The Trans People Who Are Detransitioning To Stay Safe In Trump’s America
Welcome to the war on our humanity.
Being homeless and living in a tent in the mountains wasn’t exactly where Addy had expected to be at 31. A month ago, she’d at least been bouncing from a motel to a shelter. But life has a funny sense of humor — especially when you’re a transgender woman — so Addy used her own humor to make the most of it: Alone in her remote shelter on Election Night, “I was just making weird as heck Trump statuses on Facebook,” she says. “‘Shit posting,’ as the kids call it.” Her friends rallied around her wry, Dada-esque absurdities, and even Trump’s widening lead in the electoral college was funny for a while.
Eventually, however, reality settled in. “It hit me, like, ‘oh no, this is serious.’ And I started thinking about my friends. Black, Mexican, Jewish, Muslim, trans, queer . . . they (we) are all fucked.” As hate crimes skyrocketed around the country over the ensuing week, Addy realized that to stay safe as a homeless trans woman, she’d have to take drastic measures and detransition.
“Detransitioning” is a nominally self-explanatory concept that nevertheless has a number of different possible connotations, all of which generally end with the trans person in question returning to a gender presentation that reflects their…
