Gender Studies to Detransition: Sierra's Story of experimental gender medicine | The Bridge S2 Ep3
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I thought short-term mood relief was worth any drug, but tinkering with your body causes cascading damage you’ll spend years uncovering.
Overview
Sierra spent thirteen years on synthetic progestins prescribed to lower her estrogen and induce masculinization after adopting a transmasculine identity at age 22 while studying gender at UC Berkeley. Though she wrote her honors thesis denying the sex binary and lived as non-binary for years, hormonal disruption eventually caused severe mental health decline, an ADHD misdiagnosis, and a hip deformation that required surgery. Having now detransitioned and reclaimed her sex, she calls for regulating clinicians who exploit vulnerable adults with unproven gender medicine and advocates for women’s sex-based rights.
Full Video Summary
Sierra first encountered the idea of transitioning in college at age 22 while majoring in gender studies at UC Berkeley. Immersed in theories of gender as performance and destabilizing social categories, she came to believe she was transmasculine and began both social and medical transition. She wore a binder, came out to friends, and took hormonal drugs. She was naive and assumed herself immune to side effects. At the time she was chronically underweight due to an undiagnosed malformation that made eating difficult, which she feels stunted her development. Initially, doctors prescribed her a combination of progestins derived from androgens, including Depo-Provera and an implant, in doses and combinations not used for ordinary birth control. The goal was to lower estrogen, stop periods, and induce mild masculinization. She stayed on these drugs for roughly thirteen years, from about 2010 until her implant was removed in 2023. During that time she identified as transmasculine and later, from around 2013 to 2019, as non-binary. She wrote articles and completed an honors thesis arguing against the sex binary, influenced by Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, and believed hormones switched her cells into a male metabolic pattern. She now rejects that view, emphasizing genetic karyotype, developmental trajectory, and the ways female bodies respond differently to synthetic androgens. The drugs severely affected her mental health. Previously free of significant psychiatric issues, she developed mood problems clinicians refused to link to the hormones. She was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulants rather than being evaluated for the cognitive effects of a disrupted gonadotropin system. Because synthetic progestins do not convert to the mood-regulating neurosteroid allopregnanolone, she experienced emotional instability. Near the end she begged clinicians for additional hormonal interventions, which they authorized even while privately doubting benefit. She was too afraid to use prescribed estrogen cream for vaginal atrophy because trans ideology taught her to fear estrogen, enduring chronic urinary tract infections from a chemically induced menopause-like state. Around six months after starting Depo-Provera she felt a change in her hip that began years of pain; a deformation caused extra bone to grow around the growth plate, likely exacerbated by chronically low estrogen delaying growth-plate closure. The condition, more common in low-estrogen male athletes than in sedentary women, required surgical correction last year. During her final years in that identity she used they/them pronouns and the online name Ex-Atlantic, yet remained afraid of her own female hormones, fearing they caused mental problems. She eventually realized the drugs themselves had made her feel so unwell that she feared returning to normal. Today she identifies as a radical feminist, advocates for women’s sex-based rights, and calls for regulating clinicians who exploit vulnerable adults with unproven gender medicine. She stresses that adults are as susceptible to clinical harm as minors, and urges people to respect the body’s complexity rather than tinker with it for short-term mood relief.