At the age of 18, Jalisa Vine, who was born a female, began the "transition" process to male, including top and bottom surgeries and a complete hysterectomy. But in a tearful "detransition diary" video posted in August, she expresses her regret.
"It's like a virus. There's something [that] just like infected me. It happened so quickly," she shares. "I was right there. I agreed to every single thing, and I don't know how did that happen. But now I can sit here and look back on it; why did I do that? It doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. If I just would have waited."
Vine lived as a male for eight years before she realized she was on a path to self-destruction, and she decided to undo what she could of the transition.
"It's so sad. This is just something I'll have to live with … there's no fixing it," she laments. "There's no making it better. I have to live like this for the rest of my life and figure a way to be okay with it."
She notes that the psychological issues that drove her to transition are still there and are likely worse than before.
"I did portray it online that transitioning was the best thing that ever happened to me. It wasn't, and I'm sorry," Vine continues. "Changing my external world did not change my internal world."
Another woman, who does not give her name, also recently relayed the regret she feels after agreeing to transgender surgeries and testosterone treatments.
"I can't believe this happened," she says in her Twitter video. "I ruined my life."
The anonymous woman shares that she was just starting to go through puberty and was unhappy with her body and who she would be as a woman.
"I decided that I didn't want to be a woman before I had ever even experienced being a woman," she laments. "I had no idea what being a woman was like, because I was a child."
Before transitioning, she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), a mental illness of which confusion about one's identity is a symptom.
Dr. Jeffrey Barrows of the Christian Medical Association says the doctors who agree to play a part in the mutilation of minors should have their medical licenses revoked.
"It's near malpractice in my mind," he tells AFN. "Who as a minor can give consent to having these types of permanent disfiguring surgeries done on them when they are 14, 15, 16 years old?"
The woman says in her video that transgender advocates and medical personnel prey on "the most vulnerable of us" – a line that Not the Bee suggests contributed to Twitter's decision to label the video as "potentially sensitive content."
"I told them, even though they didn't ask, that I had been diagnosed with BPD, and it was all fine to them. I just took the cure that was handed to me," she cries.
She understands now that so many mental health disorders "make you hate your body" and says, "The solution isn't to change your body; it's to fix your brain." She hopes that sharing her story will save others from feeling "ruined."
LifeSiteNews.com reports that "a growing number of detransitioners have publicly come out with their stories of regret over their decision to have gender surgeries and hormone therapies," and the Detransition Subreddit "r/detrans" – a site that exists for detransitioners to share their experiences with others and look for help after realizing their decision to medically transition was a mistake – has grown tremendously over the past couple of years and now almost has 40,000 members.
