Good Funks and Bad Funks: Eliza Mondegreen Interviews Laura Becker

Laura Becker is a public detransitioner, writer, and artist who spoke on the detransitioner panel at Genspect’s Killarney conference in April 2023. As a survivor of gender medicalization, Laura has been interviewed by numerous media outlets, and analyzes her experiences in essays, podcasts, videos, and Q&As. 

Eliza Mondegreen: So, where does this story start? 

Laura Becker: For me, it starts as early as kindergarten because I always had a feeling of loneliness, a really deep sense of not relating to my peers, and even an existential feeling of aloneness. That’s related to anxious attachment from early childhood, and maybe it’s related to being autistic, but that sense of loneliness is also part of the story of how I later came to identify as trans. I always felt different and was always questioning whether there was something wrong with me that made it hard for me to fit in with other people. When I learned about gender identity as a teenager, I ascribed that feeling of being an outsider to being trans.

Through therapy, I learned that most of this was related to attachment issues, but as I grew up, that feeling got worse and the sense of difference I felt from other people widened. In terms of gender nonconformity, I was never into anything feminine, but I didn’t really like to spend time with boys, either. Other girls were too sensitive, too clique-y, too passive, too agreeable. I was definitely more disagreeable than most of the other girls. I was very independent-thinking, an independent spirit, and I was becoming more and more so every year at the same time that everyone else was starting to conform more and more. I also hit puberty early. Combined with a developmental delay socially, that was very hard.

By middle school, I felt pretty much completely alienated and very much lived in a fantasy world. By that I mean I was writing novels about wolves. I think fantasy worlds can be adaptive or maladaptive, though I think it’s adaptive overall. I also got online for the first time. I was born in 1997 and I had a very innocent introduction to the Internet. YouTube came out when I was in sixth or seventh grade. I didn’t really have any friends so I was very isolated in this kid-friendly world of pet websites, animal websites, quiz websites.

Then, in eighth grade, I found Tumblr. Tumblr was a haven for the wolf girls, girls who didn’t fit in but were creative and funny. Meanwhile, my mental health was getting worse every year, just from attachment issues and parental abuse.

EM: What do you wish people understood about attachment?

LB: The basic premise of attachment theory is that the bond you have with your caregivers in infancy and early childhood will shape how you view yourself and relate to the world. So, the first developmental stage is either trust or mistrust. If you have enough mistrust, then each developmental stage you enter, you will enter it in a maladaptive way. If that goes unchecked, every developmental stage you hit will be affected. That means when you hit the identity-vs.-role-confusion stage as an adolescent, you’re going to have a much more unstable sense of self. You might not feel acceptable as you are and you might not be able to form those necessary attachments.

EM: You’ve written a lot about Tumblr. It sounds like Tumblr was a medium where your gifts could shine. What were the good parts of Tumblr?

LB: Tumblr was a place to be expressive, witty, offbeat, funny. It was home to a kind of neurodivergent dark humor. The humor was a huge part of it for me. I made memes about classic rock musicians. I got to connect with peers that had similar interests and talk about music and celebrate and fangirl over these band members who were cool and inspirational. I wrote fan fiction for my friends because I was good at writing. And I did graphic design, writing, memes, music, and vlogs. To me, this is very funny, but I really taught myself social skills by making videos for an audience that wasn’t there and then watching them. So from that process I learned, like, oh, it’s socially awkward if I don’t make eye contact. So I socialized myself through making videos and posts on Tumblr. It was really positive for me in those ways.

EM: Can you talk about the darker side of Tumblr?

LB: There was a lot of commiseration, a lot of talk about self-harm and suicide. Eating disorders weren’t really my thing. I liked to eat too much. But the dark suicide humor… The celebrity parasocial relationships I think were mostly very innocent and were very enriching to me. But that didn’t encourage me to go have real relationships. Everything was stuck online.

And gender was pervasive. Tumblr was a lot of teenagers all reaffirming each other’s naïve political beliefs about feminism and gay rights and racism. And I remember noticing a shift around censorship, especially around race. As a comedy-enjoyer, I’m very anti-policing of humor and free speech. So I felt critical of that. But I was still into the gender stuff and most of the social justice stuff. I believed the “transwomen are being murdered” line. I was very anti-religious, anti-conservative. The nihilism of Tumblr was well-disguised through sardonic humor but it was still pervasively harmful.

Online, I was very vulnerable to these ideas about being non-conforming and, because I’d always been a non-conforming person in general, I loved the idea of having a gender identity. Discovering the label of genderqueer was freeing and creative for me, but what should have been flexible identity exploration during teenage development became confined to a rigid identity imprisoned in a self-imposed confusion of what it meant to be a woman or a man.

As many detransitioners relay, Tumblr conveyor-belted me and other users along from generally-weird-precocious-intellectually-curious-divergently-minded-liberal-valued-naïve-child to wokeish-trans-teen-mentally-unwell-young-adult. 

Because of exposure to these ideas on Tumblr, I was an early adopter. I learned about gender online, not at school, unlike many kids now. My school was pretty tolerant. There was very little bullying. But I had some toxic relationships with two boys who would later grow up to be gay. We were all identifying as ‘queer’ at the time, so, for me, it was, like, hey, we’re all queer, we’re all supposed to be equals, and we all love each other as friends, why don’t you want to have sex with me? It destroyed my mental health. I became more suicidal. I felt unlovable. This experience seemed to confirm my sense of being unlovable. 

I started to feel like life would be better if I were a gay man. My personality would make more sense. The people I loved would be more likely to love me back. I felt like I had a special affinity for gay men. In reality, I was just attracted to unavailable men; I just didn’t realize that at the time. At 16, the idea of being a gay man made sense to me. I’d always dressed very androgynously or worn men’s clothing anyway. I didn’t have to change that much. I was doing what I’d always done, but in a more unhealthy, fixating way.

In college, I went to a big school that was known for being very LGBT-supportive, but I was disappointed because my attempts to reach out and make friends and meet people in real life didn’t work. The LGBT center on campus only wanted to do educational events. Besides, I didn’t really feel comfortable there—it was very woke, humorless. I just didn’t vibe with them. So I was isolated and I went from one unrequited obsession to another, one after the other.

When I was 18 years old, I came out as trans—as a ‘transsexual agender androphilic person.’ I really didn’t want anything to do with gender roles or norms. I did want to love and be loved by men, but that didn’t really happen. I came out as trans and I was really torn up about it. I thought it was going to alienate me even more, but I felt like I had no choice but to live this tortured existence. When it comes to gender dysphoria, you feel like the only way to cure it is to transition. I have things I wrote during that time that are like: The only choice I have is to become more masculine, more feminine, or to kill myself, and I will never become more feminine, I’ll never be more comfortable being female or a woman, so my only choices are to transition or kill myself. I kind of just obsessed over it, ruminated on it, for another year until I said, all right, things aren’t getting better. And obviously I had undiagnosed issues with C-PTSD that were only getting worse because I wasn’t being treated. I needed to do something. It’s not like I wasn’t trying to get help. I was seeing therapists throughout this time but for different reasons, and we never connected.

So I said, OK, I think I will medicalize. I went to a trans (female-to-male) professor at my university and she said I could get free testosterone in Chicago. So I went to Chicago and the clinic gave me a 200mg prescription for testosterone and I started injecting that into my thigh every week. That was really damaging to my psyche. I already had all these issues, and now I was struggling even more with boundaries, becoming reckless and impulsive, and abusing drugs. I admitted myself to in-patient treatment around that time, so I missed the start of the next semester and decided to take the semester off. All I was doing for six months was f***ing around and doing drugs and taking testosterone and ruminating on all of this.

Right after I got out of the hospital, I made the decision to get ‘top surgery.’ So I found a surgeon. He needed two letters of recommendation because he was trying to follow the WPATH guidelines at the time. I got a letter from my psychiatrist who diagnosed me with gender dysphoria and another from my GP who had no business writing that letter.

At that point, I had been on testosterone for seven months. The surgeon said he wanted me to go off it for the surgery, which surprised me. I went cold turkey off testosterone with no supervision and had a psychotic break. I lost my entire friend group right before surgery. Then I had the surgery and it went fine, there were no complications, but I was severely depressed and suicidal because I had just lost all my friends. I didn’t feel happy from the surgery but I thought my unhappiness was from this other stuff, that it wasn’t because the surgery wasn’t the right thing to do. I was afraid to go back on testosterone, so I took a hiatus. For the next two years, I took hard drugs and hooked up with middle-aged drug addicts on Grindr. I knew I needed to get serious help. I got a psych eval and was diagnosed with PTSD at 22.

By that point, I had become almost completely isolated. I was spending a lot of time online, in my own little world. That was when I started coming across more and more gender-critical content, and I was vibing with it. Then I saw some detransitioners posting about how they had transitioned due to trauma. It only took a couple of months for me to realize that for me, too, my transition was a response to trauma. I mentally detransitioned first. But because I didn’t have any friends or relationships in real life, I did it on my own. Even though nothing changed on the outside right away because I kept dressing and acting the same way, I realized how detached I had been from my body, so I started doing healing work like mindfulness and meditation. I went off all my medications to see how I felt at baseline. That improved some things. I felt more connected to reality. I felt more positive emotions. Then I did a lot of LSD—I had a spiritual awakening.  On balance, it was healing for me. I started to release a lot of anger, but I also basically tripped myself out too much. LSD is like a spiritual bypass. I was starting to heal, but I was healing the more superficial layers. I was still very vulnerable. I ended up getting involved with someone who used me for an affair. He basically pretended to be another funk god, a Zen Buddhist hippie artist. It was too good to be true. I felt like the Universe had rewarded me for my years of suffering, but that wasn’t what happened.

I realized I needed professional help. Mindfulness had helped me, but I couldn’t manage all these things on my own. That’s when I got connected to women like Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley, who helped me find an ethical and helpful therapist, and I finally started to get my shit together and heal from C-PTSD. I’m still in therapy and still processing a lot of grief, shame, and trauma, but being able to utilize my gifts of writing, speaking, art, and design, and truth-telling as a public detransitioner is greatly helping me realize my potential and begin to thrive in many ways. I also have a healthier and growing support network in the gender-critical community that helps with the bad funks.

EM: Talk to me about fantasy escapes. When do you think retreating to a fantasy world is healthy and when do you think it crosses a line?

LB: I spent a lot of time alone as a kid wrapped up in complex imaginary play. That was my favorite way to play. I’d be alone with 500 animal figurines and make up my own universes and meta-universes, rather than interacting with other people. I think that can be fine, but it becomes unhealthy when you’re failing to develop interpersonal skills. I was uncooperative and very selfish because I was used to being alone, doing my own thing. It took me a long time to learn how to give and take in a relationship and develop theory of mind.

When you have parasocial relationships with musicians and actors, it can inspire you creatively. If you really have nothing, that’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same as addressing your problems in real life. Sometimes I had that way of fantasizing about relationships with real people when they had feelings and wants and needs of their own and my magical thinking wasn’t going to work. Magical thinking is when it becomes an issue. You can use magical thinking for spiritual purposes, but when it rises to the level of, oh, I can be perceived and loved and have sex with a gay man as a female, when you’re going deeper and deeper into that fantasy of being male, that’s when it gets to the level of being damaging.

EM: Can you talk about how your relationship to imagination and fantasy has changed over time?

LB: I was humbled by reality. When you do a ton of acid and feel like you’ve been reborn spiritually and that now that you’ve accepted yourself as a woman that you’re the divine feminine and this person you met is the divine masculine and that person ends up being a perversion, that impacts you so hard that you have to wake up. You have to be self-aware of the potential of fantasy to mislead and cause harm in reality.

Honestly, I’ve had a lot of anger and grief over losing my fantasy and over losing magical thinking as a coping mechanism. I feel cynical sometimes and disillusioned, and sometimes I’m angry that I’ve had to lose magical thinking, but I also am grateful that I am no longer so susceptible to maladaptive fantasy. If you’re a highly creative person who is gifted and intelligent, if you put your mind to it, there are a lot of things that you can do. You’re able to imagine all these idealistic futures and all these synchronicities and that makes it hard to accept the limitations of reality, of your body, of other people, of your past. That’s still something that I struggle with. It’s existential. But putting your imagination into art where it’s OK to create and destroy—versus real life—can be really beneficial.

EM: You’ve written a lot about the appeal of gender to ‘quirky, sensitive, artistic weird girls.’ Can you tell me about this girl and what the appeal of gender is to her?

LB: The Archetypal FTM! She’s highly cerebral, highly creative, progressive, open to new experiences, very sensitive, overthinking, strong sense of justice, possibly neurodivergent or autistic. These girls can be so sensitive—emotionally and sensorially—that the outside world is an intimidating, overwhelming and confusing place they’d rather not participate in and that can influence retreat too heavily into her inner worlds or online worlds and make her vulnerable to magical thinking. Being highly cerebral, it can be hard for these girls to be in their bodies. It can be hard to exist in a physical space. This kind of girl may be more vulnerable to social contagion than the average because she’s so isolated or because she may lack self-competency to progress in life, and then she ends up feeling stuck in endless loops of intense thoughts, emotions, fears, and self-destructive behavior.

I also think there’s a spectrum that runs from quirky to weird, where ‘quirky’ is neutral but ‘weird’ means other people find you off-putting. You just don’t fit, on a level where there might be something wrong with you. I think the two manifestations of the archetypal FTM are the ROGD [rapid-onset gender dysphoria] girl who is very sensitive, shy, introverted, who tends to daydream and internalize, and the ‘weird’ girl who may have some borderline traits like extreme sensitivity, obsessional fixations, cognitive distortions (‘magical thinking’), lack of sense of self, fear of rejection, narcissism, and maladaptation. I think highly creative people are drawn to the creative appeal of gender and body customization. But life isn’t a cartoon fanfiction you can draw up. The body keeps the score.

EM: What would have made gender less appealing to you as an answer to the things you were struggling with?

LB: Attachment issues are always at the core for me. Having a healthy relationship with my parents would have helped, and if not that, then having a healthy romantic relationship would have helped. Having mentors. Older female role models. That’s why my relationship with Stella was so helpful. Stella is an independent spirit. Having someone like that as an older female role model who I could see myself in and who I also respected and admired because she was competent and wise helped. Just having older women and men I respect and admire and can see myself in, who can connect with me cerebrally and help me hold myself accountable to take responsibility for myself and set boundaries and change. Just having a good mentor. That was what I didn’t have from my parents or anyone else growing up. I didn’t have acceptance for the deepest parts of me. I still don’t really have that in terms of physical intimacy or being a hopeless romantic. I’m in recovery from being a hopeless romantic, but I’m not sure it’ll ever go away, and having that void is extremely painful given the trauma I have around it.

I also think physical intimacy would have helped greatly. Before I had surgery, I made a Craigslist ad because I hadn’t had sex and hadn’t had a chance to appreciate this part of my body. But it was Craigslist, so none of the replies were cutting it. So I never did that before the surgery. I never got to use that part of my body. If I’d had healthy physical intimacy, I might have had a much stronger positive attachment to my body—basically, the inverse of girls who’ve experienced sexual assault. I had never had any bodily experience, so I didn’t have an appreciation for my body the way it was. 

EM: Tell me about what it means to be a Funk God.

LB: Funk God is my higher self persona, who I aspire to be. Funk God is like a metaphysical aim. Funk God is also a philosophy. I didn’t realize this when I was developing the philosophy, but it’s a lot like Buddhism or Taoism. It’s about acceptance and existing in a flow state and in harmony. It’s about acceptance and gratitude versus fear and resentment, and the balance of all things nestled within each other where the co-existence of contradictions create harmony. You need good funks and bad funks. I call myself Funk God because I’m extremely funky in good and bad ways: I have high states of consciousness and flow and also really low states where I’m suicidal, hopeless, despondent, or feel no energy at all.

Funk God is also my brand. I make funky apparel and home goods. For all intents and purposes, it’s a queer aesthetic turned to freethinking. And I’ve started to sort of integrate my detransition experiences into this funky, freethinking independent spirit stuff at Funky Psyche, where I analyze things. I write a lot about gender ideology and developmental psychology and personality, and I’m writing a book about my experiences transcending gender and trying to figure out what to do next, because after detransition, you have to pick up the pieces of your entire life.

I have my own unique experience of being a detransitioner but I’m also a case study because there are hundreds—thousands—of people who have had these same procedures who came from the same places I did.

I’ve also been traveling around doing public speaking and education. I was just going to make a joke about how talking to myself and making those vlogs to develop a better understanding of social cues really paid off because now I love public speaking. I used to never talk in school, but teachers would always tell me to speak up in class more often because when I did I had insightful things to say. Now I can’t shut up. Speaking out redeems my inner child. I have this gift and passion for articulation and analysis. And that’s the number-one compliment I get: You’re so articulate. You really put into words what I’ve been thinking but I didn’t know how to say it. I feel like it’s my honor and privilege and duty to articulate what’s going on and be a truth-teller.

For me, it’s been extremely positive. Sometimes, people say, you know, you can take a break if you need to, but what I need to take a break from is my own rumination. The advocacy, the public speaking, all these things I do, 90% of it is rewarding, and the other 10% is the 50 people a day I block on Twitter.

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Header image by Michal Czyz on Unsplash