Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Detransition Awareness Day:
On March 12, the Hollywood gang will congratulate themselves again at the Academy Awards, and some Oscar winners will no doubt make obscene comments. It’s who they are.
On the same day, an event that is of much greater cultural significance will take place: it’s Detransition Awareness Day. Hollywood will not be cheering, but everyone else should be. Detransitioners are people who have made the courageous decision to transition back to their normal sex.
Last year those who had transitioned to the opposite sex, and back again, held a Zoom conference on March 12 to discuss their experiences. Participants logged in from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Chile, Brazil, and other countries. Their stories would shake most people.
In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in children who are confused about their sex, with girls transitioning to boys much more than vice versa. The latest data show that approximately 30 percent now transition back to their father-determined sex.
It is a national scandal that the elites in the medical profession are mostly supportive of transgender ideology. To counsel young people to switch their sex—which despite anatomical surgery can never happen in any true biological sense—is child abuse.
Virtually every boy and girl who has expressed misgivings about his or her natural sex has been encouraged by therapists, and those in the medical community, to take the next step. If they were left alone to work through this stage, 80 percent would choose not to transition.
Why do we need Detransition Awareness Day? Because those who make the decision to reverse course are attacked for doing so. They are harassed, verbally abused, stigmatized, shunned, and treated like dirt. Many examples could be cited. Here are a few.
Sinead Watson works as an advisor to Genspect, a parent-led organization opposed to transgenderism. In 2015, she made the switch from female to male; she decided to detransition in 2019.
Her second decision was greeted by therapists with scorn. “They just didn’t want to speak about detransition,” saying “it was like a kick in the stomach.” She calls the initial push to transition young people “disgusting,” arguing that the affirmative model must change.
Chloe Cole is the first person in the United States to bring a lawsuit against those who assisted her, as a minor, to make the medical transition. That was when she was 12. Four years later she realized this was a mistake.
When she made the first transition, her parents were told what has become the standard line—if you don’t support your child to transition she may commit suicide. Chloe says that “they were pretty much coerced into allowing this to happen.” Her lawsuit expressly says that she and her parents were “falsely informed” that she was “at a high risk for suicide.”
When she changed from male back to female, she was “attacked online” and in person. “I started getting harassed a lot.” She was shunned at school and made to feel like a pariah, if not a traitor to the cause of transgenderism.
There is no end to the services afforded to those who buy into the transgender scam and seek to transition. But there is nothing available for those who seek to detransition. This includes the Biden administration, which has shamelessly taken the side of the child abusers.
Those who choose to return to their nature-given status should be given every resource available. They are the ones who truly deserve our compassion and support.
