Driven to gender confusion by an absent, macho father, Garcia went to see a therapist who offered to refer him for hormone treatment after one visit.
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth installment in a series on individuals who have “detransitioned” in the wake of gender-related medical interventions. Read the first four installments here.
Growing up in a Mexican family in Southern California, Abel Garcia, a 26-year-old male detransitioner, never quite lived up to his culture’s idea of what a man should be.
As a shy kid unable to conform to macho expectations, Garcia started questioning at a young age if he’d ever qualify as a man in the eyes of his friends and family.
“Mexican men have to be very masculine, very aggressive,” Garcia, who asked to be referred to pseudonymously, told National Review.
Unlike with many other individuals who have pursued gender transition in recent years, social media wasn’t a major influence on his childhood, as he didn’t have internet access. His gender insecurity was partially driven by the sporadic absence of his father, who spent five to six days a week out of the house as a truck driver. When he came back, he’d sleep most of the time.
“I did not grow up with my father in the picture,” he said. “I never really got quality time with him.”
While he was spared from online influences in early childhood, as he entered the back half of middle school, Garcia discovered transgenderism through YouTube. “That planted the seeds of doubt in my mind,” he said. The gender dysphoria continued throughout high school.
In college, Garcia started seeing a therapist. His father soon found out — and he wasn’t pleased.
Under the pretense of a medical visit, Garcia’s father had his son accompany him on a long drive to a doctor’s appointment in Mexico. On the drive back, Garcia’s father forced him to have sex with a prostitute as a condition of their returning home.
“I didn’t know the route back to the U.S., so I was technically being held there against my will,” he said.
Garcia’s father believed this experience would snap Garcia out of his gender confusion. But the sexual puppeteering by his own parent further plunged him into identity crisis, he said.
“That was the catalyst of the trauma that made me want to escape my body even more,” he said. “Prior to that I had never had any sexual relationships with women, as I was raised Catholic. I was taught there was no sex until marriage, and I was doing my best to follow that. Obviously my father did not care about religion to follow that himself.”
Garcia left his parents’ house and started his social and medical transition later that year, at 19 years old.
He started seeing an in-house therapist at an LGBT resource center in the area. On the first visit, Garcia recalled, the therapist immediately referred to him as a transgender woman. When he asked why she was affirming his new gender identity so quickly, she said she didn’t want to “gatekeep” him, according to Garcia.
At that session, the therapist informed him she could write him a referral for hormone treatment on the spot, he said. Garcia declined but chose to continue attending sessions. After a few months, he accepted an approval letter, which he took to a primary-care physician at a gender clinic based outside Los Angeles. The doctor willingly wrote a prescription.
Garcia immediately began taking estrogen and the testosterone suppressant spironolactone, which he later learned is typically administered to treat high blood pressure and heart failure.
As the hormones began to take effect, the fat around Garcia’s body started to redistribute. The little facial hair he did have stopped growing. But there was a slight emotional improvement, he said, as he was now more outgoing.
Eleven months after starting hormones, Garcia saw another medical professional to get an approval letter for feminizing top surgery. After one session, the doctor approved him for both breast implants and a vaginoplasty, whereby a surgeon creates both an outer and inner vagina by using skin and tissue from his penis.
“I was only going to get breast implants, but at the end of it I was approved for both top and bottom surgery,” he said. “I only found that out through my insurance when I got the letter of approval for both surgeries.”
In May 2018, Garcia got breast implants, which were placed under the chest muscle. He initially recovered well.
But within a few months, regret started to settle in.
“The slow buildup came crashing down on me, and I asked myself one day, ‘What the heck am I doing?’” he said. “I realized at that moment that if I had every type of surgery, all the hormones possible, if the world recognized me as a woman, even if I looked like a woman, I was never going to be a woman. I was just a man doing a caricature of what I believed a woman was.”
Garcia visited the original therapist after getting implants to share his doubts. She allegedly told him he was only questioning himself because of “underlying childhood traumas,” Garcia said.
“That tells you her priorities.”
National Review has obtained medical documents confirming that Garcia received the prescription and procedure. Garcia declined to provide the names of the medical professionals who enabled his transition.
At age 21, he decided to detransition.
In December 2020, Garcia reversed the surgery and had the implants removed. However, he still had extra skin left over, so he had to undergo a third surgery in February of 2022 to reconstruct his chest.
“That surgery was the most difficult out of all three, as that is where I had more pain,” he said. “That one left me with my chest completely numb. It looks like I had a double mastectomy.”
Between the second and third surgeries, he wore a binder to keep the excess skin from showing. The binding, which he did for over a year, damaged his ribs, he said.
“I had developed gynecomastia, which is a medical term for male breasts,” he said.
Now, Garcia lives with memory fog and deteriorating eyesight. “This should not be normal at my age, given the fact that my eyesight was pretty decent before I detransitioned,” he said.
Due to the effects of the female hormones, “I have atrophied genitals, and my fertility is unknown at the moment,” he said. “I have tremors on half of my body.”
After spending four years detransitioning, Garcia said he’s a bit out of practice on the social behaviors of being a man, which has been an adjustment.
“There are time when reminders of what I’ve done come back and haunt me,” he said. “And that will lead to a couple days of deep depression, which are not fun for me. But I’ve been seeing a therapist for some mental health, and that’s been very helpful.”
Now he’s in Texas, which has been very welcoming, he said. This year, he helped legislators propose Senate Bill 14, which prohibits the medical transitioning of minors, including the use of public funds to provide procedures and treatments. It was signed into law last month and goes into effect September 1.
His message to children considering gender transition is to seek proper medical and mental-health care.
“Don’t go to any gender clinic and/or therapist,” he said. “Do your research, because they will only tell you what you want to hear: sunshine and rainbows. But the truth of this, and the reality, is that it’s actually much more dangerous and harmful than what we believe.”