20/04/2024
David Oliver at USA Today, a top selling broadsheet in the States, meets with Devon Price, who wants to open up discussions around the politicised issue of transition pauses and temporary detransitioning amongst transgender people. Devon says that he transitioned, detransitioned then transitioned again. "There's this huge pressure on many of us to present our story to the public, in as tidy of a way as possible; That we always knew, since we were a child, that transition immediately made us feel better about ourselves, that life was just dramatically better afterwards," Price says. "We're trying to sell the public on this idea that we deserve to have body autonomy, because we really, really needed it, we were going to die otherwise. And we're 100% better once we get that autonomy. And that's just not really how living in a stigmatized category works." The exact detransition rate is not known, but research has shown that family and societal pressure are driving forces that lead people to do it – not because people wake up and decide they're not actually trans, as anti-trans groups might make it seem. "It's just better for everyone involved if we don't treat detransition like it's this scary taboo, that it's just a person experimenting and exploring their body autonomy," Price says. "It's not the end of the world to transition and regret it. It's not the end of the world to detransition, and then re-transition again, that's just sometimes the cost of finding yourself in a world that doesn't want you to." "We know that for transgender people, being in supportive care is better, period," notes Dr. Joshua D. Safer, executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. He spoke to USA Today and went on, "And we also see that people who are getting medical treatments sometimes pause or slow down those treatments for many reasons, including effects happening faster than they expected or because of bad reactions from the people around them. Everyone’s process is different, and that's OK." The article also notes that a recent National Center for Transgender Equality survey found that out of 92,000 transgender people, 94% felt satisfied post-transition.
