16 Comments

After a year and a half of socially transitioning, my son desisted. He explained that watching and reading about detransitioners’ experiences helped him understand himself better and the self-hatred that he has struggled with. I am grateful that you have shared your story on multiple platforms and in interviews. I do not know if he came across your story, but you, Corey, Helena, and others are doing such important work. Thank you. Truly, thank you. You are spreading deep knowledge. I grieve for you and the horrible treatment you received. I hope you win the malpractice suit!

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Hi Ritchie. I am one of those clumsy parents who reached to you for advice. I just wanted to say what a wonderful and clear writer you are and to wish you love for yourself and from others. I dearly hope you have a loving family who are holding you close on your path. I am a psychotherapist, of the older variety, and I am so embarrassed by my profession and angry at the harm we are causing. I thank you for your post and your honesty and clarity about what you need now. <3

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Oct 16, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

Just joined your newsletter. I am a very fortunate mum whose child has desisted and left the cult. I've seen a few interviews with you Ritchie - thank you for your great courage, compassion, sharp intelligence and sense of humour. I will be following your lawsuit with great interest and cheering for you. What an amazing life journey you have had.

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Oct 16, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

Ritchie, You are very special. I listened to A Wider Lens recently and you remind me of my son in many ways although he is only 18. He socially transitioned aged 17, supported by his school and now attends university under a trans cloak. Only he is in control of his future, because of his age. I recognise this and despite this causing me constant unimaginable pain as his mother, I accept it. I have no choice. I hope I have planted a seed within him that will take him to read and hear your voice. You are an inspiration. Thank you for being brave and honest. You are a wonderful man. I hope you win. Dance is one of the joys and loves of my life. One day I would like to take you to the Royal Opera House to watch the ballet. I hope I succeed. Thank you.

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Oct 16, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

This is a nuanced, thorough essay linking your personal experiences with the trends, malpractice and what next. Absolutely yes, males and females should be researched separately. You've become more clear, more eloquent and, very important, more strategic. Therapy and movement to combat the body dissociation is my focus.

I'm a former professional dancer, dealt with injuries as well as the trauma of my ex-husband's cross-sex treatments and surgeries, same story, a one-appointment diagnosis by an "expert, 1993.

I believe that somatic mind/body work and various physical therapies to break the pain cycle could help you personally. Others dealing with the physical and emotional trauma will benefit from your outspokenness. Scars can be improved with pressure point treatments and Feldenkrais physical therapy helps break scar/pain cycles. On my blog, I explore and describe core muscle sequences for mind/body connection especially in the torso, where the vagus and phenic nerves are. These are brain messaging paths related to anxiety, wellbeing and alertness.

This writing and your appearances are your cognitive behavior therapy--helping others, calling out the malpractice. Below, a link to the 6 major studies (all 2022 excepting the 2011 Swedish longitudinal study) I'd love to see you sue WPATH for promoting sketchy theories based on too small cohort studies. Find the moments when your mind and pain receptors are at rest, try to expand on time there. You are doing the world a service. I find great solace in gardening. Ute Heggen

https://uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/2022/10/15/jon-stewart-read-these-6-references-compendium-of-critiques-concur-affirmation-huge-flaws-no-valid-data/

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Oct 17, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

Sending you peace to yourself, health for your future and a million thanks for your strength and courage in speaking up. ~mom of rogd daughter

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Oct 16, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

Thanks for writing, Tullip. I am a mom of ROGD daughter. I never contacted detransitioners directly myself, both out of respect for your privacy and because I don't see how it would help (If you had some magic words, I am sure you would have spoken them already publicly. ) However, I am wondering if you can please clarify something in your post: You say that many detrans men experienced disconnect with their fathers. Do you mean as a result of the transition or prior to transition? I suspect that trans identity is often (though not always) related to the relationship with same-sex parent. It's not necessarily something bad the parents did and mom/daughter and dad/son dynamics are obviously very different.

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Oct 16, 2022·edited Oct 16, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

What an amazing, reasonable and sensible man you are. Always wish you the best.

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Brilliant essay, Ritchie. What happened to you and is happening to thousands of kids is not acceptable and can never be made acceptable. It's a violation of medical and therapist ethics and also of the Nuremberg Code. As a therapist and retired nurse I feel disgust for my peers who have engaged in promulgating this cult; a cult which masquerades as a human rights movement with science behind it (when there is no science behind it) and who have so dissociated from their own ethics and critical judgement as to recruit vulnerable people such as yourself, and kids, to submit to these horrific, experimental and incredibly damaging procedures. Bravo; you're doing a great job getting the truth out and when we're so outgunned by Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Media and Big Money (not to mention thoroughly captured politicians and institutions) the truth is all we have and a powerful weapon.

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Oct 18, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

I’m so thankful for our ability to analyze information and experiences, to see the big picture as well as important nuanced details, and to articulate this valuable information in a way that is so clear and helpful to so many of us, who are desperately trying to navigate this nightmare.

Not to mention taking the constant attacks, like LC above, while you are still suffering the effects of this medical and psychological trauma.

You are making a difference in the world. Not because of the left or right or how anyone uses or attacks your voice, but because you are speaking truth.

You and other detransitioners are the largest source of facts, because so little real research exists. Thank you.

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Oct 17, 2022Liked by @TullipR / Ritchie

Here we were, detransitioners and parents of ROGD kids, looking to experts to tell us how to move forward, only to find out that we were the vanguard. Highly disconcerting, but all we can do is keep going and learn from each other and our peers.

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You're a VERY smart guy. I strongly suggest that you consider this: the "medical health" or "medical care" or "medical profession" (or whatever anyone calls it) HAS NO "expertise" in anything. The only functioning component of medicine is emergency medicine. The rest is an epic, flaming dumpster fire of failure, guesswork, and corruption.

The professionals and experts (teachers, therapists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, pharmacists, surgeons, and pharma corporations) who got the world INTO this gender nightmare (some of them deliberately) will NOT get anyone out of it.

Decades BEFORE this began, the third-leading CAUSE of death in the USA was MDs, psychiatrists, surgeons, and pharma. BEFORE any of this began. In 2022, since covid injections, the stats will be more like first or second cause. Insurance companies know this. It's now in the data.

This is NOT to make anyone hopeless. New health paradigms with NO connection to conventional systems have much to offer. That's where you'll need to look. It takes a lot of research, reading, and due diligence. To start to list the amazing health paradigms/modalities would take many paragraphs.

And genuine SPIRITUAL healing will need to be a component (not from BigReligion, but from individuals making their own connections to their source). BigGender's goal was/is to sever our connection to nature and move us along the cyberhuman continuum. Only an individual can reconnect his/her spirit to source. No "expert" can or will do that critical thing. Earth is a traumatized, "expert"-free zone.

I send all my love and support to all of you. I wish you healing and recovery, TullipR!

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I’m an adult sibling of an adult male transitioner and I haven’t found a support group yet but I can confirm that our father was mostly absent during childhood and that is also the case for another trans-identified man I know. This is definitely worthy of further research.

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Oct 16, 2022·edited Oct 16, 2022

I do agree that we all need (transitioners and detransitioners alike) need to do better. Instead of playing into the role of a victim, I think that we all need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Kids are being hurt, yes, many children have indeed been hurt by transitioning and for the surgeries that they sought out to alleviate their pain. I firmly believe that gender transition should be the very last resort option that any human should consider. I am not a proponent of what has taken place in the past several years and the affirmation first model is obviously broken and ineffective.

The vilainization of the medical community is not just a subject that occurs within trans medicine. The entire medical industrial complex is absolutely corrupt and has been for over a century. It was not too long ago when doctors were promoting the safety of tobacco use and cigarettes. We all know now that this was a lie and a partnership between the tobacco industry and with the medical industrial complex.

Let's have an honest discussion about these facts and many others that I could also comment on here. Let's try to understand what is at stake here. Children are being raised in a broken society within broken families who do not have the tools to really help their children. In the past several years, parents have become derelict of their duty to raising responsible children in which the feel accepted, appreciated and loved. Children like Chloe Cole has stated that she had unfettered access to the internet and she was not monitored at all in what she looked up on social media sites and she was only 11. Where were her parents?

Mothers are to blame for the indiscriminate rise in ROGD girls and the now daily amount of these same young women who have chosen to detransition. Where were their moms when they were all obsessively devising ways to fool their doctors into telling them that they were transgender? Tumblr and Instagram were teeming with teens who were obsessed with the potential that they too could somehow attain the look of their favorite male animé characters that they were watching. A mass social contagion was spawned out of this hive minded mental speak. They all convinced themselves that they were all men.

They literally sought out treatment, some were denied but in the obsessive state of mind, they found ways to go around any obstacle. Many of them had other comorbid psychological issues going on and they thought that this was their solution.

As for you specifically Ritchie, you seem to blame the doctors for doing this to you. At that time, NHS had a long waiting list for people who were seeking GRS. The doctors let you know that you may lose your place of priority if you did not decide on having the opportunity to go through with the surgery. This was simply their protocol, there have been others who knew that they wanted this and had been waiting for years. I know one British trans woman who literally was imprisoned in jail for trying to get her surgery in the United States but made the mistake of crossing into Mexico at the El Paso border. She was denied by NHS and she was desperate to get the surgery.

If you had your doubts, if anyone does for that matter, you should have never gone under the knife. I am sorry that you are now suffering from the complications of that surgery but it was ultimately your choice to make. I have to suffer from the choices that I had to make with regards to my family and children. It was hard and I have had to work through the pain of losing out on seeing my children but ultimately it was my choice to make.

The bottom line is this, we all need to be kinder to each other. We should not be on a mission to take away the rights of others to justify the mistakes the one makes in walking down this road. Trans healthcare is being attacked in the United States. One state has already been able to ban gender affirming care under any condition in the state of Alabama. Ironically, Alabama has a history of being racist and intolerant of people of color. Discrimination is part of their storied state history. Conservative Michigan lawmakers have introduced a bill that will put parents, doctors or anyone who promotes gender affirming care to a minor, this bill will make it a crime with a punishment of life in prison. And Marjorie Taylor Greene R-Georgia, has introduced a bill that will ban the ability for any youth to seek gender affirming care nationwide. The state of Florida has already banned gender affirming treatment for any person on Medicaid. They can no longer get their necessary hormones.

Where is this going to stop? Christian pastors are calling for the death of transsexuals at school board meetings, feminists are painting a false illusion of trans women and Conservatives are looking to turn the whole story of many of you detransitioners into ammunition to dismantle and erase trans people everywhere.

You are right, we all need to do better.

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