After I got married and moved to Illinois, I went totally stealth. I was no longer "feminine," ever. I was mostly perceived as a straight male, and met with surprise when I brought up having a husband. I never said a word to my in-laws. I lived in total secrecy, something I thought I would like... and it made me feel empty for four years. As much as I could try to look like a man, my mannerisms, speech patterns, and way of thinking all reflected someone who had been raised a girl. Yet I was never able to be wholly truthful about my childhood. At some point, my period returned, despite taking testosterone – and this was difficult to hide. It did point to the fact I was still able to have children, but this led to the question: how would I hide being female if I decided to get pregnant?
I was told often by transgender people I could have been open about my sex. I could have been the type to wear pride pins and wave flags. That was just never the life I imagined, constantly calling attention to the discongruence between my actual sex and what I wanted to be.
In 2023, everything fell apart for me. A few key events finally led me to the decision to stop trying to change my sex.
One of the first things that began to peel away the lie was learning about people in history that those in the modern transgender community enjoy applying their label to: I saw a video about Margaret Anne Buckley, who lived her life pretending to be a man named James Barry in order that she could be a surgeon. My husband pointed out that it was incredibly insensitive to apply the label "trans" to people who never did or never could apply that label to themselves - it simply was not their reality, and we would be wise not to apply the politics of today on the dead of yesterday.
This made me question how I would have lived and identified in another era. Would I have tried to lie about my sex if I were born in 1775, or hell, even 1975? While I had always thought that the answer was yes, that I would have tried to change my sex in any time period, I was no longer on social media and therefore more able to think for myself and readily say: probably not. I would have just been a woman who knows she doesn't have to pretend to be a man to be who she is. Getting mistaken for a man is interesting and fun sometimes, but believing in that mistake is a tragedy.
One of the second things that began to make me open my eyes was this: in a group chat between myself and two of my former roommates (both transmen), one confessed to us that lately he had been having "intrusive thoughts" about wearing women's clothing. He was very content in his life as a transman, living with his girlfriend and being a "father" to their children, but he had never really felt comfortable in female clothing due to his excess body hair and tall stature.
I did not admit it, but realized that I had been walking past women's clothing constantly in my workplace and wishing that I could wear it. I wondered about what this meant, because public crossdressing was ironically something I did not wholly approve of at the time, as I did not want to call so much attention to myself. I thought a lot about my childhood: I loved my Sunday church dresses even if I wouldn't have been caught dead in a dress any other day of the week. Expressing my femininity on a liberal college campus had also been enjoyable, where I could pretend to be a man crossdressing as a woman. Clothing does not make us women, of course, but I dressed to hide my female body and to make myself look as much like a man as possible.
This was all starting to make me wonder what I could even realistically do with the knowledge that I was, in fact, living artificially.
In February 2023, Jamie Reed blew the whistle on the St. Louis Children's Hospital. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I had been leaving work and stopped to look at the newspaper stand, where the article caught my eye, and so I took it to read.
All of it shook me to my core. I related to each and every line of the article and was horrified by what I read happening to children and teenagers. I myself had recited, "Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?" to my mother, a line I had heard online, a line apparently recited by medical professionals to distraught parents. I had fought so hard to be accepted as the opposite sex that I pushed away thoughts of desisting, to the extent I was able to convince myself that the phrase "boys can be feminine and still be boys!" referred not just to biological males, but to girls who want to be boys.
Having feared medical complications, I had already stopped taking testosterone several months prior. Despite my facial hair, I was being correctly sexed by confused men in public restrooms as my body fat began to redistribute.
What could my next step even be? My niece had only ever known me as her uncle, and my husband and I lived outwardly as a happy "gay" couple. I continue pretending to be a man, with my beard and mastectomy, and continue hiding my figure underneath baggy clothing... but did I want to?
I looked up what "detransition" was. I had been taught to see these people who stopped lying about their sex as self-hating, transphobic, or even rare cases of other issues being mistaken for "genuine gender dysphoria." The future was uncertain to me: I was nearly 30 and had lived half my life lying about my sex. There was no adult woman I could return to being.
What I found was so different than I had been told: hundreds of people who had been prescribed cross-sex hormones after a single appointment with a medical professional, many never seeing a therapist. Hundreds of women whose breasts had been removed without ever being asked why they wanted that. Hundreds of people whose healthy genitals had been mutilated to approximate the opposite sex, poorly. Hundreds of people who really did, at some point – or even still – struggled with the desire to be the opposite sex, an impossible endeavor.
Hundreds of people told me that even if I had been living my whole life as a transguy, that "detransition" did not mean "going back" to anything: it meant moving forward. It meant stopping the medicalization, stopping the lies, and in many cases, starting over.
I took the leap.
I planned to wait until a year had passed to publicly detransition: a way of serving penance, and a way of avoiding being perceived as a biological man trying to become a woman. I wore women's clothing at home, along with breast forms (which took an insane amount of courage, because I felt like I was crossdressing as a woman despite being female). One day, I snapped. I could not handle the misery I felt going back to work every day living a lie, and I absolutely could not continue to handle the frustration of dealing with a period in the men's restrooms – I told my HR director about my situation, expecting shock. I expected a slow few weeks of telling managers, then coworkers, then changing my name tag and restroom habits.
My director was completely unsurprised.
Expressing that she would support whatever timeline I wanted, she made sure to reassure me that absolutely no one would be uncomfortable with me in the women's restroom.
And so, I decided to change my name tag that very day, and told all of my coworkers through a handwritten note that I passed to them with shaking hands – and not a single soul was fazed. Most reacted with great positivity and support. A few asked me privately about my decision to transition in the first place, and I told them very honestly: I was groomed by adults online, felt trapped in my decisions, and the last decade of my life had been the epitome of sunk-cost fallacy.
Of course, the cat came out of the bag to my in-laws.
One day they came to visit while I was wearing breast prosthetics and women's clothing, and my husband and I expected loud bewilderment... which never came. My teenage sister-in-law brought her sketchbook over to me to show me her drawings: large-breasted anime characters that she insistently called male pronouns. I privately texted her about my detransition, to which she responded with her desire to be a boy, her involvement in the same internet circles I had fallen for, and her intentions to attempt to look more masculine. I saw myself in her: she is very feminine, but ashamed of her body, and the internet has already told her that this means she is a boy inside. After a few hours of aimless conversation, I finally told my in-laws that if they weren't going to ask why I suddenly looked like a woman, then I would just have to tell them. I was met with love and support, and wondered if I should say anything about the hole I saw their daughter falling down.
Gender ideology ruined a large swath of my childhood. I wonder today what would have happened had I never been exposed to the rhetoric online, or had therapists pressed more to ask where I was getting these ideas – especially when femininity began to appeal to me, but not being female.
Today I know that being a woman is just about being female. It has nothing to do with the way one dresses, the way one sits, the way one walks, talks, or lives her life. It is my hope that sharing my story will encourage self-reflection for those who want to change their sex, empower parents and medical professionals to question youth more deeply, and for all of us to work towards a return to sanity.
