I’m going to push on my throat all day long so the Adam’s apple won’t come out

Nicolas Blooms announced he was no longer ‘Nita’ in August of 2022 because “the trans issue has gotten so out of hand.” Posting a video for his small YouTube following six weeks into detransition, Nicolas confessed to feeling as though “I had killed a past version of myself, my inner child that enjoyed presenting as a feminine boy.” He had concealed his trauma by “identifying as a woman,” but the protective power of the lie was long gone. Nicolas had transitioned quickly at 18 and now he was finally growing up.

That video has been viewed more than 40,000 times now. In subsequent videos, Nicolas has acknowledged the role of internalized homophobia and called out the alleged professionals who never warned him that he would lose his sex drive. Connecting with relationship coach Kim O, he discovered that self-loathing is how children incorporate criticism. Nicolas learned to love himself and the child he had been. He found a path to healing his mind instead of trying to change his body.

Detransitioners are emerging into the world at an increasing rate. Despite the best efforts of gender activists to deny their existence, “gender medicine” has created too many detransitioners to deny forever. In a reversal of the Tumblr effect. which spread the social contagion of transgender conversion, detransitioners are now finding their way out by finding each other online.

Nicolas credits the growing presence of detransitioners on YouTube for his inspiration. Through transgender influencers like Blaire White, he started seeing the “queer community’ from the outside for the first time. He came to understand that “we really need more steps” and “gatekeeping” in so-called gender medicine, for he had leapt into transition as a so-called adult without ever healing the child inside.

As the wave of detransition builds, detransitioners will become not just common in society, but in every domain. Detransitioners will be journalists, advocates, candidates, workers, managers, executives, specialists, therapists, and doctors. Many, such as the talented Laura Becker, are artists. Nicolas Blooms is another talented detransitioner artist, and now he is creating books for children.

Recently, Genspect asked me to read and review Nicolas Blooms’ Trans to Detrans: A Soul Solution, “filled with 100 pages of profound imagery, breathing art and emotion into the trans indoctrination and then out of it.” As the title suggests, Nicolas understands the crisis of gender-distressed youth as a spiritual crisis of the modern world. “Gender” is an artificial religion that fills the vacuum left behind in metropolitan societies when the elites discard their traditional faiths in search of ecumenical solutions to problems.

Young people do not already “know who they are” as the gender cult claims. They are still learning who and what they are. Societies which stop systematically shaping children into adults will not produce healthy adults. They will instead produce incomplete, misshapen people with wounded children inside them.

Per his chapter titles, Nicolas calls his detransition a “spiritual awakening” that involved “sitting with my soul.” His introductory “Message to the Seekers” announces that “the foundation of inner resilience” is the Soul, capitalized. Resilience is a learned skill that “has to be taught” to children, for they cannot learn it on their own.

Nicolas calls himself a “Gender Shaman” and “ArtSoulologist” with a “liberating” message that we are not our experiences or our wounds. The ego reacts to hurt feelings, the sense of wrongness that comes from being told you are “too girly” or “too boyish,” and we tell ourselves that the message is correct. It is a protective mechanism for the ego, which is reactive and illogical.

These injuries of our socialization can occupy our minds to distraction, but “you are not these thoughts” and you are “not even these wounds.” We receive those messages from a world that wants to dictate answers to us. Growing up requires the development of “a mentality” of healing one’s self through questions rather than answers.

It is “a non-linear, messy journey.” Puberty can produce body horror: suddenly we grow hair everywhere, and our voices change. Self-harm appears in the adolescent who lacks the skills to cope. Nicolas describes a desire to choke himself all day long in the hope that he could suppress the growth of his Adam’s apple.

Adolescence brings on sexual awareness and all its confusions. Nicolas hated his penis, but now he gives it love, meaning emotional attachment. “Going through puberty is an unstable time and receiving hate was the last thing you needed,” he writes to his penis, portraying only his feelings on the page.

For despite acknowledging the role of pornography in his confusion, as well as the dangers of sex apps like Grindr for young people, Nicolas has produced a clean, artful examination of what was missing from his sexual awakening.

The process of transition, appropriately, is portrayed on a single page. Nicolas gave over his problems to a “counselor” who instantly offered hormones as a panacea. Two weeks later, Nicolas took his first pills and experienced the euphoria of that initial drug hit. However, this illusion of efficacy gave way almost immediately to doubt and dysphoria.

His “community” told him that suicide was inevitable if he stopped, but Nicolas eventually realized “I’m still mentally broken as before, now with a different flavor.”

His spiritual healing, on the other hand, had all-natural ingredients, such as going out of the house to be present in nature. Through meditation, lighting a candle with pink hearts, declaring “I am the love the wounded self needs,” Nicolas escaped the clutches of an idea of himself that was destroying his “Soul.”

“And then the Universe delivered a mentor,” he says, referring to Kim O. She claims inspiration from Christianity and Buddhism, though her message only applies a generalized spirituality, for example quoting but not naming the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu.

“Children need to know they have been designed by the Supreme Creator to have a resilient nature within, to believe in themselves and their own Divine power and love,” Kim O writes in her foreword to these books. The wisdom in them is universal.

Trans to Detrans: A Soul Solution is appropriate for children in middle school. However, Kim O and Nicolas Blooms have also created two new books for younger readers 4-8 years old.

“Nicolas & I cannot idly sit back and watch parents unknowingly allow trans ideology to destroy their children’s lives,” she writes. Dedicated to “those who lose their smile sometimes,” the Saguaro Soul series encourages children to try “identifying with feelings, rather than witnessing them” in order to develop resilience.

Being resilient means “you can’t steal my smile!” This is the lesson Anton learns in the book I Want Prickles Too! “I want to be tall and green with pointy prickles” like a cactus, Anton tells Sag the Saguaro cactus.

Rather than encourage Anton to ruminate on identifying as a cactus, Sag shows Anton how diverse the cacti in the desert are. Anton imitates all of them and realizes that he is still himself afterwards.

“You and Anton were a seed once too, tiny and low,” Sag explains. Children are encouraged to ask: “Did I want to change me today?” We are not our feelings or experiences. We cannot inhabit other beings or live inside our projections of what they think about us. These are good lessons.

In Roe the Rabbit Lost His Happy Hop, a rabbit is terrified of thunder. After the storm clears and Roe forgets his fear, Sag asks Roe if he can be the same bunny during a storm, too. “Like the ever-changing clouds in the sky, my feelings change fast, fear doesn’t last,” Roe discovers. “I can return to my happy hop anytime and have a blast.”

“My heart beats love to every body part, even my brain can be trained!” Roe and Anton announce. Resilience, rootedness, and living in the real; these are spiritual messages that children need, for they have gone missing from the culture.

“The journey to Self is through one’s heart and not through a pharmacy line or an operating table,” Shape Shifter writes in the introduction to these books. “The authentic Self is not a look. It is your Soul and it is who you are beyond your physical appearance.” Necessary and timely, the message is amplified by Nicolas Blooms’ deft artistic touch.

These books belong on the shelves of libraries. Until now, the gender cult has succeeded in positioning itself as the courageous defender of demented, pornographic grooming materials in schools and public libraries, thus inviting critics of their ideology to act as the heels in their political play by trying to ban them.

Now that detransitioner literature is appearing, however, it is possible to turn the tables on this dialectical trap and begin advocating instead for the inclusion of books by detransitioners. Americans are ready for Detransition Story Hour. We can let the gender cult play censor from now on. Their shrill defensiveness will work against them with school and library boards and the public. Nicolas Blooms belongs on those shelves. Will we fight for him?

This article first appeared in The Distance on Substack.