioned people. She brought up Walt Heyer, a conservative Christian detrans man, and radical feminists who oppose transition, saying that “I think Walt has some important points and he is easily dismissed. Same with some of the radical feminists. Their incorrect use of statistics makes them discreditable to academics and doctors. The thing is, they have important points”. Her sympathies for conservative Christian detrans people and anti-trans radical feminists helps explain why she was willing to work with Devorah even after she expressed opposition to transition and also why graham took both of our stories at face value. Her biases and views certainly made it easier for us to manipulate her.
Responding, Devorah made her views on trans people and transitioning clear when she told graham that she was “open to the idea that some smaller number of people who disguise their sex for social survival/to assist with body dysphoria might individually be well served by disguising their sex via hormones and surgery, even if only because we live in a violently misogynistic and homophobic world–but I’m extremely concerned about how “trans” has become politicized as a liberation movement, an increasingly mainstreamed option for an ever-widening pool of people (the “umbrella” seems to get larger and larger), and the impact that has on trans medical treatments as well as on wider social issues.” She went on to compare transmasculine transition to “body modification” and having an eating disorder and claimed that “autogynephilia is a very real thing, despite what activists may say. A lot of people have been harmed because of the way autogynephiles with violent tendencies have been empowered by trans identity politics”.
Autogynephilia is a pseudo-disorder used by some therapists and sexologists to pathologize queer trans women by claiming that their desire to transition is motivated by a sexual fetish. Like many lesbian TERFs, Devorah believed all lesbian and queer trans women were “autogynephilic men” and so should be barred from accessing lesbian communities and women’s spaces. She made her total opposition to pediatric transition clear stating that “’trans kids’ need to be left alone, period. Do you have any ideas for nipping this in the bud, because honestly, it’s appalling beyond words”.
In another email to graham, Devorah said that she had enough common ground with graham that they could work together and didn’t need graham to agree with her on everything, telling graham that “I don’t expect or need you to agree with me 100% on everything; I’ve experienced that kind of cult-like culture when I was in ‘trans communities’”. graham was apparently not put off by Devorah comparing the trans community to a cult, her belief in autogynephilia, or strong opposition to medical transition because they did end up meeting up not long after that.
After meeting up with julie graham for the first time, Devorah emailed me and other detransitioned women she knew to recount what happened. She started off by talking about the intense emotional impact of the meeting and went on to apologize for how her emotional reactions got in the way of her bringing up certain topics, specifically “data on how many more ftm transitioners she is seeing now as compared to in the past” and “the autogynephilia problem”. She made other negative comments about trans women she viewed as “autogynephiles” throughout the email, including that she believed that they along with “ftm tokens” were the activists pushing for more informed consent. Devorah told us that “[t]he good news is that she believes that some people are harmed by the current “informed consent” treatment protocols for transition, where you just say you want hormones and sign a paper before getting them.” graham was sympathetic when Devorah told her that “what trans offers is beyond social support, but a kind of status and recognition of oppression–and that those things are very healing and necessary but no one should have to say they’re trans as a prerequisite for getting them” and told Devorah that she “thinks one of the main problems is that there is no women’s movement”.
Devorah was dismayed to hear that the Affordable Care Act and local San Francisco initiative would soon make it easier for trans people to access surgery. Devorah expressed frustration that even though graham said everyone she sees is traumatized she “doesn’t get that we should be treating the trauma, not reinforcing these symptoms of it”. Devorah believed that most trans people’s gender dysphoria was actually unresolved trauma and dissociative symptoms. She further expressed these beliefs in the email when she talked about she thought that both trans men and some trans women became gender dysphoric and developed a trans identity in response to sexual violence and abuse. Trans men supposedly transitioned to escape from being female because they associated that with being raped while some trans women believed that they were female because they had been raped and equated being a victim of sexual violence with being a woman. Devorah specifically named migrant trans women who’d suffered a lot of sexual violence, showing how she viewed both trans women of color and trans men as having less agency than white queer trans women, who she viewed as dominating the trans community.
Devorah also talked about her disagreement with graham about the existence of “true transsexuals”. Devorah said graham wanted to “to slow things down and make more obstacles because she thinks only “true transsexuals” should be getting these surgeries”. Devorah on the other had believed that all trans people, even those judged to be “true transsexuals” could desist or detransition, find other ways to treat their dysphoria without medical transition and accept their assigned sex. She believed that some of the detransitioned women in our group had been “true transsexuals” before detransitioning. When she tried to tell graham that “I know at least one detransitioned “true transsexual””, graham acted like Devorah didn’t know what the term meant “or that in any case, not everyone can cope with reality so we should do this for people who can’t because otherwise they’ll kill themselves”. Ultimately Devorah made it clear that her and graham would have to agree to disagree about “true transsexualism”. Devorah viewed it as a “condition of suffering” but believed it was a “social problem, not a biological issue” and so she found ethically questionable to treat it medically.
Based on Devorah’s account of events, it appears that graham’s major issue with Devorah’s anti-trans beliefs was that she applied them to all trans people instead of seeing them as only true for herself and others who detranstioned. When Devorah talked about her “experience with T as assisted self-mutilation”, graham was quick to say that was true for some people like Devorah but not for everyone who transitions. This response made Devorah upset and enraged, though it’s likely that she hid her emotional response when speaking directly to graham. Devorah was angry that her “’personal experience’ was treated as some kind of unhelpful bias that clouds my judgment of the situation as a whole rather than a valuable perspective” because “THE WHOLE TRANS MODEL is about how PERSONAL EXPERIENCE and SELF-REPORTED RESULTS are the only fucking thing that matters”. Devorah ended her email asking “Why am I being asked to be so big picture and drop my personal story for the greater good–when there is a real argument to be made that people who are medically transitioning need to do that, and NOBODY EVER ASKS THEM TO?” This was Devorah’s standard reaction when she was asked to consider that her experience of transition and living as a trans man wasn’t true for other people. She couldn’t accept it and saw being asked to take other people’s realities as serious as her own as a threat to herself. Her views only got more extreme and more deeply entrenched over the years as she became increasingly involved with transphobic lesbian feminist communities and the larger anti-trans movement.
I responded sympathetically to Devorah, telling her I needed a break from talking to graham. I never ended up talking to graham after that point. I shared my own negative and cynical views of therapists, telling her I was “not really surprised that she tried to dismiss your experience. in my own encounters with therapists they seem exceptionally good at filtering information and sometimes not even perceiving something that contradicts their world view.” I complained about how too much of therapists’ “training is fitting people and their realities into boxes, into different diagnostic labels, symptoms, theories and such. some of them really seem to love that crap, they need a framework to fit people in and they’ll cling to it rigidly.”
I went on to tell Devorah more of my thoughts on therapists saying:
“a lot of them get off on “helping” people or feeling like that’s what they’re doing. they get off on filling a caregiver role, which means they need “sick” people who stay “sick” so they can keep caring for them. even though on the surface therapists present themselves as specialists uniquely suited to deal with trauma they’re not really the ones to deal with the root of the problem because they need a traumatic society in order to enact their role. so you’re right, she’s really invested in idea that she’s “helping” people and that comes out of her own needs and that’s going to effect how she sees things.
what’s also infuriating about therapists is that they can think of themselves as being more clear-sighted than other people. after all, part of their role is to point out other people’s flawed perspectives and biases. but the therapist’s own judgment is biased of course and often colored by whatever their favorite psychological theories and boxes are. i think a lot of them get off on being this “voice of reason to the confused”. just another power trip.”
What stands out to me now rereading my criticisms of julie graham and therapists in general is how well it describes how Devorah, myself and other detrans radical feminists treated trans people. We certainly behaved as if we were a “voice of reason to the confused” when talking to trans people, tried to fit their experiences into rigid theories and boxes, and tried to keep trans and detrans people in a “sick role” so that we could be “caregivers”. Now, instead of offering a genuinely “radical” alternative to therapy or medical transition, it looks like we were just competing with therapists like graham over who got to control trans people “for their own good”.
Looking back now, it strikes me that graham didn’t seem to consider that a trans person could end up detransitioning after being recruited by an anti-trans group, that even a “true transsexual” could convert to an anti-trans ideology and engage in conversion practices instead of transitioning, much like a gay person could convert to a homophobic ideology and commit to an “ex-gay” lifestyle instead of expressing their sexuality. Nor did she consider that she could be talking to such people. As someone who wanted to impose more gatekeeping, it would make sense that she wouldn’t want to consider the possibility that such practices could actually convince a trans person not to transition instead of merely weeding out people who wouldn’t benefit from transitioning. She was set on only seeing the potential harms of transitioning, not how gatekeeping or detransition could harm trans people. It made sense that she believed that trans people who were “really trans” and would benefit from transition would pass any assessments, therapy or other obstacles set in their ways, that only people who wouldn’t benefit from transition could be talked out of it. Gatekeeping only makes sense if you think you can reliably develop a process that will correctly sort out “real” trans people from people confused about their gender. But what if trans people, even those with intense dysphoria, can be psychologically manipulated just as much as any other group of people? Why would trans people be immune to conversion practices or cults? What if “reducing the number of female-bodied people transitioning” didn’t mean preventing transition regret or detransition but convincing trans people who didn’t fit the “true transsexual” mold that they were really suffering from trauma, internalize sexism or were following a trend?
Devorah was even more ambitious about reducing the number of people transitioning than graham was, as she made clear when she said even “true transsexuals” could detransition. She spent the next decade spreading the message that any transmasculine person could “reconcile with being female”, no matter how far into transition they were or how long they’d been trans, no matter if they were a “true transsexual”, or a “transtrender”. All kinds of people did indeed end up joining the detransitioned radical feminist community. We had former trans-medicalists hanging out with former radical queer genderfreaks. Most people’s experience of gender dysphoria hadn’t been significantly different from what most trans men and transmasculine people experience and most who joined continued to suffer from dysphoria to varying degrees. Much of the focus of our group was trading tips on how to use “alternative treatments” to manage dysphoria and fight off any lingering urge to transition or live as a gender other than female. Many of us thought it was wrong to transition period, not just that we personally hadn’t benefited from medical transition.
From scheming into implementation
Though I stopped talking to julie graham after Devorah’s first in-person meeting with her, Devorah and graham continued to talk, with graham seeking out Devorah’s help and feedback. For example, graham contacted Devorah while she was working on changing informed consent guidelines for hormones, offering to share an “internal document” that needed to stay “within a small group until we have a genuine real first draft”. Devorah said she’d be happy to read it and give feedback. After reading the draft, she told graham that she thought they downplayed risks and concerns, which she thought could lead to people taking the decision to start HRT too lightly. Some of parts also seemed inaccurate based on her experience, though she didn’t specify what. She asked graham if she could show the draft to other detransitioned women for additional feedback. I never saw a copy of this draft, nor do I know of other detrans women gaining access to it aside from Devorah. graham also sent Devorah links to a study on the effects of testosterone in cis men with and without heart disease. She also emailed Devorah while she was attending the 2014 Gender Spectrum conference, which focused on providing information and support for families of trans children and youth, saying that she thought there needed to be more visibility and awareness of detransition and regret.
In July 2014, graham invited Devorah to a meeting she was holding for “providers who work with adolescents and young adults” where she could speak about detransitioning for around fifteen minutes to make sure providers knew this was a possible outcome. Clearly Devorah’s anti-trans views and near complete opposition to transition didn’t disqualify her from representing detransition experiences in graham’s eyes. Devorah told me and other detrans women that she said yes to attending this meeting but I don’t recall if she actually went, not do I recall Devorah telling me about attending.
In early October 2014, graham emailed Devorah asking her if she had started any support groups for detransitioned people, saying that clinicians she knew in the SF Bay area had contacted her about some of their patients detransitioning. She said that since people were starting to reach out they would need community support. She also told Devorah about her plans to add more information about detransition and regret to the Transgender Health Services website in the future. Devorah replied and updated graham on her more recent activities, telling her that she formed a small online support/”consciousness raising” group but that it was temporarily down due to a hacking attempt. She was however willing to meet-up with local detransitioned women and establish regular meetings if there was enough interest and she could find a meeting space.
She also told graham about how she and five other detrans/desisted women had attended Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and presented a workshop on detransition. I had been one of the other detrans women who attended and co-presented the workshop with Devorah, though she didn’t mention this to graham. Michfest was a long-running lesbian feminist cultural festival that was notorious for it’s “womyn-born womyn” policy that excluded trans women but allowed trans men and other female-assigned trans people to attend. Michfest included trans men partially with the hope that they would “reconnect with their womynhood”, so it’s not really a surprise that the festival welcomed our workshop. Devorah’s concept of detransition was clearly mixed up with anti-trans lesbian feminist politics. For her, myself and other members of our group, support was bound up with “consciousness raising”, meaning coming to a specific radical feminist interpretation of transition and detransition.
This clear political slant didn’t put off graham from putting detrans women in contact with Devorah. Not long after, Carey Callahan was put in touch with Devorah through her provider’s connection with graham. This lead to a small in-person support group for detrans women called Gender Identity Drop-outs, which was heavily influenced both by radical feminist consciousness raising and 12-step groups. I skyped into a few meetings. The group only lasted a brief time and stopped meeting soon after Carey moved out of the Bay Area. Carey never became a radical feminist but she was still part of our group. Her more liberal views and “normie” appearance would prove useful to us, since it could help us reach people who would be turned off by our more overt transphobia and political views.
A meeting with julie graham in-between rituals and retreats
In 2015, Devorah and I returned to 40th and final Michfest to present our workshop on detransition again, this time as an intensive. Just like the first time, other detrans women also attended and took part in the workshop, sharing their experiences. One of those women was Carey, that was the first time I met her in person. We also brought copies of Blood & Visions, a zine full of writing about detransition and “reconciling with being female” mostly by detrans radical feminists, much of it coming from our blogs.
Those of us who had attended and presented the last year reconnected with women we met the previous year. Among them were two Dianic witches/priestesses, Ruth Barrett and Falcon River, who had agreed to sell our zine for us at their craft booth. We had first encountered them at the 2014 Michfest at their booth in the craft area where they sold archery equipment and pagan handicrafts. Devorah had noticed a ceramic art piece that reminded her of a dream she had, asked about it and ended up meeting Ruth and Falcon and soon introduced them to the rest of us. Barrett is a high priestess who was trained in Dianic witchcraft by Z Budapest. Both Barrett and Budapest believe in an anti-trans bioessentialist interpretation of feminist neopaganism. Falcon River is an older butch lesbian and Ruth’s partner. When she heard our stories of transitioning and detransitioning, Falcon told us that for years she and her fellow witches had been performing magick rituals to call trans men and transmasculine people “home” to their Amazon sisters and now we had finally returned. Ruth and Falcon had been involved with Michfest for many years and helped perform the closing ceremony for the festival each year. When we met up with them in 2015 to hand over copies of the zine, they asked if we and the other detrans women attending would like to be involved with the closing ritual. We all agreed to take part.
Since this would be the final Michfest, this last closing ceremony was intended to both mark the end of the festival but also the hope that the lesbian feminist culture of festival would continue on in other forms. The closing ceremony was held at night. The detrans women and several younger women were given small cloth bags holding candles. We were instructed to wait for a specific signal and then go out into the audience to distribute our candles but keep one candle for ourselves. Then we returned to the front of the stage. Lisa Vogel, one of the original founders of the festival and the main person running it, came forward with a taper and lit it off a burning torch held by Falcon River, who was standing in front of the stage. We all approached Vogel one by one, lit our remaining candle off of hers and then returned to the audience to lit the candles we’d handed out. Ruth Barrett gave a speech about the importance of “female sovereign spaces”, a gong was rung forty times for the forty years Michfest had run and then everyone extinguished their candles at once. The detrans women taking part in this ritual had symbolically taken on the role of receiving and passing on the lesbian feminist culture that was supposed to be manifested in Michfest. Later, when Devorah started organizing gatherings for detrans and desisted women she modeled the gatherings off of Michfest.
The ritual had affected both me and Devorah deeply. When the candles were all extinguished, we hugged each other and sobbed while we heard women shouting, howling, crying, screaming out their emotions. Soon after I returned home, I had an experience where I felt like I was in communication with a death goddess who symbolized the way destruction and creation were part of the same process of change. I saw the end of Michfest as part of this cycle, its ending was part of how we were creating something new. I believed that I and other detransitioned radical feminists were on some kind of cosmic mission to restore female power through our activism. I emailed the other women who were part of the closing ceremony about my vision, those who replied affirmed it. Now I see how I was out of touch with reality, how taking part in the closing ceremony has brought me deeper into a form of radical feminist mysticism that distorted my perceptions and made me a threat to trans people.
Ruth and Falcon put on smaller “female-only” gatherings with their organization Guardians of the Grove, a branch of the Temple of Diana. They organized one called Artemis Camp in southern California in the spring of 2016 and invited us and other detrans women to attend. Artemis Camp promised to help attendees connect with their Amazon heritage with archery workshops, presentations on ancient female warriors, priestesses and goddesses, neopagan rituals, drum circles, tarot reading and the like. In addition to that, Ruth and Falcon offered to perform a “reclaiming female” ritual just for detransitioned women. Ruth had also started working on an anti-trans anthology Female Erasure, which Devorah, Max Robinson and myself ended up contributing essays to. She was in the final stages of editing it by the time Artemis Camp took place.
About eight detrans and desisted women ended up going, among them was Carey Callahan. She flew into the San Francisco Bay area a few days before Devorah and I were planning to drive down to the campground where Artemis Camp would be held. Before leaving to go hang out with witches and take part in rituals, Devorah and Carey met up with julie graham. Devorah had suggested the meeting to graham who then emailed Carey (addressing her as one of her pseudonyms Maria Catt) saying that she would be happy to meet with them. I was in town too but wasn’t interested in meeting graham or talking to her. In a follow-up email, graham said it might be possible for her medical director to also be present but I don’t believe he ended up attending the meeting.
I don’t remember too much about what Devorah and Carey told me about the meeting afterwards except that both were frustrated by how graham wasn’t sufficiently critical of transition overall, Devorah especially. I somehow doubt that they told graham where they would be going the next but Devorah had already to graham about going to Michfest, so who knows? The meeting between Carey and graham did end up being significant because it lead to both later presenting a mini-symposium on detransitioning at the first USPATH conference in 2017.
The next day, we met up with other women who be riding down with us to Artemis Camp and headed down in two cars. One of the women who rode with us was Max Dashu, a radical feminist historian who would be presenting workshops on ancient women warriors and rebels at Artemis Camp. We would be meeting several other detrans and desisted women once we got there, including Max Robinson and her partner Kitty.
Ruth met with us all a day before the ritual to work out the specifics. Both Ruth and Falcon would be present for the ritual itself. The idea was that she would take our lead to create something meaningful to us. Carey attended the planning meeting for the ritual and shared some ideas for how it should unfold but ended up deciding that she didn’t want to participate. Devorah tried to pressure her into participating anyways and Carey got so upset that she left the campground where Artemis Camp was for several hours. We weren’t sure if she would actually return but eventually she did. Later she would refer to Artemis Camp as the “cult camp”. Among the detrans women who did participate were Devorah, Max Robinson, and myself.
The ritual consisted of three different parts: first part was symbolically destroying our old supposedly false patriarchal trans self, then calling back and reclaiming our original authentic female self, and finally returning to the larger female community. The first two parts were held in a pool house and the last one was held outside in a clearing. We wrote down parts of ourselves that we wanted to leave behind and burned them in a fireplace. Ruth used a ritual knife to sever us from our past and a rattle to “break up energy”. Then Falcon blew a cow horn to call our “true female Selves” back to us. Some of us ended up speaking in tongues, making animalistic, even demonic noises. For the last section we left the pool house and walked into a gathering of women. The other Artemis Camp attendees were arranged in a circle, singing songs about how wonderful it is to be female. Some were drumming. We danced and sang with the other women. We’d cut off and otherwise rejected our past trans selves, reclaimed our “original female selves” and were now uniting with what was supposed to be our true community. I gave myself over to the moment and got lost in a sense of group ecstasy.
Just like after the closing ceremony at Michfest, I was deeply affected by going through the ritual at Artemis Camp. I continued to believe that I was part of something important and spiritual. My belief in radical feminism had become fanatical. I was on a mission to “save” as many transmasculine people from transitioning as possible. I saw them as “my people” who were deluded by patriarchy, dissociated from their true selves, who were being exploited by the medical industry and destroying themselves by transitioning. I thought I needed to do whatever I could to show them how much happier they would be if they accepted themselves as women and joined the radical feminist community. I was particularly concerned about converting people who I saw as self-hating lesbians and bringing them “home” to lesbian separatist culture.
Now I can see how those rituals warped my sense of reality, inflated my ego, made me feel entitled to deceive, manipulate and otherwise influence people “for their own good” while failing to actually help with my dysphoria, heal my trauma or help me find genuine self-love and acceptance. I still struggled with self-hatred, depression, gender dysphoria and unresolved trauma. The feelings of tapping into spiritual energy and power, of healing, reaching deeper insights, all that was illusionary. I lost touch with reality and my distorted views made me more dangerous to trans people than ever before.
“Decidedly un-radical”: laundering anti-trans radical feminist politics into USPATH
By 2017, Carey had returned to school and was training to become a therapist. She emailed me that January, telling me that she would be attending the first USPATH conference to be part of a panel called Exploring Core Competencies for Detransition Mental Heath Care along with two detrans men Elan Lepovic, who used to blog as Third Way Trans, and Joel Nowak, who had a blog called Retransition. She told me that they wanted to show short videos of detransitioned people at the beginning of their presentation on why we detransitioned or “[w]hat did you need from therapists during either transition or detransition?” and asked me if I’d be interested in making one.
I told her would and made a video talking about how I believed I’d transitioned due to trauma and internalized misogyny. Two other detrans women also made videos for Carey, Max Robinson and Cari Stella, a younger woman who blogged as guideonragingstars on tumblr and became well known for a survey she conducted for detrans and desisted women, receiving most of her answers from the detransitioned radical feminist community on tumblr. All who made videos were anti-trans radical feminists and two of us had recently taken part in neo-pagan rituals at Artemis Camp to “heal” from our past transitions. Both Cari and Max had contributed posts to the anti-trans parent website 4thWaveNow and Cari had also written a post for Youth Trans Critical Professionals, an anti-trans blog that was later revealed to be the work of conversion therapist Lisa Marchiano.
Carey, Nowak, and Lepovic presented their panel with julie graham acting as a moderator. As she had long talked of doing, now graham had finally managed to get some detransitioned people to present about their experiences in front of medical providers and therapists working in trans healthcare. Not long afterwards, Carey emailed me, Max, Cari and a few other detrans women she knew to tell us about how it went. She said her panel had gone well but “the rest of the presentations were so over the top unnerving and scary”. She had attended USPATH with Lisa Marchiano and Lisa Littman and told us that they were in contact with reporters to see if they could call attention to those other presentations. By the end of February that year, 4thWaveNow started publishing a series of posts about the USPATH conference focusing on presentations on pediatric transition, using photos and recordings from someone who had attended in person. Did Marchiano and/or Littman turn to 4thWave after failing to interest journalists in the conference? Marchiano had previously connected with Carey and her co-panelist Elan Lepovic. She had thanked them for their contributions to an article she wrote for 4thWaveNow. Under her pseudonym Maria Catt, Carey had contributed a post to Marchiano’s Youth Trans Critical Professionals blog. Lepovic also allowed one of his Third Way Trans blog posts to be shared on Youth Trans Critical Professionals.
Carey shared the slides that went along with the panel and told us that her presentation had focused on detransition and grief, using the Kubler-Ross model of mourning. She warned us that her slides were “decidedly un-radical” because she was there to “talk as a therapist to therapists”. Marchiano had encouraged her to turn her presentation into an article.
She thanked us again for sharing our videos, praising them for being “radical” and telling us that it was very important for the medical professionals at USPATH to see our faces and gender nonconforming presentations, especially since she presented more conventionally feminine. She wanted people in trans healthcare to know that many detransitioned women don’t start presenting more feminine after detransitioning. She also mentioned a video by a detransitioned man which she said covered a lot of the same ground our videos did and also talked a bit about “how gender ideology was harmful to women”.
She expressed skepticism about being about to work with many of the people she met at USPATH because she thought a lot of them were “seriously such crazies” and the providers with the most power were those who held views she was opposed to, specifically Dan Karasic, Joanna Olsen-Kennedy and Jenn Burleton. Following Carey’s presentation, Olsen-Kennedy had reached out to her on Facebook because she was interested in detransitioned people’s perspectives. Carey was uncomfortable talking to her and passed her off to another of the presenters, Joel Nowak. Carey had been very disturbed by Olson-Kennedy’s presentation at USPATH and believed that she was “doing evil shit to kids”. She didn’t want to talk to Olson-Kennedy because she saw pediatric transition as a form of child abuse.
At war with “a deep evil”
A couple of days later, Carey emailed me, Devorah and two other detrans/desisted women to express how freaked out she still felt after attending USPATH. She told us that she hadn’t felt right since she attended. She told us that USPATH had like “a deep evil”, that she had felt a “cold, glib, weirdly disconnected, fancy energy” while attending. She was especially upset over Joanna Olson-Kennedy talking about putting an 11 year-old trans child on puberty-blockers. She referred to this child as a “girl” and how she had a feeling she would meet this child someday and they would be “in bad shape”. She was shaken up from seeing people she used to work with at Lyon-Martin, including her old bosses and a co-worker who’d mistreated her. She said that she felt “like a big spiritual shift is happening, and it’s not like a feel good spiritual shift” and how she was worried about “being co-opted”. It creeped her out how friendly people at USPATH were to her and the other detransitioned panelists, telling them what important work they were doing and thanking them for sharing their experiences. These responses were coming from providers like Olson-Kennedy and Dan Karasic, who Carey believed were “fucked up people”. She was also disturbed by a presentation julie graham gave on phalloplasty after the detransition panel. Carey closed her email with questions she’d been asking herself since attending USPATH:
“I just keep coming back to why? Why would so many people participate in this? Why would this happen? Why would we have to witness this when it’s so much bigger than us and out of our control? Like, what is the spiritual logic behind this?”
Carey had signed her email “your crazy friend” and expressed concerns that what she was thinking and feeling was “crazy” but the detrans women who responded assured her that what she said made sense. One said that it made sense to be upset because we were witnessing “human experimentation on children, homosexuals, and trauma survirors [sic].” Another said she could “relate a lot to sensing a spiritual backdrop to all of this. Like a spiritual war in a way” and said she was sending Carey “woo/light/supportive energy”.
I told Carey that I thought she was right that “this shit is evil” and that “what’s happening now is an atrocity” and part of a long history of medical abuse. I talked about how I believed medical transition was similar to how in the past some people diagnosed with mental illnesses had been subjected to “treatments” that lead to brain damage. I said I appreciated that she was able to go to USPATH and give her presentation and told her I also felt there was “a very spiritual component” to the work we were doing. I was also trying to “piece together what exactly is wrong with these doctors who are so happy to transition people”. I believed that “lot of them know they’re transitioning traumatized people and people reacting to oppression and they’ve known this for decades”. I saw medical transition as both “evil” and a “sneaky way of selling conformity as freedom and self-expression”.
Devorah also said she didn’t see anything crazy about what Carey had written and compared USPATH to a conference she’d attended for surgeons who operated on intersex children when she had been involved in intersex activism. She said she’d felt a similar sense of evil at that conference that Carey had sensed at USPATH. She then talked about pediatric transition as a form of child abuse, calling doctors like Olson-Kennedy who worked with trans youth “perpetrators” and claiming that they were going after kids who had already been “victimized” and “groomed”. Devorah believed that a lot of gender dysphoria was caused by child abuse, especially child sexual abuse and incest, that this almost always the case when a child came out as trans. She believed the 11 year-old trans child Carey had referred to had first been abused by their family and was now being preyed on by doctors like Olson-Kennedy. She referred to doctors and surgeons working in trans healthcare as “butchers” and again compared them to surgeons who non-consensually operated on intersex children, claiming that medical professionals were “expanding the criteria for who gets abused beyond physical differences to behavioral ones”.
All of us reinforced Carey’s view that USPATH and the medical professionals attending it were evil and most of us also stated that we felt there was a spiritual conflict taking place. All the detrans women Carey emailed had attended Michfest, all but one had participated in the closing ceremony at the last Michfest, and two of us, Devorah and myself, had also taken part in the “reclaiming female” ritual at Artemis Camp. We were influenced by radical feminist neopaganism, believed in magick and some of us believed that we were carrying out the will of goddesses, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that we sincerely believed that we on a spiritual mission to end medical transition. Carey was a liberal Catholic who was sympathetic to our feminist neopaganism and had felt comfortable participating in the closing ceremony at Michfest, so while she didn’t have the exact same views we did, they still resonated with her.
We also reinforced her belief that there wasn’t anything productive to be gained from working with providers who expressed interest in learning from detransitioned people, that this was part of a plot to “co-opt” us instead of working for better healthcare for people who detransition. We told her no matter how friendly they appeared they were actually child abusers preforming medical atrocities. We reflected her paranoia back with more paranoia and conspiracy theories. We clearly weren’t acting in good faith towards WPATH, we were infiltrating them for the purpose of finding ways to influence them and ultimately disrupt their operations, not to create better understanding of detransition and better healthcare for detransitioned people. Not only were we finding ways to introduce detrans radical feminist ideology to providers at USPATH through our videos, we were getting in the way of actually creating more resources for people who detransition.
Over the years, many trans people have raised legitimate criticisms of WPATH for how they treat the trans people they’re supposed to be helping. That same year at the first USPATH, a group of activists lead by trans women of color protested Ken Zucker being given a chance to present. Zucker had spent decades practicing conversion therapy on trans youth and researching ways to encourage them to desist but was still welcome among many cis medical professionals working in trans healthcare. Many have documented his harmful theories and practices. One of the protesters Luna Salemme said “it would be a mistake to see Kenneth Zucker’s presence within this year’s WPATH conference as exceptional within the history of trans healthcare in the United States” and that he was just one example “in a long history of the field’s commitment to holding alleged ‘expertise’ of openly transphobic clinicians and researchers above the knowledge and expertise that trans people hold about their own bodies and needs.” When I actually starting studying the history of trans healthcare, reading what doctors and therapists had written over the decades, I came to the same conclusion that trans critics and activists like Salemme had come to. The history of trans healthcare is full of attempts to limit or eliminate trans people, not encourage us to transition and it took decades to push back on conversion therapists like Zucker, who was still treated as a legitimate authority by WPATH in 2017.
While I’m sure there are reasonable criticisms to be made by both trans and detrans people about how WPATH as an organization handles our healthcare, viewing WPATH as being on the side of cosmic evil in a larger spiritual war is not one of them. I am disturbed now by how I and other detrans radical feminists were trying to impose our ideology on trans people and influence providers at USPATH without being transparent about our beliefs or intentions. We were a religious/political cult trying to control trans people and their healthcare “for their own good” while accusing medical professionals of being patronizing and abusive. We had such a self-absorbed “persecuted victim” mentality, an “us against the world” framework by that point that we couldn’t see how we were harming others. We were so convinced of our own righteousness. I’m disturbed by how out of touch with reality we were by that point and how dangerous and destructive that made us. If our real aim was to improve life for detransitioned people instead of pushing radical feminism we would’ve made different choices. We had a chance to inform medical providers in one of most powerful organizations working in trans healthcare about detransition and what would lead to better healthcare and instead we used that to push our harmful ideology. I wish we had been grounded in reality instead of lost in paranoid and egotistical delusions about spiritual warfare.
Conclusion
In the four years between when graham first made contact with me and Devorah in 2013 and when graham organized the detransition panel at USPATH in 2017 where Carey showed videos of myself and two other detrans radical feminists, detrans radical feminists had grown increasingly extreme in our views and more out of touch with reality. Many of us had been strongly influenced by neopagan anti-trans feminism, to the point where we believed that USPATH was a manifestation of evil spiritual forces that we were in battle with. Looking back, it greatly disturbs me how warped and paranoid my perceptions were and how much harm I did to other trans and detransitioned people. My views and actions were already harmful in 2013 but I became even more dangerous over time as I got deeper into anti-trans feminism.
In the end, I believe that members of my old detrans radical feminist group got more from working with graham than she got from working with us. She wanted more detransitioned people to speak with clinicians about our experiences in order to create better healthcare for people who detransition and develop assessments that could supposedly weed out people who wouldn’t benefit from medical transition. The detrans radical feminists she was working with were actually using her with the long term goal of ending medical transition, we saw her as a way to inject our ideology into trans healthcare and start normalizing conversion practices as a “treatment” for gender dysphoria. Most of us didn’t believe you could reliably predict who would detransition or prevent detransition with better assessment because we believed all trans people could detransition or desist and that the only thing that separated us from other trans people was our “raised consciousness”. Indeed, we managed to recruit many people whose gender dysphoria was like that of “true transsexuals” or others judged to be good candidates for medical transition. We weren’t even willing to talk or work with many influential medical professionals working in trans healthcare because we believed that they were evil. We saw them as our spiritual adversaries, not people we could educate about our experiences or work with to create more resources and better healthcare for detransitioned people. We discouraged Carey Callahan from working with medical professionals who wanted to learn more about detransition. If we were simply a group of detransitioned people working for better healthcare and more resources, I can’t imagine that we’d have passed up the opportunity to educate providers with that much influence and reach. That could’ve been a great chance to actually help detransitioned people get more support but instead members of an anti-trans political/spiritual cult used the detransition panel at the 2017 USPATH conference to covertly present their theories to members of WPATH.
I don’t believe I or other members of my old group would’ve been able to manipulate julie graham if she didn’t already believe in a more moderate version of what we believed in. She believed in a combination of more conservative sexological views of transness, such as transsexuality being rare and transition only desirable for gender dysphoric people who couldn’t find other ways to cope, mixed up with radical feminist views like that “young women” were transitioning due to internalized misogyny. She couldn’t seem to consider that more people were coming out as trans men or transmasculine because of social factors like less societal transphobia, more information about trans people and transition being available, a greater range of trans expression being acceptable both in the trans community and among medical professionals and so on. Instead she reacted with fear and paternalism. Surely there couldn’t be this many transmasculine people in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place where all kinds of queer and trans people have been moving to for decades because of its reputation for thriving queer and trans communities. Why would there be more trans men congregating in an area where FtM International was founded, where some of the first visible trans male/transmasculine subcultures started? No, it must be YouTube and peer pressure tricking “young women” into transitioning, not young trans men and transmasculine people moving to a city where they could have an easier time transitioning and finding acceptance.
While she referred to trans people working for more informed consent as “activists” who were politicizing healthcare, she didn’t appear to be concerned about how Devorah and other members of my old group were politicizing transition and detransition. graham made a post on her own blog called Information online about regret, detransition, retransition, etc. where she listed blogs by several detransitioned radical feminists including myself, Devorah and 23xx. She described Devorah’s blog as “[v]ery political” with “[l]ots of good information about the experience of detransitioning, something we really need to provide to people” and also noted the 23xx viewed dysphoria through a specific political lens. According to graham, when trans people fought for more autonomy and control over their own healthcare this led to “politically driven” healthcare but she didn’t express similar concerns about our political views. Apparently she wasn’t worried that our political opposition to medical transition could have a negative impact on trans healthcare or who had access to it.
It’s possible our politics even made us more attractive to work with. After all, she emailed me after I wrote a post talking about how I believed social pressure had lead me to transition. We didn’t go looking for her, she came looking for us and kept talking to us even after we’d made our views clear either through direct communication or writing on our blogs. Even though she said she’d seen a worrying number of people detransition, apparently none of them wanted or were in a position to work with her. Why couldn’t she find detransitioned people to share their experiences with other medical provider until she found us? Why did she have to turn to detrans TERF tumblr to find the detransitioned people she was looking for?
I find it troubling now that someone with her views held an influential position in the San Francisco Health Department working in trans healthcare, especially since a lot of her choices impacted poorer and less privileged trans people most of all, those who couldn’t pay out of pocket for their transitions but had to turn to social welfare programs instead. She was willing to work with Devorah even after Devorah openly expressed her opposition to medical transition, her belief in the transmisogynistic pseudo-disorder autogynephilia and that she knew “true transsexuals” who detransitioned. Devorah spoke to graham more about trans men and transmasculine people overall but the comments she did make about trans women should’ve been a huge red flag. Did graham also believe some trans women transitioned due to a sexual fetish or were more likely to have “violent tendencies” and if she didn’t why was she willing to work with someone who did? graham never seemed to question why Devorah was so willing to work with her even though Devorah made it clear that she didn’t think anyone really benefited from medical transition. Why would someone who believed “true transsexuals” detransitioned be helpful in developing assessments that could weed out bad candidates for medical transition? Why would someone who believed all trans people were suffering from internalized sexism, trauma or a sexual fetish be someone to consult when developing better informed consent or support for detransitioned people? How could someone who clearly mixed up her views of transition and detransition with radical feminist politics be trusted to develop a support group for detransitioned women that wouldn’t push her politics onto vulnerable people looking for help?
If julie graham wasn’t somewhat sympathetic to radical feminist views on trans people and transitioning, I doubt she would’ve seen Devorah’s views as reasonable or been willing to work with her. This is a pattern among transphobes and anti-trans activists, the ones with more extreme views can manipulate people with more “moderate” transphobic views to get what they want. graham’s own biases made her an easy mark for more extreme TERFs. We used her to extend our reach into places we otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. We used graham to commit acts of harm that she wouldn’t have done by herself, so we were the more harmful actors in the end. An ex-trans political cult pushing reactionary feminist ideology and conversion practices is more harmful than a paternalistic gatekeeping gender therapist because the former is working to eliminate trans people and transitioning while the later wants to restrict transition and reduce the number of trans people. Ultimately though, the two groups complement each other more than they conflict. It’s important to understand how gatekeeping medical professionals and other “moderate” transphobes can enable and empower trans eliminationists in order to resist the harms both groups pose to trans people.
In July 2023, some members of my old detrans radical feminist group formed a new project called Are You Asking Why? which focused initially on discouraging anti-trans feminists from working with conservative Christians and other right-wing groups. Unlike some TERF groups like WoLF or WDI-USA, my old group had always opposed alliances with the Right. More recently, Are You Asking Why?, submitted testimony against a bill banning pediatric transitioning in Ohio, HB 68, both as a collective and as individual members. Max Robinson submitted the collective statement and also submitted an individual testimony as well. Detrans radical feminists like Max haven’t changed their opposition to transition but they oppose banning it legally, instead advocating for other ways to restrict or replace medical transition with “alternative treatments”. Carey Callahan also testified against HB 68 and said she contacted dozens of detransitioned people to likewise give opposing testimony. Given her past history working with Max Robinson and other members of the Are You Asking Why? collective, who ended up providing the bulk of detrans opposition testimony, it would be safe to assume that they were the dozens of detransitioners she said she contacted. Once again, her more liberal presentation helped give detrans radical feminists cover to influence trans healthcare. There was much press about how many detransitioned people testified against HB 68 and not much about the specifics of their testimony which made their continued opposition to medical transition clear. Governor DeWine ended up vetoing HB 68 but imposing draconian restrictions that effectively ban transition for both youth and adults. While it’s hard to say for certain how much of an impact Are You Asking Why?’s testimony had on DeWine’s decision, he could certainly point to it to justify his actions. In any case it would be unwise to allow Are You Asking Why? to use this an opportunity to launder their politics and extend their influence.
Bad actors who seek to infiltrate, disrupt and ultimately destroy trans healthcare from the inside out need to be exposed and stopped from doing harm. I wrote this account with the intention of making it harder for my old group to continue to influence trans healthcare and raise awareness about such groups and the dangers they pose. I can’t change the past but I can work to undo my harmful actions. In order to stop such groups we also need to address the larger social factors that make it easier for such groups to have an impact such as transphobic beliefs and biases among medical professionals working in trans healthcare.
For ten years now, detrans radical feminists and their allies have been working to disrupt trans healthcare, often using deception to extend their reach. Don’t be fooled, they aren’t our allies, they’re not working for better healthcare or resources for detransitioned people. They’re a dangerous political cult promoting anti-trans conversion practices. They’ve already done enough damage, we can’t let them get away with anymore.