Eliza Mondegreen: Where did you first encounter the idea that you could be trans?
Steven A. Richards: It was in the background for most of my life—something I heard jokes about in school and saw on TV—but the first time I saw it presented the way it is nowadays, as a legitimate identity and marginalized group, I must have been 13 years old. That was a really difficult time in my life. Being 13 isn’t easy for anyone, but in my case, I had been bullied a lot. My family had moved. I didn’t have many friends. I spent a ton of time online. My ninth-grade English teacher recommended Christopher Hitchens, so I read
God Is Not Great, and I got into online atheism and leftism on Reddit, where the version of trans ideology we see today was just starting to circulate.
The idea of being special appealed to me, and so did the idea of being someone else. I didn’t like who I was at the time. A lot of that had to do with my isolation, and a lot of it also had to do with the messages I was getting online about being privileged for my race and sex. I got it in my head that maybe being trans explains all the unhappiness I’d been feeling. It helped explain away all the bad stuff and it gave me a purpose in my life—a narrative, something to strive for—when I’d never really felt like I’d ever had that. It brought meaning that I didn’t have before.
That’s why I was initially attracted to it, but once you’ve been involved in those communities for a while and internalized all these ideas and come to believe them, whatever it was that originally brought you in doesn’t matter anymore because the ideology starts perpetuating itself. It even gets to the point where maybe you’re not happy in your transition and you don’t feel like it’s helping, maybe you even feel like it’s hurting you, but the ideology is like a virus running in your head. It’s hard to get it out.
EM: Why do you think the online atheism community leaned so heavily into gender? Might it be related to the search for meaning that you’re talking about?
SAR: I think there are two basic types of online atheists: the people who were raised religious and who are rebelling against that, and people like me who were not raised religious and got into it because they needed meaning and community and wanted to believe in
something, and maybe they saw it as being a bit rebellious. I think I saw the atheist community as this spunky group of freethinkers, fighting back against the oppressive establishment. Another part of the appeal is that religion is coded as conservative. So if religion and conservatism is the stuff you’re
against, you’re going to gravitate to the other end of the spectrum. In these spaces, there were a lot of people who wanted to make the world a better place and wanted to do something meaningful and this seemed like the civil rights issue of our time. That’s the narrative. Then the trans issue comes along. You feel like you’re doing something heroic, like you’re just like the civil rights activists you learned about in history class, acting in accordance with these modern myths.
EM: Tell me what it was like being immersed in the trans community online.
SAR: There was a lot of talk about how we were fighting for our rights, and a lot of discussion around the best ways to access hormones and the best places to go for surgeries. New people would come in asking if they were trans, or how could they know if they were trans, and would be brought into the community and gently encouraged to transition and every time they hit a milestone—like,
I just dressed in opposite-sex clothing for the first time, I just came out to my parents, I just took my first dose of HRT, I just scheduled surgery—they’d make a post to share and everyone would celebrate. When I found this community, I felt welcomed in. I felt like people cared about me, and I felt that even more when I sought out queer groups in real life. These communities are full of love for new members.
I wound up spending a lot more time on Tumblr than Reddit, and Tumblr was a much weirder community. At its best, it was funny and welcoming, and it could look at the weird situation we were all in with a sense of humor and compassion, but at its worst it was full of backbiting, reputation-destroying callouts, and despair. You’d see absurdist humor next to pleas for money from people in desperate situations, like their parents just kicked them out or they were trying to escape an abusive partner, and those might or might not have been scams. Next to that would be news stories about the worst things in the world. Next to that was straight-up porn. All of this stuff just got fed to you in an infinite stream of content, but with this sense of purpose to it all, like you’re doing something really important, like you’re
building a better world.
I remember people expressing doubts and the idea that having doubts is an indication that you’re actually trans. I remember feeling like I should share my own experiences with doubt to comfort whoever was currently experiencing that doubt, to help them feel like they weren’t alone by saying,
It’s OK, every trans person feels like that. Everybody is propping each other up, helping everybody else shore up their doubts and construct their identities. If my identity is valid and you’re experiencing what I experienced then your identity must be valid, too.
EM: How far did you go with transition?
SAR: I was on estrogen for about eight years, starting when I was sixteen. For most of that time I was also taking puberty blockers, but five or six years in, I had an orchiectomy. My doctor had suggested to me that the blockers weren’t healthy to be on for a long time, and—when I tried switching from Lupron to another type of testosterone blocker—I didn’t react well to it, so having my gonads removed seemed like the easiest option. At the time, I didn’t really feel like I’d be losing anything; I actually felt like it was the right thing to do for my long-term health, even though I was unsure if I wanted to get total reconstructive surgery. That’s as far as I went.
EM: You’ve talked about how this belief system felt like a virus running in your brain and the community reinforced people’s identities and squelched doubts. So I’m curious, how did you start to come out of this belief system?
SAR: That’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I don’t have an answer—I have theories. For the last few years that I identified as trans, I spent a lot of time trying to ‘solve’ the ideology. It became an obsession for me for a while. I was reading about the ideology of gender—and also about anarchism, because I was friends with a bunch of queer anarchists. I was trying to sort out in my head how all the things I believed could possibly be true at once, and I wasn’t able to solve that. I kept hitting a point where it all just didn’t make sense anymore.
Then there was the physiological side of things. I was put on antidepressants at 13 and was on one medication after another from age 13 to 23, when I decided I didn’t want to take these medications forever. I wanted to see if I could do without that. My psychiatrist wasn’t very cooperative, and warned me that it was bad for people to go off medications in winter, so why not wait till summer? I didn’t want to wait, so I ended up just stopping antidepressants cold turkey. I started feeling like myself again, which I hadn’t in a long time. I felt more of a connection to my body and I thought,
Oh, I remember feeling this way. I had sort of found the feeling I had been trying to find with the transition. That thing I had been looking for was there again. So I think being medicated at a young age played a role.
Between the mental and physiological changes, at some point, I sort of snapped. The immediate feeling I had wasn’t
I made a horrible mistake transitioning, I’m actually a man. Instead, it felt like I made a choice. I said to myself,
I don’t think transitioning is ever going to make me happy, it’s not going to make me more genuine or more me. Transitioning is just a thing I did and I can either choose to live as a transwoman or I can detransition and live as a man. If both of those are valid options, I’d rather live as a man.
After I made that choice, I moved out of the ideology. My thinking changed. More and more, I began to realize it was a messed up situation, a messed up thing I’ve done to my body. Now I’m here and I’ve been writing about this because I don’t think anybody should be doing it to themselves.
I definitely don’t think it’s medical care. But that was a long process. There was no one moment.
EM: When did that process of questioning the beliefs you’d adopted and questioning your decision to transition start?
SAR: I was 21 when I started trying to ‘solve’ the ideology. It was after I’d had my orchiectomy. I was experiencing pain after the surgery—frayed nerves. It was unpleasant. When I got the surgery, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of,
Oh, I’m having a body part removed and there are going to be complications that go along with that. That’s because I didn’t feel like my sex organs were part of my body. I felt like they were
attached to me, but that they weren’t really me. So I felt like having them removed wouldn’t do anything. It was magical thinking. I was basically delusional about this and that delusion was encouraged by the community and the medical establishment and all of my friends. Actually having to live with the reality of surgery made me realize I was inhabiting a real human body.
I think what really started me thinking was realizing that I didn’t have the option to go off hormones anymore—that if, for some reason, I lost my health insurance or there was some kind of medical supply-chain issue and I wasn’t able to access estrogen, I’d have serious health complications. That was somehow something I hadn’t thought about before the surgery and something that no doctors or therapists ever talked to me about. When I realized that, it really freaked me out. That was what sent me over the edge into two years of obsessively questioning and trying to solve the ideology and trying to figure out a way that it would all make sense, trying to figure out a way that what had happened was OK. And I couldn’t figure it out.
EM: What do you wish people understood about boys and young men who are drawn to transition?
SAR: Just understand that they’re human beings. They’re not cartoon monsters. Most of them are not out to hurt anyone and most of them wouldn’t hurt anyone. A lot of them are just people who are suffering, and suffering in complicated and nuanced ways that can’t be reduced to a single driving factor. As a general rule I think that people deserve compassion, empathy, and grace.
EM: When did you decide to start writing about your experiences with transition and detransition?
SAR: I’ve been writing my whole life—
EM: What’s the first thing you ever remember writing?
SAR: I loved Disney’s
Hercules and in preschool I wrote and drew a picture book about Hercules. I think that was the earliest story I ever wrote. I was writing stories when I was in elementary school. I wrote my first novel—a short novel, it wasn’t very good—in middle school. I’ve written a couple of unpublished books, but most of my life I wasn’t really showing what I wrote to people—or maybe just to one or two people at a time—so it’s been a little weird having my writing out in the world.
EM: Did you write during the time you were identifying as trans, too?
SAR: I was writing then, too, and I was sharing some of what I wrote online. What I was writing then was all fiction, stories, mostly featuring queer and trans characters, but I still wasn’t showing anyone. A lot of it was very intense and dark. I look back now on what I wrote during that time—poetry, short stories, two novels—and I think a lot of my doubts and fears around transition were coming out in my writing. I was processing that way: write it, get it down on the page, get it out of my head.
In terms of writing about my transition and detransition, I wasn’t immediately like,
Oh, I’m going to detransition. I realized that maybe I’d rather live as a man, so I tentatively started looking up detransition online and I found the
detrans subreddit. That subreddit had a rule on the sidebar that says “Never promote cross-sex hormones” here. Calling HRT [hormone replacement therapy] “cross-sex hormones” is not something you do in the trans community. Those are
your hormones, the hormones your body is supposed to have. Just seeing that—as someone who was so deep in that ideology—I had a fear response. I almost clicked out of the page right then and went back to living as trans. But then I said to myself,
No, this matters to me. So I didn’t click away.
I spent time reading about other people’s experiences with transition and detransition and I joined the Discord server so I could talk to other detrans people. There I found other people posting their stories. We were all sort of figuring it out. I decided I wanted to share my story, but I didn’t want to show my face, so
I wrote it down as I understood it at the time. It got a ton of responses. Then
I wrote something else, about the ideology behind transition and how I felt it was both misrepresented by activists and misunderstood by people outside the movement, and got a lot of responses to that, too. Some were positive and some were negative, but I realized that maybe I had insights that were valuable. So I kept writing.
EM: Can you say more about that fear response you felt when you read the words “cross-sex hormones”?
SAR: Yeah, it was a moment of panic, a moment of
Oh, this is bad, this is wrongthink, I shouldn’t even be looking at this. Looking at something like that to attack it or hold it in contempt is one thing, but to look at it and
consider it? That felt like I was doing something wrong. I think I’ve always had a strong sense of right and wrong. I was someone who always followed the rules. So I had to really push myself to consider these ideas and weigh them on their merits, instead of just dismissing them immediately because it was wrong or immoral or a bad thing to think.
EM: What are you writing these days?
SAR: These days, mostly fiction. When I write fiction it’s because there’s something I’m trying to express that I don’t know how to put into words directly. So I try to approach it from the side, sort of frame it in a narrative so that people can encounter it experientially and think about it for themselves rather than just straightforwardly telling them my opinion. I did this before with a trilogy of pieces using demon worship as an allegory:
On the Subject of Child Sacrifice,
The Pact Shaming Needs to Stop, and
Keep Our Sacrifices Safe. More recently, I did it with a lot more nuance in a piece called
On Emory’s Balcony.
That story is about detransition and what it’s like to be trans and to be surrounded by a community of trans people. I like it a lot and I feel like there’s more to say with these characters and themes, so I’ve been trying to expand that and turn it into a novel. I’m not interested in just trashing the trans community. I want to be honest about my experiences and generous where I can be. I hope that when people read my writing, they can feel empathy for these characters who they might find distasteful or unpleasant in real life. I think we could all benefit from being kinder to each other and viewing even people we don’t like as fellow humans and not just ideological enemies.
The stuff I write for fun is mostly fantasy. I’ve been working on a fantasy novel since the start of the year, but it’s super-long and despite being a hundred thousand words in, I don’t even feel close to done. So I’m splitting my attention between that and my new project, which I think I can write in a more reasonable time frame. I love writing. It’s my favorite thing to do, and I’d be doing it even if no one wanted to read my work. I’m really grateful there are people who care about what I have to say, and I hold myself to a high standard because I want to keep writing stuff that’s worth reading.
