When Regret Finds You: An Honest Conversation About Gender Transition and What Comes Next
Regret is part of being human, and it takes many forms. Here is what it really means in the context of gender-affirming care, and how we can hold it with compassion.
Regret is one of the most weaponised words in the conversation around gender-affirming care, and I want to talk about it properly, because it deserves so much more than the way it tends to be used. It gets cited to justify restrictions, to withdraw funding, to suggest that anyone who is trans and seeks medical support is somehow making a terrible, irreversible mistake. The truth is more complicated, more human, and more important than that.
Every Human Decision Carries the Possibility of Regret
Regret is woven into the fabric of human life. We ponder the jobs we took, and the ones we turned down. We wonder about the relationships we stayed in too long, and the ones we walked away from too soon. We think about the things we said, and the things we held back. We ask ourselves what might have been if we had taken a different road at a particular moment. That kind of questioning is not a sign of having failed. It is a sign of being alive, and of caring deeply about the life we are living.
In the context of gender transition, regret can take many forms, and it is important that we try to understand all of them rather than reaching for the ones that support a particular argument. There is regret about medicines taken, and regret about medicines not taken. There is regret about having had puberty blockers, and wondering what the path might have looked like without them. There is regret about surgery, or about the outcomes of surgery not matching what was hoped for. There is the profound hope that hormones would bring a kind of second puberty, that you would be able to move through the world as the person you know yourself to be, and the regret that sometimes follows when the experience does not quite match the hope.
There is also regret that has nothing to do with medicine at all. The regret of a life changed in ways you did not fully anticipate: friendships lost, family members who stepped away, a social circle that reformed around you in unexpected ways, a working life or a daily life that felt unfamiliar for a time. All of these are real. All of them deserve our attention and our compassion. None of them should be used as a reason to withhold care from everyone else.
The Part We Talk About Too Little: Non-Binary Identities and How Gender Understanding Evolves
One of the things that makes regret so complex in this space is that our understanding of our own gender identity does not arrive fully formed. For many people, the first realisation that their gender is different from the one they were assigned at birth comes with an assumption: that if they are not the gender they were assigned, they must be the other one. That is an understandable assumption, because it reflects the binary world most of us have grown up in.
The reality is far richer and more varied than that. Non-binary and agender identities, where a person sits somewhere other than clearly male or clearly female, perhaps somewhere along a broad and shifting spectrum, are not well understood and are very little spoken about. Someone discovering their gender identity for the first time may not even know that the full spectrum exists, let alone have any sense of where they sit on it. It might feel like a 50/50 split, or something more like 30/70, or something else again entirely. There is no single destination that is correct, and there is no timeline by which someone must have arrived.
If someone took steps to align with what they understood their gender identity to be, and later found that their understanding of themselves had evolved, that is not a failure on anyone’s part. It is a reflection of how understanding our gender identity works: it develops over time, through lived experience, through the way the world responds to us, through the way we see ourselves in different relationships and different contexts. The care we offer needs to be able to hold that complexity, and to support people through the evolution of that understanding, rather than treating any single moment of decision as the only moment that matters.
The People Around You, and the Weight They Carry
Regret does not only belong to the person who transitioned. It can reach the people around them too, and this is something we do not talk about nearly enough.
If you supported someone through their transition as a parent, a partner, a sibling, a friend, or a professional, and that person later experienced regret about some element of what happened, you may find yourself carrying a weight that is difficult to name. You may find yourself wondering whether you asked enough questions, whether you were too encouraging or not encouraging enough, whether your support was the right kind of support.
Please hear this clearly: supporting someone who comes to you with a trans identity is always the right thing to do. Going through it together, asking questions, talking to specialists, taking the time to understand what your person genuinely needs, all of that is what good and loving support looks like. If the outcome was not what either of you hoped for, that is not a reflection of your love being misplaced or your judgement being poor. It means that you are human, that the person you love is human, and that life does not always follow the path we mapped out for it.
The support that is needed when regret appears is not different in kind from the support that was needed at the very beginning. It is about sitting alongside someone, working out what comes next, understanding what changes might help, whether that means adjusting or stopping medicines, exploring what reversal might look like, or simply finding a way to live more comfortably and more honestly in a different relationship with gender identity. The journey continues, and so does the need for care.
Moving Forward From Regret, Not Away From It
Regret is not the end of the story. It is a signal, a message from your own inner life that something needs attention or that something needs to change. The question it is really asking is not a harsh one. It is not asking why you did what you did. It is asking something much kinder: what do we do now, and how do we get there together?
Finding the right support in those moments matters enormously. Someone who genuinely understands gender-affirming care, who knows the medical and psychological landscape, who comes to the conversation without judgement and with a genuine desire to help, can make a profound difference to someone navigating this kind of regret. This is not about blame, and it is not about anyone having got it badly wrong. It is about continuing to move towards a life that fits.
Gender incongruence is very real. The distress it causes is very real. The decisions people make in response to it are made in good faith, with the knowledge available at the time, and with a deep and genuine desire to live more fully and more authentically. When those decisions bring some regret alongside them, that does not mean the care was wrong. It does not mean the person was wrong. It means they are human, doing the best they can in a world that does not yet fully understand them, and they deserve our continued compassion and our continued support.
I really hope this is helpful to you, wherever you are in your own journey, or in the journey of someone you love.
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Resources
How Many People Detransition? Exploring Detransition – Jack Turban
Dr Helen Webberley | Gender Specialist and Medical Educator
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Nevertheless, I struggle to find any excuse for those "gender critical" ideologues who insist the real regret rate is far, far higher than less than 1%.