Evan Urquhart

There's a dominant narrative around a set of experiences that we're currently calling detransition, and that narrative was created by people (including @reclaimingtrans) for a political anti-trans reason. It is very much like ex-gay in that way.

Creating narratives around experiences, joining people with those experiences into identity groups, and connecting those groups with politics isn't necessarily even a bad thing. If the detransition community was right in their understanding, they'd be doing a good thing.

It's bad because their explanatory framework (that trans men are self-hating women suffering from internalized misogyny who won't experience dysphoria if they confront that misogyny) was a failure. If it was right, there'd be nothing wrong with them organizing to help people.

So, when I say it's a psy-op, I mean both that it was intentionally constructed AND that it's a harmful, sexist, demeaning lie. The intentional construction doesn't make it nefarious, the lie does.

I know how complicated this is- and that's why I've backed way off the 'psy-op' language. An individual trying to understand and heal from their experiences is not a psy-op, and it was wrong for me to use language cavalierly to imply they are.

Anyway, I won't be using the 'psy-op' language any more, not because I don't think it's appropriate, but because I can't re-say all this every time I do, and without this context the impression it gives is mean and makes vulnerable people feel bad.