Detransition Awareness Day 2026

I wanted to write something profound for Detransition Awareness Day, which is today, March 12^th. Unfortunately, my day job and personal life got in the way, and thus this is a brief post.

1. Yes, there is such a thing as Detransition Awareness Day. The population of detransitioners appears to be growing rapidly. Genspect has extensive coverage of today’s gathering in Washington D.C., which will be the largest gathering of detransitioners ever.

2. I highly recommend Stella O’Malley’s insightful piece on the four stages of detransition: psychological, social, legal, and medical. She emphasises that the process is non-linear, individual, and complicated.

3. We don’t know what percentage of trans-identifying people detransition, but it is a significant and growing share.

4. We do have lived experience accounts from detransitioners – I covered several stories in an earlier post.

5. Yes, there are detransitioners in India as well. I have no idea how many, but my personal interactions, and stories from doctors, such as the one in Mumbai’s Kokilaben Hospital, confirm there are some.

Stepping back, it is unsurprising that people detransition. The gender medicine industry does not provide true informed consent to patients. The harms of gender medicine are many; the benefits are not proven. Most fundamentally, gender medicine is built on the false premise that ‘sex reassignment’ is possible. It is not, because sex is real, binary, and immutable. One’s sex cannot change, regardless of body modification surgeries and cross-sex hormones.

When a healthcare field is built on such shaky ground, a wave of detransitioners is depressingly predictable.

Janhavi Nilekani is a public policy professional who works in maternal and child health. She is the Founder and Chairperson of Aastrika Foundation and Aastrika Midwifery Centre. She has a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard, and a Bachelor of Arts from Yale. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and not any institution she is affiliated with. The image was generated using ChatGPT.