He sido trans y me arrepiento, es una estafa | Sandra Mercado
I was a feminine gay boy told I was a woman in the wrong body. After twenty years, hormones, and a vaginoplasty, I woke up: this is a scam. You cannot change sex, and giving blockers to kids is abuse.
Overview
Sandra Mercado recounts his journey from a feminine gay boy bullied and abused in 1990s Spain to a medically transitioned woman under the old gender law, and finally to a detransitioned gay man. After vaginoplasty and complications he experienced a crisis of realization that he could not change sex, and now advocates for exploratory therapy for dysphoria while warning against puberty blockers, affirmative care, and Spain’s self-ID law.
Full Video Summary
Sandra Mercado, born in 1986, recounts growing up as a feminine gay boy near Barcelona in the 1990s. From early childhood he was attracted to men and preferred activities and styles culturally associated with girls, which subjected him to severe bullying at school, psychological abuse from his father, and pervasive homophobia. Because society equated his femininity with womanhood, and because being an effeminate gay man felt shameful and dangerous, he developed gender dysphoria and came to believe he had been born in the wrong body. Under Spain’s older gender law, he underwent affirmative therapy where psychologists affirmed that he was really a woman trapped in a male body, reinforcing sexist stereotypes about what makes a woman. He began cross-sex hormones and later underwent vaginoplasty. Initially he experienced gender euphoria and passed socially as a woman, but about a year and a half after surgery he began suffering physical complications including urethral stenosis. He says surgeons experimented on him without proper informed consent during a reconstruction, relocating his urethra without warning and treating him like a guinea pig. This physical trauma coincided with a profound mental crisis. He began asking what it actually means to “feel like a woman,” realizing the concept relied entirely on sexist stereotypes rather than biological reality. He concluded he had been deceived by medical professionals and that it is impossible to change sex. He now understands himself as a gay man who was subjected to severe plumophobia, not a woman, and is undergoing exploratory psychotherapy to address the roots of his dysphoria in childhood trauma, paternal abuse, and societal rejection. Mercado is critical of Spain’s current self-ID trans law, which he argues enables fetishists and removes psychological safeguards, and he condemns the administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors as child abuse and uncontrolled medical experimentation. He insists that dysphoria should be treated with thorough psychological exploration before any irreversible steps are taken. He notes that medical transition has left him with chronic health issues and ongoing mental distress while failing to resolve his underlying condition, which he describes as a mental disorder requiring real treatment, not affirmation.