Safe Gender Transition is a Lie

Maia Poet’s talk at the 2026 Detrans Awareness Day conference

Life is full of unexpected twists and turns. Sometimes our lives change dramatically, in ways we might never have envisaged. Maia is a 26-year-old detransitioner who identified as transgender between the ages of 12 and 24—and she thought she would stay that way forever. “Two and a half years ago, when I was still trans, I would have never imagined that the trans train would lead me to this particular destination,” she says in this talk from Genspect’s 2026 Detrans Awareness Day Conference. In it, she first looks at the nature of trans identity persistence and then at how deeply entrenched beliefs can change. In Mai’s account, change emerges from experiencing a shift in focus of attention between mind and body.

It is often thought that the first step towards a trans identity is social transition. Maia disagrees. Ideation—rumination on the possibility of having an alternative sex, and the mental images and scenarios that accompany these thoughts—always comes first. This mental activity can involve collecting a case file of seemingly persuasive evidence for the belief that a person’s sexed body does not reflect their actual sex and then rehearsing the narrative that they will eventually present to others. Maia defines desistence as “the cessation of cross-sex ideation or transition desire”, in contrast to detransition, which is “the cessation of the attempt to socially and physically mimic the opposite sex”. Desistence is a psychological state; detransition an embodied and a psychosocial one. Ideation occurs in the privacy of the mind. In Maia’s case, “before a single adult knows about it”. By the time she did in fact present her trans identity to her parents in 2012, she had already decided that transitioning was her only path to happiness.

Ideation, Obsession, Dissociation

Gender transition, Maia argues, moves from ideation towards increasing obsession and dissociation “organized around the attempt to modify one’s appearance so as to mimic that of the opposite sex”. The process has no natural point of arrival. As Evelyn Ball has observed, there is always one more promising step ahead to achieve social validation and the hoped-for sense of inner peace. Young people who identify as trans, says Maia, are led to believe that the transition process will “continue forever, that they will die before they detransition”.

Maia’s account of her burgeoning teenage trans identification describes the interaction between the sensation of physical discomfort in her own body and increasingly disembodied thought processes. On the one hand, an oppressive “cascade of expectations” descended upon her as she entered the “sensory hell” of puberty. On the other, she “intellectualized everything”. The iPad she got for her 12th birthday enabled her to explore rarified conceptual ideas online where the algorithms quickly began feeding her accounts of trans adults who had always felt different and had finally found peace through transition. Online, she was told, “if you’re wondering if you’re trans, you probably are”.

War and Peace: The Battlefield of the Body

Following Internet advice, Maia began to bind her breasts with a commercial breast binder marketed as 100% safe. The sensory relief and calm this initially gave her helped her cope with the discomfort she felt in her sexed body.

Breast binding has become big business. But the practice of binding looks strikingly like a form of self-harm. The UK-based organisation Transgender Trend has examined its similarities to other harmful practices inflicted on women and girls, such as ‘breast flattening’, as well as self-harming behaviour. These practices and behaviours are widely regarded as detrimental to girls’ and women’s health and well-being. But once again, trans exceptionalism applies. Gender ideology legitimises self-harm as self-discovery. When Maia began experiencing pain in her ribs, she sought advice from a doctor on her university campus, who, instead of telling her to stop binding her breasts, encouraged her to pursue breast removal as a remedy for the pain and discomfort caused by binding. She was referred to a gender clinic.

Maia did not pursue further medicalisation. But just as the euphemism “top surgery” twists an essentially benevolent intervention and turns it against healthy organs, so does breast binding warp an effective medical therapy designed for temporary post-surgical use against the female body. Breast binders are not clothing items worn for social transition; they cause severe, lasting physical harm. As Maia explains, breast binding is promoted under the false pretence of healthcare, when in fact it is the “exact opposite of a safe and reversible intervention”.

When Maia detransitioned, she discovered that the claim that binding was safe and reversible was false. She still cannot breathe without pain; her breasts and ribs are visibly deformed. She has posture issues and severe neck pain. None of the damage resulting from the “complications of ‘breast-fighting’” has reversed itself.

While still trans identified, Maia spent several years in Israel as a peace activist. Her experiences there, as she explains in this interview, played a critical role in her reconciliation with her physical self. Witnessing the resurgence of violence in the conflict that broke out openly again after October 7, 2021, made her rethink her preoccupations with “all of this gender crap”. The immediacy of life and death made her realize “viscerally rather than just intellectually” that her female body was not a pathology to fight or to fix, but a vehicle for survival. After 12 years of transgender ideation and identification, she finally admitted defeat in the war she had waged against her own body.

The Ideological Assault on Reality

For Maia, change came from exposure to new ideas and experiences that shifted her attention from the mind to the body now directly threatened by the realities of war. Being trapped in the wrong body, she understood, was a lie and the imperative now was self-preservation.

Mais describes herself variously as having been both an “odd kid” and a “quirky, nerdy kid”. She struggled at school with the social communication rituals of other girls her own age. As their social skills rapidly advanced, hers did not. She felt alienated by the increasingly stereotypically gendered activities of her female peers. This, and the sensory discomfort she felt with her own body, has brought her to the conclusion that “gender clinicians are trying to treat autism with gender transition, and that is unconscionable”.

The war on the body is part of an “ideological assault on reality that has penetrated Western institutions”. Gender ideology creates layers of trans ideation that eclipse the underlying causes of real personal struggles. Trans identification holds out the “promise of a panacea” that offers the impossible while sacrificing healthy bodily functions in pursuit of a cross-sex aesthetic endpoint that can never be finally reached.

Maia argues that clinicians and parents need to intervene at the point of ideation. The discourse must be shifted. It must change. All of us collectively must move into a more truthful direction. And we must state unequivocally that “there is no such thing as a safe gender transition”.

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