Being gender-fluid, in a certain sense I transition and detransition my gender every week (just not medically). It feels only natural to me to think that people who’d undergone full-time or medical transition might come to regret it or decide it wasn’t for them. The core idea underlying the trans movement is expressive individualism: you should be able to express your true self. So surely, if you thought you were one gender and then realized you were another, that’s something the movement should affirm. And yet, sadly, it seems that much of the trans movement not only does not affirm such a position, but views it as a threat.

This Reuters report notes that online detransitioners often face “members of the transgender community telling them to ‘shut up’ and even sending death threats.” The work of Kinnon MacKinnon, the most prominent academic studying detransition, gets denounced as “transphobic”. True, right-wing groups hold up detransitioners to advance a political agenda against youth medical transition; they’re happy that detransitioners are convenient to that agenda. But when trans activists are denouncing research on detransition as transphobic and sending death threats to detransitioners, it’s simply laughable to claim that they are doing anything different! For both the right-wingers and the trans activists, the agenda comes first and the people second. Detransitioners are forced into taking a position I’ve too often found myself in in a variety of regards: I’m sorry that my existence is inconvenient to your narrative.

A Reddit thread illustrates how detransitioners can themselves view the right-wing embrace of them: some reject that support from people they would otherwise oppose, others go along with it saying “strange bedfellows, we need the allies we can get”. The most high-profile ones do go over to the right themselves – but after the way they’ve been treated by the left, it’s sadly hard to blame them.

Why the alarming hatred for detransitioners? I think a lot of our discourse has been shaped by psychologists’ overall consensus that sexual orientation does not change. This consensus has likely played a significant role in the mainstream acceptance of gay rights: an acceptance so huge that even Donald Trump and the Republican Party are no longer working to oppose gay marriage (when just over twenty years ago in most of the US, it was still illegal to have gay sex at all). You need to accept people being gay, the reasoning goes, because that’s just the way they are and nothing can change it. So popular culture has come to celebrate the idea of unchanging sexual orientation, in a way that then creeps over into gender identity as well. After all, officially approved terms for gay and trans these days usually lump them together, as “LBGT” (often with an attempt to throw in as many additional letters or even numbers as possible, like “LBGTQIA2S+“.)

An early sign that unchanging orientation was becoming the dominant view: Lady Gaga’s 2011 move away from the Cindy Sherman-like postmodern play that characterized her earlier work, to the much more simplistic essentialist declaration that she was born this way. In the years to come, high and popular culture alike would reject postmodern complexity for more rigid boundaries: you’re gay or straight, white or “person of colour”, cis or trans. That’s part of the reason that even several years into the trans movement, it never occurred to me that being gender-fluid was an option: since I hadn’t actually transitioned, what I heard from those around me was “you’re a hetero cis man and therefore you are the privileged oppressor, and you need to step back and let the important people speak.”

Fortunately, the world isn’t that simple, and I’m very grateful that my extremely trans-friendly circles have since come to embrace the concept of gender fluidity wholeheartedly. But the idea remains widespread that gender identity is like sexual orientation in that it does not change, which makes the idea of detransition intrinsically suspect: detransition sounds analogous to the gay conversion therapy that has been so unsuccessful (and often harmful). Any suggestion of a significant difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, in this regard at least, becomes perceived as a threat. The problem is, there is so far no reason to believe that the analogy holds!

The American Psychological Association’s statement on conversion therapy is perhaps the most telling in this regard. The statement cites six studies in support of the claim that “Change efforts were not effective when changing sexual orientation was identified as the goal.” This is followed by the statement that “Although people going through change efforts may report or appear to show changes in their behavior, there is no scientific evidence that change efforts reduce sexual attraction or change gender identity.” Revealingly, there is a footnote after “sexual attraction” and none after “gender identity”! That is: this statement provides no evidence at all that gender identity cannot change. From telling you that “same-sex attraction cannot change, and here’s the evidence”, it moves to “gender identity cannot change, and… hey, look over there!”

As far as the APA is concerned, just as it’s now standard to assume that all people with non-white ancestry can be unproblematically assimilated to the African-American experience, so we can shoehorn the trans experience into the gay. If therapy can’t change sexual attraction from gay to straight, then of course it can’t change gender identity from cis to trans. After all, we know that all marginalized people are the same in all the most important respects; what really matters is the fact that they are marginalized. You can know that without concern for any minor petty details like research.

Not surprisingly, the Reuters article found “that hard evidence on long-term outcomes for the rising numbers of people who received gender treatment as minors is very weak.” Moreover, it’s going to be hard to get that evidence, because as psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper adds, “People are terrified to do this research.” And you can see why, when a statement like this comes from the American Psychological Association – the organization in charge of expanding our knowledge about therapy for gay and trans people. They rule out the possibility that trans identity can change without any research. In so, they contribute to the harms that detransitioners face from a system that acts like they don’t exist.

It’s one thing when a random individual idiot like David Roberts tries to silence further research about trans identity as “‘questions’ that already have answers”. It’s something far more deeply harmful when such a statement comes from the organization that’s supposed to lead that research! At that point, it becomes a matter of scientific research actively being squelched in the name of a political agenda. Which is of course what the Trump administration is also doing, just from the opposite perspective and with far more resources. But at this point we would expect a petty know-nothing like Trump to try to silence ideas that disagree with him. An organization made up of psychology researchers should know better.