I Thought I Was Trans—Until War Showed Me the Truth

It took war and terror, it took witnessing horrors beyond my comprehension to realize that there is a hell on earth worse than any gender dysphoria.

As a 25-year-old who spent half of her life in the process of a gender transition, and who has subsequently disembarked from the trans train, I often find myself in the center of contentious debates about the "trans kid" phenomenon.

There is much discourse surrounding the harms of medical transition for young people. In light of low-quality studies and lackluster evidence surrounding medicalization as a treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria, the United States and several European countries have pumped the breaks on these harmful practices. While banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries for children under 18 is incredible progress, this alone will not be enough to protect youngsters from irreversible psychosocial and bodily damage. Though my gender transition did not involve a prescription from a doctor, it still altered my life and my body irreversibly.

My so-called "gender journey" began with the iPad I got for my 12th birthday. At the age of 12 in 2012, after months of online research, I came out to my parents as transgender. My parents refused to affirm the identity. Nonetheless, I was already committed to the idea that a gender transition would be my only path to happiness and I began to plan my future as a man.

I began binding using back braces, ace bandages, and multiple sports bras, which I took off only for a ten minute shower once a week, to squash down my breasts in hopes they wouldn't grow large enough to require the more invasive double incision mastectomy once I was an adult. As a 12-year-old, I already knew that women with small breasts could have them removed through liposuction and emerge from the surgery without obvious scarring. I thought that I was investing in my future ability to pass as a man by binding my breasts young.

By 18, I went off to college, began my social transition and bought a chest binder that was marketed as 100% safe.

By 19, my parents noticed how persistent I was in my transgender identity, so they sent me to Israel for a study abroad.

They hoped that extracting me from a woke, affirmation-only environment and placing me into the highly traditional, conservative Middle East would cause me to quit my gender transition.

Instead, I did the opposite. This was a new opportunity for me to live as a man within orthodox Jewish and Palestinian Muslim communities as well as the broader secular Israeli society. I was an Israeli-Palestinian peace activist with a rich social life where nearly everyone knew me as a man. Only a select few people knew my secret—that I was actually a woman.

In May of 2021, I lived through my first war in Israel, or a "military operation" as the locals call it. I found myself running back and forth to bomb shelters. In between sirens I spent hours on social media engaging in fruitless debates with my terrorist-supporting leftist American friends back home. As a result, the algorithms began to shift the content I was seeing and I found myself in right-wing internet spaces.

For the next two years, I questioned my thoughts regarding gender ideology, but I continued to socially transition. I had no access to the healthcare system and I spent years pursuing Israeli citizenship in order to medicalize far away from my non-affirming parents.

The last year of my transition was one in which I was ambivalent.

I no longer believed in what I was doing but I felt trapped in my transition because I had woven a complex social web as a man in sectors of society where men and women can't even shake hands.

It was not until I woke up to a blaring siren at 8am on October 7, 2023 and didn't have time to squeeze myself into a breast binder because I had to run into a bomb shelter, that I realized there's no point in continuing to live this lie. Why was I obsessing over my gender troubles when death was staring me in the face? Turns out there's bigger fish to fry when you live in a war zone.

All policymakers who wish to ban pediatric gender medicine must ask themselves the following questions: "What happens when you tell a trans-identified kid 'NO'?" "What happens when an ideologically captured young person has no conceivable medical pathway until at least 18?"

Since this is the world we are trying to create, let's explore how this world might look in practice.

It's important to state the obvious:

Social transition of prepubertal kids only happens due to the promise that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will be available to obscure the child's sex forever. If these treatment bans are upheld everywhere, we will inevitably have a cohort of prepubertal socially transitioned children who will approach puberty and be denied the broken life raft they have been promised since before they learned to tie their shoes.

The only options available for them in this social climate will be interventions like breast binding and genital tucking, which use tissue compressing garments that can be easily bought on Amazon or at Target, but nonetheless cause permanent bodily damage, especially when they are used by children whose bodies are still developing.

From the moment these girls begin to grow breasts, they'll crush them through binding.

I bound my breasts in different ways for nearly a decade and have been severely damaged by this process. My breast tissue is deformed, I cannot take deep breaths without pain, it hurts to lie down on my sides, I have pain in my ribs, and posture issues.

I am 25. Quitting breast binding didn't reverse any of this damage, and all of it has compounded the psychological distress that, as a 12 year old, drove me to adopt a trans identity in the first place.

These harms are often overlooked because frankly, kids like me are the "lucky ones." Many feel that transition did not damage our bodies enough for our experiences to count. My transition still robbed me of 12 years, or roughly half of my life. But it did not ruin my endocrine system or rob me of my breasts. I am lucky in that sense, but I was still damaged in mind and in body by gender ideology.

I would argue that it is equally important to heed the warnings of young people who disembarked from the trans train before medicalizing, because most young people who experiment with a transgender identity won't medicalize but will bind their breasts and tuck their male genitals for prolonged periods of time—not because a doctor had to prescribed it to them (though hospitals are encouraging these DIY interventions as treatments for gender dysphoria)—but because of an idea.

The harms of gender ideology do not begin when a child or vulnerable young adult finds themselves in a gender clinic. The harms of gender ideology begin to accrue from the moment a young person is encouraged to construct for themselves a new identity which puts them at odds with their biological reality.

But this piece is not about me. This is about all the kids who are already facing harms that are routinely overlooked, time and time again.

The harms of gender ideology do not start in a doctor's office. The harm starts from the moment that a child adopts the belief that they were born in the wrong body. Each subsequent psychosocial and medical intervention carries unique harms that compound into even more harm over time.

Assuming we succeed in banning "gender affirming care" for minors everywhere, there will be many more kids like me who managed to not medicalize but were still physically and psychologically damaged.

When we choose to ignore how harmful social transition is, we will think that non-affirmation and "gender affirming care" bans will sufficiently solve the multifaceted hydra-like harms of gender ideology. This belief is sorely misguided.

Firstly, the Cass Review (the most comprehensive evaluation of the evidence underpinning the practice of pediatric gender medicine) conducted in the UK has shown that social transition is a significant intervention which predisposes youngsters to medicalization. Secondly, and more importantly, social transition is harmful in and of itself, not only psychologically but physically as well. Breast binding and male genital tucking cause damage to the breasts and genitals of children. This damage, of course, only makes these young people more desperate to have those body parts removed entirely.

We can expect that when "gender affirming care" for minors is banned, we will have a cohort of young people who've been indoctrinated, perhaps socially transitioned as minors and they will medicalize the day they turn 18 when they are no more capable of consent than they were when they went to sleep on the night before. But now, they will be angry. They will come into gender clinics even more stubborn, even more sure of themselves because of how long their cross-sex identity and desire to transition has persisted.

If we want to end this ideology, it is unacceptable to settle for kids medicalizing at 18. It is unethical to ever turn a healthy person into a lifelong medical patient, especially when they are young and cognitively immature, when they are being lied to by their doctors and are being treated with protocols underpinned by no evidence that any of this is a good idea.

And those 18-year-olds who were denied medicalization as minors will just become even more ardent trans activists because we have told them "no," and we will soon find ourselves in the same position we started from.

Policymakers, parents and mental health professionals alike, must account for this inevitability and take steps to start mitigating it by understanding how the psychosocial, physical and medical harms of transition are inextricably intertwined. After all, our bodies and minds do not exist separately from one another. This gender ideology crisis is fueled by a phenomenon pushed largely by people whose normal distress is pathologized, medicalized and institutionally ideologically enshrined. These people have been encouraged to create a new identity that puts them at odds with themselves and with how they are perceived by others, on the basis of psychological distress. This alone makes it difficult for people to heal from their distress.

Our mental health institutions were clearly ill-equipped to deal with the underlying mental health issues—both social media induced and not—of this cohort. If we do not address this and the indoctrination at every corner, the secret transitions in schools and the groups that give kids breast binders, we will be unlikely to make more than a dent in dismantling gender ideology. We are in for a long fight ahead.

My commitment to my transition was stubborn and it lasted for half of my life, despite my parents' non-affirmation. It took war and terror, it took witnessing horrors beyond my comprehension to realize that there is a hell on earth worse than any gender dysphoria.

If these kids are anything like me, they will need to be de-radicalized. They will need proper mental health care and guidance. If we truly wish to end the death grip of gender ideology on our society, we need to face the distress that these children are facing in an aggressively honest, compassionate and practical way.

Banning pediatric transition will stop kids from being harmed by doctors, but it will not stop kids from being irreversibly damaged by an ideology which tells them that they were born in the "wrong" body. A transgender identity is easy to adopt and hard to divest from, no matter how far someone has medicalized it. These young people deserve as many possible off-ramps from a transgender identity as we are able to provide them with. In order to identify these, a greater focus must be placed on defeating these harmful ideas themselves, through de-radicalization and proper mental healthcare.

Originally Published in the Post Millennial, updated here based on current events & posted on Substack for your accessibility.