Detransition

He hadn't understood how little sense he made as a person without Reese until after she began to detach from him, until the lack of her became so painful that he started to once again want the armor of masculinity and, somewhat haphazardly, detransitioned to fully suit up in it.

She had, of course, long come to understand that masculinity dulled her, that it dissociated her from herself. But honestly, that's all she wanted at that point. A pocket of space to separate herself from the bright emotions of shame and fear, a veil between herself and the curious eyes on the subway and at work, a sheath over the sharp edge of furious betrayal that lacerated her whenever she met Reese's gaze; and likewise, a sheath over that awful longing for Reese as she had so innocently seen her before Stanley. A week before Reese's birthday, Amy stopped taking her anti-androgens. She and Reese took their last shot together on the night of Reese's birthday, before they went out for sushi, and that brief return to the vividness of estrogenated emotion so scalded that the next week, Amy faked taking her shot. She never took one again.

I didn’t conceive of “detransition” as a possibility until I read a novel last June—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, from which I’ve pulled these quotes. The main characters, Reese and Amy are two trans women in a romantic relationship until Reese starts cheating on Amy with a man. After a brutal confrontation, Amy decides to detransition, and became Ames. Ames accidentally impregnate Katrina, a divorced cis woman who is unsure of whether or not to have the child, as Ames is hesitant to be a father.

Ames’s hesitation seems to stem from an enduring sense of himself as a woman. Since he knows that Reese wants to be a mother, he proposes that Reese enter the family unit. And so the drama of the plot surrounds the question of whether or not Katrina, Reese, and Ames will end up finding a way to configure a kinship relation around the unborn baby. Ames was the first detransitioner I met.

Reese doesn’t quite believe that the detransition was a move in the “right” direction, and I was inclined to agree. If Ames has detransitioned because of an acutely traumatic incident, will some form of healing later lead her to retransition? Does the boundedness of the traumatic event which leads him to “suit up” in the “armor of masculinity” make his new gender contingent on a temporary need? In any case, the novel led me to follow detransition stories on platforms like Reddit and Youtube. I did not identify strongly with what I saw, as most of the more vocal detransitioners of the FtMtF variety detransitioned after only a few years of living as male and expressed a great deal of regret and resentment. Though I could not recognize myself in much of this, I became ambiently interested in the possibility of detransition. I had already begun to “feel” myself as more female than before; dysphoria was so distant as to be completely alien to me. And around this time, I read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, and various poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Women’s writing became an artistic horizon for me; Peters’s book one more instance of a novel which made womanhood—and trans life—interesting, and worth writing about.

I don’t recall the exact circumstances of the time, but I had also contacted a psychoanalyst in January 2021. What I do know is that I was suffering because I had fallen in love with someone with whom I primarily communicated through email and letter, and I had started to find the silences between these pieces of correspondence unbearable. My first sexual encounter with him had occurred in November, and I found out during the visit that he was going to visit another long-distance partner of his a few weeks later. Then there was a silence, for almost the entirety of December and twenty-one days in January. I wrote a sequence of emails to him during this time, some distraught, others more analytical. On some level I knew that writing to him when he was reluctant to respond would repel him further, but I couldn’t stop writing. He, in turn, seemed to communicate with me, during this month-and-a-half of silence, through stories he had posted on a personal website which I have reason to believe was only read by me. It was erotic, in its indirectness, and I found myself deeply aroused by this delicate form of contact.

My correspondent had known me since high school, when I had not yet transitioned. We had engaged in a bit of mutual flirtation, but I soon decided that I was a trans man, and that this would entail, for me, not becoming entangled with straight men. We didn’t date, not until the letters and emails were initiated almost six years later, when I was about five years into my male identity and four years on testosterone.

I had an inkling that the more I fell for him, the more I felt like a woman. A gap appeared, between how I felt subjectively: like an abandoned woman, and how I appeared to the world as a serious, small man. I imagined that my physical masculinity was off-putting to my correspondent, or that it created a gap for him between his fantasy of me and the reality of being with me in bed. In speaking about this material with my analyst, it became clear to me that I wanted to be a woman, in part to become desirable to one particular man, and in part to see what would happen if I began dating other men. It also became clear that I wanted to date men as a woman, which I gained proof of after going on a few dates with gay men.

Detransitioning inaugurated a whole other world of desire for me.

I soon found myself verified in relationships or briefer encounters where I was clearly an object of desire. There was no question of abandonment. There were situations in which I was able to re-instate a relation similar to the one I had with my correspondent, in which there have been verifiable acts of avoidance, but these remnants of my anxiety around abandonment and silence were soon replaced by the ability to tolerate these shadows or repetitions. When the feeling of abandonment comes back to me now, it fails to take hold for more than a day or two; reality returns, others come into the scene, or the person who had been silent breaks their silence. In this world without lasting anguish, I’ve also become far more confused. It has been difficult to maintain the same dedication to certain projects. For one, I used to be fascinated by literary theory around apostrophe, or address to an absent or inanimate figure, particularly in lyric poetry. I used to be fascinated by psychoanalytic theories of femininity and female sexuality. I no longer lean against knowledge and discourse around these concepts to make my day-to-day life bearable and livable, and find that my life is bearable and livable in the absence of curiosity about a specific intellectual field.

Does this signal the end of a kind of production or inscription?

How will I write or be in the world from now on?