Mar 29
Dear Ted Cruz: I Do Regret My Transition
Why couldn't I have just existed?
Dear Ted,
A little bit about me: I started to "medically" transition at 30 years old. It was the result of years of grappling with insecurities, cumbersome insurance paperwork, and social stigma. I am still balancing this transition as I struggle with what is my correct bra size and how much mascara to use, but I am pleased to be the person I am now. I just wish I didn't have to wait thirty years to get here.
I look at my childhood and see a lot of sadness that didn't have to be there. I could have been a beautiful nonbinary girl learning to do all these things when cisgender girls learned to do them, and it would have hurt no one.
Why couldn't I have just existed?
No, seriously. I am asking: Why do people like you make trans children suffer so long in silence just to be themselves?
So many people like you are claiming to be looking after "the children" when you campaign to take away trans children's access to healthcare. But really, your actions are denying us our ability to become whole people, and it doesn't just fill me with regret — it makes me furious.
When I look at the debate people like you are having about "allowing" children to transition, it's always centered around the fact that we may regret something that is "permanent." Years ago now, you tweeted: "For a parent to subject such a young child to life-altering hormone blockers to medically transition their sex is nothing less than child abuse," (Ted Cruz, 2019). As far as I can tell, you haven't changed your stance.
Yet this fear mongering isn't true, and it pushes the harmful myth that transitioning is dangerous for children. I think you are smart enough to know that. All the research indicates that puberty blockers (medication that pauses puberty) are relatively safe. The moment the child goes off the medication, they will, in most cases, resume the puberty of the sex they were assigned at birth. We know this because cisgender (i.e. not trans) children have been taking puberty blockers for decades, and we are pretty aware of their effects. As Jason Klein, a pediatric endocrinologist, told VICE (Hannah Smothers, 2021):
"Puberty blockers have been used for decades in cisgender kids who either are going through puberty too early, or, in some instances, kids who are going through puberty very quickly. Their use has been FDA approved, well-studied, well-documented, and well-tolerated for a long time now. And it's the exact same medication that we use in trans or nonbinary children to basically put a pause on pubertal development. Exactly the same medications, at exactly the same doses."
There might be some more information we will learn about this medication over time, but that's the case with all life-saving medicine. Science can tell you nothing with absolute certainty, so when a scientist states that puberty blockers are overwhelmingly safe in most cases, that's about as sure of a thing as you can get.
For those trans children who do take the extra step to socially or medically transition (i.e., not just to pause puberty, but to take on a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth), most don't regret their decisions. Detransitions are not only rare but overwhelmingly happen because of "external factors such as pressure from family, non-affirming school environments, and increased vulnerability to violence, including sexual assault," (2021).
In other words, it's not someone's transition that is the problem, but our society's reaction to it. This entire framing that people like you are putting forth is wrong. This has nothing to do with the welfare of children.
Quite the opposite, by denying trans children the resources they need, you contribute to many of their deaths. The number of trans youth (and adults) contemplating suicide is staggering (Dawn Ennis, 2021). The Trevor Project's National Survey found that 52% of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the US seriously considered killing themselves in 2020. That number went down for those who had access to spaces that affirmed their gender identities and sexual orientations.
If you cared about children, you would not be maliciously increasing the likelihood that children across the US will kill themselves. That's decidedly an anti-children stance.
All I can think when I read these numbers is that I could have been part of that figure. I was 27 before somebody even asked me what my pronouns were. I didn't know being nonbinary was even an option, but the moment I learned about it, the words they/them escaped my mouth within seconds. I had spent a lifetime not realizing that a piece of me was missing — that I could be something more than unhappy. I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom, so I could weep both tears of joy, but also of profound sadness at the time it had taken to come to this realization.
Suddenly, a lot of depression made sense as dysphoria. I had been suicidal for most of my life, and although other factors contributed to part of that, the inability to connect to my whole self didn't help. There were years spent being uncomfortable about who I was, wishing to no longer exist because I didn't think I was a whole person. I am only here today because of luck. A lot of trans people are.
But if my personhood was denied to me, it's not my fault, Ted; it's yours.
When you deny trans children the ability to learn about themselves, you aren't just deferring medication or surgery by a couple of years. You are preventing them from articulating their personhood, from being able to imagine a whole world beyond what they were taught to be possible. It's like forcing a square into a round hole and blaming the shape for fracturing into pieces. In the process, you watch the person disappear. They crawl into themselves until they cease to exist.
That is murder. It may not be as quick as shooting someone or stringing them up, but it leads to the same outcome—the death of a person.
I indeed regret my transition. I regret that you robbed me of my childhood. That you, and the bigots like you, clawed away at my very sense of self, under the pretext of protecting me, when all you were doing was protecting your own sense of comfort.
You traded my life and the lives of countless others to protect your fragile little ego, and I hate you for it. If there is a God, they will make you crawl on your knees on burning sands, listening to the wails of all the trans children you murdered, before even beginning to consider your pleas for redemption.
Burn in hell, Ted.
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