Detrans Awareness Day in Washington should have been headline news in Ireland. An Irish-based organisation, led by an Irish psychotherapist, brought over 70 detransitioners to the heart of American policymaking, with senior figures from the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Health and Human Services speaking from the stage. Under any other circumstances, this would have been treated as a significant national story. Instead, there was silence.
That silence is not accidental. The Irish media has developed a kind of editorial paralysis on this issue. They do not know how to cover it, so they avoid it. The result is a de facto blackout, a fatwah against serious engagement with the realities of medical transition and regret. Every so often some brave soul such as Mick Clifford or Hugh Linehan attempts to cover the issue, but they do not understand the complexity. They do not know what they do not know, yet they think they do, so the treatment is cursory and inaccurate and they make a mess of it.
And yet, in a hotel in Washington DC recently, something very important took place.
The location itself was kept confidential until the last possible moment. Delegates were only told where they were going a day before the event. This is now standard. Genspect spent over 20,000 dollars on security and months planning elaborate measures. This is a huge financial burden for a small organisation like ours, and it is only through the generosity of parents of trans-identified children that we are able to function at all.
Bags were searched at every entry point. In Ireland, commentators like Mick Clifford suggest that the need for security around these issues has passed. That is way off the mark and speaks to the lack of accuracy many journalists have on this topic. We are operating in an environment where events are disrupted and intimidation is routine. We have seen this at the LGB Alliance in London, where trans activists entered the event after lunch, when security might be less intense, and unleashed thousands of crickets into the conference, forcing it to close. In the United States, there is an additional and more chilling concern following the murder of Charlie Kirk, who was shot while speaking about trans issues. Security measures are more necessary than ever. Organisations like Genspect have responded by implementing significant, expensive and carefully planned protections.
In the days leading up to the conference, our team was tense. Months of preparation had gone into risk assessment. Who might target the event? How would we respond? Would we be able to protect the people who were travelling, in many cases for the first time, to appear in public as detransitioners? These questions weighed heavily on me and I barely slept in the month preceding the conference.
And then the doors opened.
More than 70 detransitioners attended with our support. Many more came on their own. For most, it was the first time they had ever met another detransitioner. Up until that moment they believed they had ruined their lives in such a gigantic way that nobody could understand, but then they met many fellow travellers. People like themselves. These are people who have lived through something that is still largely unspeakable in polite society, and here they could speak freely about their regrettable vaginoplasties, mastectomies, penectomies, hysterectomies, phalloplasties and much, much more.
There were young men who had undergone genital surgery at a time of profound vulnerability and now live with irreversible consequences. There were young women who had taken testosterone and now carry the physical markers of that intervention. They have deep voices, facial hair, male pattern baldness and chest hair instead of breasts following mastectomies that cannot be undone. Many of the female detransitioners are read by the world as transwomen, perceived as males who have medically transitioned rather than females who medically transitioned and are now attempting to present as female again.
But in DC the detransitioners could share their common problems.
And yet the atmosphere was not one of despair. There was anger, certainly. There was grief. But there was also humour, a lot of gallows humour. There was a kind of hard-won camaraderie among the detransitioners. They compared experiences. Ritchie Herron, a well-known male detransitioner, was reunited with someone he had not seen in eight years. These two vulnerable men met in Brighton Hospital in 2018. They both had vaginoplasty on the same day, with the same surgeon. They have both since detransitioned.
People found each other and compared experiences, sharing grim laughter at the horrors they had endured in this theatre of the absurd. Most striking of all was the sense of purpose. This was not a room of people collapsing under the weight of regret. It was a room of people beginning to organise and fight back.
Chairman Andrew Ferguson of the FTC opened the event. That alone should have sent a signal that something is shifting. We shared a common purpose, and few among us cared about right or left politics in that room. We were operating on a higher plane, focused solely on the harm of inappropriate medical transition. Ferguson’s speech was clear and direct. He spoke about medical fraud. About young and vulnerable people being sold a promise that was never grounded in solid evidence. About what happens when that promise fails and the system loses interest in those it has already treated. It was one of the first times many in the room felt that someone in authority was willing to name what had happened to them.
Admiral Brian Christine from the HHS closed the day. His tone was different. It was empathetic, engaged, and practical. He spoke directly to the detransitioners in the room and outlined a willingness within HHS to begin addressing their needs. He stayed for dinner afterwards, sitting with attendees and listening to their stories. There was no sense of performance about it. He has already expressed interest in supporting a future event.
Throughout the day, legal panels outlined emerging lawsuits, and expert roundtables brought detransitioners together with researchers and lawyers to discuss next steps. This was a practical, purposeful meeting, with a clear sense that their day of reckoning was coming.
Genspect has been building towards this for years. Our first Detrans Awareness Day took place during Covid in an epic five-and-a-half hour webinar. It raised just over 10,000 euro, which we used to establish Beyond Trans, a programme that now supports over 600 detransitioners.
The growth is visible elsewhere. In 2019, when I first stated following the detrans subreddit, there were fewer than 1,000 members. Today it has over 58,000. The moderators estimate that a third are observes like myself, two thirds are detransitioners.
The mainstream narrative continues to insist that regret is vanishingly rare. That medical transition is a straightforward good. That any talk about detransition is somehow a “right-wing talking point” and that dissent comes from prejudice and bigotry rather than evidence. Anyone who has spent time listening to detransitioners knows this is not true. The medical complications alone are often significant and poorly understood. Many doctors are operating without a clear grasp of the long-term effects of these interventions.
Many detransitioners described the psychological burden. Living in a medically constructed identity requires constant maintenance. They spoke of feeling as though they were always auditioning to be seen as a man or a woman. A continual sense of performance. The need to be recognised, affirmed and validated is exhausting. It leaves people brittle, defensive and psychologically destabilised.
One female detransitioner described years of chronic pain in her early twenties. She moved from doctor to doctor with no clear diagnosis. Eventually, one suggested she stop testosterone. Within two weeks, the pain resolved; it was that simple and yet no one had joined the dots. There were Irish detransitioners in the room too. Aisling O’Reilly Kane spoke about how it took her many years to admit that she had detransitioned. Even though she stopped testosterone over five years ago, she continued to tell herself that she did not regret her transition. This is a common issue. It takes great psychological strength, and often many years, for detransitioners to admit to themselves that the whole process was unnecessary and regrettable. Many cannot face this bitter truth and instead learn to live with the burden of transition.
What happened in that hotel in Washington DC was not an outlier. It was an early signal of a broader shift. The people who were once isolated are finding each other. They are beginning to speak, and others are starting to listen. Mark it in your diaries, next year Detrans Awareness Day will be massive.
Stella O’Malley