A detransitioner in agony recounts how gender doctors manipulated him into castration, hormones

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Warning: This article contains graphic details of chemical and surgical procedures performed on an individual who once identified as transgender. Descriptions also include bodily functions of adult subject matter.

When Marcus Fitz started ejaculating blood it finally occurred to him that just maybe the medical professionals he trusted had been misleading him.

For several years, he said, the doctors he saw enticed him with gender transition surgery and led him to believe that being castrated was a beneficial option that would improve his overall health and well-being.

Fitz, 41, is originally from the Midwest and now resides in California. He is among the rising number of people known as "detransitioners," having identified as transgender for over a decade. Fitz lived a "mostly stealth" life and frequently lied to coworkers, neighbors and new friends about his biological sex.

Now suffering from a host of medical complications as a result of years of hormone treatment, including phantom pain in his groin and bouts of severe depression, he is five years into his detransition journey and is reintegrating with his anatomically male body.

At his request, he is using a pseudonym in this article and other identifying details have been removed for fear of harassment. He believes it's important that people learn about the deceptive practices at gender clinics that push cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries, which he says have left him psychologically scarred, physically mutilated, and with a severely compromised endocrine system.

To verify Fitz's story, CP corroborated his account with several people he identified who confirmed that the story he shared was truthful. CP also reviewed medical documents and relevant court filings.

Gender confusion early on

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Growing up in the culturally conservative Midwest, school was always hard for Fitz, as he was frequently bullied throughout every grade.

"I was not the most masculine boy. I had effeminate traits, was called homophobic slurs … and this was well before the age of developing any sense of sexuality. So I grew up with this idea that gay was bad and not something that I wanted to be," he detailed.

As he matured and became more aware of his sense of self and how he would carry himself, he began to see how homosexuals were mocked and that he was displaying some of those behaviors and stereotypes.

Uncomfortable with his body during adolescence, the pubertal processes were never explained to him. The random erections, nocturnal emissions, and other bodily developments caused extreme self-consciousness, leading him to think he was a pervert, the kind he saw villainized in books and movies.

Fitz was not raised in a religious home, calling his upbringing "secular" but with "good Midwestern rural values." Politically speaking, he has always leaned to the left but considers himself an independent and not an ideological purist.

It was at a public university in the Midwest in the late 1990s and early 2000s where he first heard about transgenderism, recalling a moment when he read an article in the student newspaper written by someone who said he realized that being effeminate made him a woman despite actually being physiologically male. Seizing on this, Fitz thought: This is the answer! I'm not gay, I'm just actually a woman.

Thus, a relocation to the West Coast was in order so he could figure this out in an ostensibly more supportive environment. Upon graduating from college he sold all his belongings, said goodbye to his family and headed to California. Not long after he settled in, he went to a community free clinic in the city where he talked to a clinician who, he would later find out, was not a licensed therapist and was serving in more of an intern role, a student volunteer.

"I spoke to her maybe four times. She was fascinated with me," Fitz said, noting his earliest memories of exploring transition.

Much of what she said during those sessions was along the lines of "discovering your authentic self" as the opposite sex and other transgender jargon Fitz now considers to be nonsense.

She ultimately referred him to a local gender clinic so he could seek medical transition, which he did. After waiting an hour at this new clinic, he had a 15-minute appointment with a registered nurse who immediately affirmed him as the opposite sex. At the end of the appointment she prescribed him hormones.

"If you think you are trans, that means you are trans," Fitz said the nurse told him, adding that those were her exact words.

"Then I was given this piece of paper to sign which had many scary things on it and I was told not to worry about them, that they 'would do everything in our power to prevent them' and that this was basically a formality."

The paper was an informed consent document, which CP reviewed.

Fitz was prescribed estradiol and spironolactone. Estradiol is synthetic estrogen in pill form. Spironolactone is an anti-androgen, a testosterone suppressant, also in pill form.

He started taking the drugs, began dressing in women's clothes part time, and consulted pro-transgender internet resources, which he says contain "all sorts of horrible advice."

Further contributing to the idea that transgenderism was a glamorous pathway was the 2005 film "Transamerica" starring Felicity Huffman, who received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her leading role in the movie. The movie reportedly contains a line saying that after genital surgery "not even a gynecologist would be able to tell the difference,” which, Fitz says, is "stupidly untrue."

As Fitz became more serious about becoming trans he realized that there was only one way to go: cut off all ties with family, and change one's name, wardrobe and sex marker on all of his official legal documents.

"There's no alternative. That's just what you do," he told CP, adding that transition is always billed as "medically necessary."

Within the institutions promoting the medicalization of gender, the people staffing the offices have an answer for almost every concern or objection.

When Fitz expressed concerns about the ill effects the hormones might have on his liver, he said he was told: "Well no, don't worry about that. That's why we do blood tests every six months."

The small dose of estrogen he was given was quickly increased. He soon found himself taking six milligrams of estrogen. He was told up front that spironolactone was a diuretic, which concerned him about the potential damage to his bladder, wondering if he was going be incontinent later in life. After he started detransitioning, he was informed that the six milligrams of estrogen he had been prescribed was the legal maximum dose.

The transgender illusion intensifies, the surgery push



"This whole [transgender] thing became kind of intoxicating, socially and physically. It was kind of a thrill. I felt I was treated better. People were smiling at me on the street, holding doors open for me. I was getting all this positive attention," Fitz recalled.

"And estrogen in males, it kind of dulls our senses, mellows us out … and it feels good."

But it also made him a bit of a mess, he admitted.

During his transition years he was unemployed and underemployed a number of times, going on unemployment insurance for a single 18-month period spanning 2008 to 2010.

Every time Fitz went to the clinic for an appointment, the office staff would try to sell him on the idea of surgery, he said, marketing it to him as though it was the next logical and necessary step in his journey.

"Every appointment began with: 'How are your prescriptions and would you like any surgery?'" he said.

"It was like going into a restaurant and the waiter offering you the menu," he said, describing the office staff as reading from a sales script. "It was an up-sale."

Though he didn't have benefits, when Fitz was able to work full time it made him feel successful, that things were at last going to work out after years of struggling.

Being a "free" clinic, the office had a sliding scale program that was government-subsidized.

"I would go in and they would ask: 'What is your income, what are you assets?'" he recalled.

"So if you're making nothing and you have maybe $5,000 in your checking account, you don't have to pay anything — not for the appointment, not for the pills. If you're making $10 or $15 dollars an hour and you have $10,000 in your checking account, then maybe you have to pay $15 dollars as a co-pay. But it was never very expensive at all," he said.

The financial ease with which he was able to acquire the drugs psychologically fed his perception that none of this was a particularly big deal and that this was, in fact, normal medicine.

After one such "up-sale" in the gender clinic in 2011, Fitz said he "broke" and said to them: "You're always asking me about surgery. What have you got? What are you trying to do?"

He was then told about feminizing facial surgery where they would shave down part of his brow, shave down his Adams apple — called a chondrolaryngoplasty — and place implants in his chest and hips. They also offered the full vaginoplasty, where they remove the testicles and invert the penis to resemble a vaginal canal.

"'Or we could just do an orchiectomy,'" he recalled being told. The surgery involves removing the testicles from the scrotum. But they didn't say the word "testicles" when they explained the procedure, he asserted.

"That word was never used. The gender clinic staff always avoided sex-specific biological terms, preferring genderist euphemisms instead. I was told we were 'removing the part that makes testosterone.' I thought they were removing a tiny part of the testes, not the whole of them," he said.

This was appealing to Fitz because he was informed it wouldn't change how he looked, felt, or functioned, and that it would cut down on his dependence on hormones.

"I thought, that sounds great! It's a win-win," he said, thinking this would alleviate his concerns about the wear and tear the hormonal treatment was having on his bladder and liver.

Additionally, the surgery was relatively inexpensive — only $1,000 — and would only take 20 minutes to perform. The doctors made it sound as though he would be getting a mole or a tooth removed, as though a tiny piece of his testicles was a bothersome, worthless piece of his anatomy that was harming him, and that the procedure to remove it was perfectly safe and normal.

He agreed to the surgery, though he asked if he should get a second opinion. He recalled being told that he did not need a second opinion and to just get a letter signed off by a urologist.

Fitz called up a urologist and had a consultation with him. The urologist asked him if he was sure he wanted to proceed and if he had spoken with his doctor. The urologist signed off on it and an appointment for surgery was scheduled for six weeks later in November.

In 2015, when he began detransitioning, Fitz looked back at the experience and recalled being amazed at how quickly it all happened.

Asked to describe what the surgery was like, Fitz recounted: "I was told to lie in a bed and my legs were placed in stirrups. They then put you out, cut a little hole in the scrotum, and then fish them out and cut them off."

The surgical procedure was a much bigger deal than what he was led to believe.

On the day of the operation, he took public transit to go to his surgery appointment and was surprised that they made him take off all his clothes and put on a hospital gown and haircap, and lie on an operating table. This was no simple mole removal or tooth extraction, he would soon learn.

As he was wheeled into the operating room and was surrounded by medical staff, surgical equipment and lights, Fitz's fears mounted.

"I started to ask questions like 'what's that?' and 'who is this?'" he said.

No one answered him.

Right before the anesthesia drugs took effect and he became unconscious, as they had already inserted the needle in his arm, he remembered saying, "Stop!"

The surgical aftermath

When he finally came to, he was "looney tunes all day" because of the drugs and he was in an enormous amount of pain. When the bandage dressing came off a few days later he could see that this was a radical change. Contrary to their promises, he was shocked to find that he looked quite different.

"And when I went to my doctor for a follow-up, the doctor was gleeful, celebrating the surgery as a wonderful metamorphosis," Fitz said.

Because his appointments were always relatively short — approximately 15 minutes — he never got to say much.

Fitz described himself during his earlier years as a party kid and a "serial one-night stander," never having had many close long-term relationships. Fueling his thinking that his decision to transition was the right thing to do was the political environment of the day. Radical change was in the air, he remembers sensing at the time. The Occupy Wall Street movement was making noise around the country and the Arab Spring was underway.

"I had this feeling that the world was changing. People were also talking that in 2012 the world was going to end," he said, "a lot of revolution, so let's charge forward. But I was behaving in a short-sighted way."

There were several times he would go to bed with someone and, as a passable woman, his female partner would be surprised to find he had male genitals. Fitz now regrets not being honest about that. He teased men sexually but was afraid of them and never put himself in scenarios where he would be alone with men or slept with men. Sometimes he would engage in prolonged kissing with men, he said.

But after the surgery, sex was all but impossible.

"I didn't hate my genitals, but now they looked strange, weird. My scrotum looked like a deflated balloon, like the weird thing that hangs off a chicken's neck. It's lifeless, an empty sac," he said.

He did not have sex for approximately one year.

"But then I had sex because I wanted to have sex and I discovered that I was ejaculating blood," he said.

On one particular occasion when he was with a woman he became sexually aroused and had a premature ejaculation, and it was bloody.

CP confirmed with an endocrinologist that this is indeed possible after an orchiectomy.

"That scared me, so I went back to my doctor and he said, 'Oh, I don't know. This shouldn't happen, we'll run all kinds of tests," Fitz said.

They ran tests and it took several weeks to get the results. He was then advised to "wait it out," get a different desk chair, and to stop riding his bicycle. Fitz took all of those steps but nothing helped.

As doubts about what he had undergone began to set in, he thought the problem might be that he needed better, more expensive doctors. For that he'd need a higher salary so he decided to learn to code and write software. By the end of 2014, he got hired as a software engineer.

With better health coverage he thought he'd be able to see any doctor he wanted. At his last appointment at the gender clinic, he received a message along the lines of: "Oh, by the way, your last blood test indicated that some of your levels are low and we need you to start taking prescription-level Vitamin D and calcium."

When Fitz asked if this was a temporary prescription he was told that it was not, that it would probably be for the rest of his life. When he pressed the staff further he was told that it was as a result of the surgery.

"The surgery was supposed to make me healthier," he replied, "why would I now need to take prescription vitamins?"

The reason was that he was no longer producing the necessary hormones needed to maintain adequate bone density.

Fitz said he kept asking questions but before he knew it, his 15-minute appointment was over and he had to leave. Increasingly concerned, he starting asking for his medical records and began reviewing them carefully. He also asked for the letter he was asked to get signed from a urologist so he could go forward with the surgery.

The letter said that Fitz was of sound mind and was in good physical health, exceeded the standards of care set forth in the current guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

For the first time, Fitz looked up the WPATH standards of care which stipulate that before hormonal treatments begin patients are supposed to have had a psychological evaluation. Fitz maintains he never had one. Prior to surgery he was supposed to, according to the guidelines, have two more evaluations. Fitz says he never had those either.

Upon closer review of his medical records, which he shared with CP, he realized that the doctor had taken notes of his thoughts but had never noted any of Fitz's concerns about what the drugs might do to his liver or bladder. Irked by this bias, he began researching his doctor's background and discovered that his doctor was actually a trans-identifying woman who presented as a man.

All these years he thought he had been discussing his distinctly male health issues with a man.

"I felt horribly betrayed," Fitz told CP.

"There's an intimate level of appreciation for your genitals and if you're not even the same sex you can't fully understand that, just as I have no idea what it's like to menstruate or ovulate because, obviously, I can't."

Fitz also discovered that the doctor was a clinical activist, and when she was not working at the gender clinic she was giving slideshow presentations at various meetings with other doctors for more "gate-opening." This doctor called herself a "gate-opener" as opposed to a gatekeeper.

Determined to get some answers, he scheduled yet another appointment.

"This letter is an outright lie," he recounted telling the doctor when he confronted her. "You lied to the surgeon and said I exceeded the standards of care, but the standards of care said I should have talked to three therapists and I haven't talked to any."

Fitz said the doctor responded by telling him that she wanted to ensure he wouldn't be denied the operation because she knew he couldn't afford a therapist and suggested the surgery for his own benefit.

Fitz told CP he now wishes he had a recording of their conversation. He said the doctor then got up and left the room and returned with a signed document.

He said the doctor brandished the consent waiver he signed and reminded him that he was warned about the potential for adverse effects caused by the treatments.

At first, Fitz said he didn't recognize the form because many years had passed since he had last seen it. He then realized it was his informed consent document that he had signed in 2006. The form wasn't included in his medical records when he requested to see them because it had been filed in his administrative record, which he does not have access to.

"So they get you to sign this piece of paper and then they put it away where you can never see it or find it and then they only produce it when you start calling them out," he explained. "It's for their benefit, it's a defense for them."

Suicidal ideation sets in amid devastation

The weight of what had transpired and the years of deception summarily hit Fitz.

Extremely depressed and in agony, he imagined and researched ways to kill himself, wondering how he might cause his death in a relatively painless way.

He thought he might travel to Canada and try to fall asleep in a snow drift or maybe swim out in the Pacific Ocean and drown himself. He sank even deeper into despair and thought he should maybe destroy his entire body, ashamed his family would discover what he had done if his body was ever recovered. Perhaps then the best course was to try and have some kind of contraption crush him under a heavy object, or maybe self-immolate by flying to Hawaii and jumping into a volcano, he remembered thinking.

Fitz also considered taking the leftover pain meds his doctor had prescribed and acquire a gun and kill himself in front of his doctor at the next Pride parade because this doctor always had a booth at the event pushing transgender medicine and surgeries. Maybe offing himself in such fashion could make an "unignorable political point and stun the doctor," he said.

He said he had it all planned out but ultimately balked.

Fitz said he attempted suicide once, opting to jump to his death from the balcony of his high-rise apartment, but it was foiled. His cat was looking like she was going to jump off with him and he didn't want her to die, so he stepped back from the edge.

But then he felt as though suicide was wrong entirely and he should try to channel his anguish in a positive direction and use his painful experience to help other people in similar situations.

Shuffled around to doctors

In the months that followed, he was shuffled around to various doctors, all of whom were either LGBT-identified themselves or sympathetic to transgenderism. None of them helped him, he said. One told him he needed to get some therapy to help him get over his "internalized transphobia."

Exasperated beyond words, he figured he would go revisit the surgeon that performed the orchiectomy years earlier, thinking a follow-up visit might provide more answers.

When Fitz returned to his office, he said the surgeon was surprised to see him and claims he denied any responsibility for the complications he suffered after the operation. According to Fitz, the surgeon got defensive and asked him to leave his office.

Fitz said he didn't budge, recalling that he told the surgeon that he was indeed a big part of his ordeal and that the surgery caused a lot of his misery. The surgeon got up and opened the door, demanded Fitz leave or he would call the police and suggested he call a lawyer.

Fitz went home and started looking for local medical malpractice lawyers, calling dozens of different attorneys, most of whom did not return his phone calls. A few talked to him but refused to work with him and allegedly called him a "bigot" or "transphobe." Others thought his situation was weird and told him they didn't understand the issues and didn't want to get involved because it sounded too risky.

Only one person said he would help him.

"I felt very stuck. If only one in 40 would help me then I must be desperate, I'll do anything my attorney says," Fitz told CP.

As he pursued legal recourse, he also finally found a physician who was willing to help him detransition, a doctor who advised him to get therapy, which he did. Fitz also opened a Twitter account and began tweeting under a pseudonym. He was frequently attacked by transactivists and their left-wing cheerleaders.

As it became clearer he was detransitioning and rejecting a trans identity, many of his local friends started distancing themselves because they either felt outwardly offended or uncomfortable around him and stopped talking with him. These supposed friends considered him a political liability.

Around this time, existential questions were besetting him. "Am I trans? Is anybody trans?" he would wonder. Compounding the confusion was the emergence of news stories about Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce, and Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who worked for the NAACP who claimed to be black.

As transgenderism was being mainstreamed, his peers would excitedly ask him if he was happy to see positive coverage of transgender-identifying persons.

"And I would say: 'Well, actually, no. The whole thing is a fraud and it's starting to fall apart for me and I bet it will for everyone else too,'" he would respond.

Such exchanges were awkward and he found himself not getting invitations to parties and gatherings of friends. Others whom he thought were friends stopped taking his phone calls.

Fitz found the cognitive dissonance staggering that Dolezal was widely mocked and rejected for saying she felt like she was black but Jenner was enthusiastically embraced for saying he felt he was a woman.



The only people who offered him any meaningful help and support at the time were Christians and radical feminists.

"But today, a few short years later, support is more diverse, as more of the general public has become aware of how little sense transgenderism actually makes. I've got support from men and women, gay and straight, left and right," he said.

On Twitter, the only ones who would tweet sympathy were radical feminists. He started learning more about radical feminism, and much of the analysis made a lot of sense to him. Radical feminism, he soon learned, was quite different from third wave liberal feminism, which supports transgender ideology.

Fitz took legal action against one of the doctors who treated him but is not legally permitted to say how it ended. But he was, at the time, satisfied with the conclusion.

The postoperative agony continues

As the months went by in his detransition process, Fitz increasingly found himself wanting to live free from hormones so he stopped taking them. Doctors told him not to do that but he did anyway and he soon got sick. Because of the hormone withdrawal, he started experiencing menopause-like symptoms.

"I was irritated and confused. I was fatigued. I had hot flashes and cold chills. I became easily injured. It was a bad deal," he said.

About a year into his detransition, he received a diagnosis of being medium functional on the autism spectrum, a common comorbidity to gender dysphoria that gender ideologues usually ignore. Fitz maintains that that condition contributed to his struggles to communicate effectively with doctors.

Fitz also had to get a mastectomy. As a result of the estrogen intake he had grown breasts.

After having a prescription drug crash on one particular day, he recounted how the proverbial fog lifted and he took stock of his life, surveying the past near-decade, feeling like it had all been "some weird party-trick."

"I used to look in the mirror and I thought I looked too male and I need to correct that. And now I was looking in the mirror and I looked too female," he said.

He shopped around for various surgeons to remove the excess breast tissue, but some refused him because he was a detransitioner.

Before he could proceed, his surgeon requested he go on testosterone for a year. He found that, as a male, testosterone made him feel healthy and clear-headed and that it helped him sleep.

"I hate that I now have an addiction to chemical testosterone," he said.

"Testosterone is also expensive. And when it's not a government plan that is paying for everything, it's costly. And it's also a controlled substance, much more regulated than estrogen because it's more abused."

Fitz said it is always an administrative hassle when he changes insurance companies.

He thought that once he stopped taking the estrogen the breasts would go away, especially because when he was younger he had gynecomastia — a condition that occurs as a result of an increase in the amount of breast gland tissue in boys or men, caused by a hormonal imbalance — that went away on its own. Unfortunately, his transgender chemically-induced breast growth was there to stay.

Fitz underwent a mastectomy in February 2019.

Fighting back

Fitz has managed to reunite with his family but they do not talk about his transition. To this day, they do not know he had an orchiectomy. He is unsure about what they know of his cross-sex hormone use.

"I don't bring it up and they don't ask questions," he said. "They're aware of some details but not all."

"They were glad to have me back. But I feel really awful for my sister because I abandoned her. She has a few kids. She had a baby when I left, and now she has two boys and one is in high school.

"I feel guilty about that."

Yet as he continued to search for answers, he found some detransitioners online, all of whom lived in California. He eventually got together with a few of them and discussed their transition journeys.

Around that same time, another former transgender presented an opportunity for Fitz and a few others to meet with attorneys from a Christian legal firm to discuss their legal options.

Fitz had never heard of this firm but since other lawyers "didn't give a damn" about him, he was grateful for any legal advisers who might be willing to listen and help.

"I didn't know they were conservative-leaning Christians and when I looked them up it didn't bother me," he told CP.

In the fall of 2017, he and about a dozen other detransitioners went to their headquarters and sat at a table for several hours and shared their stories with them.

"From breakfast to dinner we talked. We talked and the lawyers listened. And it was very nice. Because to that point, no one was listening to us," he said.

After they shared their personal ordeals, they discussed what they might do on a legal front. CP confirmed with another detransitioner that this meeting indeed happened.

Fitz believes lawsuits are the best tool for social change and hopes to be part of a large-scale effort to sue the gender clinics that harmed him and his fellow travelers. Though he took action against his doctor, he also wanted to sue the surgeon who performed the orchiectomy. But as a result of state statute of limitations, he could not.

Many states, including California, have one-year statutes of limitations for legal action to be taken against surgeons for malpractice. Because Fitz didn't attempt to have sex for over a year after his surgery, it was too late for him to realize he had a problem, and his primary care doctor had told him to wait it out and that it would get better on its own.



This is a typical experience of other detransitioners he has spoken to who also regret their surgeries, he noted.

"They'll say 'I want to sue!' And my first question to them is: 'Well, how long has it been?'" Fitz said.

"It often takes up several years to come out of this gaslighting fog of what has happened to us and by then it's far too late."

He believes the laws are written to protect the doctors and their insurers. When lawsuits are filed against doctors, the plaintiffs mostly deal with their insurance companies, he said. Fitz still wants to sue the surgeon who removed his testicles but does not know if that is possible.

"I'd like to sue WPATH for their convoluted, misleading and negligent standards of care. I'd like to sue the Endocrine Society for being complicit. I'd like to sue the California Medical Board. I'd like to join a class-action lawsuit. I don't know how these things can happen," he said.

Other attorneys with whom he has explored this seem interested but often act cagey and only call him when they want to speak with him but never reply to his emails when he wants to communicate with them.

"The other side has decades on us, in terms of setting up the laws in their favor, so it's very tricky," he said. "It all sounds so crazy but that's because it is crazy. When you start to look at it underneath a microscope it really is eugenics, a messed-up situation."

Fitz believes that the transgender movement shares significant overlap with the transhumanist movement, specifically the notion "that your body is just a machine you can take apart and put back together."

In addition to taking part in lawsuits, he wants to organize detransitioners and is interacting with groups and individuals that have gone public with their detransition stories.



CP contacted the Endocrine Society to ask whether the organization was backing any research on or offering any support to detransitioners, and how their guidelines are adhered to in clinical practice, and if they take a position on the promotion of surgery as the best option in light of how it was marketed to Fitz. No one was available to speak and we were referred to their guidelines.

Dealing with regret, fighting for hope

"I wish I would have been taught to accept myself. A lot of this [transgender ideology] is a weird, inside-out head game of discovering your 'true self.' But it really ends up destroying yourself," he said, when asked what would have helped him not go down this route in the first place.

"I wish I had learned that there was nothing wrong with being an effeminate boy, that it didn't make me a woman," he said, adding that same-sex attraction itself is not harmful, and that medical and surgical interventions are not the solution to psychosocial problems or mental illness.

When he sees opposition to transgender medicine, he often encounters outrage about the pathway to sterilization that the combination of chemical puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones creates in gender-nonconforming youth.

While that is a legitimate issue, Fitz implores people not to forget the myriad of medical harms that result from the gruesome surgeries that are not discussed as often.

"I have scars on my genitals now. I am missing some of my genitals. I have phantom pain. I have a chemical dependence on a regulated drug made by a private corporation," Fitz said.

"I feel like I'm pretty much f-----. I wish that I could just go buy some land and farm and leave the world behind. But I can't. Because of all this. It's such an unnecessary mess. It didn't get me anywhere.

"If you're not satisfied with the result of these treatments and surgeries, the medical community will abandon you," he said.

"And nobody will know what to do with you because they refuse to research us and they refuse to publish information on what our needs are," he said of detransitioning people.

What compounded his confusion for so long was the atmosphere of the city, with gay rainbow and trans pink and blue-striped flags flying everywhere as people saunter around in the streets sporting "they/them" pronoun buttons.

Fitz believes he looks a little better after having had the mastectomy though he still experiences numbness in his chest from the operation.

"I've been told I can get testicle implants to look even better but that wouldn't affect how I feel or function. I'd still have the phantom pain because you need the nerves to be communicating with the organ that is missing. I'd still have the sexual disruptions and dependence on pharmaceuticals," he said.

His attorney had to work extra hard to get his sex markers changed back to the original on his legal documents. Detransitioning his identification papers has presented more hurdles than switching them to opposite sex markers.

"I actually had to have a legal battle to restore my birth certificate. Some of the other documents were tricky at some points too," Fitz said.

"I'm willing to talk to anybody who seriously seems interested in caring. I've talked to several journalists. Most of them don't end up publishing. I never know why."

He concluded: "I hope for a medical breakthrough to restore my wrongful amputation, to help me look and feel whole again, and to put pharmaceuticals behind me. I write to researchers working to bioprint regenerated testes in the lab, to let them know people like me exist, and I donate to their efforts. I write to surgeons performing penile transplants, to ask that they explore testicle transplants. And I meditate on restoration by means beyond science, including miracles."