“A spiritual war in a way”: How Detrans Radical Feminists Influenced WPATH
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.
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