Two 'Regretters' Discuss the Damage

In this 2010 Swedish documentary

The sad litany of transition regret has become familiar to a much larger share of the English-speaking world than it was just five or six years ago, but it has yet to break through into the mainstream.

It’s all here in this 2010 film: internalized homophobia. The stress of “passing.” The lies they told to the people they loved, the lies they told themselves, the idea of the self. It was always there, waiting to be seen and heard, but not in English.

Of all the nations now retreating from “affirmative” models of “gender identity,” Sweden had the earliest turn because a frank public conversation about detransition began more than a decade ago, before gender identitarians had gained the political, cultural, and corporate silencing power they enjoy across the western world today.

Ångrarna, or “Regretters,” a 2010 film by Marcus Lindeen, presents Orlando Fagin and Mikael Johansson, two men who chos…