My Detransition Story: Healing from Trauma with Plant Medicine | The Bridge Ep. 2
I asked to heal, and ayahuasca showed me I was a woman. I found Maddie locked in a closet and finally called her home. Detransition is learning to love the self I tried to leave behind.
Overview
Maddie Durbin describes living as a transgender man for nearly six years before an ayahuasca ceremony in Las Vegas called her back to herself as a woman. She recounts detransitioning through plant medicine, inner child work, and reparenting, while grieving irreversible changes including her double mastectomy. She believes her transition arose from trauma and a search for freedom, and now shares her story to advocate for deeper healing rather than political debate, emphasizing self-forgiveness and non-judgment of others' paths.
Full Video Summary
Maddie Durbin was born female and transitioned to live as a man at age 19 after childhood trauma and challenges specifically related to being female and being an expansive, different person. She adopted the name Max, took testosterone for five years, and received a double mastectomy at age 20, fully attaching her identity to being trans and then to being a man. She believed the change was permanent and told others she would never go back. By 2022, at age 24, she was suffering intense mental and physical pain and began a healing journey exploring trauma, spirituality, and alternative holistic methods. She moved to Las Vegas, where she eventually sat in an ayahuasca ceremony in November 2023. There, she asked why she was in so much pain and received the answer that she was a woman. In that single night, she saw a vision of herself as a confident woman with long hair and understood that her destiny was to live as she was born. Already off hormones for roughly a year, she still carried permanent physical marks: facial hair, a deepened voice, and the results of her double mastectomy. Over the months that followed, she told her friends and later her family—whom she had not spoken to for six years while trans—that she was detransitioning. She began laser hair removal in January of the previous year, started presenting more femininely, and reclaimed her birth name, Maddie, during a subsequent ayahuasca ceremony in which she found her inner child locked in a closet and resolved to bring her back. She continued sitting in ceremonies and working with psychedelic mushrooms to do deep inner child work and reparenting, integrating wounded parts of herself from different ages. She reflects that her transition was driven by unacknowledged hurt, anger, a desire for spiritual freedom, and societal pressures, and that attaching to the trans identity became a way to protect herself from further pain while preventing natural evolution. She describes detransition as an ego death requiring humility and grace, and she acknowledges the lasting grief over irreversible choices, particularly her surgery. Through forgiveness and self-acceptance, she has found greater peace and is now focused on sharing her story within a framework of trauma and healing, emphasizing that she does not judge others and that everyone is on a unique path.