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Can You Hear Us

I Was Your Client, Not Your Debate Opponent

By Anonymous

Content notes: discussion of conversion practices targeting trans youth and young adults, childhood sexual abuse, transphobia, gaslighting and manipulation.

The following is an anonymous submission to our Can You Hear Us? project by a former client of James Cantor, the American-Canadian sexologist who has become a prolific anti-trans “expert” in American courts. We offer this story to give people an idea of what it’s really like to experience the “care” of anti-trans clinicians who are currently trying to oppose affirmation models of care.

If you need supports related to conversion practices, you can find information at Born Perfect (1-800-528-6257 (US)). Additional supports for trans and gender diverse people who are distressed or in crisis can be found at the Trevor Project (youth and young adults up to age 24, (866) 488-7386 (US)) or Trans LifeLine (adults, available in English and español, (877) 565-8860 (US) or (877) 330-6366 (CA)).

By the time I decided to go to gender exploratory therapy, I had been questioning my gender for many years. My fear, shame, and confusion had become unbearable after such a long time and I expressed to my parents that I would like professional help. They chose James Cantor as my therapist and I was grateful. I went willingly. I hoped that he would help me understand my own gender and decide whether transitioning was right for me.

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You Can’t Live Off Other People’s Good Intentions Alone

​By: Eli K., she’s in detransition

After a long and complicated gender journey, Eli started a blog on her detransition experiences in early 2020. Raising her voice as a counternarrative to the anti-trans rhetoric surrounding detransition stories, her criticism is aimed at the pathologization of transition-related healthcare needs as well as the legal situation of transgender people in Germany, where she resides. You can find her on Twitter (@shesindetrans) and Instagram (@eli_kaputniza).

What it actually was that pushed me over the edge and made me think I might go without testosterone “for a while”, “just to try”, I can’t say. The questions would just pop up in my head sometimes – eventually, I was even thinking them while being sober.

“What if? What could go wrong?”

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Detrans Broken Arm Syndrome

I saw the ophthalmologist yesterday.

This is a point of struggle for me. My relationship with eye doctors, like all doctors, is a bit precarious. That’s always the case when you’re disabled or trans but especially when you are both. Even more so if you’re both, have a tendency to do obnoxious amounts of background research, and pair that all with self-advocacy. Many times, doctors don’t know what to do with you if you’re disabled or trans, and they really don’t know what to do if you’re the uppity one. Of which I can be.

Doctors and I have been doing The Dance since I was a child. Something goes wrong, (maybe) try to find out what it is, can’t or it seems like too much trouble, blow it off. I had finally started making some headway on this, securing real answers and successful treatments (of which T was one), until my vision loss struck. Then the cycle continued, particularly since said vision loss seemed to correlate with stopping T in the spring to early summer of 2019.

Unfortunately, stopping T isn’t the only thing it correlated with. It also happened in the thick of when I was first trying to build bridges with the detransitioned community. I wanted to better understand what their medical needs were, learn how to be more supportive, and mutually create a better system where the material needs of both of our communities were getting met.

It didn’t go well.

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Detransition Awareness Day: Inconvenient Truths and Community Building

Apparently today, March 12th is Detransition Awareness Day. Today is supposed to be a day for informing people about detransitioning in the name of creating more and better resources. Well then, here are some things I want people to be aware of concerning resources for people who detransition and why they’re in the state that they are today.

As someone who played an important role in creating one of the first communities and support networks for detransitioned women, who worked in that community for close to seven years, I have a lot of regrets now. I and others in that community made many bad, misguided choices that lead to the formation of a detrans community that is better at radicalizing people into transphobic ideology than it is with helping people access the resources they need to live a good life. We created a community that often encouraged people to use their trauma to attack the trans community and trans healthcare rather than helping people heal and get on with their lives.Read More »Detransition Awareness Day: Inconvenient Truths and Community Building