At 21 years old, after a history of being treated for social anxiety, clinical depression, panic attacks, self-harming behaviour, and a suicide attempt, Michelle Zacchigna thought she might be a man.
She was unhappy and depressed and had dropped out of university due to her declining mental health. She became fascinated with a “gender nonconformity” subculture on the internet and believed that once she took on a new identity and gender, the depression would go away.
At the time, videos on social media of people documenting their transition were “really popular,” she said.
“It was almost indoctrination,” Zacchigna told The Epoch Times.
“You could watch someone as their body changed, one week on testosterone, two weeks, and their voice would change. It draws people in. … It was interesting and very novel. You can’t think about how it’s going to affect the rest of your life—you’re only thinking about what it’s going to do for you right now.”
In 2010, she went to a support group at a health centre in Toronto. There, a psychotherapist who also happened to be a trans man and transgender activist suggested that she change her sex and connected her with doctors who treated transgender patients.
Zacchigna, now 34 and living in Orillia, Ont., identified as a man for 10 years. For five of those years, she took testosterone, which permanently altered and deepened her voice. She went to Florida for a double mastectomy to remove her breasts, and afterward had an Ontario surgeon perform a partial hysterectomy on her healthy uterus.
However, most of what she underwent to become a man cannot be reversed. She has male-pattern baldness and facial hair. Her body is permanently scarred. Her chest is flat, and she can never become pregnant and bear children.
She has gone public with her story to warn others who may be vulnerable that the gender decisions made during a “mental health crisis” cannot be reversed.
Lawsuit
Zacchigna recently filed the first lawsuit of its kind in Canada against eight physicians and mental health professionals, alleging that they permitted her to “self-diagnose as transgender and prescribe her own treatment” without exploring alternative treatments to removing healthy body parts and without ensuring she was of mentally sound mind to provide informed consent.
In one case, a doctor spoke to her for less than an hour before referring her for hormone therapy, she says.
Zacchigna says she doesn’t know if she will win her court case, but she wants her story to be told.
She says children don’t have the critical thinking skills to properly decide if they should permanently change their bodies.
“Even at 21, I couldn’t see those things,” she says.
“I think there are very, very few people that develop a hatred of their body or gender dysphoria on their own. And I don’t necessarily think that means that they’re actually transgender, I think it just means that they have a specific mental disorder. … For me, it was feeling like I never belonged anywhere. I was in a terrible state of mind. I couldn’t even take care of myself.”
At the time, it didn’t occur to her that she might experience deep regret in the future.
“It was a million different things that I had put together in my mind, to make me believe that I was transgender. But in reality, the reason I wasn’t comfortable in women’s clothing was because I had weird sensitivities because I’m autistic and have ADHD,” she says.
‘Social Contagion’
Zacchigna says she wouldn’t have taken the path of transitioning if it hadn’t been for the internet.“This was a social contagion for me. I can say that without the internet, I never would have transitioned. It never would have happened,” she said. “The longer I went [online], the more I saw and read that said everything I was feeling meant I was actually transgender.”
During the period of time that she decided to transition, Zacchinga lost her job, moved back home with family in another city, and was isolated with no friends.
“I was smoking marijuana, pretty much from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed,” she says.
She realizes now that she should have been referred to a psychological assessment before she transitioned. “I was autistic, I had trauma, I had low libido. I was not transgender. I came to the wrong conclusion,” she says.
‘Transition or Suicide’
According to Zacchigna, families are being pressured into invasive gender-transition procedures.“There is coercion going on,” she says. “Parents are told, do you want a dead son or an alive daughter—sometimes right in front of the child. They keep pushing this idea that if a child wants to transition and they are not allowed, they will kill themselves.”
Zacchigna says the trans community “really pushes this idea” that lives are at risk if youth can’t switch sexes.
“It’s a form of emotional blackmail. It’s very reckless,” she says.
Zacchinga’s decision to go back to female came in part from watching a friend who was born male and had been living as female and decided to detransition back to his birth sex.
“I watched him stop taking estrogen. He has to take testosterone injections now,” she says. He'd already had an orchiectomy to remove his testicles,” she says.
“We had a lot of conversations about it, and even some fights. He felt like his therapist had pushed him into [transitioning].”
Her friend now also deeply regrets his surgery, she says. Like Zacchigna, he can never have children of his own. Six months after watching her friend go through detransition and work through the psychological process, she decided to do the same.
“People shouldn’t be allowed to do something permanent and irreversible to themselves while they’re in such a vulnerable state,” Zacchigna says.
