dolphin diaries ⚢

@dolphindiaries.bsky.social

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emma, she/her or ze/zir. detrans NB lesbian, transfeminist. writing about detransition for trans liberation, bodily autonomy, and informed consent. co-host of @crackedivorypod.bsky.social links: dolphindiaries.carrd.co fiction: @mzakharuk.bsky.social

Indeed, even Abigail Shrier makes this point. In Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Me Personally, Shrier features multiple stories of
Does the Patriarchy Transition Women? …what if they’re butch? What about feminine men? And what does it mean to be non-binary? In March 2026, The Atlantic published an article by Ben Appel titled In Defense of Effeminate Boys. Subtitle: “If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded.” As one might surmise, Ben Appel (clearly and brazenly plagiarising my latest essay’s title format, for which I will be suing him presently) makes the case that the advancement in trans care is pushing feminine boys and men to identify as transgender women instead, because it denaturalises feminine expressions of manhood. In other words, the elevation of the trans woman to the status of normalcy makes the feminine man more aberrant. Ben says, “But I didn’t know to feel this type of shame [for being mistaken for a girl]. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community called the Lamb of God, and—perhaps surprising—no one seemed to care about my flamboyance. What mattered was that my heart was on fire for the Lord.” “Perhaps surprising,” indeed.
An image of a very worn teddy bear rested against a white pillow. The overlaid text reads: "In Defence Of A Phase: The Detrans Case Against Child Conversion Therapy." Subtitle: "Let us think of the children." by Dolphin Diaries
"Welfare fraud" is similar to the de-transition rate grift. Any time it's ever investigated it turns out only a small handful of people are actually defrauding the system and most people who get it actually need it.
In a statement this evening, the minister said he and the Government are aware that changes to the UK's asylum practices or laws can result in changes to the flow of asylum seekers between the UK and Ireland. "I am committed to ensuring that Ireland is not viewed more favourably than the UK by those seeking to claim asylum," he said.
I was about to yes-and this with "I would change Harry Benjamin's sex" but I actually absolutely wouldn't, my tastes in forcefem are highly specific and do not include Harry Benjamin
The Pissed Off Lawyer @legaltweetz: "You know, I have complex beliefs about all of this at this point. I also never thought I changed sex, I still recognize that I’m a biological woman, and tbh there’s just no path backwards in terms of reverse medicalization :man-shrugging:"
Tweet from The Pissed Off Lawyer: "I set my entire life on fire in an act of self immolation and protest to infiltrate transphobes. I’m going to start telling that story tomorrow. Did ya’ll really think that after 30 years of being a grassroots activist and political operative that I would just magically flip out of nowhere? I’m way more useful as a guerrilla than I ever will be sitting in a corporate boardroom. War was declared on trans people this year and I declared war back. I couldn’t just sit on my hands anymore & I became a one man army 🏳️‍⚧️ (I’m a gentleman & a scholar though. I’m not out to doxx, harass, abuse, or share personal information)"
that meme of a guy skateboarding down a staircase on a rake only to step on a rake and bonk his head on it anyway
" he/they Would be nice if that solidarity was reciprocated once in a while. I'm tired of the baeddels and transmedicalist transsexuals blaming every problem they face on "trenders" (i.e. enbies and people who aren't "trans enough" for them), the adoption of radfem hate to demonize trans/enby masculinity..."
The meme of a guy looking exasperated while smoking
"And so, with all that said, after this beast of an essay, I come to my ultimate, final conclusion, the one that I really want any trans mascs reading this to take with them: the reason you hate yourself, the reason you want to distance yourself from being a Man, the reason why it feels like everyone hates you for being a man, is because the world does not want you to be a trans man. They’re driving you crazy on purpose because they hate you for being a trans man. You are disgusted with yourself and you wish you were dead because society hates trans men and it’s really fucking hard to be one. No, you are not innately female, no, you are not so different from cis men that you cannot be considered a man in any sense, no, feminism is not lying to you and men are not really the oppressed ones (even though it can feel like it because so many feminists produce god-awful analyses)."
"In other words, the decision to go through coerced detransition is made in a state of reduced agency, often caused by social pressure and/or misinformation about transition. Nothing is explicitly preventing you from doing as you will to your sex—and so it is precisely your will which must be subverted and undermined. Notice that I make no claim whether detransition is right or wrong for the person in question. Perhaps they would’ve arrived at this decision another way, perhaps not. The point is, they are led to believe detransition is simply more sensible, healthier, better. It is the superior choice—so of course, they make it. In the end, coerced detransition is not truly dissimilar from the forced kind. What merits it separate consideration is that it’s designed to make you relinquish your own judgement, and your very own sense of self. Under such conditions, even if you would’ve ultimately detransitioned regardless, your relationship to your sex/gender is made maladaptive, and your independence as an individual is maliciously compromised."
While it is a kind of disability, it is a peculiar one—so, in terms of social construct, what is the nature and purpose of madness? Dear jury, you likely know the answer, intuitively if not in words. It is to regulate the behaviours and thoughts of normal citizens. When those things breach the line of madness, one is made mad, and to be mad is to be rendered unreliable, unpredictable, and incapable of adequate agency. Once one becomes mad, the sane and the normal are relieved of trying to understand one’s thoughts and needs and desires, for those are made inherently incomprehensible. Once one becomes mad, it is assumed one cannot be trusted to make decisions which the sane make all the time, because the mad are considered consummately and totally incapable of perceiving reality or of making choices that do not harm the self or others. In short, they are a danger to all, including themselves. What is to be done with the mad? First, they must be removed from society, lest they cause harm. Then we must attempt to make them sane—that is, behaving and thinking in ways that are normal. If that is impossible, we must make them seem as sane as possible, so that their madness is confined to their own head and does not spill over. If even that is impossible, they must be removed from society permanently. Otherwise they will disquiet and disturb the sane, or worse, infect them with madness.
“As services become more depleted, people seeking care are increasingly viewed as problems – they are costs to reduce and risks to manage,” Courtney says. This view flows from the top. Successive governments, committed to ever-deeper public spending cuts, have all demonstrated “a clear inability to think about care and support without linking them to economic productivity”, according to NSUN.
"The post in the info channel outlines some details: Which medical examinations are going to happen, what to bring to the kickoff call, a [start highlight] lengthy ramble about microphone etiquette for some fucking reason [end highlight], and details about the shipping of the HRT."
A manga panel showing a young woman sitting in a cinema, and she's tearing up. The text reads: "This shit...is so ass."
A stark, almost black-and-white image of a gavel rested atop a table. Over it there is a title and a subtitle of an essay from dolphindiaries.substack.com. Title: "Detrans Women v. Trans Men, Or: The Sanity Of Sex Change." Subtitle: "What madness lies at the heart of patriarchy?"
Somewhat later, circa 2013, I did hear of weirder gender concepts in the distant West, mostly as just definitions of words. Genderqueer, nonbinary, et cetera. I comprehended them rationally but I did not understand or relate to them. Wherever I read about it, genderqueerness was described in a manner parallel to transsexuality—the sex-changing—or else as an exotic alternative to hormones and scalpels. But I desired body change so desperately, and regardless, I could not envision living as a nonbinary gender in my own country. Maybe in the West that was possible, but here nothing but derision would entail. It just wasn’t for me.
A picture of a smiling woman leaning on a chair in front of a projected PowerPoint presentation title slide for "Escaping War While Trans." She's young, white, with partly gathered dark wavy hair. She's wearing a denim bodycon dress, a funky pink blouse and a similarly funky red scarf, a sunflower pin, a name badge on a lanyard, and a pair of Doc Martens with a print of flowers and skulls
A microphone on a blue-and-purple background. Over the image, the text reads: "A Conversation With Lucy Kartikasari. An interview with a fellow detrans woman and activist about her experience. dolphindiaries.substack.com"
A cropped screenshot of a discord message. Shows an image of a shell-shocked-looking dog in front of some cupcakes, titled "Me every time I read your writing"
A faded black-and-white image of a woman in a frilly white dress, sitting in a field. Her face is carved out, completely blank and bright red. The title text over the image reads: "Death Of The Woman." The subtitle reads: "Stories of detrans women are often used to delineate womanhood. What shape of woman would you cut against my image, in my name?" Link to dolphindiaries.substack.com
A Substack screenshot of a user Lemon quoting my article. My quote: "That is enough to prove the Right’s point. I, therefore, wish to argue we are not a contradiction to trans rights or existence, but in fact on a continuum with both. That by virtue of our needs and lived realities, we are trans. Differently trans, but trans nonetheless. Some (trans and detrans)." Lemon's comment: "This feels a bit “not like other girls”-y- my mutual Akiva wrote a great critique on how she’s worried that “detrans” as a marketable identity will lead to this"
"... I have nothing to offer but this: so long as transition is reviled, so long as the transsexual are persecuted in any manner at all, there is no freedom of sex and there is no neutrality. Insofar as this pertains to detransition: so long as the transsexual are persecuted, hated, and forced into obscurity, we are likewise bound to their persecution, hatred, and abandonment. So long as that holds, voluntary detransition can never be free."
"Gatekeeping gender-affirming care is not in the best interests of detrans people. On the contrary, it is often to their detriment. Instead of emphasizing gender assessments and other forms of gatekeeping in their practice, clinicians should strive to reduce wait times, improve their informed consent practices, inform themselves about detransition, and broaden their services to better meet the needs of detrans people. Detransition care is an integral part of gender-affirming care."
"2022b). Gender exploration, assessments of co-occurring conditions, and psychotherapy can be beneficial when freely chosen by the patient but are likely detrimental if patients feel that their response could negatively impact their access to gender-affirming care. Requiring gender exploration, psychotherapy or an assessment of co-occurring conditions raises severe ethical concerns, as they would not be fully consensual and undermine patients’ ability to end clinical relationships without prejudice. Moreover, involun"
"underpin them. Gatekeeping practices are often predicated on the beliefs that neurodivergence and mental illness can make people falsely believe that they are trans, and that disabled and mentally ill people cannot be trusted with deciding for themselves whether to initiate gender-affirming care (MacKinnon et al., 2020; Shapira & Granek, 2019). These beliefs make it more likely that disabled people will be denied gender-affirming care, aggravating the risks posed by gender assessments with regards to honesty and forthrightness, gender exploration, shame and anger, transnormativity, and the therapeutic alliance."
"patients. Gender assessments can make patients reluctant to pursue psychological assessments for suspected conditions, due to fear that a diagnosis would lead to gender-affirming care being delayed or withheld (MacKinnon et al., 2020; see also Luka C. J. White et al., 2023). This concern is heightened for conditions that have a history of being used to deny gender-affirming care such as"
"it to be. These unreasonable expectations may be directed at gender assessments, with some patients believing that gatekeeping can reliably predict how gender-affirming interventions will make them feel and weed out those who would detransition. Those who believe that gender assessments guarantee that they are ‘truly trans’ may be at risk of disappointment and resentment. Merely mentioning that an outcome is"
"MacKinnon et al., 2023). Although patients in each of these examples may have made the best decision that was possible under the circumstances, their decision-making does not reflect maximal autonomy and could lead to negative outcomes in terms of psychosocial flourishing or regret. This explanation could account for why many detrans people who re-transition later adopt a more fluid gender identity and pursue less common forms of gender-affirming care"
"By not conceptualizing gender-affirming care in individualized terms, transnormativity restricts the decisional space available to people pursuing gender-affirming interventions. Some patients may initiate testosterone because they did not realize they could obtain a mastectomy without it. Some patients may believe that they must socially transition and cannot identify with their gender assigned at birth if they want to secure transition-related interventions. In even rarer cases, patients may even pursue an undesired surgery under the threat of losing access to hormone therapy otherwise. These anecdotes are derived from first- and secondhand knowledge. Historically, several trans people underwent otherwise-undesired transition-related surgeries to change their legal gender marker, a situation that is ongoing in many countries (Dunne, 2017)."
"individual’s desired embodiment goals. For transnormativity, people who are ‘truly’ trans want to conform to gender norms, do not experience significant uncertainties, doubts, or worries about their gender identity or embodiment goals, and do not experience shifts in their gender identity. People who have certain psychiatric disabilities or mental illnesses are at times excluded from transitude under the belief that the person’s gender identity and/or gender dysphoria is inauthentic and is attributable to their disability or mental illness (Gelly et al., 2025; Gould et al., 2024; MacKinnon et al., 2020). Transnormativity conceptualizes gender-affirming care in a narrow and non-individualized manner. If you are trans, you must take hormones, have a mastectomy, get facial hair removal, pursue genital surgeries, etc. Anyone who does not satisfy these ideals is not ‘truly’ trans and should be denied gender-affirming care."
"(Wilson et al., 2017). Instead of understanding detransition as a personal or institutional failure, clinicians should see detransition as one of many possible steps in a person’s gender journey. Finding the gender identity, expression, or embodiment that best suits the person in the present is nothing to be ashamed of or angry about. It is, if anything, something to be celebrated."
"detrans people. Gender assessments are intended to weed out and prevent future regret; where they fail to do so, patients may feel betrayed and blame the clinician for misleading them and/or improperly assessing them. Being angry about bodily changes and blaming them on someone else can reinforce social messages that depict detrans people’s bodies as mutilated, ruined, or monstrous (MacKinnon, Gould, et al., 2022, pp. 246, 252). These social messages are predicated on ableist tropes that frame disabled bodies and bodies that have undergone medical interventions—such as radical mastectomies for breast cancer—as undesirable and, all too often, subhuman (Cherney, 2019; Hsu, 2022; Reeve, 2018). Internalizing these greatly negative, inflammatory descriptions can foster rumination and may cause or aggravate detrans individuals’ sense of disconnection from their body and social networks (Gelly et al., 2025; MacKinnon, Gould, et al.,"
"Gould, et al., 2022, pp. 245–246). As a result, shame can make detrans individuals reluctant to reach out to trans friends and support groups, alienating them from their previous support system and negatively impacting their mental health. "
Gender assessments contribute to the stigma surrounding detransition. Detransition is a possible step in someone’s individual journey. Gender assessments may reinforce the belief that detransitioning is attributable to a patient’s lack of self-knowledge or, in certain cases, to their attempts to circumvent gender assessments through lying and/or truth-fuzzing (MacKinnon, Gould, et al., 2022, pp. 244–245; MacKinnon, Kia, et al., 2022, pp. 4–6). Barriers to detransition, such as requiring that people socially detransition for a prolonged period before recommending further medical interventions (Coleman et al., 2022, p. S42), likely further contribute to the stigmatization of detransition. Patients who see detransition as just another step in their gender journey may, by contrast, be less prone to shame.
"The psychiatrist attempted to talk of the gender spectrum as a way of persuading me to not pursue medical transition. I took this as a challenge to how serious I was about my feelings and what I wanted to do, and it made me want to transition more. The anecdote, which was offered in support of gatekeeping, instead eloquently shows how gatekeeping can breed defensiveness and foreclose gender exploration in the process. Had the clinician instead offered a judgment-free space within which to explore the patient’s embodiment goals without raising barriers to care, the patient may not have felt the need to double down and been more open to gender exploration. While freedom from defensiveness, spite, and resentment does not guarantee that a patient will engage in gender exploration, it fosters conditions that are propitious to it"
"Because gender-affirming care can significantly alter people’s experiences, priorities, and values, some individuals find it difficult to predict how they will feel after initiating care (Howard, 2022; McQueen, 2017). The opportunity to try out hormones can play an important function in clarifying patients’ sense of gender and embodiment goals amidst uncertainty. Being denied this opportunity can significantly slow and even altogether halt the unfolding of someone’s gender and transition journey. It is possible that Jamie would never have found a home in her identity as a queer woman had she been denied testosterone."
"Because gender assessments are predicated on the view that gender exploration should precede the initiation of transition-related interventions, they foreclose the possibility of using these interventions to explore gender. Trying out hormone therapy, for example, can be a way to figure out whether it suits the patient and feels right for them (Ashley, 2019b). The scholarly literature offers examples of individuals who tried out hormone therapy, decided it was not for them, and were grateful at the opportunity to try it out (Turban et al., 2018; Turban & Keuroghlian, 2018; see also Bradford et al., 2019). In a composite case study about a queer woman who discontinued testosterone after one year, Turban and Keuroghlian (2018) explained: Eventually, Jamie informed her care team that after the trial of testosterone and much reflection, she had come to understand her identity as a queer woman and wished to discontinue hormone therapy. Jamie reported being pleased about the hormone therapy trial, because this allowed her to clarify her gender identity. […] Gender exploration, including a period of testosterone therapy, was an important part of her identity formation, and she was grateful that her psychotherapist carefully facilitated her process of introspection through her transition period."
"part of gender exploration. Fourth, gender assessments can foreclose patients’ willingness to explore their gender due to defensiveness. Defensiveness can be a self-protective response to a threat such as denial of care. However, selfcensorship, impatience, and defensiveness are antithetical to effective gender exploration and impede patients’ ability to make the best possible decisions for themselves about gender-affirming care. In other words, gender assessments can make it more difficult for detrans individuals to realize that they are not trans or that transitionrelated interventions do not suit them."
"manipulation (Petersen & Dickey, 1995). One can also think of Agnes Torres, who obtained a vaginoplasty after successfully convincing sociologist Harold Garfinkel that she was intersex. Any attempt at stricter gatekeeping would doubtlessly be met with equally creative workarounds. Life finds a way (Spielberg, 1993)"
"likely to be. This incentive to lie and sanitize is even greater when clinicians’ waitlists are long, as patients can be exasperated by the wait and all the more eager to access transition-related interventions (McKay et al., 2022; van de Grift et al., 2024). The ubiquity of truth-fuzzing and misrepresentations in trans healthcare is well documented in the scholarly literature. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, trans communities coached each other, carefully preparing and rehearsing ahead of assessments (Fisk, 1973; Knorr et al., 1969; Meyerowitz, 2004). Patients told each other to wear conventionally gendered clothing rather than unisex styles, to lie about their sexual orientation, and not to mention any potential pleasure they might derive from their genitals out of fear of being denied hormone therapy. More recent scholarship also speaks of such realities (Knorr et al., 1969; Spade, 2006)."
"Unlike conventional medical care, where the patient seeks out clinical expertise to determine whether an intervention would have the desired outcomes, gender-affirming medical interventions are desired for their well-established physiological effects. Individuals do not typically seek out transition-related interventions because they believe that the interventions will cure an underlying illness; instead, they typically seek them out because the interventions’ physiological effects align with their gender embodiment goals (Ashley, 2022a, p. 133ff). Because the physiological effects that patients desire are more or less independent from the patient’s individual characteristics—e.g., testosterone stimulates facial hair growth—gender assessments have a limited impact on patient desire for the interventions."
"decision-making process. By incentivizing patients to sanitize their gender history, gender assessments tend to curtail patients’ ability and willingness to discuss their doubts and worries, explore their sense of gender and embodiment goals, establish and maintain a strong therapeutic alliance, and secure individualized information about gender transition and transition-related medical interventions. Incentives to misrepresent one’s experiences act as a moderating variable for other detrimental consequences of gender assessments and gatekeeping."
However, detrans people form a highly heterogeneous group that displays a wide range of identities, transition histories, and feelings toward de/transition (MacKinnon, Kia, et al., 2022; Pullen Sansfaçon et al., 2023). Some detrans individuals, for example, identify with a gender that does not correspond with the gender they were assigned at birth and refer to themselves as transgender. Trans and detrans communities are not mutually exclusive groups, and our references to them as separate groups should not be interpreted as suggesting that all detrans individuals are no longer trans.
"In the present article, we argue that gender assessments are detrimental to detrans people because they (1) disincentivize honesty and"
"In a previous article, we reviewed empirical studies on gender assessments and concluded that they cannot reliably predict or prevent decisional regret since they rely on gender stereotypes, arbitrary parameters, and unproven considerations (Ashley et al., 2024)."
"In other words, to the medical system under this understanding of transition, trans women are ill males to whom oestrogen is a psychiatric drug, and trans men are ill females for whom testosterone is an antidepressant. Changes of sex characteristics are only needed insofar as they act as mood regulators, and they ought to be withheld or revoked if the doctor sees fit. For instance, all patients with an oestrogen-dominant hormonal sex are more prone to osteoporosis than their testosterone-dominant counterparts—but only transsexual women are advised to detransition to fix osteoporosis. Virilisation of cissexual women is not entertained as a treatment option. In fact, incidental virilisation is deemed such a dire side effect that it is to be avoided at all cost, including the patient’s health and even life."