After living a decade of his life as a transgender woman named Brianna, Brian Wagoner came to one realization, he had made a huge mistake.
In February, the 31-year-old made the decision to detransition back to his biological gender and live once again as a man.
“Coming out of my transition was like leaving the Twilight Zone, but the rest of society is still in it,” says Wagoner.
“It was basically like medical professionals cheering on a girl with bulimia for puking up her lunch when her ribs are already poking out,” he said of the estrogen treatment he was put on for years. “There’s a lot of money to be made by doctors here. They see the dollar signs, and in the end, money talks.”
Wagoner reached out to news media after seeing an article in June. The article talked about two young women who really regretted transitioning into men when they were in their teens.
One of those detransitioners, Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy, is now campaigning for a Florida rule that will block Medicaid funds from paying for medical interventions in cases like hers.
Growing up in San Gabriel Valley, Calif., the son of divorced parents, Wagoner said he was always a typical boy.
“When I was a kid, I liked Legos and trucks,” he said. “I never wanted to wear my sister’s clothes. I never wanted to play with Barbies.”
However, Wagoner also knew he was gay and that was something frowned upon in his father’s household, where he lived as a teen.
Wagoner said his dad is a Vietnam veteran and “a very alpha male, super-macho kind of guy. I learned … at a young age that being gay is a terrible thing. I was so paranoid about him finding out that I was.”
As a very closeted teen, Wagoner chose to outlet his frustrations through drugs.
By the time he transferred from a junior college to the University of La Verne in California to study sociology at age 20, Wagoner claims, he was regularly using marijuana, ecstasy, Adderall and cocaine that he got from friends and dealers at his school. He said he began experiencing withdrawal, was staying up for days on end, and even contemplated suicide.
He also developed an online porn addiction. Gay porn led him to transgender fetish content, which sparked a sudden feeling of gender dysphoria, also described as a discomfort within one’s body. “Before I discovered this bizarre subgenera of pornography, the idea of being a woman never crossed my mind. Never. It just came out of nowhere, really,” he said.
After making this discovery and being desperate to grasp a lifeline, in early 2012, Wagoner started looking into information about the transgender movement on YouTube and found a clinical social worker based in Los Angeles who made videos about trans people. He made an appointment to see her. During their first in-person session, he said, she immediately told him he could be transgender.
“I just thought maybe I had some sort of weird fetish,” Wagoner said. “But I went to go see this therapist, and she told me I’m really a woman trapped in a man’s body and all my other problems were really because I was transgender.”
After just a few therapy sessions, the therapist gave Wagoner, then 22, a referral letter to see a doctor in Hollywood who wrote him a prescription for estrogen on his first visit, he said. “This therapist knew I was addicted to drugs. She knew I had severe depression. But we didn’t go over any of that. It was just about hormones.”
Along with regular hormone therapy, Wagoner had laser hair removal on his entire body and legally changed his name to Brianna. At the time, transition seemed like a way to escape his suppressed identity. “The idea that I’d be a heterosexual woman and not a gay man was just really appealing to me,” he said. “I was so sick of being Brian the ‘f-g.’ I just liked the idea of being literally anyone else.”
People even rewarded him socially for transitioning to a woman at college. “At my college, I was basically like a minor celebrity for being trans,” Wagoner said. “I got a lot of praise, and people suddenly wanted to be my friend.”
Yet, Wagoner said his personal life was still an extreme struggle. “Transition made all my problems worse,” he said. He got into even harder drugs, including heroin, after graduating from college. He went to rehab four times before finally getting sober and holding down a steady job, which he declined to disclose out of concern he will be targeted by the gender activist community.
After he started tuning out all the online propaganda and contrarian media figures like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, Wagoner said, he realized he no longer wanted to be Brianna. “Once I got off drugs and got a real job, I just had a clear head and started feeling a new gender dysphoria all over again,” he said. “I was looking at myself in the mirror and looking at my childhood photos as a little boy and started thinking, ‘What have I done?’”
In February, Wagoner chose to become a man once more after living a third of his life as a woman. Wagoner said, “I cut my hair, stopped hormone therapy, and changed my name back.”
He says he was so glad he didn’t get surgery, but admitted to suffering painful urination and having an inflamed pelvic area due to estrogen treatment. Now he is being monitored for osteoporosis, a known side effect of hormone therapy.
After years of repressing his true self, he has finally come to terms with who he is. “I really reconnected with being myself and accepted the fact that I’m gay,” Wagoner said. He even came out to his father, who he said has fully accepted him. “My dad and I are cool now. He knows I’m gay, and he doesn’t even care. Had I been honest from the get-go, I do think it could have possibly prevented me from going down this path.”
In retrospect, Wagoner blames medical professionals for glossing over the other personal crises he was experiencing, like internalized homophobia and drug addiction. “My therapist really was an activist who also happened to be a psychologist,” he said. “I probably should have been put in a psychiatric hospital, not given estrogen. I just needed someone to listen to me, but this woman had me go and change my body’s chemistry and my whole life.”
Now that he’s content living as a man, Wagoner said, he hopes his tale serves as a warning to others. “The reason I decided to speak out is because here in California, there really are no barriers to transition.” He said he’s even considering pursuing legal action against the therapist and doctor who helped him coast through his transition without ever investigating what was really going on under the surface.
“I just don’t want to see people have the same bad experience that I had,” he said. “I hope someone will hear this story and really think about what they’re doing and get therapy.”
I wonder if he listens to Creep by STP all of the time now?
I find it interesting that this young man wanted to be a new person…. so he decided to become a woman. I wish he had considered his Creator, Jesus Christ. In Genesis humans are created in the image of God: 3 parts. Father(mind), Son(flesh), and Spirit(spirit)). Each person is born with a spirit that cannot be changed. We can change our mind and our flesh, but not our God-given spirit. That is eternal. Often a transgender spirit will suddenly appear to remind the person what they really are, no matter how they try to change their physical appearance.
This man could have made the best decision and come to Jesus Christ. “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things become new.” 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17.
GOD LOVES HIM SO MUCH!!!!
At age 32 I became a new person when I submitted to my Creator, Jesus Christ. The LORD of a second chance!
Seeing that the foster care kids are being targeted by social media for gender dysphoria it’s clear it has more to do with depression than anything else. Again once the free money from big daddy government starts paying for things all the evil doctors get in on the taking. Estimated about $70,000 per surgery. This is about big medicine once again it has nothing to do with children . We are living in an age where the doctors themselves are evil.