Detransition: Beyond Before and After

By Max Robinson

I experienced my transition as a form of resistance, but in reality it only affirmed the same stereotypes that had done me harm to begin with. Trying to prevent myself from committing suicide by becoming less recognizably female was an attempt at resistance that, politically, functioned in many ways as a form of capitulation. Many feminists are concerned about the way transgender ideology naturalizes patriarchal views of sex stereotypes, and encourages transition as a way of attempting to escape misogyny. In this brave and thoughtful book, Max Robinson goes beyond the 'before' and 'after' of the transition she underwent and takes us through the processes that led her, first, to transition in an attempt to get relief from her distress, and then to detransition, as she discovered feminist thought and community. The author makes a case for a world in which all medical interventions for the purpose of assimilation are open to criticism. This book is a far-reaching discussion of women's struggles to survive under patriarchy, which draws upon a legacy of radical and lesbian feminist ideas to arrive at conclusions. Robinson's bold discussion of both transition and detransition is meant to provoke a much-needed conversation about who benefits from transgender medicine and who has to bear the hidden cost of these interventions. Transition is not an unconstrained choice when we are fast-tracked to medical intervention as if being female was a tumor that required immediate removal to save our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925950410

Book preview

Introduction

There is no before. I don’t know her. She was a child and I’m grown up now.

There is no after. This could not have happened, and if it did, it wouldn’t have happened to me.

Lost in the before/after narrative is everything except the packaging, in the most shallow and commercial sense. Every aspect of our humanity is abandoned in the pursuit of an easy story—one that challenges no one.

Mine is not a transsexual story but it’s not not a transsexual story. I don’t think we have ever been perfectly extricable from each other, and anyway, naming our shared femaleness is more important to me than delineating where our neuroses diverge. Born in the wrong body, born in the right body—either way, the body I am talking about is the type that is expected to menstruate in perfect silence. The type of spectacle I am asked to become is something that women like me have often been asked to become when we refuse shame. Trace us throughout history and try to find any argument that any certain one of them, beyond any shadow of a doubt, was either a lesbian or transsexual. It’s bullshit. The difference is smoke and mirrors, subjectivity, whatever you want to call it. We are women suffering in a way we have always been asked to suffer, relegated to life as dirty secrets and embarrassments.

Question: Who does it serve to position the lesbian and the female-to-male transsexual as truly separated from one another?

Answer: It serves parties with an investment in devaluing the importance of what we share: the perpetrators of patriarchy.

The fact that we ourselves (the lesbian ‘we’ as well as the transsexual ‘we’) advance the argument of our difference may seem like a contradiction but it isn’t. We are always fighting to justify our existence, both in private and in public, and the details of this negotiation change with our circumstances. Why shouldn’t these justifications contradict each other, when our purposes sometimes find themselves at odds? It’s something more and something less than a generational clash. The anger between us at times is sincere, but could be more honestly expressed elsewhere: toward the patriarchy.

I don’t want us chasing each other in circles. We do this both because we have lost sight of our lesbian herstory and because we will not face our lesbian present. As Susan Leigh Star points out in ‘To Dwell Among Ourselves’ (Star, 1978, p. 82), there is no real kindness without comprehending the dimensions of atrocity a woman has faced. Surviving together means naming the context that causes women’s pain, the context that, in various ways, we all suffer within. Leigh Star quotes Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Natural Resources’: But gentleness is active / gentleness swabs the crusted stump / invents more merciful instruments / to touch the wound beyond the wound / does not faint with disgust (Rich, 1977, p. 67).

I cannot touch the wound beyond the wound if I refuse to name that cutting into someone with a scalpel does harm to her. Julia Penelope, in ‘A Cursory and Precursory History of Language’ (Penelope, 1976), reminds us that all honest speech requires risk-taking on the part of the speaker. Valuing a lack of conflict (a dishonest peace) between lesbians and females-to-male transgender people (FTMs)¹ over frank discussion of our shared situation does no favors to us.

And I know, too, that some of you are sincerely romantically and sexually invested in men and refuse discussion of anything else. To the extent that’s true, we part there on lesbianism—but how often is it true? Is it really often enough to make me crazy for thinking there’s something to this connection between the FTM and the lesbian? I am entitled to describe my world as I see it, and I respect your right to do the same. We’re all entitled to our own understanding of the cultural moments we live in. We don’t have to agree—but we don’t necessarily have to disagree, either.

I recognize your truth-telling and I am not calling you a liar when I say that when I told this story, what I meant was that I wanted to be seen as a living creature whose life deserved full consideration.

It’s always been easier to come after each other than to talk about what we have in common. What has all the new language added, really? Most of what I have to say can be expressed without it. The conflict between our need to be seen as individually valuable and our group membership as lesbians is old. We live in stifled peace when we disappear and we are hounded when we don’t.

It’s possible to honor what our individual solutions have given us, the lives they may have saved, and still recognize the tragedy of the perceived isolation they require as sacrifice. We are not alone, and have never been. We are all around each other.

The attempt to transition from female-as-defined-by-men to male represents a devastating failure of lesbian imagination. For all the bravery we express in our attempt to transcend the limits men place on us, we have settled—growing to more closely resemble them instead of moving towards ourselves—and we did not see the difference. We are unable to imagine ourselves except as something that men can see, and since men cannot perceive female reality (see Dale Spender, 1990), women cannot imagine who we actually are. As Jeffner Allen has pointed out, We walk in footprints we cannot fit (1986). We must ask ourselves a question she poses to the woman who tries to pour herself, one way or another, into fulfilling male expectations: Onto what am I holding, and why? (1986, p. 18).

The conflict between our humanity and our group identity is created by the belief that women’s only path to humanity is through men; that we are damned on our own. This conflict is a lie. The proof of that is as much between my partner and I as it is between any other two female human beings alive on this planet, no matter how we describe ourselves or how we describe our connection. For better or worse we are vibrantly alive together; women together are not women alone, as Janice Raymond put it so brilliantly (1986/2001). Our enemy should not be each other, and to the extent we occupy ourselves with in-group conflict, our real enemy is relieved at our time wasted. The opposite of male violence against women is sincere friendship between women.

To the extent they can frustrate our relationships with our sisters, men are granted a reprieve from the political consequences of their actions. Time is precious now, as always, and we should not waste any of it picking up the threads of a story that is much older than the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care. We have spent enough time separated to know well who is served by that separation, and it is not ourselves or our sisters.

It is in part because of my utmost respect for the necessity of the hidden woman’s decisions that I believe that we all deserve a world where no woman perceives the need to conceal or denounce the fact of what we share. An incredible amount of resources throughout history has been expended convincing us that our highest hopes should be in isolating from each other. In recent herstory, the lesbian feminist movement represented a genuine threat to the male establishment. The patriarchal backlash was swift, expertly targeted, and highly adaptable. More efficient than just destroying lesbian feminism was building an evermore convoluted maze between every lesbian and any political awareness of her condition.

Here’s the solution to that maze: don’t go in. Aspects of the backlash, like queer theory, obscure more than they clarify. Transition is treated in many circles like the ultimate challenge to the status quo. In reality, transition is one of many medical projects of bodily control meant to influence how others see and treat the patient. It does not stand alone. Like any such project, we seek medical transition because we desperately need relief, and sometimes, in some ways, the interventions do bring us that relief. But they do so at a cost to ourselves and those like us.

We can best understand these costs by contextualizing transition alongside other interventions with similar functions—and we don’t have to do this work from scratch. An enormous body of useful and approachable work by feminist thinkers is there for those who look for it. Older work does not always directly address contemporary situations, but it establishes crucial frameworks we can use to contextualize what’s going on now.

By building on some of the most promising work by women instead of discarding it, we can achieve genuine movement forward.

1Language matters to me. Please see the Appendix (pp. 167–175) where I explain why I use specific terms and how I define them.

Chapter 1

‘Choice’: Freedom inside Patriarchy

When I was a teenager, I made a choice. Here are the options I saw before me:

First: I could try to look and act appealing according to patriarchal aesthetics of femininity and conform to heterosexual life goals that held no interest or imaginable future for me.

Second: Through transitional medicine, I could become a man, thereby escaping the future that had seemed inevitable and access a life that I would find worth living.

Where did this idea come from, that becoming a man was better than being myself?

Transition was presented by other FTMs (female to male transgender people, otherwise known as trans men) as a cure for the distress I felt about being female. I saw myself inside the framework of gender dysphoria because of the basic assumptions that I needed fixing and that hating being female is something that can be medically cured through obscuring physical signs of femaleness. This approach to addressing a woman’s distress around her sex relies on a fundamental lack of faith in the ability of gender non-compliant women to live meaningful lives. I ‘chose’ transition because I did not understand that life as a gender non-compliant lesbian was a real option.

Without the understanding and awareness of misogyny and patriarchy I have now—that is, a feminist consciousness—I saw transition as ‘empowering’ and named it to myself and others as such. It felt good to wear what I wanted, finally, and to have these clothes perceived as a confirmation of my new gender identity instead of a violation of the rules for my sex. It felt good to have medical professionals, who I saw as the arbiters of authentic suffering, validate my pain and distress with prescriptions and surgery consultations. It felt like my suffering was, at last, being responded to with an urgency that was proportionate to what I felt. It felt amazing to decide I was going to look different, then actually watch myself be changed, through binding, then hormones, then surgery. When the way strangers treated me shifted as I changed from frivolous teenage girl to an inherently competent young man, my empowerment felt as if it was at an all time high.

But what does ‘empowering’ actually mean?

Author Andi Zeisler identifies social worker Barbara Bryant Solomon as the earliest user of the description of ‘empowerment’ in the context of fighting oppression. In her 1976 work Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities, Solomon defines it as an intra-community effort to work toward both financial stability and power, an alternative to a top-down model that depended on the benevolence of those already possessed of such things (p. 28). Empowerment described a clear objective with measurable results.

A similar usage was also applied a few years later by members of the women’s rights movement in India. Indian feminist scholar and activist Srilatha Batliwala described her approach as a political and transformatory idea for struggles that challenged not only patriarchy, but the mediating structures of class, race, ethnicity (and in India, caste and religion) which determined the nature of women’s position and condition in developing societies (Batliwala, 2007, pp. 557–565).

Rather than characterizing empowerment as an action which makes one individual feel better, as it’s most commonly used now, these women used empowerment as an evolving way to rethink entire power structures and value systems, draw on shared skills and knowledge, and endow marginalized communities with tools for economic sustainability (Zeisler, 2017, p. 170).

By this definition, my transition was not empowering. It required no community of women, and it accomplished nothing for other women. As Srilatha Batliwala (2007) has identified in more recent years, the originally useful concept of ‘empowerment’ has since been stripped of meaning and used against the very women it was specifically intended to uplift. Poor women of color do not benefit from empowerment as it is often used today: to describe consumerist decisions that make a woman feel good, allowing her to believe she has contributed to her liberation without actually moving any closer to freedom. When women do have substantial access to resources allowing them to consume easily, they rarely find a way to apply their buying power to reduce their dependence on structures that are hostile to them. Those with extremely limited funds are denied even the personal pleasure of ‘feeling empowered’ others attain by purchasing and then publicly displaying their acquisition of a product or service.

With regards to the more common use of the word, my transition was indeed empowering. In fact, when I identified my own physical self as the problem, I removed the emotional urgency that could have motivated me to organize with the goal of obtaining genuine empowerment for myself and others, serving precisely the function of the patriarchal misdirection created by emptying ‘empowerment’ of its original meaning. All of my frustrations with living inside patriarchy, frustrations I had no idea how to name, were not only directed away from their external source, but refocused instead on my literal female flesh. There was a medicalized consumer roadmap that suited me then: exchanging money for medical professionals to deem me fit for transformation, and then to apply their treatments to my body.

At the time, my transition felt necessary—not a ‘choice’, but a biological imperative. I thought of it as something I had to do for