How Do We Move Forward?

Four speakers with their own individual stories bring different perspectives to life beyond detransition

Keira Bell, Aisling O’Reilly Kane, Jessi Harris, Jonni Skinner. These four detransitioners spoke at the panel discussion, Life Beyond Trauma, at Genspect’s Detrans Awareness Day 2026 conference in Washington. All four brought very different life experiences, perspectives, hopes, and fears to a discussion of the meaning of social and medical transition, and of life after detransition.

A pretty diverse bunch, you might say. A panel discussion that makes diversity visible. But there’s the rub. Diversity has become a bugbear of the political right and a beacon of progress for the political left. It’s a highly contested concept. Until recently, it was synonymous with corporate virtue and, as such, has drawn the ire of some Marxists. While acknowledging its potentially authoritarian features, they largely argue pragmatically that the diversity industry obscures the—in their view—real class-based conflicts that merit political attention. Intriguingly, this concern with class as a neglected category is also shared by some commentators on the conservative right.

A more trenchant critique is that the proponents of à la mode diversity are not particularly interested in real people, but are obsessed by categories:

The current version of diversity is abstract and often administratively created. It is frequently imposed from above and affirmed through rules and procedure.

The detransitioners speaking on this panel are not just stand-ins for abstract ideas. Each of them has a unique story to tell about how they have been hurt by obsessive categorisation and regressive stereotypes about how we should be and which groups we should fit into. In this panel discussion, Aisling O’Reilly Kane points out that the category of ‘detransitioner’ itself can be limiting: “’Detrans’ and ‘trans’ are not good words. ‘Detrans’ implies ‘going back’. But I can’t go back. The question should be ‘How do we move forward?’”.

This panel discussion is not about labels and words, be they detransition, desistance, or regret. All of the panel speakers are on complex journeys away from sex denialism towards affirming the reality of their sex. In other words, they have accepted the one true dichotomous category that undoubtedly exists: sex. “Sex is pretty damn binary,” as Richard Dawkins has said. And sex is immutable. Beyond that, there’s a lot of room for manoeuvre in life, and we have a great deal of freedom to realise our individual potentials as human beings who are more than just the sum of our parts.

The irony is that the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ crowd that espouses a creed of dogmatic diversity is so eager to reduce people to label-bearers. Convoluted acronyms are like adhesive labels on tightly sealed identity boxes. Labels impose constraining expectations and norms. The “trans” label provides a ready-to-wear explanation for complex and nuanced experiences and feelings. For all its supposedly subversive intent, the trans perspective actually resuscitates older ideas of conformist normality. Often in caricatured and stereotypical ways. Jonni Skinner’s endocrinologist told him that he would not find love and acceptance in the gay community and that he needed to “disappear into society”, be normal, and find a husband and not stand out so much. Unaccepting of Jonni’s gender non-conformity, the endocrinologist persuaded him that he was not actually gay but had “a girl brain in a boy’s body. And everything needed to be reconstructed so that I could be normal.”

Each of the panellists in this video has their own individual story to tell. There is no one-size-fits-all narrative here. Each of them has taken the tough route of facing and endeavouring to tolerate reality. Which means letting go of the fantasy, as Keira Bell puts it, of being able to extinguish personal anguish and fill an “internal void” by changing the external self. This means giving up “identity absolutism”. It also means tolerating differences, including differences of opinion.

Dissenting opinions are precisely what the current cult of diversity appears to find most difficult to tolerate. In fact, it often looks much more like a demand for conformity with unchallengeable ideas and beliefs. It leaves little or no room for uncertainty. In therapy, that means anaesthetising thought and quickly affirming so-called “gender identities LINK”. In political debate, it means shutting down alternative views and analyses. But a deeper understanding of human conflicts can require uncomfortable disagreement at times. Help does not come from the “friendly and kind” experts who set Jonni Skinner on a path of medicalisation, but from the tougher love that Jessi Harris urges parents of trans-identifying young people to show: “You don’t have to agree with them. You can disapprove, that’s OK. But make sure they know you love them”.

The panel discussion here does not present a neatly packaged worldview. As the moderator Stella O’Malley puts it: “We keep listening and welcome the fact that we have so many people with different political convictions in the room.” The range of different voices in this panel discussion is invaluable in helping listeners to grasp the complexity of the trans issue, with speakers of different persuasions and ages.

There is a searing honesty to the stories told here: not a narcissistic baring of the soul, but a productive sharing of vulnerabilities with the aim of spotlighting the experiences and challenges facing a group that has largely lived out of public view and that appears to have no place on the current mainstream diversity agenda.

Discrimination and recrimination are just some of the costs that come with detransition. Detransition alone doesn’t fix everything, says Keira Bell, “but it puts you in a better position to deal with life”.

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