202 - Detransitioned After Three Decades as a Trans Man, with Jessi

Gender: A Wider Lens

Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley

Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Mental Health

4.6 • 961 Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sasha and Stella welcome Jessi, a 69-year-old detransitioned butch lesbian, who shares her extraordinary life story. Jessi’s journey challenges misconceptions about detransitioners, confronting the common assumption that they are predominantly young people who transitioned in adolescence. Instead, her experiences shine a light on older individuals who made these life-altering decisions in vastly different cultural and social contexts. Her life as a gay rights advocate, shaped by threats and hardships, reveals the complexities behind her decision to transition during a time when living openly as a gender non-conforming lesbian carried significant risks.

This episode offers a compelling exploration of the varied paths of detransitioners, and provides a thoughtful reflection on the broader social and psychological complexities of navigating life outside traditional gender norms.

For links and resources relevant to this episode, access the full show notes at https://www.widerlenspod.com/p/episode-202.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland.
0:04.0	And I'm Sasha Ayyad, an adolescent therapist in the United States.
0:08.0	And this is Gender, a Wider Lens, a podcast dedicated to the shifting concepts around gender in our contemporary culture.
0:16.0	Through in-depth interviews, personal stories, and psychological exploration, we seek to open up the discourse
0:22.7	around this hot button issue. Join us as we look at gender from a wider lens.
0:32.4	Hey, Stella. How's it going, Sasha? It's going well, And I feel like we talked with kind of like an elder in the detransition community, which is, I think, really important. There is this kind of perception right now that all these detransitioners are these young kids who transitioned in adolescence, but that is not the case.
0:56.0	And in fact, you were telling me even before we started recording that in your D-Trans or
1:01.4	beyond Trans meetings, you've met a lot of people who transitioned in their 40s and they're
1:05.7	now in their 50s and 60s.
1:07.8	Like, this is an important aspect that we don't always hear about. Yeah, I'm really glad that we
1:15.2	got to have Jessie on the podcast because she represents a cohort that need to be represented. And I
1:23.9	think they are particularly hard on themselves because they may be transitioned as adults
1:28.6	and then they transitioned as older adults.
1:31.4	A lot of them I believe from what I can gather if I was to see a commonality is they live in
1:37.0	trans for longer, knowing that they regret it, but thinking I'm not going to go back.
1:43.4	And then they make the decision to go back.
1:45.9	And it seems to liberate them.
1:47.6	It seems to work.
1:49.5	Yeah, you'll hear that in Jesse's story today that she felt for years that she kind of
1:54.2	wanted to get out but didn't know how.
1:56.5	She even talked about the ambivalence pre-transition of like not really wanting to become a man but
2:01.8	wanting to feel safe and she's lived a really extraordinary life you know she was um she's 69 years
	...

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