Detransitioning after 25 years. From self centredness to surrender
After 25 years and countless surgeries, Sam calls transition “a fragmented ego turning violence against its own body.” The scars are permanent, the pain still raw, and the promised wholeness never arrived.
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Sam, after 25 years of living as a trans man and undergoing multiple surgeries, now describes transition as a decades-long flight from childhood trauma rather than a path to authenticity. In a raw garden monologue he calls “a death of illusion,” he says the process shattered his false self and left him confronting the “sheer immensity” of brokenness that medicalisation could never heal.
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Sam, speaking from his garden on a quiet Saturday morning, opens by acknowledging that viewers have worried about his long silence and that he has “not been okay at all.” He frames the entire video as an attempt to explain why: he is in the middle of a brutal, years-long confrontation with the truth of who he is, a process he bluntly calls “a death of illusion.” Recalling that he first wanted to transition at seven or eight in 1977 and then underwent surgeries throughout his late twenties and thirties, Sam now sees that decades-long effort as an elaborate escape from childhood trauma. “I spent my entire life escaping myself,” he says, describing transition not as becoming real but as “a fragmented ego turning violence against its own body” in a futile attempt to soothe unhealed wounds. The heart of Sam’s testimony is a spiritual and psychological reckoning rather than a political one. He explains that severe early trauma forced him to construct a false self—“an avatar in the world”—and that transition became the ultimate expression of that self-centered story. Once the same patterns of pain kept repeating, he “broke,” and in that breaking began to see the “sheer immensity” of everything his identity had excluded: shame, self-hatred, unworthiness. Seeing it clearly, he says, brings a person to a choice: keep authoring hopeful endings to the old story, or let the story die. Sam is choosing the latter, describing it as “a death before we die” so that real life can finally begin. Sam repeatedly returns to the language of surrender and mystery. He speaks of asking forgiveness from “whatever God is,” of recognizing that “you are already somebody,” and of moving attention away from the small, self-created image toward the larger “divine pattern of existence.” Transition, he now believes, was “an utterly ridiculous childish mistake” born of the illusion that one must do something to become enough. The work now is to stop coping, to “include everything”—trauma, scars, mistakes—and to rest in the mystery rather than in the certainty trauma once demanded. Near the end, Sam apologizes for his absence, explaining that coherent monologues have been impossible while he is “crossing this threshold.” He reassures viewers he is still available for one-to-one Zoom conversations and is considering launching a Patreon for live Q&A sessions because dialogue feels more honest than polished videos. He closes with gratitude for the compassion shown by his audience and a promise to keep chronicling “this metaphysical thing we call life” as it unfolds.