Detrans when transition.., p.1
DETRANS: When transition is not the solution, page 1
DETRANS
When transition is not the solution
Dr Az Hakeem
Copyright © 2023 Dr Az Hakeem
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.
ISBN: 9798862184549
Imprint: Independently published
MORE PRAISE FOR DETRANS
"Beset by scandal and pseudoscience, the edifice of Transgender Medicine is toppling under its own weight. Dr Hakeem provides the ultimate guide to understanding why the current medical regime failed, and how we can build a more sober and compassionate treatment regime for sufferers of gender dysphoria."
Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
“Dr Hakeem has been deeply involved in working with those with disturbance in relation to Gender for very many years and is one of the leading thinkers in this area. This book makes a unique contribution to this discipline. It gives a concise but thorough overview of the history of 'trans', starting long before the time when it became such regular front page news. Dr Hakeem was there at the beginning. But even more important than this, he brings his long experience and knowledge of that most neglected group - those who changed their mind, 'detransitioners'. Their painful stories have been silenced in the media storm, and Dr Hakeem gives them a voice which is both moving and disturbing. This book is written in a clear and compelling way and will be essential reading for all those involved in work either professionally, or as carers of individuals in distress in relation to their gender. But further than that, given the huge storm this subject has created in the last ten years or so, it will be of considerable interest to the general reader who wants to understand this area from the wise and balanced perspective Dr Hakeem provides. Essential for all libraries.”
Dr David Bell, Psychoanalyst and former Governor of Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
“By turns touching and heartbreaking, this uniquely insightful book combines the insights of the first clinician to write about the modern explosion in trans identification from outside the ‘gender affirmative’ paradigm, and those of the detransitioners who are its fallout.”
Helen Joyce, author of
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
“Hakeem has brought his own voice and experience, while sympathetically enabling the lost, forgotten, marginalized, or cancelled voices of others. The result is a delightful mixture of empathy, hard-hitting information, and empirical evidence from years of clinical practice. It is a fabulous book, and just what is needed, with complex ideas told simply for the professional and lay reader alike. The psychosis of trans, he concludes, is not to be found in the individual, but in the society that enables it.”
Dr Heather Brunskell Evans, author of Inventing Transgender Children and Young People
“DETRANS is essential reading for anyone who is interested in supporting people with gender-related distress. This is a compelling read. The harrowing stories of the detransitioners are combined with practical approaches that can offer hope to this minority within the minority. Anyone who is embarking on medical or social transition should read this. Parents of gender-distressed children should read this. Professionals should read this. Most of all, those people who are lost in transition, who have already medically transitioned and are now reflecting on their situation, should read this as they will come to realise there are many ways to cope with the trauma of an inappropriate medical transition. DETRANS lays bare the shameful behaviour of medical professionals and therapists who perpetrated the notion that medical transition could act as a panacea for vulnerable people. This book brings solace to everyone who has been harmed by medical transition, as it heralds the beginning of a new era of truth and reconciliation that has become necessary in the wake of the unhinged excesses of gender ideology.”
Stella O’Malley, Founder of Genspect
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo: Dan Welldon
Dr Az Hakeem has worked as a psychiatrist offering specialist exploratory psychotherapy for adults presenting with conditions relating to their sense of gender identity for over 20 years. He single-handedly set up a dedicated adult gender dysphoria specialist psychotherapy service within the UK National Health Service and ran it for over a decade. He has written, published and lectured on the subject extensively.
He now works in private practice in London. He is an Honorary Associate Clinical Professor at UCL Medical School. He is the Professional Patron of The LGB Alliance and part of the Clinical Advisory Group for Sex and Gender CAN-SG. He is also the author of TRANS: Exploring Gender Identity and Gender Dysphoria.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
MORE PRAISE FOR DETRANS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
SECTION I: TRANS?
1. HOW DID I COME TO WRITE THIS BOOK?
2. ‘TRANS’ MEANING EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
SECTION II: PRETRANS: RECIPES FOR CREATING TRANS
3. TRANS AND AUTISM (AND HOW PRONOUNS BECAME SO IMPORTANT)
4. TRANS AND TRAUMA
5. TRANS AND HOMOPHOBIA
6. ROGD: A PSEUDO-MEDICALISED YOUTH SUBCULTURE
7. 1984 OUT BY 39 YEARS, OTHERWISE ACCURATE
8. GENDER IDEOLOGY AND ITS CAPTURE OF ORGANISATIONS, SOCIETY, AND THE MEDIA
9. ‘BORN IN THE WRONG BODY’ - THE MYTH AND THE REALITY
SECTION III: DETRANS
10. DESISTERS, PERSISTERS, DETRANSITIONERS AND RETRANSITIONERS
11. A DETRANS’S LIFE STORY:
12. A DETRAN'S LIFE STORY:
13. A DETRAN'S LIFESTORY:
14. A DETRAN'S LIFE STORY:
15. A DESISTER'S LIFE STORY:
16. A PARENT'S STORY:
17. A PARENT'S STORY:
18. THE FIRST UK SPECIALIST TRANS & DETRANS PSYCHOTHERAPY SERVICE
19. DEALING WITH DYSPHORIA, DESISTING AND DETRANSITION. A PEER-LED SUPPORT GROUP
20. SUPPORTING PARENTS OF TRANS-IDENTIFYING CHILDREN.
21. GENDER CRITICAL: THE ASSENT OF THE RATIONAL
22. THE TAVISTOCK GIDS AND CASS REPORT
23. GENDER CRITICAL CLINICIANS AND SERVICES
24. THE LEGAL FICTION OF GENDER AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF DETRANSITION
25. DIRECTION FOR FUTURE DETRANS CLINICAL SERVICE PROVISION
26. OUTCOME MEASURES:
27. FIGHT CLUBS, WEREWOLVES AND THE DENTON’S DOCUMENT
28. USEFUL ORGANISATIONS
USEFUL titles
INTRODUCTION
My first book TRANS: Exploring Gender Identity and Gender Dysphoria was aimed at helping anyone and everyone to have an understanding of the complexity of gender dysphoria, its different presentations and an overview of treatments available, including my specialist psychotherapeutic work with gender dysphoria patients over the past two decades. Since then, there has been a growing concern with the rate at which people, especially children and teenagers, are increasingly identifying as ‘trans’ in all parts of the developed world. There has been an inordinate increase in children being diagnosed by themselves or others as having gender dysphoria. This is very much a growing ‘first world problem’ as it is not replicated in countries of the developing world.
Along with the massive increase in those identifying as trans, there is of course a growing number of those who had once identified as trans but then desisted, reverting to a former non-trans identity without ever having made any changes to their body whilst they were trans-identifying. These people are the ‘desisters.’ There is similarly also a growing number of those who at one time identified as trans but who then changed their mind only after undergoing medical or surgical ‘sex change’ procedures or both. These are the ‘detransitioners’.
This is the first book dedicated to detransitioners or the ‘detrans’, written and edited by a clinician with a career’s worth of experience working with Gender Identity Conditions.
Detrans are those individuals who were once convinced that the sex of their body was wrong. They were clinically facilitated along a medical and surgical pathway involving hormonal and surgical castration, cross-sex hormones, and the removal of sexed bodily parts - which were replaced with tissue fashioned to resemble as much as possible that of the opposite sex. This was giving them what they believed they wanted at the time. They were meant to live happily ever after. But at some point, after they had tried to change their sex, they changed their mind.
Detrans are the people who the politically active trans-activists do not want you to hear about. They are silenced as they go against the ‘one solution fits all’ approach and ‘born in the wrong body’ myth which the political activists have wanted everyone to believe.
What proportion of those who undergo medical/surgical ‘sex changes’ later regret their decision? The real answer is we do not know. We cannot know as this is the only medical/surgical intervention for which there is no follow-up data collected or follow-up studies published. Trans political activists often refer to a figure of “1%” but this is made up and fictional. No one is followed up. None of my Detrans patients were followed up, no one asked them, they are invisible in terms of data or stats.
Having had a part-time clinical specialist interest in Gender Identity Conditions as a Psychiatrist and Medical Psychotherapist for over two decades I have seen many det
This book joins the growing library of books critical of current Gender Ideology. Heather Brunskell-Evans’s, Inventing Transgender Kids [2019], Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality [2021], Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls [2021], and Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage [2020], a must-read for everyone and a real eye-opener into how Gender Ideology and gender clinics are currently causing mayhem, especially with young girls in the USA. I am hugely grateful to the people who have contributed a chapter outlining their own personal story of how they found themselves to subsequently be detrans. These incredibly brave individuals offer us a first-hand insight into what they were experiencing, thinking, understanding, what those around them were telling them and how the clinicians they saw dealt with them. Their feelings of regret, grief, mourning, and anger is at times raw and difficult to process, but this has been their reality, and for them to put this into words for this book has been a courageous feat which is to be commended. These individuals are widely considered pioneers for detrans awareness.
I would like to thank my guest contributors from both the UK and USA: the desisters and detransitioners who have bravely given a frank account of their personal journeys, the parents who have given an account of their experience having a trans-identifying child and those who run support groups for detransitioners and parents. I am grateful to colleagues who have kindly taken time to write of their professional work in this very specialist field and their thoughts on what services for detransitioners may look like in the future. I would like to thank fellow clinicians in CAN-SG for their professional collegiate support, and especially Stella O’Malley and Anna Hutchinson for helping with this book. Also, John Timoney for creating the cover design. and a huge thank you to Joann who tirelessly makes my everyday working life run smoothly. My thanks too to cancelled comedy writer turned Gender Critical fighter Graham Linehan for permission to include his chapter on The Denton Document exploring why so many institutions across the West have been captured by Gender Identity Ideology, and to the almost-cancelled lawyer Sarah Phillimore for her chapter on the legal situation for detrans people.
I would also like to thank the wider gender critical community not only of clinicians but the swathes of concerned parents, relatives and women who feel erased by Gender Ideology and members of the charity LGB Alliance. Until I joined Twitter, I believed I was the only gender critical person in the world but now many thousands of us are finding each other and gathering a voice to be heard – heard by those who can hopefully address the predicted future tsunami of detrans people following from the huge increase in those people currently identifying as trans, a proportion of whom will inevitably progress onto ‘detrans’ at some point in the future.
The reader will have noticed my use of the term ‘sex change’. This is intentional. I do not use the term ‘gender reassignment surgery’ as gender is a social construct and not a physical entity and so cannot be operated upon. ‘Sex change’ interventions aim to help someone resemble a member of the opposite biological sex so that they may live in their chosen trans identity. I put ‘sex change’ in single quote marks as it is of course not possible to actually change one’s biological sex in terms of changing one’s DNA and reproductive functioning, even if it is legally possible to change one’s gender or sex in many countries. To some there is no distinction between legal and biological sex, but the belief that biological sex is real and immutable is thankfully now a protected belief, alongside the world not being flat or having been created in seven days.
This is a book based on over twenty years of clinical experience working with people suffering from gender dysphoria. Many of my patients I saw on a weekly basis for over a decade. I knew them very well and they were able to talk with and confide in me in a way which they had not had the opportunity to do before. Many felt that it saved them from making decisions they would have regretted, others came to me already feeling that it was too late and that nothing could be done to reverse what had been done to them – these were the ‘detrans’. This book is not based on an ideology, a fantasy world, or conjecture, and is most certainly not based on hatred or ‘transphobia’. I am gender critical which means specifically that I am ‘critical’ of current Gender Ideology (where one can be any of a hundred genders including ‘cat gender’ and other such fantastic nonsensical assumptions) and that I believe in Science and Biology – this is not ‘transphobic’ despite what the gender activists would like you to believe. This book is based on what I learned from the very many patients whom I had the privilege of being able to think with week in week out over many years, none of whom thought of me as anything other than wanting to be helpful and none ever felt me to be ‘transphobic’.
I would like to dedicate this book to my many patients over the years and to them I am very grateful.
SECTION I: TRANS?
1. HOW DID I COME TO WRITE THIS BOOK?
I am not detrans and I have never been trans.
But as all doctors know, one does not have to personally experience a condition to be able to learn about it and gain expertise in it. Also, as I will describe in the book, ‘trans’ is an umbrella term encompassing a myriad of different conditions and presentations of which no single person could personally experience all subtypes. I have however had the privilege of encountering all different types and presentations in my professional work in this very specialist area over the past twenty years. The idea of not fitting in or feeling different is not unique to trans and those of us who have felt different in some way are able to empathise with this aspect helpfully.
I was born and brought up in beautiful North Wales to parents who, having witnessed the atrocity that was the partition of India, did not particularly want to be reminded of the country they were leaving behind, and so North Wales was suitably remote. We were the only ‘brown looking’ family in the town or, as far as I could gather as a young child, in the whole of Wales or perhaps the UK. I remember coming home from my first week at infants’ school and saying to my mother, “I don’t think I should be brown, I think I should be the same as all the other children”. Of course, the entirely sensible and appropriate response from Mummy Hakeem was to help me accept little brown me, and for me then to expand my repertoire of understanding of what being brown could be for me and what it should not stop me from being. A ridiculously inappropriate response would have been to tell little brown me that I was ‘trans-ethnic’, ‘trapped in the wrong body’, and seek out physical treatments to enable me to be the white sort of person I felt I should be.
I nearly did a Fine Art degree instead of Medicine. I had applied to both, got accepted for both and had planned to do both back-to-back, but plans change. I went into Medicine knowing that I was going to be a psychiatrist, although I did briefly entertain the idea of specialising in Plastic Surgery and my first post after qualifying was as surgical house officer to a lovely Professor in Plastic Surgery at University College London. During that post I was able to assist in operations including gender reassignment so I could see first-hand what was being done and how. I can still draw each stage if asked. Having had quite an Arts background my initial thought of transgender was that it was the ultimate feat of post-modern human sculpture. From a reconstructive surgical perspective, it was astounding what skills surgeons had developed and were trying to achieve. The idea that men could actually be turned into women seemed too fantastic to be real, surely? However, whilst the surgeons were quite rightly focussing on their brilliantly honed technical skills, I did wonder what was going on in the minds of the people requesting this extreme surgical makeover. My hope was that on entering the field of psychiatry I might find out. I did not. Also, what if the person later changed their mind about their change of sex?
