Lost boys

Speaking up for detrans males

Recently a detrans mens discord has launched to address the need for much needed single sex space for desisting and detransitioning males.

Our stories are eerily similar with themes of overpowering shame and confusion for being male. Autism, ADHD, OCD, Anxiety, delayed puberty, high academic intelligence but low social intelligence.

We were all bullied.

Many of us are same sex attracted and even those who aren’t; all experienced fear and confusion over our developing sexualities.

Whilst it feels warm to have bonded with the guys, it also feels bitter every time I see the same injustice reoccurring. Almost every single one of us had a much older trans person coaching grooming us and some of us are still in that situation.

We are lost boys, who are faced with the insurmountable task of rebuilding ourselves as men, when we never knew how to be that in the first place.

Is it any wonder then, that particularly detrans males find themselves yo-yoing between identifying as trans and detrans?

Whereas our sisters in the well established detrans women groups have a firm landing, they have matriarchs like Sinead, Helena, Grace and Alex, along with many more who continue to fly the flag for all detrans and desisted women, which have had the support of a multitude of women’s rights groups.

I don’t mean to diminish those detrans men who have spoken so eloquently about their experience, but after the recent webinar and our getting together, it has come apparent that we are largely lost and we need men to help us.

We need other men to help us, not just women. We need you to show us the way, because without that direction we will continue to be lost boys guessing our way into manhood.

Many of us are still picking up pieces of a life that will never be whole again. Sinead was right when she said “You won’t go back to the way you are” and for many of us, that is most definitely the case.

Some of us never finished puberty because of hormone treatments and didn’t grow past 5”2 . Some of us started fresh out of the gates of puberty, in our early twenties, but all of us are changed forever.

For many who have retained their gonads, stopping hormones was a straight forward choice. For those without, we are left with three options;

1. Stay on Oestrogen but risk brain disease, heart disease and stroke.

2. Switch to TRT - which though a natal hormone, artificial testosterone seems to cause other ailments for those without gonads to process the hormone.

3. No hormones and risk osteoporosis and bone disease.

I opted for option 3, and over the last several months have been slowly coming off estradiol. Though i’ve had an increase in tiredness, my mental health is simply the best it’s been in over 4 years. I can see why many detrans males who are in this difficult position find retransition appealing - I do.

But for me, it would be like going back into that character mode, an identity that wasn’t true to my fibre and opt for a life of blissful ignorance.

For years I felt something was wrong and at every turn I was ‘put back on course’ to a path I knew deep down I didn’t want.

So again, we lost boys look to our peers for guidance and we find ourselves in the overwhelmingly male online trans spaces who like salesman, give us a new updated deal, with updated terms and conditions about how this was all just internalised transphobia and the mean old nasty ‘terfs’ misled us.

If trans activists cannot call us liars, they will blame us for our choices, they will abandon empathy if it may risk popping the deeply flawed and false self image they’ve built up.

Meanwhile, our boys are still lost and they are desperate to learn how to be men, masculine or otherwise.

I definitely feel like I may hit the category of the big brother type in the group, being a little older and having transitioned longer, but I too am a lost boy.

It might just be because we need to give it time, but i do know we can’t do this on our own, and I’m not quite sure what the answer is to this.

I hope I find one.