By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
“It took me almost two decades to realize the error,” Antoinette De La Cruz told a Fort Collins audience on November 20. “Transitioning didn’t fix anything. It delayed the inevitable. Healing.”
It was the first time many Coloradans had heard a detransitioner describe her path into transition, what it cost her and what brought her back.
Read RMV’s reporting on the event here.
Here she shared the fuller account of her story.
Where it began
De La Cruz said her transition began long before hormones or surgery. “I learned very young as a little girl that I was not valued as a woman, and I definitely was not safe as one,” she said. When she was seventeen she met someone who told her she could become a man. “I had no idea you could even do that,” she said. “Once I learned you could become a man I thought, now I could become valuable and now I’ll be safe.”
“I was suffering from a disconnection with myself,” she said.
While her story reflects the emotional and physical cost of transition, physicians are raising concerns about the medical side of these interventions. Colorado physician Dr. Travis Morrell said in an interview, “Your brain needs hormones to develop. Puberty blockers stop all of that. You don’t need studies to know that’s harmful.”
The collapse of gatekeeping
De La Cruz said the professionals around her had several opportunities to stop the process. She described falsified documentation, rushed evaluations and insurance workarounds.
In Colorado, a therapist’s letter is required before a surgeon will proceed with gender related operations. The letter is meant to confirm a diagnosis and document completed therapeutic steps.
“I lied about how long I lived as a man. I didn’t go to therapy. But the therapist still wrote the letter,” she said. When she returned two years later for updated paperwork, the evaluator simply changed the date and approved it again. “Everything was rushed and fudged,” she said.
Another clinician looked for fibroids to justify a surgery insurance would not otherwise cover. “I appreciated their compassion but I needed their ethics,” she said. “I was sick. I was mentally ill, and you allowed me to go down this path.”
A comparison stayed with her. A woman once asked a doctor to remove her healthy eyes because she felt she should be blind. “He told her absolutely not,” De La Cruz said. “Why then would you take healthy breasts from a sick person like me.”
Morrell said stories like hers reflect a larger pattern in the field. “We are harming some of the same organs we condemn other countries for mutilating,” he said.
The surgeries and what they cost
“I died twice on the table,” she said. After a surgeon perforated her bowel she developed a severe infection. During emergency surgery she was under anesthesia for so long she stopped breathing. “They had to put a machine on me like a leaf blower to breathe for me,” she said.
She later wore a temporary ileostomy bag, one of her greatest fears. In another surgery she stopped breathing again. “You would think that would be enough for me,” she said. “But it wasn’t. Later that year I went and got my breasts removed.”
“I convinced myself these were rites of passage,” she said. “I was earning my transness. I thought I had to die to my old self.”
“Before you mutilate your body, you have options,” she said. “Once you sterilize yourself and remove those parts, you can never recover them.”
Morrell said some doctors tell kids they can “just get their breasts later again in life,” something he described as medically impossible. “I don’t know how a doctor says that,” he said. “To a doctor they’re organs, they perform a function, and if you cut them off you can’t replace them.”
He was referring to comments made by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, who told a classroom that, “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.
The shift that saved her
She said the first change had nothing to do with medicine but with how she faced her own inner world. “A person’s ability to heal is directly tied to their ability to be honest with themselves,” she said. “And the only way I could be truly honest with myself was to finally learn compassionate gentleness for myself.”
“That gentleness made room for responsibility. “It takes a level of accountability and integrity to be able to say ‘I made a mistake and now I’m going to correct it,’” she said.
The shift also required learning to sit with her thoughts instead of running from them. “Mindfulness helped me understand why I wasn’t doing well.” She explained, “You ask: Why am I reacting this way? What’s triggering me?”
“When you get to a place where you can be calm during those spaces it becomes a moment of reflection,” she said. “Kids need that ahead of time instead of being pushed into disconnection.”
She said the same internal work that helped her could help others long before any medical intervention is considered. “Critical thinking should be taught, not removed,” she said. “Kids need tools to understand themselves before anything else.”
“The inevitable was healing,” she said. “Becoming whole again.”
Her advice to parents
She often speaks about how families can approach a young person in gender distress. The tool she finds most effective is motivational interviewing.
“Motivational interviewing allows the child to answer their own questions,” she said. “Ask with curiosity and love, not judgment.” She suggested asking when the feelings began, how the child learned about the concept and what concerns might arise. “Kids expect judgment,” she said. “Curiosity disarms all of that.”
While she spoke about the conversations that can help inside families, the support families find outside the home can look very different.
Morrell said parents frequently tell him they are shocked by the lack of support they receive from institutions. “Parents feel like they’re living in a twilight zone because the very systems meant to help them turn against them,” he said.
Why helping others is so hard
She hopes to guide other detransitioners through recovery, but not everyone is ready.
“It’s like talking to someone in a cult,” she said. “They escalate the moment they hear something they don’t like.” She described an online exchange where a stranger called her a liar, and then accused her of wanting trans people murdered. “That’s quite a jump,” she told him. “Walk me through that.”
“They create their own reality and escalate immediately,” she said. “It’s not healthy communication.”
She said adults often project their confusion onto kids. “Adults are passing on their delusions and confabulation to children,” she said. “Kids don’t know they are trans unless someone teaches it to them.”
The people who stood by her
“One of the hardest realizations,” she said, “was learning how the community I once relied on responded to my doubts.—They’ll use you as a puppet until you’re no longer useful. Especially if you detransition, they have nothing to do with you.”
Her perspective changed when she learned what was happening to families across Colorado. “I had no idea it went this deep,” she said. “I didn’t know it was that damaging, but once new information is presented I act accordingly.”
“Folks from different backgrounds have taken me under their wing,” she said. “They’ve been protective of me. They’ve been making sure I make the right connections and that I’m safe.”
She also spoke about her connection with Morrell. “He reminds me of an older brother,” she said. “He’s been nothing but kind, gentle, respectful, compassionate,” she said, adding that his commitment to protecting kids reflects the strength she wishes more people had. “To me that’s a real man,” she said.
Morrell reacted to the praise with his admiration of De La Cruz. He called her “the nicest person you’ll ever meet” and said she is “amazing,” adding, “I wish everybody would listen to Antoinette’s talk.”
Reclaiming her life
When she stepped away from transition everything shifted. “I was living in darkness, like a pit I couldn’t get out of. When I stepped back into who I am—everything changed,” she said.
She described a renewed sense of levity and a reconciliation with her parents after nearly ten years apart. “There’s a health to my life I never had before,” she said. “I am in recovery from my disorder.”
She shares her story because she knows how few people make it through the process. “If people survive it, then we could get them into recovery,” she said. “There are other people who are sick that may not make it.”
Her public updates can be found on her Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61583956537814
“I want them to hear me because I know how dark that hole is,” she said.
