Not too long ago, I met a man on a dating app. We hit it off quickly, exchanging jokes about the 1990s elementary-school publishing juggernaut Animorphs. We also noted you can use jokes about the Animorphs as a very quick test to see if someone is gonna be 40 soon.
After a fun, entertaining conversation in which it was clear to me we were both quite into each other, I mentioned that I was recovering from surgery. He did what good people do when you tell them you’re recovering from surgery and asked me if everything was OK.
I steeled myself. I liked him, he liked me, and I wasn’t sure if he’d read my profile from start to finish. In it, I disclose that I am transgender, but there’s always a chance someone missed that part of the profile. So I always hold my breath when I disclose. It can change a conversation rapidly.
Madison Rose McClendon
“I’m recovering from a vaginoplasty,” I said. “Sometimes called bottom surgery.”
It happens a lot: You feel like you are developing a connection, and then you find out the person you thought you were connecting with wasn’t connecting with you as a person. Rather, they saw you as a toy, a specifically gendered toy they suddenly became uninterested in when they discovered your genitals might be complicated.
Since you never were a person to them, they stop treating you like one.
Cisgender women, too, have a lot to fear from these people: They will only respect you so long as they feel they must.
But this man was different. He surprised me. His response was to congratulate me and immediately indicate that he had no idea I was trans. He told me he was proud of me for taking a huge step. He went out of his way to make sure I was OK and acknowledged how brave I had been, both to get the surgery and to tell him.
During the course of many conversations that followed, he eventually told me something else I didn’t know about him: He had detransitioned.
It’s a big word, “detransition.” It’s politically charged and often wielded against transgender people like clubs; “detransitioners” are held up as examples of how dangerous we are. Everything transgender people do to ourselves to make our outward selves align with our inward hearts is somehow seen as detransition regret just waiting to happen.
The anti-trans crowd loves to say, for instance, “Let’s listen to the detransitioners,” as a way of saying detransitioners will uniformly tell a story of regret and discouragement. But they don’t really listen to detransitioners at all. If they did, they’d hear stories like his all the time. Stories of cisgender people who stopped transitions because it wasn’t right for them and they learned that fairly quickly. Stories of trans people who stopped not because they wanted to, but because they were forced to by their families or the lack of adequate medical care.
He had not gotten very far. He had tried on some different hairstyles, worn some different clothing and done his makeup. In a few of the pictures he sent, he was better at makeup than I ever have been. He had taken some estrogen for about six months, and you’d never guess he had been on hormones. He’s built sturdy, like he’d grown up on a Midwest dairy farm.
“Most of us have seen the inside of more therapists’ offices than any politician using our lives as a punching bag.”
And he did what trans people often do or have been doing: He started therapy. We often need to do this to access medical care. Anyone telling you trans people need therapy is missing the fact that most of us have seen the inside of more therapists’ offices than any politician using our lives as a punching bag.
During therapy, he realized he was feeling different things, that the source of his disconnection, discomfort and estrangement was not gender. What it was is private, for him to share, not me. But that work taught him he was comfortable being “he.”
So he stopped transitioning. And he’s been comfortable ever since.
These are the kinds of narratives I wish we used more to talk about detransition. It often looks just like … stopping. You don’t dramatically shift back from one phase to another. You just stop and carry on as you were.
The cisgender world likes to imagine anyone who detransitions must do so because they realize they have made a dramatic mistake. That they’ve been somehow lied to by transgender ideology or tricked into following a fad. The cisgender world, obsessively focused on trans people’s bodies, imagines every detransitioner must have gone through life-altering bodily changes that never can be reversed, only to find out at the end of it that they made a dreadful mistake.
And that just isn’t the case. My friend’s reality, his life, his place as a cisgender man, is made more precious, thoughtful and generous toward others because he thought about what it meant. He is a model of masculine protection and nurturance because he had thought carefully about transitioning. His cisgender identity and his masculine presence are stronger because he reached them on a transgender journey.
On the night we met, he extended an incredible courtesy to me — an act of love, of care. The moment a man realizes I’m trans on a dating site, either because I tell them or they finally read my profile, is often a moment when I am suddenly responsible for taking care of his feelings. They might be angry, despondent or confused; they might just go silent.
But no matter how they feel, I have just done one of the bravest things a trans woman can do. I am there with the breath caught in my throat, having risked much and now waiting to see his reaction.
On that night, this man made it clear to me my feelings mattered more than his. He took steps to make sure I knew I’d been seen. He understood I had done something brave, and he made sure I knew I was safe afterward. He took care of me, and not the other way around.
“He was a stronger man because he had tried to be something else and discovered who he was.”
He was able to do that, in part, because he was a man who once thought he might be a woman. He was a stronger man because he had tried to be something else and discovered who he was. He had settled back into that man with grace, comfort, and ease, better than when he had started.
There is room in transgender life for detransition. It is not a bogey for us. We are all journeying together toward the bodies we desire and need, and we all need support, including mental health resources, to navigate those questions with authenticity and courage.
What there isn’t room for is claiming detransitioners are victims of transgender ideology. They are not. They are, instead, often its beneficiaries: People who are stronger today because they explored who they needed to be.
They found that person, and then chose to live as that person, with full knowledge of what that meant. Now they can hold themselves with more tenderness, authenticity, courage and care. That’s the story we should be telling. Those are the journeys we should be living, compassionately, boldly, carefully, creatively.
Madison Rose McClendon lives in Chicago and is a graduate of Furman University and the University of Chicago.