I recently met a group of American women in their early twenties who are not supposed to exist. They are women who, in their teens, realised that they were actually men, socially transitioned to the other sex and then underwent hormone therapy to change their bodies, faces and voices to become transgender men. After varying amounts of time, however, they all realised they had made a big mistake, stopped testosterone therapy and “detransitioned” back to being who they were before. They are now embarrassed, they say, but not ashamed. “I don’t identify as anything,” one of them told me. “I just have two X chromosomes in the bag.”

These women are not anti-trans, or religious nuts, or members of the far right. They expressed not