Transition, detransition and trauma
Reflections on the trauma experienced by parents of trans-identified children and detransitioners, inspired by the recent Genspect conference
In this issue I’m going to share some reflections inspired by attending the Genspect conference in Killarney (I shared my speaking notes for the keynote last week). These concern trauma, as experienced by parents convinced that their children are making a terrible mistake by transitioning, and by detransitioners, who come to that realisation themselves.
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I’d estimate that maybe half the delegates were parents of trans-identified children. Their situation is nightmarish. Not only are they watching their children caught up in something they think is seriously harmful, and not only can they do nothing to convince their children of this, but these parents are opposed, indeed betrayed, by the very people and institutions they naturally turn to for help and support. Schools, health-care systems, charities, the media: all are pushing the trans narrative. A parent who dissents will be treated with, at the minimum, contempt. In some jurisdictions they risk losing custody.
It’s impossible to convey the horror these people experience. It truly feels like their child has fallen into the Upside Down, no one believes them, and in many cases everyone around them is working to keep the child there. I am aware that some of my readers are likely to be living with this situation, and all I can do is offer unavailing sympathy. I spoke to several of these parents during the conference one-on-one. The code of omertà in the media and in academic research means they each feel individually trapped, alone—and yet their stories were so similar.
They spoke of sons and daughters who discovered the idea of identifying as trans online, from peers in school or, increasingly, in school lessons and LGBT clubs. Most had managed to keep their children from any irreversible steps until the age of 18—I didn’t meet anyone whose child had attended a paediatric gender clinic. But once these young people reached 18 there was no longer anything their parents could do. And getting hormones and referrals for surgery is so easy now.
At this stage, the parents had to retreat from trying to lead their children away from a harmful belief system to trying to maintain even the barest contact with them. And this is incredibly difficult. Their children threaten to cut off any friends or family who express the slightest scepticism or hesitancy about their trans identification: refusing to use the new name and pronouns, for example. They are so isolated. One attendee at Genspect told me that her family and friends have been totally unsupportive, and she has no one at all to talk to. She was attending largely out of desperation to be with other people who understood what she was going through.
Some of these children had been, by their parents’ description, having a tough time in adolescence. But in other cases, the trans ideation derailed a normal, happy child and turned him or her into someone the parents barely recognised: angry, self-obsessed and sad. The trans social contagion now seems to have spread well beyond the most susceptible groups, namely gay and proto-gay kids suffering from internalised homophobia, kids on the autistic spectrum, and kids with mental-health comorbidities such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders. The idea that declaring a trans identity allows you to reinvent yourself and to leave behind the mundane and to craft a unique persona has become so ubiquitous that happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids in loving families are now doing it too.
The only phrase I can use for what some of these parents are experiencing at their children’s hands is emotional abuse. Their children blackmail them, saying, in effect: accept without question everything I say about myself and act delighted—or lose me forever, either because I will never speak to you again or because I’ll kill myself and you’ll know it was your fault. And they are being gaslit on a grand scale. An idea that is raging through society is taking away their children, casually dismissing, even mocking, their grief and leaving them to blame themselves. They have lost all trust in other people and institutions, and I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to describe them as traumatised.
The other group at Genspect who were quite clearly trauma victims were the detransitioners, of whom about a dozen were in attendance.
When I was writing my book I got some invaluable advice on how to interview detransitioners from Jungian therapist Lisa Marchiano. She told me that when she was training to be a therapist herself, her mentor was someone who had worked with Vietnam veterans. And he taught her an important lesson: never let a traumatised person tell you their full story at the first session.
At the heart of trauma is shame, Lisa said: a traumatised person feels like damaged goods, like they deserved the terrible thing that happened to them and that they are utterly unlovable. And if you let them tell you “the thing”—the terrible, worst event of their lives, the secret at the heart of their trauma—in the first session, they will leave and never come back.
She drew an analogy with a Vietnam vet getting into the back of a taxi to the airport on a dark night who takes the opportunity to unburden himself of the horrors he’s seen—the friends lost and the survivor’s guilt—to someone he knows he will never meet again. What her mentor taught her, she told me, was to keep deflecting away from “the thing” in the first meetings; to say, first let’s talk about your childhood, your parents, school, hobbies—anything to enable the two of you to build trust before you start talking about the trauma and start to help them, rather than becoming a disposable receptacle for the shame.
And all of this applies to detransitioners, because they are traumatised people—victims of medical malpractice. Lisa said to me she thinks they may be the most traumatised people she has ever come across (and remember that her comparison group includes Vietnam vets…). They have been through a cult-like experience, and they not only sought it out but in many cases fought the people who love and know them best to do so. Their anger, guilt and shame are compounded by the physical trauma of voluntarily sacrificing healthy body parts.
I suppose if you’re a journalist who wants to talk just once to a traumatised person and then quote them, you mightn’t need, as such, to worry that they won’t speak to you a second time. But if you do need to, even just to check facts or quotes, you run the risk of being ghosted if you don’t know what you are doing. This is the case especially if the person you are talking to is not just traumatised, but misunderstands what journalism is about.
As I listened to the detransitioners at Genspect talk about feeling they were being used by journalists, I thought of a famous book about being a war correspondent, called “Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?” The titular quote is attributed not to the author of the book, but to a BBC journalist who is said to have shouted this out to a group of Belgian nuns who had been airlifted out of Stanleyville during the 1964 Congo crisis.
That quote sometimes cited to show how awful journalists are, but I don’t think that is what it shows at all. It sums up a job that is in some ways dirty and in others noble: get the story and get it out. That’s the bargain you make with interviewees: tell me what happened and I’ll tell the world. You’re not their therapist, and the duties you owe them, beyond telling their story, are honesty and candour. Your primary duty is to your readers: you’re there to tell the stories they want (or need) to know, and very definitely not the stories that your interviewees want told.
From the point of view of the interviewee, this works if they want their story told, and understand this is basically all the relationship is about. And trauma victims very often do want the world to know what happened to them, indeed that may be an essential step in regaining peace of mind. They are beyond furious at the harm that has been done to them, and desperate to see the people responsible exposed and ideally punished.
Unfortunately, people who have experienced terrible things are vulnerable to what may feel like exploitation by the press. This isn’t because individual journalists are bad people (though some are), but because cumulatively that’s how it works. If you have an interesting story to tell, journalists will want to talk to you. And they’ll keep taking from you without any thought for what that’s doing to you, because it’s not the same person taking each time, but it is the same person giving.
There’s a pattern I’ve seen repeated by now several times, of a new detransitioner “coming out” publicly, speaking candidly about horrific things—mutilated genitals, alcoholism, suicidal depression—and then going private again because they feel used up and burned out. It’s compounded by the fact that in many cases they were already vulnerable before they identified as trans—that vulnerability in many cases was a large part of why identifying as trans appealed in the first place.
My advice to journalists would be to remember you can’t just dive into a conversation with a traumatised person, but need to build a personal connection first. And then to make sure that the interviewee understands what your role is, and doesn’t think they’re going to be getting something you can’t give them. You can’t offer them emotional support, or even write a full account of the rounded, interesting person they are now and could be even more so in the future—you’re there to make sure the world knows the terrible thing that happened to them, and that’s basically it.
Hopefully they’ll feel that telling their story will give them some solace because it makes it less likely other people will suffer in the same way. But if that isn’t enough for them, or if the pain of reliving awful experiences is too great for the bargain to be worth it, then they really shouldn’t be talking to you.
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Before I sign off, here is my second column in the Critic. I am pleased by how it turned out, and that it got wide readership because the Queen, aka J.K. Rowling, retweeted it.
"Part of Keen’s genius is that she doesn’t just allow women to speak; she forces pusillanimous politicians to." Fantastic piece by @HJoyceGenderhttps://t.co/dZd1I7pg7T
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 1, 2023