49. Max

“Hi. My name is Max Robinson. I am the author of the first book of feminist essays on detransition by a detransitioned woman, Detransition: Beyond Before and After from Spinifex Press.

I considered myself transgender from when I was 16 to when I was 20. I started hormones at 16, I had a mastectomy at 17. I went off testosterone and changed my legal sex back to female at 20. I'm in my late 20s now. For the most part, I'm more or less past the whole thing, in my personal life. I'm still interested in the politics of the issue and feel it's important for affected people to participate in conversations, but I definitely just feel over it. Lesbian feminism works better for me than transition did. At this point, I've been at it longer, too.

Being able to connect with other women who took ourselves, our ideas, and our work seriously has been an incredible blessing. I feel very lucky that I found the people I did during the very turbulent period when I first started questioning whether transition really was the only thing keeping me alive.

At that point, there was very little public discussion of the issue. We all speculated that as transition became more mainstream, there'd be more detransitioned women, too, and eventually there'd be enough that the right would have a constant supply of tokens to burn through promoting anti-LGBT public policy. This is exactly what's happened.

On top of that, so much of the peer-to-peer conversation about detransition on social media is all about how much transition ruined you, and how you can "fix" your body and presentation. Getting to express that kind of pain matters too, but the focus overall seems incredibly superficial, to the point of being pretty actively sexist. It's disturbing. The whole picture now is disturbing.

Stopping transition, for me, was about understanding that every woman in the world is a complex individual who deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. I didn't have to be male to matter, and I didn't need to change my body to matter. Being a woman was good enough. Being a lesbian was good enough. That was true before transition and it's true after.

I'm glad to be a lesbian and a feminist. I'm glad to gather with other women and make our feminist work together. No matter what happens with trans and detrans politics, we will be here, doing our work, being with each other.”