Thinking and Living Outside the Box

Detransitioner Josh Middleton in interview at the 2026 Detrans Awareness Day Conference

Josh Middleton, featured in this interview with Graham Linehan at Genspect’s Detrans Awareness Day, is a detransitioner who doesn’t have a big online presence and hasn’t spoken out publicly before. But it was important to him to meet up with lots of other people who have also been badly harmed by trans ideology. He travelled to Washington in March of this year to join 70 other detransitioners to share his story and experiences because, as he says, “I know that it could benefit other people.”

Josh Middleton transitioned in 2019. By 2021, he had had “top and bottom surgery” and, although he has recently detransitioned, he is still undergoing hormone treatment and is hesitant to go into the full reverse of what he calls a “third puberty”, bearing in mind the unknown effects that could have on his ongoing mental health struggles. He is still getting to grips with sexual abuse as a child and the lack of supportive male role models in his life. For Josh, the journey back from a trans-identification is primarily about reclaiming clear thinking from a diffuse emotionality that he believes drove his earlier decisions. There came a point during his trans identification when he asked himself, “Why did I do all this to begin with?” The process of detransition, he says with great clarity, is about turning away from the immediate satisfaction of receiving affirmation from others to the much harder task of taking back control of his own narrative.

Josh’s experience with Genspect’s Beyond Trans groups has played a key role in his relatively recent detransition. “People try to categorize others under one broad brushstroke as if we’re all one set of people.” Through the Beyond Trans support network, he goes on to say, he came to appreciate the diversity of people striving to build meaningful, grounded lives, regardless of their experiences with trans ideation, medical transition, or gender dysphoria. Beyond Trans groups offer space to people who are stuck or treading water to think clearly and find a way forward towards recovery, understanding, and connection with their embodied experience. For those who have experienced medical transition, crucially, this also implies “building a life beyond labels”.

Beyond Trans groups are there for anyone (including parents and family members) encountering issues in the area of trans ideation, medical transition, or gender dysphoria. Those attending who have experience of a trans-identification or medical transition may call themselves detransitioners, regretters, or desisters, or something else. No single label can capture the full spectrum of people’s experiences.

There is a place for categorization in human experience. As Kathleen Stock writes in Material Girls: “As binaries in nature go, the sex division is one of the most stable and predictable there is.” And in some circumstances, we can’t do without distinctions. Sometimes it’s also good to wave flags, to be active, and to raise your voice and banner in public. But it’s more problematic to identify completely with a fully integrated set of views. And it’s particularly problematic when they “come in a package,” as Josh Middleton puts it in this interview. The ‘trans movement’ seems to flatten a huge range of experiences and traumas and put them in a single neatly labelled box. “As humans,” Josh says, “we want to conceptualise things, and make labels, but with things like this, with people’s lives and bodies, that they’re going to have for the rest of their life, I think we need to be exercising a lot more precaution.” Josh is critical of what Sara Morrison calls the “festival of fashionable causes” in which a long list of adjacent positions must be accepted unquestioningly and adopted and performed publicly, often and without hesitation “as a single, seamless identity”. This is the realm of “no debate” that replaces the “hard, unglamorous work of building coalitions, facing contradictions, listening to people you disagree with, and doing the slow labour of real change.”

As far as Josh Middleton is concerned, ‘no debate’ doesn’t help anyone, “because when you have that, it just becomes an echo chamber.”

That is why Josh is not only just getting on with his life, but along with many others who have never spoken out before, came to Detrans Awareness Day to share his story and highlight the harms of medicalised gender care and the urgent need for safeguarding, informed consent, and accountability.

Genspect advocates for ethical, non-medicalised responses to gender distress. But it also encourages thinking outside of the box. It rejects the ‘no debate’ mantra, it doesn’t speak for any one particular political tribe but welcomes diversity in action: “a personal (often hotly personal) variety of diversity, where each individual’s beliefs are understood and respected, whether defended or challenged.” Genspect has no time for those on the political extremes or anyone with reservations about its inclusion of gay, bi, and trans-identified people and detransitioners. Above all else, however, it values the willingness to engage in dialogue and the courage to speak out that can turn ordinary people into extraordinary individuals like Josh Middleton.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.