Why is there so much hostility towards detransitioners in the trans community? Particularly towards those to have reclaimed their womanhood?
I think the way that you are thinking abt this like is collapsing a few different social dynamics at play in this situation. Like, to understand like what is going on in some of these things, it’s important to remember that there really isn’t one form of trans community and there’s not really one form of detrans/retrans/whatever-you-wanna-call-this-process.
So I think there are two primary areas or situations where there is a large amount of tension between trans people and detrans people, but they are particular to the types of trans people and the types of detrans people that we are talking abt.
The first is that I think for a lot of trans people who perhaps have a more conservative view of transition (esp people w a highly medicalized, or maybe essentialized understanding of trans identity) that someone detransitioning, esp if that person also held a medicalized or essentialized understanding of trans-ness can provoke insecurity abt their own process and how it might be perceived. Like, if yr argument for why people are trans is that it’s a ‘birth defect’ or that you’ve ‘always known’ and someone else has those same feelings but ends up thinking differently, that presents a problem: why don’t you just deal w your trans feelings without transitioning?
If someone has had anxieties abt not being *really* trans, seeing someone who was maybe even more certain that they were detransition might present some uncomfortable questions to them, and I feel like some people react defensively to that, no matter what way the detrans person is talking abt their own process. I think there’s also somewhat valid anxiety that this will be used to argue against other people being “allowed” to transition, bt that’s not really on any individual choosing to do a different thing than they were before, right?
This leads into the second source of substantial tension: there are a certain segment of people who detransition and then use that experience to integrate themselves into transphobic (or sometimes more specifically transmisogynistic) politics. This can range from either people detransing in a way reminiscent specifically of ‘ex-gay’ identity along the lines of conservative christianity, or it can happen along the lines of articulating that detransition along the lines of transphobic feminism.
This will obviously bring a certain amount of conflict, because this isn’t necessarily abt the detransitioned status insofar as it’s abt the politics that the person takes on and uses to understand their own gender, and in turn might project onto trans people. This is because frequently this comes w a certain way of articulating particularly trans women’s dangerousness, or it comes w a politics that seeks to use one’s own detransition story in order to argue for more gatekeeping of other people (esp younger people) from accessing medicine or having their identity respected socially/legally/whatever.
However! In the absence of these two factors (a certain conservative kind of trans identity and a certain conservative kind of detrans identity) I actually feel like there is actually an ability for these two groups of people (and people w experiences somewhere in between, which is frequently left out of the conversation!!) to get along quite well and have a lot of respectful engagement over similar life experiences. I’ve been in communities that included detrans/retrans people (or people w similar life experiences) since before I came out and when I was coming out a decade ago. Some of the most famous authors and activists within the trans world have had experiences on this spectrum. Lots of trans people go thru something on this spectrum of having to renegotiate their identity post-transition or post-surgery, esp those of us who have relatively unconventional approaches to trans identity.
So there are instances where like there might be the normal amount of social tension that comes from people negotiating new approaches to their life and gender, but i think if you take out like a lot of the universalizing politics that seems to be common within both conservative self-understandings of trans gender and of detrans gender, I think there is actually frequently still a lot of community between people, ime. It’s just that, regardless of the actual proportion, the most vocal people within these groups tend to be the people w the most universalizing approach.
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