In Defence Of A Phase: The Detrans Case Against Child Conversion Therapy
Originally published on the Dolphin Diaries substack. Be advised, this essay contains discussions of child sexual abuse.
“A trans kid always knows who they are.”
When arguing against anti-trans child conversion therapy—that is, a practice of attempting to force a minor to comply with a cis existence and change their mind on social and medical transition—the refrain above is cited about as often as it is cruelly picked apart in response. The casus belli for conversion therapy is, after all, prevention of change. What if the child changes their mind? What if they wake up one day with changes they no longer desire, as if it was all a phase or a temporary fixation?
What if, indeed.
As usual, there remains an assumption underneath it all: that preventing the transition of a maybe-cis child is beneficial and desirable. And that assumption is not answered, because the usual riposte to the conversion therapy casus belli is: the therapy doesn’t work. Its victims transition anyway. Those who don’t, often say things that indicate they’re repressing a desire to transition, ever praying it away. It’s said conversion therapy is torture, but it’s rarely said without also asserting how ineffective the torture is.
‘Effective,’ here, means converting trans children into whole cisgender adults, ones sufficiently happy with being cis.
To make the darkest joke I’ve ever made on this blog—and maybe ever will—I could, under a certain light, be presented as a successful case of conversion therapy. I used to believe I was a trans man, and now I identify with my birth sex. I’m quite happy and well-adjusted about it. As a teen, I went through five years of what can be described as a DIY, at-home conversion therapy: a variety of continuous efforts to convince me my transness was a delusion, and to teach me how to act like a girl. Sounds like it worked, right?
You’d have to skip a decade of my life to make that point, but you could if you had an agenda in mind.
Morbid and uncomfortable non-jokes aside, I don’t think any trans person that’s ever spoken out against conversion therapy would agree to putting a cis child through it. They just aren’t interested in making an argument about that either way. After all, most children threatened with conversion therapy are likely trans, so why bother.
Unfortunately, the gender-conservative opposition very much is interested in making the claim that anyone who reneges on transition post-conversion is a success story. That I exist at all would be taken as evidence every trans child could be me one day. How would you know with certainty it isn’t so? How would the children know?
So let’s take a look at a success story.
The Method
It wasn’t, perhaps, typical of the Western experience. There was no clergy—but then, we were barely religious. There was no medical institution—but saying that, a medical doctor was involved. You see, for someone raised in the Soviet Union—my parents’ generation and older—to be witnessed seeking psychiatric or psychological help is to fall so far in your social status as to become a leper. So there was never a possibility of a kind of structured programme that a Kenneth Zucker could salivate over. Not unless I was so irreparable that my family would risk eternal public humiliation—which is what me transitioning would’ve already entailed.
That is to say, nobody but me and my parents knew. My internet and phone access was tightly controlled, so until I flew the coop, no one ever found out. Which, firstly, meant that whatever treatment I was subjected to, could continue unimpeded and unquestioned by anyone outside our home for five years.
Secondly, it meant there were no ‘procedures’ or ‘treatments.’ No such words were uttered. Things simply happened to me, without preamble or schedule or preparation or naming; they happened to me because I deserved them and they didn’t need to be explained. The way I talk about them now is of my own devising.
With that in mind, there were four components to my treatment: the talks, the isolation and surveillance, and the temporary cosmetic procedures. Because there was no institutionalised structure, how much of it was designed deliberately and how much was borne purely out of reaction, I can’t say—though doubtless, my parents had access to the internet’s advice on how to treat trans children.
Talks, first. They kicked off the whole thing. One day at age twelve or so, I was called into the master bedroom with a particularly stern and foreboding voice. It was explained to me that my research stash about transsexuality had been found out. For the next two to four hours my gendered behaviour would be verbally dissected. Since I’d forsaken my childhood innocence by googling phalloplasty, discussions of sex were thoroughly on the table, in particular and especially how I’d deluded myself into fantasies of genital mutilation that would render me unfuckable and sterile. It wasn’t a non-interactive discussion: I was asked questions and guided through justifications and appropriate explanations. What exactly did I mean to accomplish, at twelve, by considering having a penis someday? What about myself did I imagine would ever be physically desirable to women after all these dangerous procedures? What event has compelled me to think of myself this way? My childhood habits were thoroughly narrated and examined: what toys I played with, what friends I had. Lastly, have I seen pictures of top surgery complications?
The talks always lasted more than an hour, involved two adults on one side and me on the other, and typically left me begging for them to stop.
I can’t say I found the contents of the talks convincing in the rational sense. It was difficult to even contemplate them as something containing ideas to agree or disagree with. I was a child whose sexual and gendered behaviour—for the little that it existed at all—was put to ruthless autopsy by the two adults I’d trusted the most. A moment ago, I was still thinking about what crushes I had and how porn was kind of gross. So I had no answers for my parents. I was not capable of giving any.
What I actually experienced during the talks was the feeling of my spine melting in acid. I was rendered into something that had no opinions nor desires and never had and never would; something that wanted only for the talks to stop. I would say and do anything to that end. Any sense of self—any boundary between me and the things that were happening to me, any sense of preference, of like and dislike, of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’—would only reemerge very slowly in the absence of these talks, and would be destroyed immediately when a new talk occurred. I watched and felt my own annihilation from inside my head and had no power to stop it.
Regardless, the main culprit for my delusion was found quickly: the internet. After all, if I never knew what trans men or transition was, I wouldn’t have hallucinated that I wanted it. This is a pretty classic conclusion: the likes of Abigail Shrier advocate for limiting information available to children frequently and emphatically.
Children are so fragile, after all. One wrong word could harm us irreparably.
So, isolation. There had already been plans about possibly transferring me to a different school—a much smaller one, in which my family had pre-existing personal relations with the administration—and this cinched it. No contact with old friends that may or may not have supported me (some did.) My computer was removed, and my father, a system administration specialist, had no problem securing near-complete oversight over my internet usage. At least, to me it seemed complete, as I was only twelve and not nearly as knowledgeable on the subject. I could, potentially, spend my free time sneaking off to an internet café, but that’s where the second part came in: I would not have unsupervised free time at all.
My town was small. I already had a helicopter-inclined grandmother without a job and with a preoccupation to control my every move. She could, for instance, show up at my school any moment and see if I was still as dolled up as I was when I left the house. My parents normally disapproved of that kind of thing and tried to curtail grandma’s excesses, but now she became useful, even if she didn’t entirely know what she was party to.
(Not that she’d disapprove—she was extremely preoccupied with my growing into a fuckable woman, and badgered me and my parents about getting me breast implants.)
Culturally speaking, privacy was not a terribly respected right anyway, and I’d signed it away when I started calling myself a boy online.
Naturally, this lack of privacy extended to the home. My door was to always stay wide open, as wide as it could go. If I resisted, it would’ve been taken off its hinges entirely, but knowing that, I didn’t. My drawers were searched for masculine clothing and binding tape—all trashed—and the money I’d saved up from my allowance was taken away. After that, my allowance would not exceed the price of a single bus ticket necessary to return home from school, and maybe also a meal or two.
(This mainly taught me how to steal. I needed money for my eventual escape, so I pickpocketed when the opportunity presented itself, and I stole from every house in which I’d ever been left even slightly unsupervised.)
The fact I no longer had anything resembling personal property wasn’t what ailed me the most, though. It was being always exposed and openly stalked. Supervision that was not quite constant, yet very frequent and random. I had to be ready to be observed anytime, all the time. And naturally, every inch of my behaviour was scrutinised for obedience and gendered markers. How did I walk? How did I stand? How did I sit? What did I do with my hands? How did I speak? What facial expressions did I make? What books was I reading when left without homework? Was I happy about doing feminine things, or was I displeased or upset? I better be happy. I’d been expressly forbidden from acting unhappy.
If my performance was not up to a standard, that would earn me a talk, which meant having my entire sense of self reset to negative-one all over. If I was found aggravating or deviant—but not quite bad enough for an extended therapy session—my mother would communicate I’d crossed a line by hitting me on my head any time she walked behind me with all the strength she had, which was pretty substantial. That’s how I learned what behaviour was acceptable for a girl. My dad was the good cop, showing concern for my distress—when mother wasn’t around—but only so long as I agreed I was being delusional, and so long as he had my tether to the online world firmly in his hand.
I developed a hatred for holidays and special occasions. I wanted nothing to do with summer or birthdays or New Year; I did not wish to travel and I didn’t want gifts. Family visits and days out were torture. I much preferred days of routine and nothingness, because they meant distraction and being away from family at school—as ‘away’ as I could be, anyway.
That constituted a problem for my re-education, though. What to do about the times my family absolutely couldn’t supervise me without causing a scene?
The school transfer was the first step, as I mentioned—no prior friendships, and a much smaller space. Better yet, the new school’s student demographics skewed heavily towards boys, at almost 80%. You might find this strange—why would this be a benefit? Wouldn’t it make more sense to send me off to an all-girls boarding school or some such? But in the post-USSR space, single-sex schools were highly unusual, almost non-existent. Moreover, my parents didn’t really care if I made friends with girls or boys; in fact, perhaps girls were more likely to encourage my delusion than rowdy and pubescent boys. Teenage boys wouldn’t suffer some sort of half-man-half-woman thing. And anyway, it was much more important that I would be in proximity to potential boyfriends. The more boys were around me, the more likely it was that a boyfriend would happen to me.
To that end: makeup, clothing, and cosmetic procedures. For a number of reasons—somewhat precocious development only one of them—I’ve always been a kind of adultified child anyway. Always supposedly more mature than my peers, always just slightly more sexualised, if in a repugnant sort of way. Now it was my mother’s mission to make me into as much of a young woman as possible, as quickly as possible. From vitamin supplements to skin treatments to eyebrow sculpting, I’d just narrowly dodged the possibility of tattooed makeup—a fad at the time—due to my age.
Naturally, I had no control over my hairstyle or clothing. To my mother’s great annoyance, I also had diminutive breasts that wouldn’t develop further, a boyish deep voice, and an attitude men found mostly repellant. So my mother increased her efforts. Picked sexy underwear for me (I had no control over that, either), put more makeup on me, made me wear heels every day to school. My clothes became shinier and frillier and most of all, tighter.
I developed a litany of eating disorders—if I couldn’t escape clothes that’d display every inch of my body, then I could ensure my body had no inches left—which my mother disapproved of because she was a doctor, but also somewhat approved of in a roundabout way. It wasn’t okay to starve or throw up, but it was okay to constantly exercise. If I became fat like she always feared, then I’d be truly unfuckable.
As a result, I was only mostly unfuckable. Uninteresting to peers who were also uninteresting to me, but eye-catching enough to older men that liked them helpless. Teachers, mostly. This was useful to my family, since my grandmother was obsessed with my exceeds-all-possible-expectations academic performance, and she’d berate my mother if it wasn’t so. My mother didn’t enjoy being punished for my mistakes, so she could send me especially dolled up with a bribe in hand to a male teacher, and turn that A into A+.
Don’t get that uncomfortable, I still remained a virgin and all.
Think Of The Children
I left my familial home in 2014. In 2021, unrelated to anything that’s ever happened to me, a foundational text of the modern American ‘gender critical’ movement was released to great sensation and aplomb: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier. In it, Shrier seeks to answer the question: why do young girls want testosterone? And what can we do to change that?
In Chapter One, she writes (emphasis mine):
“Teens of my era [...] set the high watermark in the U.S. for teenage pregnancy. It’s been plummeting ever since—as have rates of teenage sex—recently reaching multi-decade lows. [...] [Teens] report greater loneliness than any generation on record. [...] To understand how some of the brightest, most capable young women of this era could fall victim to a transgender craze, we should begin by noting that adolescent girls today are in a lot of pain. In America, Britain, and Canada, teenagers are in the midst of what academic psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called a ‘mental health crisis’—evincing record levels of anxiety and depression. [...] Until the transgender craze strikes, these adolescents are notable for their agreeableness, companionability, and utter lack of rebellion. [...] They’ve also never been sexually active.”
Still in Chapter One, she writes:
“Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy [...]. Long before they may have had any romantic or sexual experience at all.”
To finish off Chapter One, she writes (emphasis mine):
“Adolescents are far less likely to have had actual sex than the women of my generation were at their age [...]. Many of the adolescent girls who adopt a transgender identity have never had a single sexual or romantic experience. [...] What they lack in life experience, they make up for with a sex-studded vocabulary and avant-garde gender theory.”
In the eleventh and final chapter of Irreversible Damage, Shrier concludes:
“Far be it from me to advocate teenage sex. But in the course of writing this book, I’ve come to view this monster differently [...]. There’s something horribly sad about teenagers who aren’t even interested. [...] for many teens suddenly identifying [as trans], it very often seems to be a sad cult of asexuality.”
What is a child—a teenage child, to keep it limited—to Shrier? She does not believe in some sort of precocious development. No, Shrier rather subscribes to the popular misinterpretation of a study, claiming that the prefrontal cortex “does not complete development” until the age of twenty-five. She utilises this claim to infantilise university-age adults. She does not believe children to be adult-like; she believes them incapable of making decisions, in fact; those should be ceded to parents.
What is a teenage girl to the patriarchy?
Why, something that must become a woman, of course. Same as a teenage boy must become a man—and be punished if he doesn’t. And we all know how society punishes both the sissy and the dyke.
In Chapter Eight, discussing why a girl might be beset by such madness as to transition, Shrier writes (emphasis mine):
“Intersectional language denies all [girls’] biological specialness. [...] The gifts and presumptions of this culture make it hard to imagine why anyone should want to be a girl.”
In her advice to parents in her last chapter, Shrier writes:
“Tell [your daughter] also that a woman’s most unique capacity—childbirth—is perhaps life’s greatest blessing.”
In other words: no girl would want to be a woman if she’s allowed to think about it for too long (such as being on the internet). Becoming a woman, naturally, entails being fucked and knocked up. That is her patriarchal purpose. Therefore: teenage girls must sexed-up and fucked quickly enough that they don’t get funny ideas.
Under patriarchy, childhood is a process by which a sexual commodity is created. The mother’s role to a daughter—and the father’s role to a son—is to instruct the future sex object/subject, to teach them to behave just as the parent has been taught to behave. To know it, to tolerate it, to like it—ultimately, to do it or to accept it being done to them. There is no higher purpose to a patriarchal parent than to make their daughter a woman and to make their son a man.
You don’t need to think very long about what that means, do you?
A queer child is then a parent’s ultimate failure. A failure to make their child conform to—never mind excel at—their designated sex-role. Although not every form of conversion therapy or related behaviours directly, literally involve sexual abuse, it is the natural endpoint and the unavoidable Damocles’ sword over the child’s head. After all, what is being corrected is the child’s future sex life. There’s just no way around it.
British survivors (1, 2) of anti-gay conversion therapy—both gay men—describe their experience as follows:
“He would sit uncomfortably close to me and instruct me to imagine different scenarios: my parents having sex, my mother’s vagina, my experience being molested when I was 15. He would tell me to think about good-looking girls, even though this wasn’t allowed in our religion.” “I was incredibly drained. It felt like the prolonged session had been an effort to break me down. It was a constant interrogation about the most private details of my life.”
Finally, as an irrelevant aside to match Shrier’s irrelevant asides, she has a rather extensive Chapter Seven called The Dissidents (from the trans cult, that is.) In it Shrier pens effusive praise to many sexologists and psychiatrists that either practice or endorse conversion therapy. Naturally, Ray Blanchard is among them. Including—as a quite bizarre non-sequitur—his “groundbreaking research into pedophilia”:
“...a man who pursues fourteen-year-old-girls may be a criminal, but he isn’t a pedophile.”
The Success In Question
Naturally, the moment I left for university, I transitioned. It didn’t really matter to me whether it was a ‘delusion’ or not. I had no such concerns. My gender stopped being a part of me that grew and developed as an organic part of my person, something I could know or discover or doubt. Rather, it became a fixed point. My parents asserted Fixed Point A, ‘female,’ which entailed the treatment I described above. I held in my mind a Fixed Point B, ‘male,’ which entailed an absence of said treatment. That’s what transition came to mean for me: the freedom to say no, and to keep saying it.
It came as something of a shock to my family. Over the years of conversion I’d developed a relatively well-oiled puppet persona. I could smile as if I meant it, say things as if I meant them, and do things as if I enjoyed them, while in actuality feeling nothing at all. Or perhaps while feeling awful. My genuine reactions became impediments, threats to my survival. Especially bad reactions: if I betrayed that I wasn’t enjoying it, I’d be punished harder. So, year after year, I slowly lost the ability to perceive how I reacted to things at all.
This ability did not return when I left home. I had only a rudimentary understanding of ‘I like this’ and ‘I don’t like that.’ I could tell whether I enjoyed the taste of a meal, but anything more complicated than that turned into arcane puzzles. I would go out in the company of new friends and at some point find a tension coiling in my gut; only then would I realise something was off. But what? Did I dislike the new friends? Did someone say something that rubbed me the wrong way? Did I actually hate bowling? I had no clue. Likewise, I could suddenly feel overcome with a kind of strange anxious jitter, and I’d realise I was perhaps happy, but I wouldn’t be sure what made it so.
My emotions felt more like autoimmune responses. Physical sensations that were sudden and pointless, impossible to trace to their source and therefore nearly uninterpretable. In order to respond to the things happening around me, I would try to rationalise a reaction that made logical sense. Would I enjoy this? Should I say no? But the immediate default was to simply go along with whatever was happening. To make people angry with me had been a threat to my survival, so my behaviour had warped around acquiescence.
This would come in handy later, when I needed to go through a psychiatric assessment for my transsexualism diagnosis. I had a script to act out and I needed only to ignore the invasiveness of the procedure. Ignoring invasions on my person and body were my best-developed skills.
But, of course, this wasn’t really beneficial to me in any other way. I was incapable of having complete, whole relationships with anyone, including myself. I existed as a kind of rational mind attached by a thin flesh cord to something flayed and distant with which the rest was constantly trying and failing to reconnect. That ‘something’ was not gender; gender was only part of it. It was, quite simply, me.
Although, speaking of gender, this state of affairs certainly ensured I took my sweet time to realise I didn’t want to transition and live as a man. Not just because it would’ve rendered my abuse, to some minds, justified. But how would I even know what being displeased with the effects of transition felt like? I could only live by scripts, and for that, there were almost none. What did it mean to want to be a woman when ‘woman’ was the shape of your abuse, and very explicitly so? It was not really spoken of. Neither subject would go so far as to ever discuss detransition—that was a hard line.
Well, there was grift, of course, but whatever kind of truth or solace could be found in that.
(One could argue that, in a perfect world, I wouldn’t have been allowed to transition in such a mental state. But then, I wasn’t really mentally fit to exist in society in general. So what was to be done with me? Ought I have been placed in a cushioned bubble, to be allowed life and decisions only when I was sufficiently healed?)
No, it took the decade I needed to rethread my nerves and synapses into that of a functional human being to derive from first principles what I wanted my life and gender to look like. That, and the companionship of several trans women—but there’s already an essay about that. My ability to have any gender and any sexuality—which are always intertwined—had been broken over, and over, and over again, and there was nothing but time and great personal effort and anguish that could’ve fixed it.
Such is the result of conversion therapy. Not a cis adult nor a trans one, but rather someone without a whole sense of self at all. Not man, not woman, but a pliable nil. It’s called success when the nil complies and a failure when they don’t. That is all.
Why Must the Children Know?
“A trans kid always knows who they are.”
But what does it mean, to know? What does it mean to feel like a gender? What does it mean to feel like anything?
Perhaps this answer will not suit everyone’s sensibilities, but here are my two cents.
A self is a feedback process. One receives information about the world, decides on their relationship to it based on internally felt preference, and then demonstrates: “I am this, and not that.” In response, the world may agree or disagree, to which the individual making the proclamation adjusts. “Women wear lipstick,” the world says, and she paints her lips; or maybe, she answers, “No they don’t, and I won’t;” or maybe, he says, “But I’m not a woman, so I won’t.” On and on this loop continues, until the individual no longer exists to formulate responses. This is what makes a self feel like something; it’s what makes it actualised. Real.
It’s what makes one’s gender feel real. No matter what it is, and whether it is even recognised as a gender by the wider society. What matters is the mere ability to show it; to be able to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
Any conversion therapy, or any lesser act of external gender repression, is effectively an effort to push the victim’s gender out of reality. To make it hypothetical and immaterial—in contrast to the gender they’re forced to perform, which is made forcibly real. The goal is to create a puppet-self, and to drown whatever hides beneath it.
So what difference does it make whether the gender in question is a ‘phase’ or not?
Perhaps it’s that I know this intimately, on my own skin, which makes me so irritated with attempts to justify transness via ‘born this way.’ As if there is something, anything, more important, more make-it-or-break-it to the human mind, than autonomy. Is it not human to have phases and change? Perhaps there is a secret static True Self that must be discovered, perhaps there is not; either way, it is empirically evident to me that enforcement constitutes a murder of any personal truth, eternal or transient. A self—and therefore its gender—can only be developed by one’s own initiative.
But to a society in which gender is a method of designating feminised labour—who is allowed to fuck and who gets to be fucked, and who must make children—that is, of course, complete horseshit. There is no truth that matters except such that can be weaponised to this distribution. Children are only sexual resources that need sorting, and gayness and transness constitute a pillaging of said resources.
That’s why queerness is always obscene, but child sexual abuse is only wrong when the person who doesn’t own the child does it. Trans and gay people are always groomers—but father and mother simply know best.
Efforts to control children’s (and adult’s) gender should be understood as nothing less than that: an attempt to assert the reproductive and sexual order, completely and utterly agnostic of any supposed psychological benefits. To call it a ‘therapy’ is a masquerade in benevolent individualism. So are any pretenses that the conversion’s goal is to prevent potentially unwanted physical changes. The child’s desires have never mattered. The GC rulebook for child-rearing explicitly states children cannot know what they want and need to be fucked before they do; this same sentiment is repeated across languages, across time, across cultures.
The goal is, and always has been, to enforce a specific sexual development regardless of preference—the one that marks you as the correct commodity.
It wouldn’t have taken me a decade to detransition had I not been through this abuse. I can look back on plenty of small instances in which I clearly felt displeased or distressed with the effects of testosterone, as early as a year into taking it, but which I always ignored or filed away as unimportant or unreal. I did not do so because of a ‘trans cult,’ or because someone convinced or coerced me. In fact, I never talked about them to anyone; no one was even given a chance. I did so because, as an adolescent, I was broken and forcibly reassembled into whatever vision of ‘woman’ my parents had. So I had no sense of how to follow my own autonomy. As an adult, I just did my best.
So I ask you this: does it matter if a child always knows? Why are we even talking about that? Is it really that commodification of children is inexcusable because the wrong sexual commodity is being enforced? What is ‘wrong,’ in this case?
Did it matter that I was wrong?
