The Detransition Diaries tells difficult stories that demand answers, action

Early twentieth-century Danish painter Einar Wegener enjoyed dressing in women’s clothes—a habit he developed when he would don the apparel of his wife, a fellow artist, and model for her. In time, encouraged by his wife, he assumed a female identity, changing his name to Lili Elbe. Wegener (or “Elbe”) became the first man to undergo what is now called “sex-reassignment surgery”, having four separate operations. In 1931, he died of an infection from a failed uterine transplant.

Almost one-hundred years removed from Wegener’s death, the story of “transitioners” remains strikingly similar, as Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell demonstrate in their new book The Detransition Diaries, which builds upon Lahl’s 2021 documentary film Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender? The book is an excellent introduction to the explosive popularity of transgenderism, with chapters explaining the gender-affirmation movement, its connection to other historical medical abuses, and why adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to messages encouraging transitioning. Most arresting (and powerful) are the stories of seven individuals who all realized that their attempt to transition was gravely mistaken.

A theme consistent across the stories in The Detransition Diaries is the irresistible influence of social media on those already struggling with loneliness, self-confidence, health issues, or disabilities. Helena, who lost her primary caretaker when she was very young, was told on websites such as Tumbler that if she didn’t fit it, it was a sign she was trans. Chloe, diagnosed with ADHD and autism, at the age of eleven began spending a lot of time on Instagram and Tumbler, where she compulsively consumed content on transgenderism. Torren, who had a difficult relationship with his father, was fascinated by stories on Reddit that “portrayed transitioning as a solution to problems like his.” As a teenager, Rachel, who grew up in an abusive home, discovered transgender ideology through online videos, Reddit discussions, and private chats.

Once social media opened the door, these individuals found little, if any, resistance from the medical practitioners supposedly serving as gatekeepers. An hour-long meeting with a social worker and nurse practitioner at her first appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic resulted in Helena being prescribed 100 mg of testosterone per week. The hormones caused dramatic emotional side effects, and self-harm landed her in the emergency room. “The entire time she was on testosterone, none of the professionals caring for her connected any of the symptoms she was experiencing to the hormone treatment.” After a few consultations, Grace received the green light from her therapist when she told her that she wanted “top surgery” because being a woman was not working for her. Nick’s therapist urged him to address his desire to be a woman “head-on” by taking estrogen and testosterone blockers. At her third appointment with a therapist, that medical professional encouraged Cat to medically transition with testosterone.

And yet the side effects of these treatments were legion. After four months of treatment, Cat developed strange cysts on her lower abdomen, followed by pain in her right side, nausea, palpitations, and permanent damage to her voice. Chloe’s ribs remain deformed from wearing a chest binder, while the double mastectomy she endured means that she will never be able to produce breast milk. Taking estrogen worsened Torren’s mental and physical health, aggravating his depression and anxiety to such a degree that it permanently affected his ability to process information. When Rachel went on testosterone, her kidney and liver began to fail, she became jaundiced, started urinating and vomiting blood, had three mini-strokes, developed endometriosis, and eventually vaginal atrophy.

Yet deciding to detransition in light of these side-effects brought a new set of complications: vitriolic reactions from the trans community. Nick removed himself from many social media groups, “having witnessed how aggressive people were toward those who disagreed with them.” When Chloe created a Twitter account to speak out on transgender issues, she endured harassment, and has lost many friends. Rachel has been labeled by critics as “transphobic” for publicly talking about her transition experience to health professionals. “There is so much pressure from the [trans] community and so much encouragement to step into the spotlight to say that this [transitioning] is the best thing you’ve ever done,” she explains.

What these stories demonstrate is that while transitioning is presented as a panacea for all manner of problems, it often compounds them, while creating new ones, as the aforementioned side-effects show. Lahl and Fell write:

Transitioning was not turning out to be what she [Helen] had expected. She had thought she was going to blossom and finally become her authentic self. But instead, she had become profoundly dysfunctional.

Grace worries that young people are being told that “transitioning is the answer to problems that would actually be better solved in another way.” Torren, in turn, now believes that his gender dysphoria “was not the cause of his mental health struggles, but a symptom of them.”

What can be done in the face of this trans epidemic, claiming as many as five percent of American youth?

First and foremost is to protect vulnerable, impressionable kids from this messaging. Helena argues that teenagers do not have the foresight and maturity to realistically understand decisions that often have permanent consequences. Chloe urges parents to “keep your kids off social media, keep them off technology for as long as you can, and once they are old enough to use it, keep track of what they’re doing and how much time they spend [on it].” Citing a 2021 study, a 2022 Heritage report noted that, “research shows that the majority of those who transition were persuaded to do so online through social media, blogs, and YouTube.”

There is also a need for increased research on the long-term effects of transitioning. Cat, for example, “found that there actually isn’t much quality evidence supporting medical transition as the best treatment for gender dysphoria,” and practically no research on detransitioning. Even Dr. Michael Irwig, director of transgender medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told the Associated Press that the few studies that do exist on detransitioning have too many limitations or weaknesses to draw firm conclusions. Grace opines that the long-term health problems caused by transition surgery and hormones are in need of further study.

That aligns with a 2022 Reuters report, which found that “hard evidence on long-term outcomes for the rising numbers of people who received gender treatment as minors is very weak.” Such sentiments align even with the opinions of pro-trans academics, such as Dr Kinnon MacKinnon, a transgender assistant professor of social work at York University, whose studies revealed that a third of respondents regret their decision to transition from the gender they were assigned at birth.

Grace also believes that there is a demonstrable deficit in clinician competency regarding the handling of gender dysphoria, given the trigger-happy tendency to encourage transitioning as a solution to mental health problems. MacKinnon told Reuters that a sociological study of those who transitioned found many respondents believed “their doctors were ill-equipped to help them with the process.” Lahl and Fell observe that themes of untreated mental health issues and related trauma, peer or social contagion, and a fear of being authentically female stemming from misogynist tendencies in our culture (ironically often coming from feminists)—seem to explain why these trends are higher among adolescent girls. More studies exploring this phenomenon are required.

Further journalistic work must be done to expose the influence of advocacy groups and pharmaceutical and biotech firms to push the “transition option.” Once children are medicalized, they are medicalized for life, presenting quite an incentive to encourage transitioning early. Write Lahl and Fell:

It would be naive to think that pharmaceutical firms, the fertility industry, and healthcare providers have not been using ‘gender-affirming care’ to make a profit from the disoriented minds of young people with gender dysphoria.

An app developer for a pro-trans app told Forbes in 2020 that the average cost of transition was $150,000 per person. “Multiply that by an estimated population of 1.4 million transgender people, we’re taking about a market in excess of $200B… That’s larger than the entire film industry,” she claimed. The Human Rights Campaign’s Healthcare Equality Index, for example, is bankrolled by Pfizer, and pushes transgender ideology on more than 2,000 hospitals nationwide. AbbVie, manufacturer of controversial hormone blocker Lupron, made $726 million on the drug alone in 2018.

Finally, detransitioners’ stories need to be told. “This is a population with real needs, and the voices of the detransitioners can no longer be denied or ignored,” write Lahl and Fell. As the outcry (and censorship) from establishment elites over the 2020 publishing of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage proves, there is a powerful lobby who aim to vilify, antagonize, and suppress any information that might undermine the narrative that transitioning is an objective good, even for adolescents.

The Detransition Diaries is thus a necessary contribution to the growing chorus of concern over what has truly become a national health crisis.