COLUMBUS — The Ohio Statehouse elevator lifted, and Carey Callahan practiced what she’d say. Hi. I live in your district. I’m a detransitioner.
A decade ago, when Callahan stopped taking testosterone, few Americans knew a transgender person, let alone someone who had transitioned and then returned to their sex assigned at birth, and when Callahan went looking for other people who’d changed their minds, all she could find was a defunct email group that had topped out at a dozen members.
But much had changed since then. Detransitioners now headlined conservative rallies. They spoke on Capitol Hill and on Tucker Carlson’s show, and billionaires flew them across the country to beg legislators to ban gender-affirming care. Earlier this spring, detransitioned women had come to Ohio from California and Michigan to describe themselves as mutilated.
As far as Callahan could tell, she was the only detransitioner who actually lived in Ohio. She knew Republican legislators believed a ban would help people like her, but she’d lived in the detransition community longer than almost anyone, and her experiences had taught her that the only way to protect detransitioners was to improve health care, not take it away. And so, this spring, as the state legislature considered a ban on transition care for minors, Callahan thought her representatives might like to hear from her.
Callahan stepped into the hallway and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the elevator’s closing doors. She was 41, a well-off mom from the suburbs, wearing a chic black blazer, a vintage A-line skirt and bright yellow cloud slides. If Callahan wanted to pass as someone without a complicated gender history, she could. But she didn’t think she’d be able to forgive herself if she stayed quiet, so she made her way down the hallway.
Dozens of parents and their gender-fluid children stood with signs and homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Others had packed the chamber where an Ohio House committee would hold its fourth and final hearing on the proposed health-care ban. All the seats were taken, so Callahan waited in the hallway until she spotted her representative, a young Army veteran with slicked black hair and an American flag pinned to his lapel. Callahan waved to get his attention.
“Hi, Representative!” she called. “My name is Carey. I live in your district. Do you have a moment to talk about detransitioners?”
The legislator scanned Callahan’s upper body. She had on a bright yellow T-shirt that said “gender-affirming healthcare saves lives.” Maybe he was looking at the shirt, Callahan thought, or maybe, he was looking at her chest. She’d come to the Statehouse once before, and she’d thought then that policymakers were eyeing her body as if trying to discern the ways testosterone remade her. One had even suggested Callahan had had it “easier” because she still had breasts.
The representative mumbled something, then pointed to a young aide trailing a few feet behind. Callahan turned to look, and as she did, the legislator slipped through a door that led to the committee chambers.
Callahan slumped onto a wooden bench next to Cam Ogden, a 23-year-old transgender woman who runs the advocacy group Trans Allies of Ohio.
The two had become friends on TikTok. Ogden was still in college but was already becoming a political insider. When Callahan first showed up in Ogden’s feed, the young woman was surprised. Callahan had worked with some of the country’s most prominent anti-trans researchers and personalities. She’d disappeared for a while, but now she was on TikTok, denouncing health-care bans. Ogden was intrigued. Legislators tended to ignore trans people, but maybe, Ogden thought, they would listen to Callahan.
“Before we met,” Ogden told Callahan as they waited, “I had an opposition file on you. I looked at you as a high risk, high reward thing. You were kind of a Hail Mary.”
Callahan nodded. She had never been as famous as the current wave of detransitioners, but she had once traveled the country describing her pain, and she suspected her work had paved the way for this moment, one where half the country had either passed transgender health-care bans or was considering passing one.
She closed her eyes. She had gotten so much wrong in her adult life. She’d miscalculated her transition, and she’d joined forces with people she now saw as harmful. She wanted to make up for that somehow, but as the House committee opened the hearing, all Callahan felt was guilt.
A hard transition
As soon as Callahan went through puberty, she wanted a different body. She hated the angry red stretch marks that striped her chest. Her thighs seemed too big, and she suspected her breasts didn’t look the way breasts were supposed to look. Worse, men began treating her differently. Her father stopped hugging her. Guys harassed her on the street.
If she had different thighs and a flat chest, Callahan thought, she would feel right.
American doctors rarely treated transgender children when Callahan was growing up in the 1990s, and few doctors treated adults. Callahan didn’t know transitioning was possible until she reached college, and though she felt jealous of trans men who had their breasts removed, she didn’t begin to consider it an option for herself until her late 20s.
Even then, in 2012, not many Ohio providers specialized in transgender health care. The only counselor Callahan found who offered LGBTQ+ therapy did so as a side practice in her off hours. Callahan had experienced multiple incidents of sexualized trauma, and she talked about those with her therapist, but they didn’t discuss other things Callahan would later wish they had — obsessive compulsive disorder, body dysmorphia, the way trauma can lead a person to dissociate. Instead, Callahan told the therapist she needed testosterone, and four months later, she had a prescription.
Callahan started injecting the hormone, but what she really wanted was top surgery and liposuction. The only gender-affirming surgeon she could find charged $10,000, but she heard insurance companies in California covered the procedure, so, in May 2013, she moved to Oakland.
She found a job waiting tables. The restaurant industry proved an especially tough place to transition. As Callahan took testosterone, she gained weight and developed acne. Her voice deepened, and she grew facial hair, but she never passed as a man, and customers seemed to notice. The more her body changed, the fewer tips she earned. By the end of summer, she was broke.
Without health insurance, the only clinic she could afford was one so overwhelmed by debt, that it had nearly shut down two years earlier. Appointments were hard to come by. And Callahan almost never reached anyone when she called.
One day, in September 2013, a nurse practitioner left a message that said Callahan’s most recent lab work showed an elevated level of liver enzymes. (Though researchers have found some trans men experience modest increases in liver enzymes, the incidence of liver injury is very low.)
The call scared Callahan. She tried to make an appointment, but the clinic had a months-long waiting list. She didn’t want to destroy her liver, so she skipped her next shot. Callahan thought she’d take a break until her lab work evened out and she found a job where her salary didn’t depend on her appearance. But a few weeks later, Callahan’s period came back, and the change in hormones unmoored her. She cried at work. She had panic attacks, and she thought about suicide constantly.
Callahan never resumed testosterone, but she thought of herself as a trans man for another year. She left the restaurant and took a job as a receptionist at the clinic where she received health care. There, she met people whose lives had improved with transitioning, and she met others who struggled the ways she did. By fall 2014, Callahan realized testosterone hadn’t made her happy. She had the same thighs and chest. She was broke. And men harassed her more than ever.
She quit her job and returned to living as a woman.
‘I realized I was chasing a fantasy’
Initially, Callahan couldn’t find other people who detransitioned. She contacted an email group called “NoGoingBack,” but no one replied. She posted on Craigslist, and all she got back was a description of a man’s penis and a few emails from people who said she sounded “fascinating.”
That lack of community led Callahan down a deeper spiral. Everyone else understood themselves, she thought. They figured out the right way to be trans. She alone was too messed up to get her identity right.
Eventually, Callahan’s therapist found one other detransitioner. That woman knew another detransitioned woman, and the three met a few Fridays along the banks of a lagoon. Together, they talked about the things they had overlooked in therapy, and Callahan began to suspect the failure wasn’t hers alone. People questioning their gender deserved a more thoughtful and comprehensive process, she thought.
As fall gave way to winter, Callahan decided she didn’t need to stay in expensive California if she wasn’t going to transition. She moved back to Ohio. She found good therapists, and she continued talking to detransitioned women on the phone, but she longed for a space where she could process her experiences. So, in 2015, she created a blog.
“I really think of transition as a way I was trying to throw it all away,” Callahan wrote in September 2015. “And then once I lived the experience of throwing it all away — lived through having a surgeon draw on me, lived through people try to coach me into a stereotype of bro-itude, lived through the low expectations for the quality of my new trans life my healthcare providers had for me — yeah, I turned around. Yeah, I realized I was chasing a fantasy, and chasing that fantasy was going to wreck my liver and finances and self-respect.”
Initially, Callahan wrote anonymously under the name Maria Catt. But in 2016, after a trans writer compared detransitioners to “ex-gays,” Callahan came out on YouTube and started posting videos.
“Every step I took in affirming that trans identity, life got worse,” Callahan said in one.
If Callahan had transitioned or detransitioned a few years earlier, her blogs may have gone unread by the general public. But she started writing at a crucial time for LGBTQ+ rights. Just 8 percent of Americans knew a trans person in 2008. By 2015, that number had doubled, and it continued to rise exponentially in the years that followed. Trans people ran for office. They starred in television shows, and, increasingly, they turned to medical interventions that had once been hard to get.
In 2014, Time magazine declared that the country had reached a transgender tipping point. The following year, 17 million people watched as Caitlyn Jenner came out on “20/20.” The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage a few months later.
Marriage equality had long galvanized voters, and when the courts settled that issue, conservative groups turned their focus toward stemming the expansion of trans rights. North Carolina passed the country’s first bathroom bill, and parents in Oregon and Illinois tried to force trans children out of school locker rooms.
At the time, researchers estimated fewer than 1 million Americans identified as transgender, .3 percent of the population. Academics remain uncertain how many of those stop transitioning, but a handful of studies have found a small minority do. Still, skeptics looked to Callahan’s blog for proof that trans medical interventions shouldn’t exist.
“Not only will this directly help other detransitioners, it will help the entirety of society be more skeptical of trans narratives and medical treatments,” a WordPress user named “fmnst” commented on a post Callahan wrote in August 2016.
In 2017, the Catholic advocacy organization LifeSiteNews shared a transcript of one of Callahan’s videos with the headline “How Carey was set free from transgenderism.” And a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, used another chunk of Callahan’s words in his trans-critical book “When Harry Became Sally.”
Callahan admonished the Heritage Foundation author for using her as “a rhetorical device.” Still, she continued to write and speak publicly. Detransitioners weren’t, as one reviewer called them, “medical monsters,” Callahan thought. They were real people whose stories might help others.
Between 2018 and 2019, Callahan criticized pediatric transition care in public talks and in a column on the anti-trans-medicalization website 4thWaveNow. She helped create a nonprofit to reform both trans and detransition health care. And she was featured in the Atlantic article “When Children Say They’re Transgender,” a lengthy portrait of children and adults who had once thought they were trans but decided they were wrong.
Around the same time, Callahan met a doctor who led Ohio’s largest pediatric gender clinic. Callahan went to their meeting prepared to tell the doctor he was harming kids, but he listened carefully, and Callahan realized he wanted what she did — to give children the best possible care.
In Ohio, at least, children didn’t rush through therapy straight to hormones the way Callahan had as an adult five years earlier. Parents and children met with a team of doctors and mental health experts. They talked through comorbidities and other possible diagnoses, and most never moved onto medication. (According to public documents, just 7 percent of children were prescribed puberty blockers when treated for gender dysphoria at Ohio’s children’s hospitals. Thirty-five percent were prescribed hormones, and 65 percent received only mental health support. State hospital officials say they do not perform gender-affirming surgeries on minors.)
Callahan began to worry her words were leading to actions she didn’t support. Parents replied to her 4thWaveNow column insisting that their children had fallen victim to “a social contagion.” The editor of a book Callahan contributed to said trans children “don’t exist.” And a group of attorneys general cited the Atlantic article in a 2019 memo seeking to roll back trans medical rights.
Callahan had continued sharing her story, in part, because she believed — naively, she now says — that it was safe to do so. Though she often said she didn’t think children should transition, she never believed pediatric gender-affirming care should be banned, and in the years she spent writing and speaking, hardly anyone else suggested outlawing it, either. But as parents wrote to her and right-wing groups linked to her videos, Callahan saw that the country was changing, and she wasn’t skilled enough to pick the right collaborators or manage the effect her words might have.
In 2020, a few weeks before the coronavirus shuttered the country, Callahan left the nonprofit she created. She deleted her YouTube videos, and she made her blog private. She spent the next few years living a low-profile life. She became a therapist and counseled children in Cleveland. She married a lawyer. They moved to a big house in the suburbs, and they had a son.
A year after Callahan stepped away, in 2021, Arkansas passed the nation’s first ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. A fleet of other states introduced similar bills, and in May 2022, a 17-year-old flew from California to Ohio and urged legislators to pass their own.
Her name was Chloe Cole. She told legislators she was a detransitioner who regretted the medical interventions she’d undergone to live as a boy.
Callahan was so busy with new motherhood that she initially missed Cole’s appearance. But when she heard about it months later, she felt heartbroken and guilty. She hadn’t improved health care for people like Cole. All she’d done was raise the profile of detransitioners, and now, she felt, conservatives were using them to hurt trans children in her home state.
By the end of the year, Callahan had reappeared online. This time, she decided, she had to undo what she’d help set in motion.
The ‘rock star’ treatment
By the time Callahan returned to public life, other detransitioners had begun to renounce their past advocacy. Ky Schevers, a former detrans activist who once claimed that gender dysphoria was a trauma response coupled with internalized misogyny, recanted her views in 2021, and said she and other detransitioners still privately struggle with gender dysphoria.
And a trans woman whose name is now Elisa Rae Shupe told The Post she had been in a mental health crisis when she detransitioned from nonbinary to male in 2019. Shupe, an Army veteran, had a 100 percent disability rating and diagnoses of C-PTSD, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. Still, according to emails Shupe shared with The Post and others, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation offered to fly her across the country as an expert witness to condemn transgender health care and the Equality Act.
Shupe said they pushed her to exaggerate the alleged harms she’d experienced, and they continued asking her to testify even after Shupe told them she was in episodes of bipolar mania and depression. When she said she was too unwell to travel, the emails show, the Alliance Defending Freedom offered to ghostwrite editorials on her behalf.
Shupe said she felt seduced by their attention. The Family Policy Alliance booked her in the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown Atlanta, and she felt important, “like a rock star.”
The Heritage foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Policy Alliance did not return messages seeking comment.
Eventually, as those groups ignored her mental well-being, Shupe came to believe they were only using her until they found “the perfect teen victim.”
Shupe re-transitioned last year, and in March, she released thousands of emails she’d sent or received from conservative lawmakers and anti-trans activists as part of a group pushing model legislation. The emails show that conservative activists longed to find young detransitioners to bolster their cause.
“I am told two or three really good malpractice cases, particularly from minors with regret … and it is game on,” anti-LGBTQ+ doctor Andre Van Mol wrote in 2019, a year after Callahan’s appearance in the Atlantic. “It won’t be long.”
Van Mol did not return messages seeking comment.
Chloe Cole had never spoken publicly before she testified in Ohio in 2022, but she went on to become a regular guest at conservative rallies and talk shows. In 2023, she spoke at a federal committee hearing, and she testified in front of at least eight different state legislatures. Her testimony was effective: Nearly every state Cole visited this year passed a ban.
By spring 2023, Ohio remained one of a few holdouts. When Callahan learned that conservative groups were fundraising to bring Cole back to Ohio, she decided posting online wasn’t enough.
‘You did a really bad thing’
As Callahan sat with Ogden outside the House committee hearing this spring, she felt overwhelmed by the task ahead. It had been so easy to get people to listen when they viewed her as something broken they could use. Now, she couldn’t persuade her own representative to stop for a few moments.
“It’s so emotional to be here,” Callahan told Ogden. “It feels scary, and then, I end up weighing out my guilt. That very quickly turns into a wave of emotion that I can’t …”
She trailed off.
“Carey,” Ogden said. “Corinna’s here. She signed up to testify.”
Callahan’s body tensed so tightly she felt as if she were vibrating. Corinna Cohn had helped Callahan create the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. Cohn transitioned to female as a teenager, but later came to feel that she hadn’t been old enough to make that decision. She was 48 now, and still presented as a woman, but she had become an outspoken critic of transitioning.
Cohn had stayed with the organization after Callahan left, and she had become its president. GCCAN advertised itself as against health-care bans, but Cohn had driven from Indiana to Ohio the year before and told legislators that the organization supported banning minors from transitioning. Maybe, Callahan thought, in leaving the organization, she’d forfeited the ability to temper its stance.
“I have to find her,” Callahan said.
Callahan raced down the hallway. She looked in the overflow room, and she peeked, quickly, into the main chambers, but she didn’t see Cohn, so she texted her.
“Hey Corinna, I’m here at the statehouse. Please don’t testify in support of this bill,” Callahan wrote.
They messaged for a few minutes, and Callahan’s fingers shook as she replied. She told Cohn that medical professionals would never be able to improve trans health care if legislators passed a ban. Cohn stopped replying, and when Callahan looked at the television someone had set up in the waiting area, she saw Cohn had taken the stand.
“I’ve come to realize that gender medicine is not health care,” Cohn told legislators. “It is an attempt to achieve a form of perfection through medicalization.”
Callahan told Ogden she needed to be alone. She left the Statehouse and sat outside, looking at pictures of her son. She called her husband, and she listened as a protester pounded a drum.
The committee had announced it would vote around noon, so a few minutes before then, Callahan returned and found that the quiet halls had turned loud and chaotic. Mothers were yelling at Republican legislators, and teenagers were crying everywhere Callahan looked.
A sobbing woman grabbed Callahan and told her the committee had passed the bill, and it would now move to the full House.
“I appreciate you speaking up,” the woman told Callahan. “I just don’t know what to do with my little one. She’s been this way since she was a baby.”
“I’m so sorry,” Callahan said. “I’m so sorry.”
Callahan felt dizzy. She started to walk away, but after three or four steps, she turned back and pushed toward the chambers. She found Cohn inside, laughing with the representative who sponsored the bill.
Callahan’s legs shook, and her throat tightened as she walked toward them.
“You did a really bad thing today,” Callahan said.
“Why?” Cohn asked.
“Because you are hurting hundreds of people,” Callahan said. “You don’t live here. It was not your right to do this.”
Cohn shrugged, and the representative laughed.
“Bye Carey,” Cohn said.
Building a coalition
The House passed the health-care ban a week later, but after it reached the Senate, it sat without moving, and Callahan hoped it might die there, as a similar bill had done in 2022. She spent early fall teaching her son how to say “apple” and “all done,” and she found a job at a private therapy practice. Then, in November, Ohioans approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion. Two days after that, the state’s Republican senators announced they would move forward with the trans health-care ban.
Callahan tried to set up meetings with legislators, but most never answered or returned her calls. When she reached one Republican aide, the woman told her that her boss, a senator from the southwest corner of the state, said there was “no point” in meeting with Callahan.
The Senate began holding hearings later that month, and they reserved the first for supporters of the bill. Nearly half the people who spoke flew in from out of state. A detransitioned man from California said he’d become homeless after he transitioned in his 20s. A woman who regretted the top surgery she’d had at 18 in North Carolina described gender dysphoria as a “social contagion of mental suffering.”
Legislators had been hinting for weeks that they’d found another detransitioner in Ohio, one who supported the ban, and that woman testified, too. The woman said she’d transitioned at 21 and had stopped taking testosterone eight months earlier, when she was 25, and the months after were the most “brutal” of her life. She stopped showering, and she cried 10 times a day. She’d made plans to die by suicide.
Callahan watched footage of the hearing at home, and she felt sick. No one suggested improving the conditions that led the California man to become homeless, and no one floated the idea of supporting detransitioners with better mental health care or treatments such as electrolysis and reconstructive surgeries. The committee chair called the proponents “courageous,” then she adjourned the meeting.
All year, detransitioners had spoken in favor of health-care bans across the country. As far as Callahan knew, she was the only one who’d testified against them. But she knew other detransitioners agreed with her.
She had met one at the Statehouse the week before, a teen named Cassidy who was moving to Ohio for college and had seen Callahan on TikTok. Over lunch, Cassidy had told her that she’d lived with severe chest dysphoria for years. Her parents had supported her when she said she wanted to transition, and she’d had no trouble finding doctors, even in north Texas. She’d started hormones and had top surgery at 14, but she’d come to believe her providers hadn’t offered her the care she needed. They overlooked multiple mental health diagnoses, and her surgery consultation lasted just 15 minutes. Eventually, with therapy, she’d realized that her dysphoria stemmed from a sexual assault.
Cassidy said her life felt brighter now that she had detransitioned. Still, she felt deep empathy for trans people. She understood what dysphoria felt like, and she knew what it was to be oppressed. Her family had fled Texas after Child Protective Services, working on an order from the governor, investigated them because Cassidy once identified as trans. (She asked that her last name not be used because she still fears being investigated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is trying to collect information on trans youth from Texas who seek care in other states.) Cassidy’s family moved to Maryland, and she’d begun living as a girl again and was able to get reconstructive breast surgery through a new state program to cover trans and detrans treatments.
“We need more health care like that,” Cassidy said. “The red states are saying they’re trying to protect detransitioners, and none of them have even considered that.”
When the state Senate committee held its final hearing in early December, Carey drove down the night before, and Cassidy traveled eight hours through a snowstorm to testify alongside her.
As they strode into the Statehouse, Callahan beamed. Callahan had contacted dozens of detransitioners, and asked whether they would join her in testifying against Ohio’s ban. Nineteen submitted testimony — nearly triple the number who’d testified in favor of Ohio’s bill. It was more than had ever testified in one state.
The Statehouse was decorated with wreaths and a big tree for Christmas, and a harp player strummed holiday songs as Callahan and Cassidy attempted to stop senators in the hallway. One Republican listened as they told him about Maryland’s coverage for detransition health care. Another sent his aide out to talk.
The detransitioners who’d flown in from out of state described themselves as irreparably harmed. Cole had told Ohio legislators that she would always feel damaged. Callahan understood why the teenager might feel that way, but Callahan had learned that those feelings could pass. She wasn’t a mess anymore, and she didn’t feel broken.
Eighty-seven people signed up to testify, and when Callahan’s turn came, an hour into the 11-hour hearing, she reminded legislators that they had heard from only two Ohio detransitioners — neither of whom had transitioned as children.
“The proponents of this bill have not produced a patient who detransitioned or felt regretful about the treatment they received who attended one of our six pediatric programs,” Callahan said. “Quality health care prevents detransition — not a lack of health care. The rigor of Ohio’s six programs prevents detransition, which is why you have not heard of even one detransitioner who received pediatric gender affirming care in Ohio.”
The state Senate voted a week later, largely on party lines, to pass the ban. While Ohioans waited to see whether the governor would veto the bill, Callahan made one last effort to share what she’d learned. She wrote an op-ed in her local paper, noting that Ohio had some of the most cautious doctors in the nation. If the law passed, families with gender-questioning children would do what she had — move to places where they may receive less thoughtful care.
A few days later, in late December, political advocates said they’d heard the governor might call Callahan. She wasn’t sure whether he would, or whether the supermajorities would let his veto stand. But she’d come to believe that she could slowly build toward what she’d long wanted. She would keep working with Ogden and others to show that the best version of trans health care also supports people who desist. And if the governor called, she knew just what she would say.
