No-Bullshit Conversations the Trans Community Needs to Have
[February 4, 2026]
We are living through a sustained backlash against trans rights, and pretending otherwise does not protect us. It began to accelerate in earnest around 2020 and gained real political momentum in 2024 and 2025. Donald Trump ran openly on an anti-trans platform, including attack ads aimed at Kamala Harris declaring “she’s for they/them, not you.” Once he took office in January 2025, that rhetoric translated quickly into policy. Anti-trans executive actions followed, including stripping pensions and benefits from transgender veterans. These were not symbolic gestures. They were material harms, designed to signal that trans people were acceptable targets again.
Preserving trans rights in this climate is going to require more than slogans and defensive postures. It is going to require the trans community to have some deeply uncomfortable conversations, including conversations about how gender is framed, how medical care is discussed, and how internal dynamics can unintentionally make us more vulnerable to external hostility. Avoiding these discussions and shunning anyone who dares to ask these questions with labels of "transmed, truscum" has not kept us safe. It has left us reactive, fragmented, and easier to caricature.
I want to be clear that this is not about blaming trans people for transphobia. The responsibility for oppression always lies with those wielding power. But refusing to examine how narratives, practices, and priorities play out in the real world does not stop that power from being used against us. If we want to understand why the backlash has been so effective, we have to look at the full picture, including the parts that are uncomfortable to name.
To explain why I believe these conversations are necessary, I need to start by sharing my own story, because it is representative of how policy, ideology, class, and gatekeeping intersect in ways that rarely make it into public discourse. My life is not an abstract argument. It is what happens when theory meets systems, and when systems fail.
I am forty-six years old, and I have known I was a boy since I was four.
That sentence alone already puts me at odds with almost every version of this conversation that happens online. I am not new to this. I did not wake up during the pandemic bored and decide to reinvent myself. I did not discover gender through social media. I lived with dysphoria for decades before I had language for it, and even longer before I had permission to name it out loud.
I had been calling myself “a gay man trapped in a woman’s body” since the 1990s. My high school best friend was a gay guy. I was the first person he ever came out to. At one point he told me he wished he were straight so I could be his girlfriend. I told him I wished I were a guy so I could be his boyfriend.
In 2004, I was diagnosed with gender identity disorder. Critically, nobody told me what that diagnosis was. Instead, I was abruptly reassigned from a therapist I trusted, a gay man I got along with, to a new therapist, a butch lesbian who insisted that my distress came from internalized misogyny and that I needed to “embrace womanhood.” I did not get better. I got worse. I self-harmed. I ended up hospitalized.
Only years later did I understand that experience for what it was: a form of conversion therapy. Not religious, not overtly punitive, but still an attempt to force me into an identity that was not mine because it made other people more comfortable.
I did not come out as trans until I was thirty-three. Not because the feelings weren’t there, but because I did not know it was possible to be the kind of person I already knew myself to be. I first heard the word “transgender” when I was twenty-eight, when I made friends with a few trans folks on LiveJournal. It took five more years after that to understand that I could be a man who liked men, because up until that point I had never met or heard of a gay trans man. The only stories I was given were straight trans narratives, framed in ways that did not fit me at all.
When I finally came out in November 2013, a week before my thirty-fourth birthday, to the friends I had at the time, the response was not shock. “No shit,” they said. “We already know.”
In March of 2014, a few months after I came out as trans, I disclosed this to my primary care doctor and asked about starting testosterone. I was told I would need to live socially presenting as male for two full years first, then undergo at least a year of therapy, before testosterone would even be considered. There was no discussion of informed consent. There was no acknowledgment that I had already been living this reality internally for decades. There was simply a moving finish line.
In 2016, after I had been living openly as male for two years, I contacted the gender clinic in the state where I lived at the time. This clinic was my only option for gender-affirming treatment. I was told I would need a referral from a therapist. My insurance at the time was Medicare and Medicaid, which meant I had exactly one clinic I could attend. I began therapy there and quickly realized my therapist did not understand trans people at all, including how I could identify as male and be attracted to men. When I disclosed that I had experienced domestic violence, her response was, “What did you do to make him hit you?” That is not a misunderstanding. That is victim-blaming.
It got worse. After exactly one session with a different provider at the same clinic, a person who did not know me and did not ask why I felt I was a man, I was informed that I was trans because of childhood sexual abuse, and that if we healed the trauma, I would no longer be trans. This is bullshit on multiple levels. I knew I was a boy when I was four, years before the abuse began. If this theory were true, everyone with CSA trauma would be trans. CSA statistics are tragically high. Trans people are vanishingly rare. The logic does not hold, and the harm caused by this framing is immense.
In 2018, I attempted to access testosterone through an informed-consent model at Planned Parenthood. Even there, I was denied because my testosterone levels were already naturally elevated. (In November of 2025, after finally seeing a specialist and getting comprehensive labs, I was diagnosed with non-classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia.)
In 2020, I moved to a red state. Not by choice, but to avoid homelessness; I moved in with one of my two best friends. That decision kept me alive, but it effectively ended any realistic access to trans healthcare. In this state, gender-affirming care is nearly impossible to obtain. Our local Planned Parenthood does not offer hormone therapy for trans people. The nearest provider who does is over two hours away one way, and they do not accept my insurance. For someone on disability, that combination of distance, cost, and policy is not an inconvenience. It is a wall.
And because of my elevated T levels I would probably still be denied care, so if I tried to break through that wall I would run into yet another wall.
This is what forced medical detransition actually looks like. Not a sudden change of identity, but being boxed out of care by geography, poverty, and hostile policy until your body is no longer allowed to align with who you are. I have been told more times than I can count to “just move” to a blue state, often by other trans people who have never had to choose between housing and healthcare. Moving requires money, stability, transportation, and safety nets. For many of us, it is not an option. It is a fantasy offered in place of solutions.
I mention the bit about forced detransition, because in the current backlash to trans rights, detransitioners are brought up constantly as "proof" that nobody should be allowed medical care.
One thing that gets lost in the panic is that true detransitioners are rare. Every serious study we have shows that the overwhelming majority of people who transition do not regret it. When detransition does happen, the most common reasons are not sudden realizations of being “tricked,” but external pressure: transphobia from family or community, lack of access to medical care, inability to afford hormones or surgery, or fear for personal safety. People are forced back into closets by hostile environments, then held up as proof that the closet was where they belonged all along.
It is also worth distinguishing between people who detransition quietly and go on with their lives and the small, very loud subset who turn detransition into a political identity and a career. The latter group is wildly overrepresented in media coverage and legislative hearings, not because they are typical, but because they are useful to anti-trans agendas. Their stories are framed as cautionary tales not about inadequate support or social hostility, but about transness itself being a mistake.
A particularly common narrative among this group is the claim that they were autistic and therefore uniquely vulnerable to being manipulated into “becoming trans” by social media, peers, or online trends. As an autistic person who primarily associates with other autistic people, I call bullshit. One of the most consistent traits many of us share is resistance to social conformity, skepticism toward trends, and a tendency to see through shallow messaging rather than absorb it. Autism does not make someone especially prone to going along with a popular identity they do not genuinely feel. If anything, it often makes us more stubbornly ourselves.
What also raises red flags is how often these stories are monetized. Chloe Cole, for example, is paid substantial sums to speak against trans healthcare and promote legislation restricting it. Some other highly visible detransitioners offer paid coaching to parents of trans children on how to discourage, delay, or suppress a child’s gender identity, which smells like a grift to me. When money, attention, and political influence are involved, skepticism is not cruelty. It is common sense. Meanwhile, many of the supposed autistic “victims of the trans movement” remain anonymous and unverifiable, and often with clear suspicious goals (butch lesbians trying to convince trans men to detransition and become butch lesbians).
Supporting actual detransitioners does not require suspending critical thinking. We can hold compassion for people who regret medical decisions while also acknowledging that most individuals claiming to be detransitioners are lying, exaggerating, or being strategically amplified. Treating every detransitioner story as equally representative is not neutrality. It is negligence, and it actively harms trans people who are already struggling to access care, safety, and dignity.
One of the detransitioner narratives that I have been noticing is that of those who claim to have been non-binary people without dysphoria who went on T and had various surgical procedures and now regret it, and this is where I think the trans community needs to start asking ourselves some brutally honest and difficult questions.
After I came out as trans in November of 2013, I started interacting with other trans people on Tumblr (note: I eventually deleted my Tumblr account in 2016, and as of 2026 still refuse to use the site for any reason). Within months it became obvious I had stepped into a war zone. On one side were people labeled “truscum,” who believe you must have dysphoria to be trans. On the other were people labeled “tucute,” who believe anyone can identify as trans for any reason. Those labels hardened quickly into factions, and nuance disappeared almost immediately.
“Truscum” is often used interchangeably with “transmed,” but they are not the same thing. In my experience, transmeds are people who believe you must have medical transition, or be actively pursuing it, to be taken seriously as trans, regardless of cost, health, or circumstance. A not-insignificant number believe you must have all possible surgeries to be legitimate. I have personally been told by other trans men that I am not really trans because I do not want phalloplasty or metoidioplasty. I am explicit about why. It will not look or function like a natal penis, and that would make me more dysphoric, not less. I do not want to have to go without my favorite form of stress relief (masturbation) during long recovery periods. I do not want to risk my ability to orgasm. Those are not frivolous concerns. They are about embodiment, function, and quality of life. Refusing a surgery that would worsen my dysphoria does not invalidate the dysphoria I actually have. Those concerns do not make me less male.
I have also learned the hard way that spaces exclusively for binary trans men are often hostile to gay trans men like myself. There is an unspoken belief that if you truly have dysphoria, you should either be asexual or a top, and that having penis in vagina sex somehow disqualifies you. That belief is absurd and cruel. Cis gay men who are bottoms are not told they are “really female” because they are on the receiving end of penetrative sex. Their manhood is not interrogated based on sexual position. Gay trans men should not be subjected to a double standard that equates masculinity with dominance or penetration. My dysphoria is not invalidated by how I have sex, any more than a cis man’s would be.
I have also taken a lot of shit from other trans men for things that have nothing to do with dysphoria at all. I like the color pink. I like flowers. I like cooking. I sometimes dress flamboyantly, and wear headscarves and jewelry. This gets framed as evidence that I am not really male, as if masculinity is so fragile it can be undone by a scarf or a piece of jewelry. It is worth noting that most of the time I dress like a regular guy, in T shirts, hoodies or sweatshirts, and jeans or sweatpants. Even if I didn't, it would not matter.
This kind of macho posturing is just toxic masculinity recycled inside trans spaces. It reinforces the same sexist stereotypes feminism has been trying to dismantle for decades, where being a man means being emotionally restricted, aesthetically dull, and allergic to softness. Flamboyant cis gay men are not subjected to the same level of scrutiny over their hobbies, interests, or presentation. They are allowed complexity. Trans men should be afforded the same freedom without having their gender put on trial.
Reducing manhood to a narrow checklist of approved behaviors does not protect trans men. It polices them. It teaches that masculinity must be constantly proven and defended, rather than simply lived. And it pushes trans men into the same rigid gender roles that harmed many of us long before we ever had language for dysphoria.
Because I have been unable to access medical transition care due to finances and medical gatekeeping, I reject the cruelty of transmed ideology. My inability to access care is not a failure of identity. It is a failure of systems. I also reject the extreme end of truscum ideology that insists dysphoria must mean a full rejection of one's natal genitalia and must also mean full conformity with presentation expectations of one's gender to be seen as valid.
Around 2018, and accelerating sharply during the pandemic years, I watched a noticeable shift happen. Being trans stopped being discussed primarily as a medical and embodied reality and started being treated, in some spaces, as a form of self-expression or social identity you could opt into without much reflection. Dysphoria was reframed as optional, and those who insisted you need to have dysphoria to be trans were shunned. Language around transition drifted away from healthcare and toward vibes. The line between gender nonconformity, exploration, and trans identity became increasingly blurred, not because those distinctions are impossible, but because naming them became socially forbidden.
Treating gender as a purely subjective aesthetic identity reinforces sexist stereotypes by collapsing gender into interests, presentation, and personality traits. Liking pants does not make someone a man. Liking makeup does not make someone a woman. When gender is framed this way, dysphoria becomes optional, medical care becomes trivialized, and transition is reduced to a form of self-expression rather than healthcare.
That framing does real damage.
On a personal level, some of the most painful and disorienting transphobia I have experienced has not come from conservatives or strangers. It has come from people who identify as non-binary and frame gender as vibes. I did not expect that when I came out, and I was unprepared for how deeply invalidating it would be.
I have had non-binary people bristle when I talk about dysphoria related to my chest or to menstruation. I have been told, flat out, that I am already “in a man’s body” and should learn to accept this as simply a different way of being male. That is not affirmation. That is telling a trans man to make peace with a body configuration that causes distress, while reframing that distress as a personal failure of acceptance rather than a real medical and psychological need.
I have also been accused of enbyphobia for insisting on he/him pronouns. I do not want to be called they/them. Wanting to be recognized as male is not hostility toward non-binary people. It is a boundary. The idea that respecting my pronouns somehow invalidates someone else’s identity turns affirmation into coercion.
My last partner prior to Andy, from 2018 to 2020, was a non-binary person and described me as “the best of both worlds,” meaning both male and female. That was not a compliment. It was a reminder that they did not see me as fully male, no matter how progressive the language sounded.
Another non-binary person told me that a man would have to be pansexual, not gay, to be attracted to me, and then tried to bury that implication under word salad about pansexuality meaning not caring about genitalia. In practice, the word "pansexual" is used interchangeably with "bisexual" and what they were saying was that I am still female as well as male and need to find someone who likes both women and men. That is transphobia, even when it is delivered with rainbow vocabulary.
I am not alone in noticing how some non-binary discourse creates terrible optics for trans rights. We now have situations where AFAB people who look indistinguishable from cis women insist they are not female based on nebulous feelings, then snap “I don’t owe you androgyny” when strangers assume female gender based on presentation. At the same time, they express outrage that those strangers did not intuit they/them pronouns. Gender cannot simultaneously be purely internal vibes and a social category that everyone else is required to magically perceive.
What makes this worse is that many of these claims rely on the same sexist logic trans people have been fighting for decades. Being quirky, rejecting femininity, liking masculine things, or not fitting stereotypes does not mean someone is not a woman. Some non-binary people are stereotypically feminine and still insist that identity alone overrides sexed reality, as if saying “non-binary” is a way to opt out of womanhood without interrogating why womanhood is treated as something to escape. In some spaces, identifying as non-binary has become a way to affiliate with the most socially rewarded part of the LGBT community without engaging with dysphoria, transition, or material risk.
I am not denying that non-binary people exist, nor am I arguing against anyone’s right to self-definition. I am saying that when gender is reduced to vibes, it does real harm to trans people whose identities are rooted in dysphoria, embodiment, and medical need. When trans men are told they are already male enough, already in the right body, or secretly still female, that is not liberation. It is a repackaging of the same erasure we have always faced, just delivered from inside the community.
This is also where the “LGB, drop the T" crowd gets everything wrong.
They claim that trans people are trying to turn gay and lesbian kids into trans kids, as if being trans were a more desirable or socially rewarded state. That claim collapses immediately when confronted with reality. Right now, trans people are treated worse than gays and lesbians. We are legislated against, surveilled, denied healthcare, and turned into moral panics. There is no incentive structure here. There is only risk.
They also insist that trans people believe every tomboy is secretly a boy and every effeminate man is secretly a woman. We do not. Gender nonconformity is not transness. Drag, cross-dressing, gender-bending, and androgyny have always existed, and most trans people understand the difference better than anyone because we have spent our lives being accused of confusing the two.
Then there is the favorite TERF narrative: the butch lesbian coerced into transition. That story does not describe me at all. I never identified as a lesbian. I am into men. I was not a jock or a hyper-masculine archetype. I was a nerdy kid with dysphoria who did not have the language or community to understand myself yet. Gay trans men exist. Trans lesbians exist. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same axis.
The "gender equals vibes" crowd makes it easier for opponents to argue that trans healthcare is frivolous, experimental, or unnecessary. It undermines the legitimacy of people who need medical transition to function and survive. It blurs the line between gender nonconformity and trans identity in ways that are not liberating, but regressive. And it has contributed to a backlash that is now being written into law.
I do not believe the rise in anti-trans legislation can be blamed solely on any one group inside the community. But I do believe that refusing to acknowledge how some narratives weaken our position is a mistake. If we want to defend trans rights in a hostile political climate, we have to be able to say that dysphoria is not vibes, that medicine is not fashion, and that protecting access to care requires seriousness as well as compassion.
And any serious attempt to protect trans rights has to include an honest discussion about standards of care. What I was subjected to was not care. It was extreme gatekeeping that locked me out of treatment entirely. That kind of cruelty does not protect anyone and should never be repeated. But the opposite extreme, where gender is treated as vibes and medical transition as something anyone should be able to access immediately without sustained evaluation, also has consequences. When people without dysphoria pursue hormones or surgery and later regret it, those stories do not stay personal. They become ammunition. Ignoring that reality does not make it go away.
This is especially relevant when discussing minors. Contrary to anti-trans propaganda, nobody is performing genital surgery or mastectomies on children. That claim is a lie, repeated because it is emotionally effective, not because it is true. What actually exists is a cautious, stepwise approach. For minors, care typically begins with social transition and therapy. Puberty blockers are fully reversible. In cases where blockers are prescribed, they usually transition to hormone therapy around age sixteen. That age is not arbitrary. In the United States, sixteen is when you can drive, work a part-time job, and are expected to make decisions that shape your future, including what you want to study in college. It is also the age when many teens are approached by military recruiters, as I was, a decision with lifelong consequences.
It is also impossible to ignore the hypocrisy of those screaming about “groomers” and “think of the children.” Again and again, the loudest voices pushing this panic turn out to be abusers themselves and/or consumers of CSA material. I am deeply skeptical of claims that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” caused by social contagion is a real phenomenon. In the 1990s in my church, I watched adults panic over Dungeons and Dragons and secular rock music supposedly turning kids into Satanists and witches. That hysteria produced dramatic testimonies from "ex-Satanists" and "ex-witches" and it amounted to a whole lot of nothing. ROGD and most detransition narratives are the same moral panic structure recycled for a new generation.
The increase in trans-identified youth does not point to a social pandemic. It points to language and visibility. When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, we had nothing. No vocabulary, no public figures, no internet communities, no way to name what we were feeling. Dysphoria did not disappear because it was unnamed. It went underground. When people finally gain words for an experience, reporting goes up. That is not contagion. That is recognition.
We have seen this pattern before in other areas of medicine and psychology. Autism rates have increased dramatically over time, not because of vaccines or environmental damage, but because diagnostic criteria have improved and broadened since the 1980s, when I myself was diagnosed. More people being identified does not mean more people are suddenly becoming autistic. It means fewer people are being missed. The same logic applies here. Finding more trans people now does not mean something new is spreading. It means fewer people are being forced into silence.
A useful analogy is astronomy. We are not discovering new planets because they are magically appearing in the sky. We are discovering them because our tools and methods have gotten better. Better detection does not equal a crisis. It equals progress.
That said, skepticism of ROGD does not mean abandoning clinical judgment. Every young person seeking care deserves to be evaluated as an individual. There is a meaningful difference between dysphoria rooted in embodiment and distress, and identification rooted primarily in social belonging, aesthetics, or vibes. Pretending that distinction does not exist does not protect anyone. If a young person is exploring gender without dysphoria, that exploration does not require medicalization. Social transition, time, and support may be appropriate. Medical intervention should be reserved for cases where dysphoria is persistent, significant, and clearly articulated.
I believe irreversible procedures require an even higher threshold. I think someone should be at least eighteen before undergoing an irreversible surgery such as a mastectomy. I would argue that twenty-one, the legal drinking age in the United States, is an even more reasonable standard. I have been told by some people inside the trans community that this position is cruel. It is not. It is common sense. I say this fully aware that I myself experienced severe distress over my chest as a teenager who went through early puberty, and I would still apply this standard to my younger self. Protecting minors and acknowledging distress are not mutually exclusive. Treating medicine as a tool rather than a rite of passage protects both trans youth who genuinely need help and young people who are still figuring themselves out.
Nuance is not betrayal. Case-by-case care is not a ban. Saying that medical transition should be treated seriously does not mean denying that trans kids exist. It means recognizing that bodies, brains, and circumstances differ, and that good medicine adapts rather than collapses into ideology on either side.
Moral panics thrive on fear, not facts. They always claim to be about protecting children, and they always end up harming the most vulnerable people instead. If we want to defend trans healthcare against that kind of hysteria, we need to be able to say clearly what is actually happening, what is not happening, and where thoughtful limits serve care rather than erase it.
