Vaishnavi Sundar, “Dysphoric: Fleeing Womanhood like a House on Fire (Part 3: Trans Regret)” (2020)
In this episode of her four-part series on the effects of gender identity ideology on women and girls living in misogynist societies, Sundar chooses to focus on detransitioning / desisting in female-to-male individuals and the issues and problems they must confront in doing so. Through interviews with medical and psychological experts and counsellors, and with people who have undergone detransitioning, Sundar shows the harassment and alienation detransitioners suffer from others who initially supported their transitioning efforts, and the lack of support from the medical and psychological professions who also encouraged or even pushed transitioning. Transitioners and detransitioners alike are not told of the medical and other health consequences, often permanent, of undergoing surgery to remove their breasts, ovaries and uteruses, and how such drastic changes can also affect their mental health. As the episode progresses, viewers gain some sense of how the detransitioners interviewed have come to terms with, even embraced, their new hybrid bodies with all the damage that had been done, and moved ahead to create new futures for themselves.
The episode has educational value for people and their families grappling with detransitioning and desisting, in showing that communities of detransitioners and desistors already exist, online if not physically, that can offer support and comfort. Individuals in the process of detransitioning need to know that such a process is a continuous one. Perhaps one comfort detransitioners can obtain is that, as the uniquely hybrid individuals they have now become, they can literally become new people free of the stereotyping, male and female, that hampers others: neither male nor female, they are now a third sex. Depending on where they have come from and what their previous experiences and traumas have been, this knowledge can be liberating or devastating.
For most other viewers who do not have to face issues of transitioning and detransitioning in their own lives and families, the most valuable thing to learn from this episode is that the medical community is not at all supportive of detransitioners, and may even be hostile to them. This may say something about how the medical community views transitioning individuals as guinea pigs to be experimented on. Detransitioners on the other hand are in effect taking control of their own bodies and wresting them away from continued medical intervention and decision-making by outsiders, even though they may need some form of hormonal treatment for the rest of their lives. Likewise, researchers who want to study detransitioning and destransitioners face hostility and indifference from universities and government bodies that issue grants for research; this hostility and the refusal to fund research into detransitioning may very well suggest that government and academia alike have an interest in controlling and moulding human bodies, and through them controlling and moulding nature and biology.