Miles Yardley And The Detransition Wave

It's coming. How big will it be?

The transgender restroom selfie is a very important ritual

“They very quickly put me on hormones without really any discernment,” Miles Yardley tells The New York Post of his medical transition at the age of fifteen. “Looking back, if I were a doctor, I would think this is a much larger decision than the kid thinks that it is.” Indeed. None of us is the same person we were twelve years ago, so how on earth is a 15-year-old supposed to ‘know who they really are’ in the future, when they will be 27, like Yardley?

Yardley’s story resonates with everything detransitioners say about ‘gender medicine’ and its extortions. “His story is one that’s becoming all too familiar: A child with unconventional interests, swayed by strange ideologies on the Internet, is hustled by doctors into a life of medical dependency — only to find himself questioning everything years later,” Chadwick Moore reports. Imagine thousands of young people like Miles Yardley across America, because the real number is likely in the tens of thousands.

Yardley arrived in Manhattan during 2022 as ‘Salomé Evangelista’ and “quickly became the toast of New York’s downtown fashion scene,” Moore writes. Yardley transplanted again when he decided to get off the trans train. “I had to move to LA to detransition because I was like, I don’t want to have this conversation with people. I don’t want to tell the people hiring me or the parents of the students that I teach that I’m actually a man. I just couldn’t deal with that,” Yardley tells the Post.

Contrary to the framing of transgender activists, ‘minority stress’ was never a factor in Yardley’s transition or detransition. On the contrary, he was bullied into the identification. “I had not questioned my own identity before other people started asking me questions and putting that on me,” he says. The doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania prescribed endocrine disruption on Yardley’s second visit, telling him he was “the perfect example” of a transgender child. It was fraud.

Yardley’s story matches hundreds that I have heard from detransitioners and parents describing an industry that extorted ‘informed consent’ out of minors who could not possibly understand the consequences. And there have been consequences. “In April 2024, Yardley was diagnosed with pituitary adenoma — a type of brain tumor — and has hypothyroidism. Both conditions have suspected links to hormone therapy,” Moore reports. Detransitioners such as Exulansic have been raising awareness of this linkage for years.

“I thought that there would be less social friction for me if I looked like a female because so many people were assuming me to be that way. And I was not super comfortable with people assuming I was gay,” Yardley says. He is still not comfortable with the assumption that he is gay.

Yardley credits his Catholic community, “a welcome reprieve from the cattiness of couture life,” for helping him realize that “I’m hurting myself. I’m poisoning myself. I’m sterilizing myself. The normal things that bring meaning to normal people’s lives I’m shut off from because I can’t have children in this state. I can’t do the normal things that bring normal people meaning.”

He wants to meet a “nice Catholic girl” and settle down, if he he is able to be a father after more than a decade on cross-sex hormones. Because Yardley absolutely isn’t gay. He’s also not an autogynephile, of course, but he was never a homosexual transsexual, per Ray Blanchard’s typology, either.

“Gay and trans are the same thing”, Yardley told Valerie Stivers at UnHerd in March. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed.” Yardley now shares a house with ‘ex-gay’ Catholic Milo Yiannopoulos, who is also his talent agent. This statement is not true at all — no gay man ever needed hormones to be gay, no one’s “gender” is actually real enough to injure — but it works for some, and will work for others.

It remains unclear just how many children have been affected by hormones versus surgeries in pursuit of the ‘gender identity’ dragon, but we do have some clues. Stop the Harm has produced an anonymized database of 13,994 minors across the United States who were medicalized for “gender dysphoria” over four years, with thousands of them receiving “gender affirming” surgeries. It is only a partial list, as only some of the major insurers were included.

“The practice of sex ‘change’ surgery in minors is not nearly as rare as its advocates have said,” Dr. Leor Sapir told Ben Ryan, and chemical medicalization is even more common than that. In fact we have all been gaslit by activists across the media landscape who were peddling harmful patent medicine woo-woo for kids: ‘this never happens to minors,’ we were told, even as it was happening to Miles Yardley at 15 during the second Obama term. It took Yardley about 10 or 11 years to realize ‘transition’ was a lie — right about the average for detransition. And he was an early case.

In other words, we absolutely can expect more young people like Miles Yardley to emerge in the next few years. Lots more. Detransition will become a more common narrative. All the lies that detransition never happens, or almost never happens, will be impossible to support when public awareness of detransition reaches critical levels. While the detransitioners themselves are “transcending” the term as an identifier and moving on with their lives, they have stories to tell, and every one of them involves a false belief that they were the opposite sex.

Rebounding from that belief is usually a decentering, bewildering experience. Detransitioners often report going through huge shifts in perspective and opinion as a result of their realization that ‘gender’ was a lie. They find new religions, or go back to their old religions. They find new, healthier ways to exist. They challenge the assumptions that underlay the ‘trans rights’ cause, and their politics frequently change in the process. Sometimes their sexuality changes as hormonal interventions wear off.

In a presentation to the November 2023 Genspect conference in Denver, professor Wilfred Reilly described the size of the wave we should expect using figures in the tens of thousands. Of course, historically “the majority of those kids simply go on to be gay” if left alone, he noted. Except that now, some of them will reject homosexuality, too, while others will never be able to form complete romantic bonds of any kind with anyone because of the damage.

The consequences of the ‘gender journey’ that was sold in the clinics include long-term political reaction and generational backlash. We are not going to like all of the conclusions the rising generation draws from the detransition experience. They do not need or want us to let them lead. They want their lost time back, and they cannot ever get it.