On Detransition
November 6, 2012 at 7:05 pm Natalie Reed
http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/11/06/on-detransition/Note: This post owes a great deal to the contributions and input of a friend who had lived through relevant experiences. While they wish to remain anonymous, I want to express gratitude for their help and lend credit where credit is due.
Last week a story broke in the British press concerning a young trans woman, Ria Cooper, who at 17 had been the youngest patient to ever receive hormone treatment for gender transition under the NHS. Ria was now considering "detransition", that is, the choice to eschew her scheduled lower surgery, discontinue the use of exogenous hormones and anti-androgens, and return to living and presenting as male, within general cultural concepts of male-ness.
Obviously the often notoriously vicious and transphobic mainstream British press seized on the story, providing as it did an apparent "confirmation" of the initial fears and doubts that the cis public had expressed when Cooper first sought treatment: their outrage at the idea of "kids being given sex changes!", the idea that at 17 she was "too young" to make such a decision, the distrust of the NHS funding gender transition at all, let alone for "unconventional" patients like trans youth, the idea that it was a frivolous and risky expense of the NHS' public funding, and the general "gatekeeping" mentality: cissexist or cis-centric biases that lead to the idea that medical gender transition is something that demands an especially extraordinary amount of caution, evidence that the patient is "sure" and capable of being "sure", and evidence that the patient is "really" trans. Cooper's (immediately publicized) choice to detransition offered an almost irresistible narrative for everybody in Britain who had expressed outrage, disgust, unease or even mild suspicion that it was a "bad idea" to "allow" her to be treated. It offered them all a chance to feel smug, collectively shrug their shoulders and sigh "I told you so".
Naturally, this was how the story was spun.
