Has transgender identification declined among young people? That’s what’s been reported in the media based on a new study from the FIRE Foundation.

But looking more carefully, it is not transgender identification that’s down among young people, so much as it is specifically “nonbinary” and “queer” identification that are down. Gay and lesbian identification remains stable, whereas heterosexual identification has increased.

While there is cause to be optimistic for detransitioners like us when we see that nonbinary identification is falling—it points to the possibility that young people are recognizing that sex is fundamentally binary—it’s not clear from this survey whether or not transgender identification is down. For instance, the survey doesn’t differentiate between a woman and a transgender-identifying male who identifies as female. 

What we can say for sure is that “queer” and “nonbinary,” at minimum, were fads—just like goth and punk once were. “Transgender” will prove to be a fad, too, although probably closer to how cutting and eating disorders became destructive fads in the 2000s. 

The difference, however, is that there was no social apparatus of adults dedicated to “validating” goth and punk—kids were allowed to be kids—and there was no social or medical apparatus of adults “affirming” children’s desires to harm themselves. Teenage anorexics were not given liposuctions, teenage bulimics were not prescribed laxatives—they were told they were beautiful in their bodies and were treated responsibly by doctors who ensured they got to a healthy weight.

Both of our lives are a testament to the horror that unfolded in the decade after: transgender-identifying children, instead of being told we were beautiful in our bodies, were lied to and made to feel as though we had to transition. Doctors even told the parents of transgender-identifying children—often while we were still in the room—that if we were not allowed to transition, we would kill ourselves.

The so-called experts—the doctors, the medical boards, the therapists, the activists—lied to us, all in service of what was, all along, a social contagion.

Among the two of us, Luke, thanks to his mother, was able to escape medicalization as a child—but because his school counselors, low-cost Kaiser Permanente therapists, and institutional figureheads had decided he was “transgender,” they’d already effectively placed him on the track to social and medical transition. When he turned 18, Planned Parenthood prescribed him estrogen, which left him with a woman’s fat distribution in a male body. Realizing he would always be a man, he detransitioned.

Like Luke, Prisha was given cross-sex hormones—testosterone, in her case, and it was prescribed to her when she was a minor. Additionally, unlike Luke, Prisha was operated on surgically, given a double mastectomy by surgeons who managed to butcher the procedure. When, years later, she had detransitioned and given birth to a beautiful baby boy, she was unable to breastfeed because of the mastectomy—but because, during the procedure, the surgeons did not get rid of her milk tissue and sewed her nipples on in the wrong place (to give them a more ostensibly male appearance), she had breastmilk trapped in her chest, unable to feed her son and causing her intense pain. This was on top of the several pregnancy complications she faced due to testosterone having affected her hip development, forcing her to have a C-section.

All this pain, all this trauma, and for what? For a trend that is going away. Goths and punks were never operated on by doctors, anorexics were treated properly by doctors, but those of us who identified as transgender when we were just kids have to live not only with the psychological scars of being lied to by every adult we should have been able to trust—those of us who were medicalized, like the two of us, will face lifelong medical damage.

Those adults, of course, will move on, even if they spent years shaming anyone who might have stood in the way of lifelong medicalization for transgender-identifying children. They’ll laugh and say they never actually believed in it. 

But what will happen to us, those of us who were put on this awful, medicalized path? We will be forced to live with the scars.

The FIRE survey shows a promising shift away from transgender identity, but we will only have won when no one denies the immutability of sex, when no doctor is allowed to perform so-called “sex change” procedures, and when people like us receive justice.