The Trans Regret Challenge

Source image by Daniela

You hear a lot these days about regret in the context of trans people and transitioning. A lot of that talk comes from right-wing conservatives who have somehow decided that stopping a certain 1.3% of the population from pursuing happiness is the hill they will die on. A fair amount of it, though, comes from not from strangers but from the people in our lives.

Actual studies on the subject show that regret rates for various transitioning activities are overall incredibly low. Less than, say, the regret rates associated with medical practices like knee replacement that never come under this same scrutiny.

This post is not about any of that. It’s not about which side is capital-R Right or what the statistics say. Those who actually care about facts, data, and reality either already know or can read the above links.

“But you might regret it!”

Rather, this post is about the challenge itself. It’s about the phenomena of cis people throwing “you might regret it” at trans people when we come out, or when we talk about transitioning and what we might want to do in our transitions.

I could count on about 67 hands the number of times I’ve seen people posting on Reddit about regret challenges they’ve received from friends, parents, siblings, spouses, or even strangers. Not to mention (sad to say) challenges trans people put to themselves when contemplating HRT or surgery or any of the rest.

The subtext of this challenge, whoever it comes from, is that the trans person has a burden to prove that they won’t regret any or all transitioning activities before they do them. That nobody should transition unless they can prove that they will definitely not experience any regret whatsoever.

I have two main qualms about the Trans Regret Challenge. The first one is...

It’s an impossible demand

The Trans Regret Challenge demands we predict the future. Nobody can do that. None of us has a crystal ball that unerringly reveals to us what lies ahead. Moreover, it asks us essentially to prove a negative. Prove that you won’t have regret.

This is no different at its core than UFO truthers responding to challenges to their mindset with “Yeah? Well, prove to me that aliens don’t exist!” It’s not a serious response. You can’t prove a negative. And short of being able to predict the future with 100% accuracy, you can’t prove that you won’t regret transitioning either.

The Trans Regret Challenge frames transitioning as something that is only justifiable if you can prove the genuinely unproveable. In this, it is not a serious, reasonable, or even compassionate standard to hold in front of someone contemplating the path of gender transitioning.

It’s a unique standard

The second qualm I have with the Trans Regret Challenge is that this impossible standard is really never used as a challenge against, well, anything in life. Despite everything we ever do or choose carrying some amount of risk. Some non-zero possibility of regret.

We choose all kinds of things, every day of our lives. Some of these choices are small, some are extraordinarily consequential. But never do we have a guarantee that regret won’t come knocking. And yet, somehow that doesn’t stop us. Somehow, we accept that risk and keep going.

One of the first big choices people face in our modern world is what college to go to. Or indeed, whether to go at all. There’s a lot of choices! A lot of uncertainty! You apply to the schools that sound good. If all goes well, some of them accept you, and then you have to choose. This one has a beautiful campus and a great art program! That one is pretty good, but costs half as much. What if I choose wrong? What if I regret it?

Still, you choose and you go.

In college, we have to choose what to major in. That’s a pretty big decision, with extremely consequential implications for our future careers, finances, and life-paths. Again: lots of choices! Lots of tradeoffs! And no certainty about which one will be the best. Nevertheless, you choose.

You meet someone. Fall in love. Decide to get married. Does anyone come after you saying “Are you sure you want to get married? What if you regret it?” No. No one says that despite the pop-culture wisdom that half of marriages end in divorce. But the heart wants what the heart wants, so we get married despite a staggering 50% chance of regret.

I bought a house 25 years ago. It was a smart financial decision. Housing prices where I live have gone up by about 500% in that time. No one ever challenged me that I might regret buying this house, neither then nor at any time since. And yet, I do. At the time, I was young and stupid and I paid no attention how the layout of the house would impact my wife and me as we got older. Now, I wish I’d bought a rambler instead of a split-level entry.

That’s just how life works. We make our best choices and hope for more we don’t regret than ones we do.

Nowhere else in our lives do people throw around an impossible standard of “predict the future and prove a negative” before we choose something. So why should gender transitioning be held to such a high bar? What makes it so special as to warrant being held to an impossible standard?

It is obviously an extremely consequential choice to make. But that doesn’t make it different than hundreds of other extremely consequential choices we face all the time.

Source image by romana klee

Trans people aren’t reckless

I’m not saying trans people should throw themselves into gender transitioning without careful thought. Not at all. It very much is an extremely consequential choice. Given how deeply gender affects every aspect of our lives, I’m hard pressed to think of a more consequential choice. We owe ourselves an enormous depth of soul-searching and painstakingly careful thought before going down that road.

What the people who throw the Trans Regret Challenge at us don’t understand is that by the time you hear about it, we've already done that careful thought. We know how consequential this is. That’s why we want to do it at all: precisely because we’ve thought carefully and have come to the conclusion that it will bring such positive consequences to our lives.

The only reason you’re hearing about it at all is because your friend, your child, your spouse, your co-worker came to that conclusion. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have come out of the closet in the first place. We’d have just kept our mouths shut and kept on living as whatever gender we were assumed to be at birth and you’d be none the wiser that we ever contemplated transitioning at all.

The only reason to come out of the closet—to face the scorn and rejection from an increasingly transphobic society, face the risk of losing our jobs, being disowned by parents, kicked out of our houses, or divorced on the spot by our spouses—is because we’re in a place of deep, deep pain and we’ve realized that even if all those other bad things come to pass, transitioning will still leave us better off.

That was my situation at the time when I came out of the closet. I was willing to lose absolutely everything in order to transition, because not transitioning was worse.

Don’t talk to us about regret. We’re keenly aware of the potential for that, I assure you.

And anyway, if you talk to actual trans people who are transitioning or have already finished, the vast majority will tell you that it was the best decision they ever made. That the only regret they have is not doing it sooner.

Don’t put regret in charge

We should all of us, cis or trans, be careful. Be thoughtful about our choices. Of course we should. But whether it’s transitioning or literally anything else in life, we should not let the possibility of regret stop us.

Otherwise, we’d never do anything at all.