Diagnosed With Gender Dysphoria After One Visit
One afternoon, one clinician, one coached script—and Medicaid paid to castrate me. A month later I was suicidal. Regret isn’t rare; it’s just buried under ideology and scalpels.
Resumen
Forest Smith recounts how a single visit to a Portland gender clinic at age 20 left him surgically castrated and implanted with breasts—all on Medicaid—after being coached on ‘what to say.’ Four years of social-services-enabled transition ended in suicidal regret, PTSD flashbacks, and a long climb back to family, work and testosterone-replacement therapy.
Resumen Completo del Video
Forest Smith traces his path into identifying as transgender back to a childhood marked by early exposure to online erotica at nine, followed by cross-dressing at twelve. Raised in a religious household, he says those experiences fused with shame and secrecy, producing the anxiety he would later label “gender dysphoria.” By sixteen he was receiving school-sponsored “queer theory” workshops that presented sex and gender as fluid spectrums, and in college the underlying shame and academic failure “boiled over” into a conviction that transition was the answer. During a long, storm-filled drive from Tennessee to Oregon he heard an NPR story affirming transition, took it as a sign, and returned home determined to pursue medical change. At Portland’s TransActive clinic, Forest says he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in a single visit with a trans-identified clinician who, he claims, coached him on “the things you’re going to need to say” to obtain hormones. He began estrogen at twenty, despite repeatedly expressing concern about fertility and being reassured the effects were reversible. Therapy, he recalls, focused on deconstructing misgivings rather than exploring them, attributing any distress to societal transphobia and prescribing activism as the cure. Social-services agencies supplied free clothes, breast forms, housing, and community, creating what he calls “a whole livelihood supported” by LGBTQ programs. After four years, acquaintances who had undergone castration without full “bottom surgery” persuaded him that an orchiectomy was a healthier, more non-binary path; herbal-hormone discussions at anarchist camps further normalized the idea. Forest ultimately underwent both an orchiectomy and breast-implant surgery paid for by Medicaid. Within weeks he was engulfed by suicidal regret, yet felt trapped by the ideology that treats regret as an expected part of trans experience—“I regretted it, but I didn’t repent,” he writes, borrowing Jane Austen’s phrasing. Flashbacks and night terrors began; he would wake “screaming no,” reliving the moment of castration. Only a severe COVID illness forced him back to his parents’ home, where the ideology “started falling away.” Listening to the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, journaling, and caring for his dying grandparents became anchors of rediscovery. He calls the grief “extreme,” says he now understands PTSD “not lightly,” and began testosterone-replacement therapy in January 2021; by July he had returned to work and, months later, had the breast implants removed. Today Forest operates machinery at the same cannery where his parents met, is studying automotive technology at a community college, and is writing both a Substack and a memoir to dissect “the psychology of what led me to transition.” He emphasizes gratitude for reclaimed family ties, steady work, and a value system he feels he had to rebuild from scratch after the medical and ideological detour that began with one visit and a diagnosis delivered in a single afternoon.