Aaron Osborne
2 min readMay 4, 2021

--

I'm aware that you are a trans man; that being said, you made a number of assertions that relate not to your own lived experience, but rather to your misreading of my piece. For example, I never asserted that gender reassignment therapy is "the answer to everything for all gender nonconforming people." I can't even argue that point, because it's simply not what I said, nor do I believe to be true.

Myth #1 is very clearly a response to the claim that transgenderism ITSELF is a mental illness. Obviously trans people can have mental illnesses; there's nothing about being trans which makes one impervious to depression, schizophrenia, etc. But trans people are not mentally ill by virtue of the fact that they are trans (I assume you agree with this point).

In addition, conservative transphobia very often IS based on sexual anatomy (i.e. the conflation of sex and gender). If you'd like, I can link you literally dozens of videos of right-wing pundits such as Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles claiming that trans identity is invalid because "a person cannot change their sex." This conflation of sex and gender is foundational to much of the transphobic rhetoric spewed today. Demonstrating that this conflation is false, and that sex and gender are NOT synonyms (a fact of which you are no doubt well aware) is important.

As for Myths 2, 3, and 4, you don't actually seem to object to anything I said. I never argued that nobody detransitions due to their life circumstances or lack of funding; my point was that people who REGRET their transition are exceedingly rare. This is why Myth #4 is "Many trans people regret transitioning," not "some trans people detransition due to life circumstances." In fact, I specifically addressed the issue of detransitioning due to trauma and social stigma at the end of my piece.

--

--