The risk of writing a book about an ongoing medical scandal is that it might be outdated before anyone has had a chance to read it. A smart approach, then, is to humanize the scandal by telling the stories of the real-life victims, which is what the Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan wisely chose to do with her book Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.
These days, a common joke on social media is to remark on how quickly transgender activists will go from insisting that transgender-related surgeries on teenagers never occur to conceding that, OK, yes, they occur, “but that’s a good thing.” “If I had a dollar for every time a trans activist says surgery doesn’t happen to minors I’d have enough to pay to reconstruct the boobs they chopped off me at 16,” Luka Hein posted on X in April.
Hein, now 22, is one of the four detransitioned women that Olohan profiles in Detrans. (Detrans also includes one chapter on three detransitioned men.) Hein was a troubled teenager who suffered from panic attacks and sometimes found it difficult to get out of bed. Like so many other girls of her generation, she sought escape in social media — Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and especially Kik, where, she told Olohan, adults, including many transgender-identified males, coerced her into sending sexually exploitative material of herself. Soon, Hein’s mental health worsened, and, at the behest of her psychiatrist, she entered a partial hospitalization program. It was in the program that she met the therapists who would affirm her transgender identity.
Prisha Mosley, 24, had an eating disorder at age 12. She received inpatient treatment and was diagnosed with anorexia, bulimia, OCD, major depression, and possible schizophrenia. At 14, she was raped by an adult, which resulted in a pregnancy and, later, a miscarriage. Transition, Mosley told Olohan, would allow her to become someone else — in this case, one of the boys, who, in Mosley’s mind, were statistically less vulnerable to sexual assault. At 17, she began testosterone injections, and at 18, she received her double mastectomy.
Chloe Cole is a name that many readers will be familiar with. Cole, 19, has become the face of the movement to ban sex-trait modification for minors across the U.S. She frequently speaks at political conferences and testifies in front of state legislatures. In 2012, writes Olohan, at age 8, Cole was diagnosed with “disruptive behavior disorder,” and, at age 11, ADHD. She also suffered from anxiety and other autism-spectrum symptoms and had difficulty making friends. At age 12, she told her parents she wanted them to start addressing her as a boy. Concerned, they took her to the pediatrician, who, Cole told Olohan, presented medical transition as the only viable option for her struggles with identity. Less than a year later, an endocrinologist prescribed Cole testosterone and the puberty blocker Lupron Depot. (The FDA has not approved the use of Lupron to treat gender dysphoria, writes Olohan, though it has approved the drug for the treatment of precocious puberty, prostate and breast cancer, and to perform chemical castration on sex offenders.) Even though Cole’s mental health worsened as a result of the hormones and blockers, she was approved for and received a double mastectomy at 15.
I wasn’t far into Olohan’s book before I was marveling at how adept these young women are at describing the psychology behind their transgender identification. Their level of self-awareness rivals that of adults twice their age. This is particularly true of Helena Kirschner, 25, who has written extensively on Substack about her experience and whose reflections Olohan features in Detrans. For “white, ‘cis’, straight” girls like Kirschner, who are “privileged” and therefore part of the oppressor caste, gender ideology provides a way to “game [the] system.” By identifying as transgender, Kirschner wrote, one is instantly “transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face.” Add to that early exposure to graphic pornography depicting the degradation of women, prevalent on Tumblr at the time, for a lot of girls, regular womanhood just didn’t look all that appealing. Unbeknownst to Kirschner’s mother, she was affirmed as a transgender boy by her school’s guidance counselor and later, the school’s psychologist. At 18, Kirschner began taking testosterone. To her relief, she never underwent any surgeries.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Detrans is learning about the thought processes that led each of these women to question the choices they had made. What begins for each of them as a niggling doubt soon becomes the overwhelming and unavoidable realization that what had been sold to them as a panacea is actually making them exponentially worse. Not surprisingly, more than one of the detransitioners in the book compares leaving the transgender community to leaving a cult. As Olohan writes, when Hein dared to post some research she had discovered about the potential dangers of puberty blockers on social media, a friend called her hateful and said that she was causing children to kill themselves. Even clinicians grow uncomfortable when their patients start to renege. Kirschner’s therapist was quick to attribute her patient’s doubts to nothing more than “internalized transphobia.”
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What’s missing from Detrans is a recap of how we got here. There’s no discussion of the development of these treatments in the Netherlands in the 1990s or of the opening of the first U.S. pediatric gender clinic in 2007. Knowledge about the dystopian beginnings of these novel treatments is, I think, important for every American who cares about our children’s future to have. Not least of all so that he or she is armed with all the facts when his teenage daughter tells him she wants a double mastectomy.
What Olohan’s book makes abundantly clear is the consumer-driven nature of transgender medicine. Olohan frequently references the online telehealth platform FOLX, which, for a low monthly membership fee, provides “transfeminine, transmasculine, and nonbinary” users access to clinicians who are eager to write them prescriptions for synthetic hormones and letters of approval for high-risk (sorry, “life-saving”) surgeries. “Now available in all 50 states!” reads the website’s homepage. When you drag your mouse across the website’s home screen, it leaves a trail of multicolored fairy dust.
Ben Appel is a writer living in New York City. His memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, is forthcoming. Find him on Twitter @benappel and at benappelwrites.com.
