‘It’s disgusting, I’m disgusting’: Male detransitioner explains why no one – not even adults – should have cross-sex surgery

Ritchie Herron’s life will never be the same.

As a young British adult dealing with depression, OCD and latent homosexuality, he thought becoming a woman would make all his problems go away.

It did just the opposite.

In an interview for the podcast, Gender: A Wider Lens, Herron recalls his high school misery, including bullying and an ear infection that led to deafness.

“I’m short, fat, with a stinky ear. My parents are going through a divorce. I’m getting groomed online. I was having a s–t time,” he said.

Herron became obsessed with transgenderism, which he now believes was an OCD rumination.

But gender clinic professionals ignored Herron’s other mental health issues. Instead, they repeatedly offered him cross-sex surgery without any discussion of the potential consequences.

The regret he experienced after surgery was overwhelming.

“It was when I really started to look at myself in the mirror, and I just looked like I’d been savaged. It looked like I’d been attacked,” Herron said. “There wasn’t anything wonderful about it. It literally looked like an animal had got on my crotch and it just went to town on it. And I was just like, ‘What the f–k have I done?’”

Herron, 35, no longer identifies as a woman, but there will never be a way back to his old self.

In a series of indelicate tweets, Herron explains in graphic and self-deprecating detail what it’s like living in a body mutilated by cross-sex surgery.

I'm a year in. And I'm handing in my ????

A ????

— TullipR/Ritchie ???? ???? (@TullipR) January 30, 2023

“It’s f—ing awful,” he writes, “like my a—crack has been extended all the way to the front. It’s disgusting, I’m disgusting.”

“Detransition/Transition are both lies,” he writes in another. “Neither happened, I just became a eunuch, overdosed on estrogen and for a while, took testosterone.”

Now, Herron is speaking out to help people like him, particularly detransitioning males.

“There are sects of people who will view any male as highly, highly negative,” he says. “You cannot be a victim because you are the oppressor.”

He also argues for the importance of helping adults, not just children.

“You need to focus on the adults because when you focus on the adults, you inherently will capture the kids too. If you just focus on the kids, you will only stop that happening from [sic] them.”

Biological males struggle to find support because “they get told that the only sympathy available is for children or women,” Herron explains.

His advice to other transgender people was all too pointed.

“Avoid surgeons at all costs.”

“I do have a lot of libertarian values and I don’t want to restrict anyone from doing something, but I don’t want to enable people to hurt themselves,” he continued. “Like in the same way I wouldn’t let an anorexic have a gastric bypass, I don’t think it’s appropriate for most people to have genital surgery.

“The vast majority should not be having it.”