72 - Disenchanted by Transition
Gender: A Wider Lens
Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley
4.6 • 961 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2022
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode was made especially for anybody who might feel a sense of regret or anxiety about their medical transition. This does not mean they should necessarily detransition. Rather, it means that they are undergoing a reckoning with themselves. While some people choose to detransition, others are deeply ambivalent about transition but may feel they are “at a point of no return” and choose to remain in a trans identity. Others may find the detransition process too difficult and disappointing and decide to retransition. Sasha and Stella explore the blurry lines between terms like “transition” “detransition” and “transition regret” and hope to help listeners feel hopeful and find healing beyond these narrow concepts.
Links:
- What I wish I’d known when I was 19 and had sex reassignment surgery, Corinna Cohn:
- Hormone Hangover: The Opposite of GD
https://hormonehangover.substack.com/p/the-opposite-of-gender-dysphoria?s
- Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Extended Notes
- Make the best decision for yourself at the time.
- Sasha changes her mind about the argument made by Alice Dreger.
- Stella shares her experience of working in addiction and her patients’ lost years.
- Some experiences make a person feel like an outsider in their peer group.
- The importance of speaking with someone who relates to you.
- The Beyond Transition project encompasses all the different layers of transition.
- Transitioning or detransitioning is nobody's business but the individuals.
- Therapy and practices for the body help people get in tune with their physiology.
- For those feeling overwhelmed, consider what you can do today, not tomorrow, just today.
- Learning to be patient and dealing with setbacks requires mental flexibility.
- Sharing a transition experience can assist others with their journeys.
- The reasons behind self-destructive behaviors.
- Navigating the multiple pathways to healing.
- Tools to understand influence and mitigate self-blame.
- Stella shares the beautiful story of a woman who detransitioned.
- Getting back to nature and the calming effects of pets.
- Only you know what you need. Do what you have to do.
This podcast is sponsored by ReIME and Genspect. Visit https://rethinkime.org/ and https://genspect.org/ to learn more.
For more about our show: https://linktr.ee/WiderLensPod
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to gender, a wider lens. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland. |
| 0:06.5 | And I'm Sasha Ayad, an adolescent therapist in the United States. |
| 0:10.6 | Since 2016, my practice has been exclusively dedicated to gender questioning teens |
| 0:16.1 | and families impacted by gender dysphoria. |
| 0:19.0 | I also work with gender questioning teenagers and I facilitated support meetings for families and |
| 0:24.2 | individuals who have been impacted by gender issues. We're curious about the |
| 0:28.0 | concept of gender and how it's unfolding in the wider culture. Join us as we look at gender through a wider lens. |
| 0:35.0 | Hi Stella. |
| 0:38.0 | Hi, Sasha. |
| 0:40.0 | I think today's episode should be interesting. I think we're going to go into territory that maybe hasn't been covered |
| 0:48.1 | before really in the world of gender. Yeah you unfortunately, we keep landing in these binaries, which I know sex is binary. |
| 0:57.6 | I'm not disputing that. But there seems to be like transition and detransition. |
| 1:02.4 | As though those lines are very clearly demarcated and maybe |
| 1:06.8 | for some people they are but I think there are a lot of people that are in this blurry place that we might say they're lost in transition where maybe |
| 1:20.0 | they're transitioned and they don't really have any plans to |
| 1:23.4 | de-transition but they feel very ambivalent about some of the choices they've |
| 1:27.8 | made or they feel like they weren't given the full story. And then there are |
| 1:32.4 | people that we've heard about who, let's say they will |
| 1:36.6 | de-transition, but they're in the agonizing place after a surgery or after |
| 1:42.0 | their bodies have started changing where they think oh my god if I made the biggest mistake of my life |
| 1:48.0 | and then there are other individuals that I've become aware of that seem to flip-flop back and forth between transition and |
... |
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