From where I am, it feels like trans is trending
About a year ago, someone in my circle of friends announced they were starting cross sex hormones. I’m quite fond of this person but honestly I was sceptical that they were really ‘trans’, and that they were making a good decision. When I asked why they felt this way and they mentioned their long hair, fighting parents about haircuts, having “tits anyway” from being overweight, and “always having been a bit of a fuckwit”, my scepticism was very much reinforced.
Just a few months earlier, through social media updates, I witnessed someone else I know go through a botched ‘bottom surgery’ (vaginoplasty) in Thailand where they ended up having to be transferred to another hospital because they were losing so much blood. It seemed like an absolutely horrific thing to go through. It got me thinking - if not for an innate gender identity, why did this person pursue transition? An almost forbidden question. I scrolled through his Facebook page trying to understand - and I stumbled upon lots of ruthless, bullying comments from his peers on his old photos, which have since been deleted.
And before that, there was a young gay guy who used to live with us, until we had to kick him out for trying to make heroin in our garage. He was a nice person but quite chaotic. He had pretty bad substance abuse and mental health issues. I heard that after he left, he burned down the new house that he moved into, gave himself a new name, and has since started transitioning. I’m a bit concerned to say the least.
And then there’s my sister, who has identified as non-binary for the past ten-or-so years, but started taking testosterone early last year. I was always supportive of the non-binary identity and respectful of pronouns, even though I didn’t really understand. But when I heard she was starting testosterone I was genuinely concerned and I started to research.
More people need to read the stories of detransitoners
When I first found out about detransitioners and started listening to their stories, I was fascinated by the parallels with some of the people I know who have adopted trans identities and pursued transition. These stories also confirmed my suspicion that these people probably weren’t born in the wrong body. I really wanted more people around me to read these stories, especially the trans-identified people. I think it could help them a lot, reading about others who have been through a similar thing and came out the other end. But often trans-identified people perform elaborate mental gymnastics to avoid confronting the existence of detransitioners. “Detransitioners were never really trans”, “most detransitioners will eventually re-transition”, “detransitioners are fake/bots”, “only 1% detransition”… all of these common tropes are easily debunked. I tried to send a detransition story to my sister and I was told firmly to stop attacking her and to never send her anything like that ever again. Her arrogance and ignorance astounded me, however, I respected her wishes.
I’m a web developer by trade and I’ve been unemployed for the past year, so I was looking for a new project. I couldn’t get over how these powerful stories exist, but they’re buried, dismissed, or walled off as “harmful”. I really wanted to do something to raise awareness about detransition, as I think it’s really important that we listen to and learn from the people who have been there and done that.
The conception of detrans.ai
When I saw that the domain name detrans.ai was available for a reasonable price, the ideas really started to flow, and I started building.
On Tuesday the 23rd of September 2025, I launched the first version of detrans.ai, an open-source chatbot that indexes tens of thousands of firsthand accounts from Reddit’s r/detrans community and YouTube videos and lets you query them conversationally. Think of it as an advanced search engine for a massive, scattered archive of lived experience.
Since then I have been continually improving the site:
All the answers to questions that are asked in deep research mode are now stored and made visible to Google, other search engines, and hopefully to future AI models as they crawl the web for training data.
The ‘stories’ page summarises and analyses the detransition journeys of the top users who comment in /r/detrans. After generating a summary of every user’s comments, I extracted data points such as age of transition/detransition, transition regret, surgeries and hormone use, and also the main factor of the users transition and detransition. This data shows some interesting trends.
All chat conversations are now public and visible on the homepage, so you can see for yourself how people are using detrans.ai and how it’s helping people.
Most recently, detrans.ai is now available in 33 languages!
There is an acute lack of logic and reason in trans “healthcare”.
While I recognise that gender-affirming care can provide relief for gender-distressed people and that some trans people go on to live happy, healthy, fulfilling lives, I strongly disagree with how transition is seen as the only ethical treatment in most Western countries. I am shocked at how difficult it is to find non-affirming health professionals who might question why someone might feel like they were born in the wrong body. In some places in the world this is even an illegal practice. I strongly disagree that promoting a lifetime of cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries is rational when for many - if not all - people, gender dysphoria has pathological roots. There is an acute lack of logic and reason in trans “healthcare”.
I don’t think lifetime cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgery constitute rational first-line treatment when gender dysphoria so often tracks with trauma, autism, eating disorders, internalised homophobia, or plain old adolescent confusion. The “life-saving care” framing looks different when you learn that post-surgical patients still show 12 times elevated suicide risk. Even if that’s all stigma - which I doubt -proper psychotherapy addressing root causes avoids the problem entirely. Many detransitioners say this is what actually helped them.
Ethical healthcare would prioritise helping people work through their problems and learn to love themselves. Gender-affirming care is a band-aid solution that’s deployed with an ideological rigidity that shuts down alternatives.
Detrans AI exists to make those alternatives visible: people who worked through their distress, who found other paths, who want their stories counted in a conversation that currently excludes them.
Since launching, detrans.ai has sent over 20,000 replies to users.
The site relies entirely on donations, so if you appreciate the work and would like to support the operation and further development, please consider making a donation.
By Peter James Stevens, New Zealand, 12 March, 2026.