![]() ![]() “I can’t think of any other examples where you’re not allowed to speak about your own healthcare experiences if you didn’t have a good outcome,” MacKinnon told Reuters. These forays opened his eyes to the online abuse detransitioners receive – not just the usual anti-transgender attacks, but members of the transgender community telling them to “shut up” and even sending death threats. In his continuing search for detransitioners, MacKinnon spent hours scrolling through TikTok and sifting through online forums where people shared their experiences and found comfort from each other. Most often, they talked about how transitioning did not address their mental health problems. ![]() Others said their doctors were ill-equipped to help them with the process. Some said they avoided telling their doctors about detransitioning out of embarrassment or shame. Many have said their gender identity remained fluid well after the start of treatment, and a third of them expressed regret about their decision to transition from the gender they were assigned at birth. Then he started interviewing detransitioners, and what he heard changed his mind. POWERFUL STORIES: Kinnon MacKinnon, an assistant professor of social work at Toronto’s York University, used to think regret among detransitioners was a nonissue. Their stories have upended his assumptions. In the past year, MacKinnon and his team of researchers have talked to 40 detransitioners in the United States, Canada and Europe, many of them having first received gender-affirming medical treatment in their 20s or younger. To learn more about this group for a new study, he started interviewing people. MacKinnon, whose academic career has focused on sexual and gender minority health, assumed that nearly everyone who detransitioned did so because they lacked family support or couldn’t bear the discrimination and hostility they encountered – nothing to do with their own regret. “We’re not supposed to be talking about this.” “This doesn’t even really happen,” MacKinnon recalled thinking as he listened to an academic presentation on detransitioners in 2017. They were too few in number, he figured, and any attention they got reinforced to the public the false impression that transgender people were incapable of making sound decisions about their treatment. MacKinnon, a 37-year-old transgender man and assistant professor of social work at York University here, thought it was offensive to talk about people who transitioned, later regretted their decision, and detransitioned. For years, Dr Kinnon MacKinnon, like many people in the transgender community, considered the word “regret” to be taboo. ![]()
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