A recent settlement with the Department of Justice in Texas has flung open the doors for the very first time for detransitioner medical care.
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced earlier this month that after a lengthy investigation into the alleged misuse of Medicaid funds to perform transitions at Texas Children’s Hospital, they would open a first-of-its-kind detransitioner clinic. This news is a welcome reprieve from the national conversation surrounding detransitioners and pediatric gender care.
For years, detransitioners like myself have been testifying, pleading, and speaking publicly about our medical needs while being treated as though we barely exist. We have been told that there is no infrastructure for us. Very few doctors agree to treat us, and very few clinics agree to accept us: because there are no clear medical diagnoses or billing codes for detransition, it’s hard to track us, research our needs, or even bill insurance.
Many of us live with permanent complications from hormones and surgeries, yet there are almost no doctors trained to help us manage the fallout. Even fewer are willing to publicly acknowledge that this population exists at all.
The mainstream media often minimizes the realities of detransitioners’ struggles and grief. An NBC News piece on the Texas story says, “Surgeries for minors are rare and not recommended by the medical associations” and “Detransitioning, which involves no longer identifying as transgender or stopping medical transition, is rare.” But these carefully crafted statements obscure far more than they reveal.
First, surgeries on minors were – and are – absolutely happening, especially with the rise of pediatric gender clinics over the past 15 years. Many of us are living proof of that – myself included. Thousands of children and teenagers across the country were prescribed cross-sex hormones or underwent irreversible surgeries while still in middle school or high school – and this is still happening in some states. Pretending these cases are too insignificant to matter is deeply dishonest to the people now forced to live with permanent medical consequences.
Second, insofar as detransitioners are “rare,” it is largely because the medical system has made almost no effort to track us. There are no comprehensive registries or mandatory long-term follow-up studies. Many patients disappear from clinics entirely after complications or regret, and the system simply counts them as lost to follow-up rather than potentially harmed.
You cannot seriously claim something almost never happens while simultaneously refusing to study it.
And even if detransitioners represented a small percentage of patients, medicine has never shied away from a challenge even with seemingly niche issues. Rare disease research, for instance, has received upwards of a billion dollars in funding in recent years – and this is for conditions that definitionally affect fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. That is to say, even if detransitioners are a small percentage of the population, why would medicine stop at us?
If even one child is unnecessarily sterilized, left with chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, infertility, or irreversible surgical damage because adults failed to exercise caution in the name of ideology, there needs to be structural change.
A detransitioners clinic is, fundamentally, an acknowledgement that we exist and that the medical system failed us. Beyond that, it will be a commitment from the medical system not to continue failing us, to invest in repairing what it did to us.
I’ve spent countless hours sitting in a doctor’s office and online appointments with practitioners working underground with detransitioners, realizing there are no clear answers for people like me. No treatment protocol. No specialist referral. I often find that, even after countless scans and tests, I am repeatedly referred back to the industry which harmed me. But I don’t need my gender affirmed, I need real and ethical healthcare to deal with iatrogenic harm.
That is why this clinic matters.
I hope that the new clinic will prioritize rigorous research and honest informed consent. I hope that patients are fully educated about the risks, benefits, and uncertainties surrounding every possible treatment in ways many of us never were. Most of all, I hope detransitioners finally receive compassionate medical care instead of dismissal, hostility, or political defensiveness.
