With my clinical therapist, he told me that maybe being trans was like a step that you needed to take along your identity.

And that just pissed me off because, like, on the one hand, I've got to give him a little bit of credit because I was trying to explore my identity.

And the fact that I was able to explore my identity by being a woman, I don't want to discount that as a valuable step in my development.

But medical transition?

Medical transition with unknown effects and potentially surgically altering my body, get out of here.

That's not a step that I need to take in order to understand who I am.

That's a, I'm still not sure how much of the responsibility lies on me and my own mistakes, because certainly I made them,

and on the therapist that I had but that thing that

he said just really got me.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dau. This is another episode about

gender. As you may know, I've done several shows having to do with

the enormous rise over the last several years of young people identifying as transgender and the

controversy surrounding how and if they should be treated with medical intervention. I've had on a

number of therapists, two of whom have facilitated due transition,

and at least one case continue to do so, but who are nonetheless concerned about a lack of

emphasis on exploratory therapy as an assessment procedure.

I've had on parents who are wrestling with this issue with their kids.

I've had on journalists like Lisa Sullen Davis, who has extraordinarily nuanced and rigorous

insights as to why this issue has become radioactive to the point where most people are

simply unwilling to talk about it. This week, I interview a young

detransitioner, which is to say someone who identified as transgender at one point, but then

decided that was not the right path and reversed course, stopped taking hormones, and went back

...