For Simon Amaya Price, the articulate young detransitioner featured in this interview, transgender identification emerged not from a childhood conviction of being female, but from bullying, alienation, and psychological distress.
In middle school, peers targeted him with homophobic slurs, threatened him, and made him afraid and uncomfortable in his own body. At 13, he told his parents that he was bisexual and — in deep crisis following a sexual assault—declared that he was a girl a year later. A therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital encouraged him to go behind his parents’ backs to obtain hormone treatment. Around his fifteenth birthday, a paediatrician asked his father whether he would prefer “a dead son or a living daughter.” His father resisted medical transition— a decision Simon deeply resented at the time, but now regards with profound gratitude.
“You don’t reject yourself if everything’s going perfectly well,” Simon says now. He was struggling with the effects of puberty, didn’t fit in with dominant gender stereotypes of how men were supposedly meant to be, was depressed, anxious, and uncomfortable with his sexuality. The decision to present as a girl, as he did between the ages of 14 and 17, seemed like the answer.
Simon started the long process of social detransition at age 17. He now believes identifying out of his sex reinforced the same stereotypes that once harmed him. He describes desisting from his transgender identity as a gradual, multi-layered process. “Gender ideology is a cult,” says Simon in this interview, a cult of absurd lies that trapped him in ideological loops, which it took years of psychological disentangling and mental deconditioning to escape from.
Part of his struggle has been about learning how to build healthy relationships and confront issues with self-esteem, as well as what it might mean to be a man and all the responsibility that entails. He also feels a sense of duty to help other young people not to make the same mistakes he did and to support families struggling with the same issue. What is more, he is using his experience to provide testimony on state bills, executive and judicial actions around the United States.
Simon hopes to help young people wrestling with questions of identity understand that periods of discomfort, insecurity, and emotional instability are a normal part of life, particularly during adolescence and early adulthood. Genuine support cannot be found in ideological labels or symbols.
Threats, Cancellations, and Common Challenges
Publicly detransitioning and speaking about gender ideology comes at a cost. Detransitioners and desisters are often treated far worse than other critics of gender ideology. Thanks to his father’s intransigence, Simon doesn’t have to face the medical issues that many other detransitioners do, but he says that all detransitioners face a lot of the same struggles and share a common interest in ending the medical transition of minors. But, when detransitioners speak out publicly, “we all face the same death threats, same harassment, loss of jobs and cancelling,” and in Simon’s case “an uneven application of rules at university, for example”. He was prevented from delivering a campus presentation at Berklee College titled Born in the Right Body: Desister and Detransitioner Awareness. The event was indefinitely postponed, ostensibly due to safety concerns. When the event did finally take place at MIT with the support of the university’s Open Discourse Society, it was criticised as potentially “difficult and painful” by the university’s LBGTQ+, Women and Gender Services. As if the topic of human difficulty and pain requires trigger warnings and should be studiously avoided by those of sound mind. More problematic still are those trans activists who are quick to condemn homophobia, but who cast doubt on the validity of detransitioners’ experiences, slur them as “transphobes,” and send threats comparing them to Nazis. “It’s no wonder so few of us speak up.”
Simon’s analysis of trans identification is both personal – acknowledging the challenges he faced in his own life as a teenager – and political. He intends to build on the experience he has already gained from public speaking and testimony to go into politics. In part, because of institutions' policy responses to gender-questioning young people. In particular, he identifies the failure of the medical and regulatory establishments as issues that need to be tackled. Simon’s therapist wasn’t the only adult who affirmed his new identity. Apart from his parents, nearly every adult in his life—including teachers, counsellors, and medical professionals—supported and encouraged both his social transition and the prospect of medical interventions. During Simon’s time at Berklee, students were systematically asked for their pronouns, professors were required to respect them, and, like so many others, the college actively offered advice on how to medically transition. “It’s everywhere,” he says, “You can’t run from it.”
For people like Simon, who want to effect political change, the unavoidable question is, “Why is trans ideology everywhere?” Perhaps, as Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender [DIAG] say, those advocating for “gender-affirming care” and the violation of women’s rights and spaces mean well. But what can meaning well possibly mean when it requires an insistence on irreversible medical interventions on healthy bodies and on “absurd lies”, as Simon puts it in this interview? Why do so many conservatives find it so hard to stand up for common sense, and why are progressives wedded to absurdly otherworldly, pseudo-utopian schemes? Simon Amaya Price has very clear ideas about how the political mechanisms of gender ideology work. And he is remarkably eloquent in articulating his views and experiences.
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