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‘Perfect Storm’: How a Toxic Internet Diet and Exploitative Docs Pushed an Autistic Woman into Gender Transition
‘If a professional dug their heels in at some point, I think that could have saved me.’
Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a series on individuals who have “detransitioned” in the wake of gender-related medical interventions. Read the first installment, on a British man who was pressured into castration by a U.K. gender clinic, here. Read the second installment, on a bipolar teen whose history of mental-health problems didn’t stop doctors from pursuing medical transition, here. Warning: The following article contains a graphic photo of the subject’s torso, taken after she received a mastectomy. Reader discretion is advised.
“I was a true transsexual — a sure case — they said.”
The 33-year-old female detransitioner, who asked to be referred to using her online pseudonym, Peregrine, out of fear for her family’s safety, grew up “extremely tomboyish” on a rural farm in the Midwest. Raised by her grandparents, who at one time lived without running water and electricity, Peregrine was a social outcast from the cradle. While the girls in her class talked about boys and makeup, she went hunting and fishing.
“I didn’t fit in. People called me a lesbian even before I knew what that meant. Even in elementary school,” she said.
Peregrine was diagnosed with autism at the age of seven, but her family didn’t take it seriously.
“If I had known what I know now, girls with autism tend to be more masculine. There’s a link to autism and the transgender movement. It has more to do with how your brain works than your gender. People mistake personality for gender identity,” she said.
A very logical child, she’d get absorbed in male-oriented hobbies, whether cataloguing insects, reading encyclopedias, or roughhousing outside. Neither girls nor boys wanted to associate with her, which was very isolating, she said. Peregrine had no friends until high school.
Her grandfather was a bit sexist and subscribed to traditional gender roles, she said, which made her resent her femaleness more. An autistic child apprehensive about female puberty, Peregrine toyed with the idea of becoming a boy. Her family talked her out of it — but only temporarily.
“Then the internet happened,” she said.
Her family got dial-up internet access when she was twelve years old. Peregrine immediately found the furry community, a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters. There were many LGBT-identifying people, she recounted.
“It is a fetish community, straight up, absolutely, 100 percent. Anybody who tells you otherwise is wrong. They’re lying,” she said.
A man who ran an “anthrocon,” or a furry convention, tried to rebrand the community as family friendly, which “ended up luring in a lot of children,” Peregrine claimed. She said she’s heard of many stories about pedophilia in the furry space.
As an adolescent, Peregrine looked at furry porn, which features cartoon characters. One fetish she encountered was “vore,” short for “carnivore,” in which one experiences sexual arousal from imagining devouring someone whole. In addition to cannibalistic content, gay and transexual porn, “like a character with breasts and a penis,” became part of her regular consumption.
While extremely disoriented, Peregrine wondered whether the backwards gender depictions she saw were achievable in real life. “It was the opposite of how I felt, but I was like, ‘Oh does that mean I can be a boy?’” she said.
At 16 years old, Peregrine got pregnant. She was kicked out of her home and lived with the father temporarily. His family was abusive, she said, and kicked her out a couple months after she gave birth. They eventually took her to court to strip her of her custody and won, she said. For several months, Peregrine was homeless. Sometimes she slept in a drainpipe and lived off the land by eating native plants, she said.
“While I was technically legally emancipated at 17, no place would let me get an apartment,” she said. From work, Peregrine saved up enough money to live with roommates. She’d stay with older guys, she said, who would drink heavily, get her drunk, and show her even more porn.
“By that point, I was so thoroughly saturated in that stuff. The treatment you get from men your whole life, I was just like, ‘I’m sick of it.’ I have had people try to abduct me; I’ve had people molest me on the bus. I was sick of it,” she said. “I had always kind of thought about transition. There were rumblings of it on the internet, and I was like ‘I think I want to do this.’”
Between the exploitation from men, the pornography exposure, and her autism, it was a “perfect storm,” she said.
Peregrine started socially transitioning in 2012, shortly after she got married on a whim to a man in the military whom she met online.
“I was like, ‘I’ll do it, I don’t care about my life.’ So, I did,” she said. “It was a marriage of convenience.” They were frequently separated by distance, with him being deployed.
Like many other transgender individuals, Peregrine found Tumblr, “an early hive of transition,” she said. Since she was a teenager, she frequented 4chan, an anonymous website that is a hotbed of bizarre activity and discussion.
“When I got computer access after being homeless, I was on there daily. There’s a lot of messed-up stuff,” she said. It was gender material galore, including resources on how to bind and acquire testosterone. The gender craze now sweeping society has its roots on Tumblr, she said.
“They pushed the social justice and oppression hierarchy on you. On Tumblr back then, the more oppressed you were, the more sway you had,” she said. “Now that’s just the way the world works because those people grew up and apparently had wealthy parents. I’m sure to many people it feels like one day the world just went crazy.”
“To me, it feels like the world is Tumblr. It’s surreal and gross,” she added.
After being submerged in Tumblr, Peregrine decided to pull the trigger on taking testosterone in 2014 at age 24. Three years later, she underwent a double mastectomy. National Review has obtained medical documents confirming that Peregrine received the prescription and procedure.
“I hated my breasts. They grossed me out. If somebody touched them, I felt like I would vomit,” she said. “It was similar with my voice. If someone recorded my voice and played it back to me, I would get nauseous. I think I just hated myself so much.”
There was a lot of moral blackmailing from doctors, who told her that medical intervention was the only way to relieve the gender dysphoria. She made the same case to her husband as he tried to discourage her from transitioning, she said.
“I would say, ‘I’m suffering, you don’t want me to suffer, right?’ That’s a rough thing to put on your spouse,” she said. “If they really love you, they’ll say, ‘Of course I don’t want you to suffer,’ and the doctors will tell you all the same things. They’ll say, ‘This is the only way.’”
Rather than surgery and hormones, she needed therapy, she said. She needed a professional who could explain that her typically male interests — cars, guns, and contact sports — shouldn’t prevent her from living as a woman, and that her discomfort with her body was likely related to her autism.
A 2020 study found that people who identify as transgender are six times as likely to be autistic as those who don’t struggle with gender dysphoria. Autistic females tend to have high testosterone levels and more masculine features, while autistic males tend to have more feminine features, according to Dr. Lawrence Fung, a psychiatrist at Stanford University.
None of the medical professionals, supposedly sworn to “do no harm,” pushed back on the life-changing decision, Peregrine said.
Peregrine had her student therapist from a local clinic simply write a letter recommending her for surgery, after meeting the requirement to be on hormones for at least two years. “The therapy letter is a joke. They just give it to you as soon as you ask, even back then,” she said. Her doctors signed her papers without protest, and then she was on the operating table.
“I was an adult, albeit a vulnerable autistic and traumatized one, so I feel like a lot of it’s my fault. But they do encourage transition as soon as you bring it up, and if a professional dug their heels in at some point, I think that could have saved me,” she said.
Peregrine received the mastectomy from Dr. Scott Mosser, a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon who’s since become well known for performing gender-transition surgeries. In 2013, he opened the Gender Confirmation Center to keep delivering on his “deep and long-lasting commitment to gender confirmation surgery,” according to the website. It notes that Mosser has 13 years of experience performing these procedures.
Peregrine feels wronged by the medical gender industry, which she was suspicious of before transitioning but now views as a “money-making mutilation machine,” she said.
“Now these monsters are taking advantage of vulnerable people who hate themselves for a profit,” she said. “I think it’s ironic that so many people who identify as trans these days fancy themselves socialists, when the transgender medical complex is the most brutal dark spot of capitalism in recent history.”
Mosser did not respond when asked about Peregrine’s allegations.
Now, the scars from her top surgery and the nipple-grafting hurt all the time, she said. Peregrine has a plethora of autoimmune disorders.
“My neurologist is convinced that the testosterone caused neuropathy in my limbs,” she said. Testosterone induces early menopause, doctors have told her, which fast-forwards health issues that ordinarily don’t set in until your 60s.
“If you were predisposed to autoimmune issues, you’re signing up for that much earlier. They don’t tell you that when they start you on hormones,” she said.
Peregrine has multiple specialists, many of whom still don’t have explanations for some of her symptoms. At 30 years old, she developed arthritis, which her neurologist believes was triggered by the testosterone. Her body struggles to absorb Vitamin B-12, making her constantly lethargic, so she gets shots often. During her transition, she visited hospitals in multiple states. One gender clinic purged her records, she discovered recently, because they were over seven years old.
“I think they’re covering their a**es by throwing these out as soon as humanly possible. I think deep down these people know there’s going to be a wave of detransitioners coming,” she said. “I am the canary in the coal mine. You’re going to see a lot more in the next five, ten years.”
In 2015, Peregrine and her husband decided to recommit to their marriage. They talked about having children.
“Everyone thinks they know exactly when they want in the future, but they don’t. Especially when you have a bad upbringing and bad experience in young adulthood and then you get with a good person and get stable,” she said. “It changes your feelings a lot. I’d never thought I’d be stable enough to be a parent.”
Still identifying as a man, Peregrine joined a parent group for transgender men.
“Everyone was insane. They were saying things like, ‘It’s white supremacist to be against nonbinary people.’ Crazy off-the-wall stuff,” she said.
Multiple men she knew medically transitioned because she inspired them, which creeped her out, she said. “They tried to imitate me pre-trans. That was in the back of my mind,” she added.
The parenting group then started admitting nonbinary people and transgender women, many of whom dismissed her for using “TERF logic” in the comments. TERF is a derogatory acronym used by trans activists that stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.” Some members talked about raising their children gender neutral, without telling them their birth sex, which upset Peregrine. She got banned from that group and a few others for her opinions.
About a year after getting off testosterone due to the mounting health complications, Peregrine stopped passing as a guy, which made her distressed at first.
“But then I thought about it, and I was like, ‘Why do I care so much?’ The things that bothered me the most, my breasts and my voice, are gone. So, then I thought, ‘Maybe I should take back some control and identify as female,’” she said.
Peregrine had heard that gender ideology was being pushed on kids in school, so she investigated.
“It’s all real. So that sucked to find out. And I was like, ‘Man, what have I been supporting?’ How did things get this crazy?” she said. “I became more informed and conservative as a result. It’s funny that their own behavior is what turns people against them now.”
Having transitioned before it was mainstream, Peregrine is now often labeled a transphobe. “I know what I’m talking about,” she said. Living as a woman, Peregrine has a five-month-old son, whom she almost died giving birth to due to a blood clot in her lung that her current doctors believe may have been caused by the testosterone.
“They think the testosterone might have upped the risk factor on that,” she said. “My platelet count was permanently elevated. I am still on blood thinners.”
Having once detested her breasts, she lamented their loss during pregnancy, when she was constantly reminded that she couldn’t breastfeed.
“I’m ashamed. I regret it. Even though my breasts caused me distress because I have sensory issues, being autistic, now I understand their purpose,” she said.
Peregrine didn’t use to mourn her feminine voice until recently. When she talks to her infant son, she notices he’s not as engaged when she speaks in her normal voice as when she speaks in a high register.
“Suddenly, it all clicked. I was already made perfect; I just didn’t know it.”