Detransitioners say they face vitriol from trans activists they previously considered a 'second family'

As the number of American adolescents identifying as transgender continues to climb, more and more teens and young adults are detransitioning. Some of these individuals are citing their decision to swap genders as a symptom of other problems which they masked under the guise of gender dysphoria at the coercion of online activists and the transgender community. 

After detransitioning, some individuals choose to speak out about their transition experience and in doing so, they often face vitriol from the transgender activist community, according to detransitioners who spoke with Fox News Digital about their experience. 

Detransitioner Luka Hein is currently 21, but she transitioned at the age of 16 after going through a tough time in her early teens, which included switching schools, her parents' divorce and online grooming, to the point police got involved. After that, she said she started to "disassociate" from her body to "an extreme degree." 

Hein explained that she started hating things about her body, including her breasts and her period, which coincided with depression and compounded many of her existing issues. She was prescribed hormonal birth control to stop her period, as well as antidepressants that "furthered the disassociation" from her body. 

"While this is all going on, I also kind of shut myself off and retreated more and more into online spaces," she told Fox News Digital. "In these online spaces, normal teenage insecurities like not liking your period or being self-conscious about how your body is growing and developing, growing more curves, breasts, stuff like that ... it was twisted into, 'Oh, these are not just normal teenage experiences, this means that you're actually a boy born in the wrong body,'" she explained. 

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Luka Hein began gender-affirming treatments at 15-years-old. (Courtesy of Luka "Bunny" Hein)

"Obviously from someone who went through trauma, was disassociated completely from their body, that was a that was an idea that all of a sudden I was like, 'Okay, yeah, that makes sense.'"

Hein said her 14-year-old self took this explanation as justification for the way she was feeling and "ran with it," instead of looking at any deeper issue about her past and the trauma she had faced. 

"During that time, no one really pushed back against what was going on after I came out, it was automatically accepted as like, 'Okay, yes, this is the issue,' despite the fact that these professionals knew the history of what was going on in my life, knew I had other co-morbidities, there was no push back," she said. "My parents were told that there is a suicide risk if you don't affirm …  the whole ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son’ mantra stuff."

At the age of 16, Hein had a double mastectomy which was followed a few months later by testosterone treatment. After that, even before she detransitioned, Hein said she had faced backlash for questioning aspects of the transgender community, including the push to redefine biological sex. 

"In high school, that made me rather unpopular with some of the other trans-identified people because they didn't like it … to the point where one of them almost punched me in the face at a youth pride event over it," she said. 

After she detransitioned, Hein said she started speaking out about her experience and in the communities of trans activists that formerly embraced her, she faced name-calling and threats. Instead of being the "kind" and accepting people they often claim to be, Hein said "they're always the most miserable people I've ever met, and they're always so mean."

Now in her early twenties, Luka has detransitioned to the gender she was assigned at birth.

Hein said she is willing to face backlash and vitriol because she believes in telling her story, but pointed out that there is a reason the public often does not hear from detransitioners because of the hate and intense backlash they receive from the transgender community.

Hein said the stress she felt from speaking out on these issues came to a head when she started having extreme anxiety and chest pains before a testimony, forcing her to pull back from doing in-person appearances because her body couldn't handle it. In some instances, she would encounter people, including elected officials, who would claim she was "killing people" by sharing her story. 

"It's funny because I can't think of really many, if any other medical practices that the victims of these medical practices get treated like this," she said. 

"It's one of those things where when you have a child or a young teenager and they're coming to you and they are distressed and they are saying, ‘I think every single thing is wrong with me, down to my very physical being’ … What kind of adult do you have to be to look that child in the eyes and say, 'Yes, everything is wrong with you and we're going to make sure we change everything about you, and you'll be better," she added. "You are just affirming every negative perception of themselves into reality, instead of helping them work through it."

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In March, Hein called out Nebraska State Senator Megan Hunt for her comments on the floor of the state legislature where she claimed transgender surgery "never happens" in the state. Hein tweeted a photo of her scarred chest from a double mastectomy that she received in Nebraska at the age of 16.

"It's ridiculous," Hein said. "A mental gymnastic loop of it is not happening. 'Okay, well, it is happening, but it's not that often. Okay, it's happening, but it's a good thing it's happening' to 'It's a good thing and you must accept it.'"

"I don't think I have ever seen those steps happen just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom so fast as I have with these issues specifically towards detransitioners," she added. 

Detransitioner Chloe Cole took has a double mastectomy at the age of 15.  (Twitter/Screenshot)

Detransitioner Chloe Cole, who is now 19-years-old, but began her gender transition at the age of 13, echoed Hein's sentiment, explaining she also started experiencing hate from the transgender activist community before she was public about her detransition. 

"Once I even said that I was detransitioning, that I regretted it, in that I was talking about my experience and how transitioning damaged my life, the immediate response from my transgender friends in this community that I once looked up to, that I once saw as a second family ... was now entirely against me," she said. 

Cole said those same people went out of their way to tell her she would never be pretty again or that she looked better as a boy, so there was no point in going back to female.  

"With each step [of my transition], I was actively encouraged to go further into it, I was celebrated for what I was doing, but now that I was being honest about it, now that it was something that was painful for me, they were telling me that I had to stop talking about my experience, that I was harming other people within the community by making them feel afraid of thinking this themselves," she said. 

Over the past few months, Cole said she has been on tour, visiting universities across the country because she feels it is an important issue to speak out about, but at every school she has experienced protests and backlash over her presence. 

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"For example, yesterday there was a protest they [trans activists] were holding," Cole recalled. "I've never seen anything like it before. It was like a concert drag queen dance ritual kind of thing and one of the men who was in women's clothing there went out of his way to try to intimidate me, shaking his fake breasts in my face, knowing that I had a double mastectomy at the age of 15, just a complete mockery of my experience and of women in general."

"This is a group of people that is very ideologically captured and many of them are not the most mentally stable, many of them have severe trauma that is not being addressed," Cole explained. "They're not being helped by the doctors … [which] are actively encouraging them to go further and further into their unhealthy lifestyles."

"They're convinced that there is a genocide actively being waged against them, against children and that any sort of pushback against this is pushback against their livelihoods," she added. "Basically, they're told that they are losing their basic human rights and they're losing their rights to health care."

One common accusation lobbed against detransitioners is that they themselves are "transphobes," which Cole said she struggled with when she first started speaking publicly about her experience. 

"That used to be very painful emotionally because this was a group that I was once a part of that I loved and that rejection, that loss of something that was really all that I knew for a very long time, was something that was a huge point of pain for me," she said. "

Chloe Cole testifies during the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government holds a hearing on gender affirming care for children. (Jasper Colt-USA TODAY)

But now it's something that I've gotten past," she added. "I recognize that these words, these threats, they're empty and these people, they're hurting. I was once in their situation, and it's hard to see that they've been so blinded by this ideology. I think that they deserve better."

In other instances on college campuses, professors have allegedly canceled classes in anticipation of Cole's visit for fear of the emotional trauma they believe her story will cause transgender students, which Cole described as incredibly weak. 

"If you can't handle a 19-year-old girl coming on to your campus to speak about her life experience, what else are you unable to handle?" she asked. "You are a grown adult. It's not my responsibility to be your mother or your therapist. There are things in life that are not comfortable, but you still have to face them."

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Cole said it is shocking the way that people go after her character, completely dismiss her story or make fun of what's happened to her body, but moving forward, the close relationships she has made with other detransitioners and those who have desisted keep her motivated to continue telling her story.

"Knowing that there's other people and entire other communities that are being affected by this, makes me want to fight for them, it makes me want to stop history from repeating itself ever again," she said.