There is Life Beyond Trauma

Vernadette Broyles’ powerful speech at Genspect’s Detrans Awareness Day 2026

“You may not get back many things, but you can take back your life.”

Vernadette Broyles is not the kind of person who comes across as vulnerable. She is intelligent, tough, and, in a word, formidable. But when she spoke on Life Beyond Trauma at Genspect’s Detrans Awareness Day 2026 conference, she began with something few people would dare to share publicly. She told the story of a little girl. At just five years old, she was sexually abused by a member of her extended family. Her physical and sexual boundaries were violated, and, because of the trusted nature of this family member, she was forced to endure it alone. She grew up feeling unsafe and isolated and began to view her sex as a liability.

It didn’t stop there. In high school, this same young girl was groomed and sexually exploited by a 42-year-old teacher, in a case of statutory rape. Once again, she was preyed upon in a place where she should have been safe, by someone who should have protected her. When she eventually found the courage to file a Title IX complaint, the school board did nothing. No discipline. No accountability. The institution shrugged. Every person and every authority that should have protected her failed. She was left in such profound despair that she began contemplating an “exit strategy” because she couldn’t bear her life.

That girl was, of course, Broyles herself, and her vulnerability as she told her story was palpable.

That she is now one of the foremost legal advocates in America for detransitioners and their families tells you something about what a person can do with pain when they refuse to be consumed by it. This is the reason she wanted to tell her story: she sees so many parallels between her experience and that of detransitioners.

Her betrayal was at the hands of family members, a predatory teacher, and a school board that chose institutional convenience over justice. Detransitioners were betrayed by doctors and therapists, social workers, and teachers—precisely the people with the professional and ethical obligation to protect them. They were encouraged to believe that their bodies were a problem, and that they could find relief on the other side of a prescription or with surgery. Broyles describes this as the worst form of violation of all.

But trauma is not the end of these stories. In some ways, it is only the beginning. Broyles’ story changed when she channeled her own trauma in a positive direction, aiming to become “a voice for the voiceless.” She channeled her energy into pursuing a career in law, attended Harvard Law School, and became a successful family law attorney. But when she came to understand the scale of the harms being perpetrated against children and vulnerable adults and their families, she closed her private practice and set up the Child and Parental Rights Campaign.

The cases she has taken on since are remarkable in their range and their significance. She has represented detransitioners like Sage Blair and her mother, Michelle. She represented January Littlejohn, whose daughter was socially transitioned at school without her parents’ knowledge, a case that went nearly as far as the Supreme Court. In what she terms one of the great honors of her life, she represented Jamie Reed, the whistleblower who came forward from inside a Missouri gender clinic. She has gone up against CPS (Child Protective Services) when parents who refused to affirm their child’s transition faced losing custody of them. She has challenged laws that permit schools to transition children in secret. She is currently representing the first female collegiate coach to legally challenge the forced inclusion of trans-identified males in women’s sport and changing rooms. She credits her Christian faith for healing her wounds and for giving her the strength to keep fighting the good fight.

Her message was simple and from the heart. No one needs to sit alone in their trauma. Detransitioners should forgive themselves—completely and without qualification. Yes, trauma has taken some things that cannot be given back. Broyles will never have her childhood or her adolescence. Detransitioners cannot recover everything that was taken from them either. But your life, she said, that you can get back.

Detransitioners have more power than they know, and that is why the people —Broyles calls them “medical predators” —fear their voices most of all. Nor are detransitioners doomed to stay stuck where they are. Trauma does not have to be a prison. It can become something else entirely. It can become the thing that drives you to transform from a “victim to a victor”, as she puts it. Vernadette Broyles is living proof that it is possible.