"I want to tell everyone what they took from us, what irreversible really means, and what that reality looks like for us. No one told me any of what I’m going to tell you now.

"I have no sensation in my crotch region at all. You could stab me with a knife and I wouldn't know. The entire area is numb, like it's shell shocked and unable to comprehend what happened, even 4 years on...

"No one told me that the base area of your penis is left; it can't be removed—meaning you're left with a literal stump inside that twitches. When you take testosterone, and your libido returns, you wake up with morning wood, without the tree.... And if you do take testosterone after being post op, you run the risk of internal hair in the neo-vagina. Imagine dealing with internal hair growth after everything?...

"My sex drive died about six months on HRT, and at the time I was glad to be rid of it, but now, 10 years later, I'm realising what I'm missing out on, and what I won't get back. Because even if I had a sex drive, my neo-vagina is so narrow and small, I wouldn't even be able to have sex if I wanted to. And when I do use a small dilator, I have random pockets of sensation that only seem to pick up pain, rather than pleasure…

"Then there’s the act of going to the toilet. It takes me about 10 minutes to empty my bladder, it's extremely slow, painful, and because it dribbles no matter how much I relax, it will then just go all over that entire area, leaving me soake[d]. So, after cleaning myself up, I will find moments later that my underwear is wet—no matter how much I wiped, it slowly drips out for the best part of an hour. I never knew at 35 I ran the risk of smelling like piss everywhere I went…"

"I would never have imagined until recently that I would find it liberating to embrace my masculinity. Masculinity was too closely associated with arrogant entitlement, predators, creeps, abusers, oppressors—all the greed and prejudice that has ruled human history. I can think of no deeper self-image problem than these; I cannot find something more loathsome to think of myself, something which more plainly says: ‘I do not deserve to live; I do not deserve care or consideration; the world would be better without me.’...

"Before I knew what was going on, I knew that some men could be that frightening; women seemed not to be like that ever; I felt it was because of maleness itself; and I wanted at all costs to avoid being seen that way. But I now know I can do better than a life of avoidance."

"The British trans-activist organization Mermaids states that 'gender dysphoria,' which was long taken as the basis of transgender identities, can manifest as a general struggle with life, framing it in advance as a very broad state of being that can apply to most everyone. This sentiment is echoed in several popular resources such as the 'Gender Dysphoria Bible,' which states that 'a lot of people believe that you can only be trans if you feel actively hurt by being seen as a man, but that particular feeling won’t usually arrive until after you’ve started to transition and you finally know who you truly are'— in other words, that discomfort with biological sex will only come after adopting a cross-sex identity."

"A few months later I started my transition back to being a man. As you will see, this process was infinitely more involved, time consuming, and difficult than the cavalier sign off of my original transition—the exact opposite of the way it should be. The process required me to find two medical professionals to sign off on my detransition, submit it to my health insurance, and then find a surgeon who would remove my implants. Months passed, and I was eventually able to find a second medical professional to sign off on my detransition,...Once we submitted the documents to my insurance company, we waited—and then, finally, I was denied! Fortunately, I was able to appeal the decision, which I did, and after thirty days I was approved. My implants were removed (by the original surgeon!) in December of 2020. I had to then fight the state of California to allow me to change all my documents back to male, which took a total of six months."

"By the time I came out as trans, I’d already made the decision to transition. I had planned my own death in excruciating detail to ensure success. I wasn’t depressed because of dysphoria, I had untreated depression that my therapists thought was because of my dysphoria.

"My entire transition was driven by this moment that I came out as trans. My therapists called it my 'do or die moment.' Many trans people hit it, where they don’t have the strength to fight it any longer and must choose transition or death. They actually let you make life-altering decisions while suicidal."

"I started my transgender journey as a four-year-old boy when my grandmother repeatedly, over several years, cross-dressed me in a full-length purple dress she made especially for me, and told me how pretty I was as a girl…[later] my teenage uncle…felt I was fair game for taunting and sexual abuse. I wasn’t even 10 years old…That abuse caused me to not want to be male any longer. Cross-dressing gave me an escape. I lay awake at night, secretly begging God to change me into a girl. In my childlike thinking, if I could only be a girl, then I would be accepted and affirmed by the adults in my life. I would be safe."

"The goal of this second round of therapy wasn't focused on my gender identity disorder at all. The subject came up from time to time, but that wasn't what my therapist wanted to talk about. In time, I began to see it as she did, as a smokescreen I was throwing up to hide deeper issues...

"Because it turned out that wasn't my problem. My problem was that I didn't like myself. Thinking that I'd like myself better if I were a woman was only a symptom. And once I dealt with the root cause, the symptom faded away. There was no big moment of discovery, no one session where I declared that I was happy being a man. It just gradually became less of an issue. One day it was just part of my past, something that I used to feel, but didn't any more.

"This is the 'conversion therapy' that the pro-trans movement wants to ban. Behind the specter of electroshock and forced conversions is this truth—that therapy that addresses the root causes of a person's feelings of being in the wrong body often causes those feelings to fade away. And the corollary is this: often the hormonal and surgical transition is treating the symptoms, and, after the transition, the root causes are still there, as strong as ever."

"I'm still someone who's in constant pain...

"I thought guidelines [for authorizing surgery] mattered. And then they just got rid of them all, and I got hurt...

"My life really fell apart after surgery. And I really rallied to do good....I went to school all through my surgery recovery...I got myself a job. And like my mental health? It plummeted. And I lost everything. So I'm just really rebuilding...

"For the males who are going through this. A lot of the people you're encountering, like clinicians and whatever...a lot of them are women and that's not to say they can't do medical stuff...they're dealing with male parts and affirming that, like, we're not males....All the impacts of what our biology is and needs, and all that. We're missing a part of our nervous system. Like a regulatory part of it. That's huge. That's insane."

"I was very consumed by trans media and trans culture and all my transgender friends...I’ve always been very susceptible to people...who think they’re guiders, you know, people who think they are a good guide in life. Always been susceptible to that because I’ve never felt like a person with an identity or a purpose. I’ve always been very, like, my identity depends entirely on who I’m around and I guess to some extent those people, uh, were trying to impose permanent identity upon me."

"I’m an older transitioner, around middle age. I transitioned from male to female and got surgery in my 30s after decades of therapy. Within months of surgery, I started to experience regret. I’ve been on a path of self-discovery ever since, trying to make sense of how this happened and what I can do about it...

"Prior to this, I did have something in common with today’s transitioners—that I didn’t fit in with my birth sex. Really, I didn’t fit in anywhere. The girls were just nice to me, and they liked the types of activities I did, so I hung out with them. During therapy, this would be attributed to me being a girl largely based on what I would later discover were just stereotypes. The fact that I would later mimic the boys to fit in led to affirmations that I was doing that to hide the fact that I was really a girl. I was really just trying to fit in though."

"There will always be nights like last night, because the damage is visceral and permanent. I cannot rest in my body. There is an alarm flashing at all times, like a malfunctioning machine: the horrible absence, unabating scream. Burnt and severed cords buried deep in the flesh [orchiectomy site] and the empty skin which haunts me. Who can I blame? Who willed this for me? Saddled with a worthless burden, the brunt of a collective fetish, not my own. To call it an 'experiment' is an insult to intelligence; call it a fetish, revenge, quack science, under the guise of my own 'consent,' because I am, in many ways, the most agreeable type of person. There were many hands involved in the process of grooming me, seducing and sedating me, shuffling me along unto the surgeon’s scalpel. Too many for the mind to latch onto, to blame any one of them, and so the mind churns like wheels spinning in the mud. An experiment implies control, care even (in the clinical sense of the word, as a synonym to 'precaution'), of which there has been next to none. Even the appearance of care evaporated once I had passed the surgical threshold and desisted."

"They called the surgery an 'orchiectomy,' but these days I think of it as a castration. I sometimes have nightmares about waking up afterwards. In my dreams I scream and scream, I run through the hallways howling and begging for them to undo it, to fix me, to make me right again. In reality, I stuffed all my feelings of grief, regret, and horror as far down as they would go. My testicles were gone. My healthy endocrine system, which would have begun to function again if I'd ever gone off medication, had been destroyed...

"I'd ruined myself, and I'll never get back what I lost. I've made myself permanently reliant on the pharmaceutical industry for artificial testosterone...I still have phantom pains, and probably always will, as well as intense cramping in my groin when I do certain exercises. I wasn't warned about any of this by the doctor who performed my surgery."