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Survivors of the Trans Panic: Detransitioner Reveals Horrors of Gender ‘Cyber-Sect’
“I was not given coherent informed consent”
After being absorbed into the “cyber-sect,” the “transition” process of taking cross-sex hormones involves a litany of side effects. A woman taking testosterone will experience changes in the form of her body, shrinking hips and thighs, muscle growth, facial and body hair, cracking voice, increased sex drive. But then there are other, less predictable side effects, which, according to Estella, are mostly glazed over in the process of “informed consent.”
She told Breitbart News, “I was not given coherent informed consent,” explaining that side effects were told in terms of effects on
men taking testosterone, not women, and that other side effects she experienced were not mentioned at all. She speculates this is because they are just not investigated. Estella said that when she expressed having negative side effects, she was dismissed, saying, “If I say, ‘I have experienced this, this is something that it caused me,’ they’ll be like, ‘Well, it just didn’t work out for you, that was your body.'”
According to Abigail Shrier’s book on the transgender movement’s effect on teenage girls,
Irreversible Damage, testosterone will be administered based on “desired physical appearance — rather than the alleviation of physical illness — it is guided by aesthetic principles, not medical ones.”
Shrier writes:
Testosterone is typically justified as a treatment for ‘gender dysphoria,’ but the endocrinologists who administer it rarely seem even to be evaluating its progress with the patient’s dysphoria. What they examine instead are blood levels to ensure that testosterone stays within normal range for a man. This seems to place endocrinologists (and just as often, nurse practitioners) in the position of hair stylists, who aim to satisfy, rather than medical professionals who seek to cure.
Although alleviation of gender dysphoria was supposed to be its justification, doctors administering [testosterone] very often seem less interested in treating ‘gender dysphoria’ than in giving trans-identified patients the look they want.
This reporting reflects Estella’s experience with hormone treatment.
“There are expected changes, you know, your voice, and your clitoris grows, and there is a sex drive increase, muscles, you know, all the lovely… They give you all these beautiful changes that will happen, and then they kind of like whisper the ****** stuff that happens,” Estella told Breitbart News.
“What I went through incrementally was weakened bladder, disruption of my pH, which was recurring infections, insomnia — they say insomnia, but they don’t explain where the insomnia comes from, and it’s from excruciating heat flashes that were like itching pins and needles on my skin, and that was every single night — and that creates mental health problems, the highs and lows of hormones, and that causes strains on relationships — that’s all not addressed,” she continued. “You don’t cry when you’re on testosterone — that’s a weird side effect that is not investigated — it’s very hard to feel those … feminine emotions.”
“I was always allowed to do whatever I wanted with my hormones, like, my doctors gave me a suggested amount, but they never were like, ‘Don’t do this.’ If I was like, ‘I want to go on a higher dose,’ they were like, ‘Okay.’ ‘I want to go to lower dose,’ ‘Okay, we’ll just take your blood and look at it’,” Estella explained.
“There’s no standard,” she continued. “Their job is to make your hormones match the testosterone levels of a boy the same height and weight as you, which is, to me, that’s the most pseudo-scientific thing. I don’t have testicles or semen, why would I need that much testosterone, that’s the amount of testosterone needed to maintain semen and testicles, all those things, and I don’t have that system, so why would I be given that amount, to match those levels?”
“The standardization of this prescription, prescribed transition, I think that if the doctors were going to go by ‘Do no harm,’ if they were going to go by that and work by that, there would be no justification to prescribing hormones and surgery to this idea of gender dysphoria, which is very much … a consciousness issue. It’s a spiritual issue, your soul is in the wrong body,” Estella said.
“Rescue fantasy”
Garfield-Jaeger explained that health professionals and educators engage in an “emotionally abusive relationship” with vulnerable young people by engaging in an experimental treatment of promoting and “affirming” transgenderism as a solution to any number of maladaptive feelings and behaviors.
She said the “transition” process has an initial, temporary period of “euphoria,” creating positive reinforcement, despite professionals acting out “a rescue fantasy” of administering treatment that has not been demonstrated to be helpful or effective.
“I don’t understand it, in terms of from the professional side, how they can believe in this,” Garfield-Jaeger told Breitbart. “I understand how a person can be tricked to believe in it if they’re told, ‘All of your pain and suffering will go away if you take this, almost, magic pill,’ which is become transgender, and then you get all this positive reinforcement.”
“There is a sort of honeymoon phase where you do end up having this… they call it euphoria, what they feel is euphoria. Sometimes it’s even physical, because the hormones actually will, especially with testosterone, will give you a high, so it’s almost like taking a drug that gives you a high at the beginning for quite a while for them,” she explained.
“And then you also get, like, love-bombed by this community,” Garfield-Jaeger went on. “If you’re on a social media, you often get a whole bunch of new likes and followers and a whole bunch of, like, social status from becoming transgender. So now if you’re someone who felt very invisible in your life, you maybe were autistic, or were struggling socially in some way, or feeling alone, or feeling emotionally neglected, maybe your family was going through something, maybe your parents are going through a divorce, or for whatever reason, people weren’t there for you, even if they were there for you, you didn’t feel they were there for you, and now you’ve got these people who are saying that you’re the greatest thing on earth because you’re transgender, you almost get worshipped.”
She said that “naive” mental health providers, though, are acting out of codependence, as they do not “affirm” any number of other maladaptive behaviors, such as drug addiction or eating disorders.
“What I don’t understand … is how professionals are able to believe that this is the right thing to do,” she said. “I understand there are people who are silenced. I understand there are people who are fearful, and there are people that are maybe avoiding the topic so that they can continue to have some kind of livelihood, but I’m still having trouble understanding the people who truly are believers in this, who aren’t evil; I believe that [there] are just naive people who think they’re doing the right thing because this is about acceptance and love, and I think they’re riding out some kind of rescue fantasy … I think it’s giving helpers this feeling that they’re helping and they have this desire to help, and there’s almost a codependence happening.”
“It’s almost like an emotionally abusive relationship, like ‘Mommy Dearest’,” she said. “If you look at other disorders — of course now they don’t want to call it a disorder, they compare it more to an immutable characteristic, but we know that’s not the case because people are choosing to do it — if you look at other mental health issues, like an eating disorder, or drug addiction, you don’t have institutions being, like, ‘Well you need to affirm their addiction,’ ‘We need to affirm their eating disorder.'”
“This is very much like, I would say, negligence. Just people who maybe are well meaning and doing things that are irresponsible, just because they thought, ‘Oh, well, this is the expected thing, the cool thing,” Estella told Breitbart News of those who treated her in her “transition.”
“I can look at myself objectively and see that I was … an 18-year-old … a young adult, who was already going through way too much, like, had too much on her shoulders. So I’ll forgive myself for making big girl decisions when I did not, you know, have the capacity to deal with the big girl consequences,” Estella said, reflecting on her experience.
“I have so much love for the people who are still in this sect, because I can see them, I do see them, and I see the pain, and I remember.”