After more than a decade of trying to live as a woman, Neeza Powers realized, “I need to detransition.” 

Powers is well-known for his viral TikTok page, boasting more than 100,000 followers, and his adamant advocacy for keeping men out of women’s spaces, particularly transgender-identifying men. IW Features spoke with Powers last fall on the importance of this issue and as an athlete, and formerly transgender-identifying himself, Powers told IW Features he finally realized this year, “I need to live as a man.” 

“It’s March in Vermont, everything is frozen, and I’m sitting there meditating. This one particular afternoon, this thought of myself being a man, and that I could love myself and express myself that way, and that the rest of the world would follow suit, came into my mind, and I just finally became okay with that,” Powers said. “At that moment, this giant icicle broke off from this waterfall, crashed down, and it just woke up every cell in my body. Since, I’ve just known that this is going to be my path moving forward.” 

Powers has since changed his name from Nicole to Neeza, and has shifted his content to be about his detransition process. 

Though he now sees social media as a tool to reach others who are questioning or challenging gender ideology, Powers underscored that social media led to much of his own gender confusion in the first place. 

“I grew up in the late 2000s. Instagram and all these things were starting to come into focus for the youth, and now it’s worse than ever. I feel like it continues to further that narrative that people are not perfect and they are trapped in the wrong body,” Powers said. “For me, that’s what led me to pretend to be a woman for over a decade—the simple fact that I was a very flamboyant boy that was bullied constantly in high school.”

Gender ideology pushes that very narrative, and when Powers was in a vulnerable state, he fell victim to the lies. 

“Because of that bullying, I went to seek out help from a trusted—or what should be trusted—professional, like a school counselor or therapist. That was where the first question of, ‘Do you feel like a girl?’ was asked, and it took me 12 years to understand that’s never a feeling,” Powers said. 

The decision to detransition and speak out about the harms of gender ideology has cost Powers the support and community he’d grown used to—especially from those on the Left who were supposed to be “allies.” 

“I feel like it’s a lot harder for someone like me to have a community online,” Powers said. “It’s a lot easier for people to get on board with somebody playing pretend and living in a fake reality, versus someone that has no filters, no guards up. I’m literally just being authentic.” 

Yet, in traditional leftist fashion, Powers’ authenticity is not met with praise, but criticism. 

“The support when you’re pretending to be something you’re not is outstanding. You could grab any guy off the street right now and convince him that he is a woman, and he’ll have people lining up to support him. But as soon as somebody like me says, ‘Look, I realize that will never be the truth, and I’m done trying to lie to myself and lie to the world anymore,’ people are very quick to leave,” Powers said. “So I lost all of my friends in the community.” 

However, Powers admitted he’s used to the backlash. Even before he announced his detransition, Powers faced outrage for his stance on trans-identified males playing in women’s sports—namely, that they shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women at all—and for arguing that trans-identified males shouldn’t take estrogen or other cross-sex hormones.  

“It can be very detrimental and devastating for a man to take female hormones for an extended period of time. I definitely want to shed light on that. It’s not just some simple thing that you can take and you magically grow a pair of breasts,” Powers explained.

And yet, according to Powers, taking female hormones almost became a standard litmus test for fitting the mold of a transgender-identifying person. 

“I would lie to friends and family members and say that I was taking the prescribed dosage in order to fit in the community. But in reality, I was taking a very micro dose of estrogen and I would take them maybe a month or two at a time, and then back off of it because it would cause me extreme anxiety,” Powers said. “It was like my body knew that this doesn’t belong here but the pressure to take it was overwhelming.”  

It was no longer a question of whether these hormones made him feel better, Powers said, because they didn’t. Rather, cross-sex hormones became a way for Powers to feel validated in his transgender identity. 

Powers said it was not only the transgender-identifying community that pushed the hormones—his doctors did as well. 

“Every doctor I talked to, I would tell them, ‘I took hormones for two weeks, and never the dose that you recommend. And the first thing they’d say is, ‘You need to take the dose that’s recommended.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I took half of it, and I feel extremely anxious, and I feel like I don’t even want to leave my house, and I’m just nervous all the time,’” Powers said. 

The medical advice he received? Take more.  

“I never told anyone all of this, because it’s scary that people would rather push you into feeling anxious and paranoid all the time in order for you to continue coming back every month for a prescription refill,” Powers said. 

Powers said he will continue to advocate for keeping men out of women’s spaces as well. 

“It is the badge of honor for these men who are looking to become women if they can be accepted into female-only spaces. That’s why it is so pushed hard,” Powers explained. “If you make it a requirement of your identity …  then, yes, more trans-identifying men [are going] to push this topic. Because if they don’t, if they aren’t allowed in bathrooms and sports, then they’re not going to get that final piece to the puzzle of being able to dive into their dysphoria.” 

Powers said he knows his detransition could be a long and difficult journey. But he hopes that the more he sheds light on his experience, as well as the dangers of transgenderism, the more he’ll be able to help others battling gender confusion. 

“That is what this ideology does, it ultimately wants to fit people into boxes that they’ll never belong to,” Powers said.