Transgender youth who regret changing gender are turning to the internet for help to regain the appearance of the gender they were born into. In most cases, the changes began by the age of 17. Now the group doesn’t have enough money to reverse the socalled “detransition” process.
After mastectomy and testosterone treatment, many women have broader shoulders, straighter hips, beards, and body hair. Today, however, they are no longer satisfied with their own image.
College student Prisha Mosley, 24, lives in Big Rapids, Michigan. In an interview with the British website Chron, she revealed that she has been depressed ever since she decided to have the gender reassignment surgery.
“Doctors only want to help if you change sex, don’t come back,” he noted. “They have no idea what they’re doing to us. There is no standard of care. There’s no set of rules to fall back on.”
Prisha is begging for money online to reconstruct her breasts, which she removed six years ago. The young woman has already raised just over $7,000 from 100 donors. However, the amount does not reach half of what is needed to carry out the procedure. Prisha also says laser hair removal is too expensive and she can’t afford it.
Crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe and GiveSendDohas seen an increase in the number of young transgender people repenting, according to the Chron.
Angelina Mannino of Red Hook, New York is another example. She is asking for $1,500 online for help with laser removal of a beard that continues to grow even though she stopped injecting testosterone five months ago. “It’s traumatizing every time I look in the mirror,” he wrote on Twitter.
https://t.co/rSjM9aGkmk #GoFundMe
— Mannino (@angie_mannino) June 6, 2022
escape attempt
There is no official data on the number of people who “detransition”.
Psychotherapist James Caspian has been working with transgender adults for over a decade. More recently he has been contacted by dozens of detransitors.
“This whole area of transgender medicine is very understudied,” he said.
“A lot of them seem to have had a very negative experience of being a woman in a woman’s body — sexual harassment, abuse,” he said.
Debbie believes she made the transition to deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
“I thought I was on a journey to become a different person. I would turn into someone else and leave the traumatized woman behind,” she said.
But through therapy, she added, it became clear that “the transition was an escape attempt.”
Debbie is now being treated at one of the UK Public Health Service’s gender identity clinics.
“There was an error. How do I become the Debbie I was again?”
Debbie was born a girl and lived that way for most of her life.
But almost two decades ago, at the age of 44, she sought help in transitioning from a woman to a man.
She changed her name to Lee and took testosterone — the hormone that can lead to changes like more facial hair and more muscle gain — for 17 years.
She believed the transition would allow her to “be taken into the world”. But now, at the age of 61, she is reverting to the gender she was assigned at birth.
The number of people openly questioning their gender identity has grown rapidly and the demand for specialist gender identity services in the UK public health sector is at an alltime high.
SOURCE/CREDIT: West Magazine/BBC