EPISOE 15 - One Detrans Voice: a Conversation with Carol
I checked all the boxes for being trans, but the boxes were wrong. I didn't need testosterone and a mastectomy; I needed antidepressants and actual therapy. We need options starting with the least invasive, not a one-size-fits-all medical path.
Overview
Carol is a 40-year-old detransitioned butch lesbian who medically transitioned at 33 and stopped testosterone at 38. She describes a childhood of rigid gender enforcement, teenage isolation, and a breakdown at 17 before encountering transition ideology in her early twenties. After an initial failed attempt due to strict gatekeeping, she began hormones and had a mastectomy within months in 2015, initially feeling relief but later suffering severe anxiety, panic, and physical deterioration. She credits a properly matched antidepressant with giving her the clarity to detransition, and now argues for non-invasive therapeutic options before medicalization.
Full Video Summary
Carol grew up in a strict religious family where girls had to wear dresses and were forbidden from sports. Around age nine, she was told she walked and acted like a boy and needed to change; when she played football with a pastor’s sons, her mother was furious. She suspects her mother may have been a closeted lesbian. After her father died in infancy, an abusive stepfather entered the picture around age four, and she became disconnected from her body. She refused to attend high school, instead staying home isolated, partly because she was already mocked for her masculine appearance and body hair and was terrified of exposing herself in gym showers. She came out as a lesbian at twenty, but had first realized her attraction to women at sixteen. That realization, combined with her religious upbringing, triggered a breakdown at seventeen during which she stopped eating and lost significant weight. She first heard about transitioning at twenty-one, when many of her butch lesbian friends began identifying as trans men. She identified as a trans man in her early twenties and saw a gender specialist around 2002, but the requirement to live as a man for six months before receiving hormones felt impossible for her curvy body, so she abandoned the attempt. In her early thirties, after a period of intense loss, depression, and suicidality, she spent nine months watching transition videos online and decided to medically transition. In 2015 she went to a Planned Parenthood in California and started testosterone under informed consent; her therapist, whom she had seen hoping to explore her feelings, simply affirmed her and suggested she “just try” hormones. Within four months she had a double mastectomy. Initially, testosterone boosted her mood and energy, and passing as a man made her aware of how poorly masculine women are often treated. Yet she never felt she truly belonged in male spaces, and she grew disturbed by aggressive dynamics she observed among men. After about a year and a half, her anxiety and panic attacks worsened dramatically. By year four she was essentially paralyzed in her room, unable to leave. Her female anatomy had also atrophied painfully. None of her doctors would acknowledge that testosterone might be contributing. The turning point came when she started an antidepressant matched to her genetics; within a month she felt well enough to manage her dysphoria and realized she had needed psychiatric help, not transition. She remained on testosterone for another year while processing this, but eventually stopped at age thirty-eight due to declining physical health, including rising cholesterol and pre-diabetes. Now forty and two years off testosterone, she identifies as a butch lesbian and advocates for offering gender-distressed people therapeutic and psychiatric options before medical transition, arguing that the least invasive treatments should be tried first.