An American named Maia was residing in Israel on October 7, 2023, identifying as a transgender man. However, during a bomb attack by Hamas that forced her to seek refuge in a shelter, she had an epiphany about her beliefs on gender identity amid the chaos of war.

At 25 years old, Maia reflected on how the crisis made her reevaluate her priorities, realizing that her gender dysphoria no longer held the same significance in the face of imminent danger. She admitted, “I became significantly less concerned about all of this gender crap.”

She says the “whole saga” of her gender transition began when she noticed she was attracted to her female classmates as a tween.

Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Maia lamented the lack of lesbian culture she experienced growing up, attributing its decline to the overshadowing influence of gender ideology. She refrained from sharing her last name online due to being targeted in the past by transgender activists who engaged in doxxing.

That’s when Maia started thinking maybe she was a boy, since she was attracted to girls, and started watching documentaries about transgender kids on her iPad.

“The algorithms bombarded me with more and more trans content, and I latched on super hard,” she recalled.

She came out as transgender at the age of 12, but says her parents, who she describes as “very intellectual Soviet Jewish types,” were instantly “very skeptical because of that Soviet background and the natural skepticism surrounding institutions and dogma.”

They refused her request for a chest binder, so Maia turned to the internet to learn how to compress her breasts with Ace bandages and multiple sports bras layered on top of one another. She began sleeping in the painful contraption, which she said gave her poor posture.

When Maia went off to college to study political science, she changed her name and pronouns and purchased a chest binder.

Her parents found out during her sophomore year of college, in 2019, that she’d socially transitioned —and gave her an ultimatum: If she wanted them to continue paying her tuition, she had to study abroad in a non-Western country, where maybe she’d see through gender ideology.

Maia picked Israel, because she is Jewish and there was an international study program available through her school. She was there in 2021 when conflict broke out between Israel and Palestine, and shocked to see her peers back home cheering on Hamas as she hid in bomb shelters.

“My heart was just racing [constantly] because you never know when the next bomb siren is going to come,” she recalled. “But, between running to bomb shelters, I was just fixated on trying to convince my friends to stop supporting Hamas — people who were DMing me from boba shops in California as I was running from rockets.”

The experience left her questioning the political left.

“I had a lot of realizations that would kind of underpin the [detransitioning] trajectory that I would later go on, and one of these realizations was that I was being lied to by the left about Israel and Palestine,” she said. “I started to become very disillusioned.”

The experience sent her down a “right-wing rabbit hole” that even had her questioning aspects of trans ideology — especially trans women in women’s prisons and the concept of non-binary.

“I started to kind of marinate in those ideas, but it was a very slow process,” Maia said. “I had woven myself into such a complex social web where everybody knew me as a man that I thought I couldn’t get out.”

It wasn’t until October 7th that the truth about her transition became impossible to ignore.

Maia and her friends had seriously considered going to the Nova Festival, where Hamas massacred more than 300 concertgoers and took 40 hostages, but they couldn’t find a ride at the last minute and the tickets were expensive.

Instead, she awoke in her Jerusalem apartment to bomb sirens and the boom of the Iron Dome intercepting missiles, sending her fleeing for a bomb shelter.

“I was sweaty, I was shaking, I was nervous, and so I just had to run for it,” she said. “I didn’t have time to put on the breast binder. I just had to freaking run for it, and I had to feel my body move naturally, unconstrained by the binder.”

At the bomb shelter, she watched live-streams of people her age getting executed on social media. She later would find out one was her drinking buddy.

“It was really in those moments where I was like, why the hell am I even doing this trans thing anymore,” she said. “It was taking so much brain space to play all of these trans mind games. I realized that my body is the only thing that is going to allow me to survive, and that my body is not a pathology.”

Maia now likens trans ideology to a “luxury belief,” a term popularized by writer Rob Henderson to describe ideologies only sustainable for those who can afford to cushion themselves from reality.

“War-torn countries have limited healthcare resources to turn people who are sick into people who are healthy, but in rich countries like the United States, you have basically unlimited resources to take a young healthy person and turn them into a lifelong medical patient [with gender-affirming care],” she said.

“We’re permanently altering people’s healthy bodies in such a way as to make them less healthy,” she continued. “This is total insanity, if you think about it. You can’t be reliant on Big Pharma for your hormones for the rest of your life if you end up in a war zone.”

Her parents bought her a plane ticket home the following week, and she returned “in tatters” — mourning friends and acquaintances who died at the Nova Festival and “recovering from the psychological aftermath of realizing that I’d been living a lie for so long.”

Maia now identifies as a lesbian woman and is living with her parents. She is a freelance writer and SubStacker, where she writes under the moniker Maia Poet.

“One part of what delayed my detransition was the absolute unwillingness to admit that my parents were right. I was so angry at them for so many years, but now I’m so grateful,” Maia said.

When she stopped binding her breasts as part of her detransition, she realized her rib and back pain did not go away, nor did her posture issues. Her breast tissue, she said, is irreversibly deformed.

“Nobody told me that this would be permanent,” she said, recalling Tumblr posts that promised her binding was a temporary solution.

As Maia grapples with lasting damage, she warns that simply banning the medicalization of trans youth will not mend all the wounds caused by the ideology.

“When we ban medical transition, kids are just going to do exactly what I did and bind their breasts or tuck their genitals and still sustain permanent damage to their bodies,” she predicted. “The harm of this ideology starts way before a doctor or before a gender clinic gets involved. It starts when a young person adopts this belief about themselves, that they were born in the wrong body.”