Trans woman reverses transition after five years, returns to male identity

Emiliano was eighteen when he became Milena. It happened on New Year's Eve 2016, a deliberate crossing marked not by a single moment but by a decision made in his mother's presence—a pile of men's clothes stacked on a chair, a conversation about what comes next, and then the choice to stop being someone else. For five years, he lived as a woman. He got breast implants and lip fillers. He changed his name and the gender marker on his ID. He wore tight undergarments to conceal his genitals. He worked as a sex worker because the money was better than any other job available to an eighteen-year-old trans woman without experience. He felt powerful in a way he never had before.

But five years later, sitting across from a journalist, it was Emiliano again. The implants were gone, leaving two horizontal scars where they had been removed. The lips had deflated. The long hair was cut short. The legal documents were in the process of changing back. What happened in between is something rarely discussed but documented: gender detransition, the decision to return to living as the sex assigned at birth.

The question of why cuts to the heart of something larger than one person's story. Emiliano grew up in Mar del Plata, a child who played with Barbies and also played football in bare feet, who killed enemies in Mortal Kombat and sometimes wore his mother's skirt in secret. At fourteen, he came out as bisexual to his family—a rupture that made him the first openly gay person in his household. By seventeen, he clarified: he was gay. At fifteen, he wore a costume to a party and called it a disguise. Years later, working as a drag queen with a friend who performed in nightclubs, he discovered something unexpected. The character Milena, built from wigs and heels and glitter, made him feel strong in a way his own body never had. When the night ended and he took it all off, he no longer wanted to.

The transition itself was difficult. His family did not support it. He moved to Buenos Aires at twenty-one and underwent surgery. He obtained what he had always wanted—breasts—and the validation that came with them. But the cost accumulated in ways he did not anticipate. The constant effort to appear feminine enough, to look like a "biological woman," to compress his body into shapes it resisted. The ache of high heels. The rejection from men who wanted him behind closed doors but would not be seen with him in public. The discrimination that followed him into shops and offices. The realization, around age twenty-two, that he was exhausted.

In a video posted to social media in June 2020, still Milena but beginning to speak the doubts aloud, he described the physical toll: the fear of aging, of losing hair, of having to wear wigs forever. He did not want more surgeries. He did not want to keep compressing his genitals. He did not want to feel the particular shame that came with being a trans woman in a world that desired her body but despised her existence. "Being a man in this world is much easier," he said. "As a boy, I wasn't used to that kind of rejection."

The detransition process cost him many tears, he says now. Milena had been his life project, his dream. He had reached a high level of transition, felt beautiful, but that beauty demanded a price he could no longer pay. The struggle against constant misgendering, against discrimination, against the impossible standard of passing—he could not sustain it. Other trans women fight this battle every day and endure. He could not. "The truth is that the sequence is being faithful to yourself," he reflects now, nearly twenty-five. "If at one moment I felt more woman than man and decided to transition, that's perfect. In the end it's my body and my decision. And if today my life project changed, that's also fine. What matters is feeling comfortable, happy. And that's how I feel."

Research from the National Center for Transgender Equality, conducted in 2015 on nearly thirty thousand trans people, found that eight percent reported detransitioning. The three most common reasons were social: parental pressure, the transition process being too complicated, and facing too much harassment and discrimination. Emiliano's fear, he admits, was that people would think he was crazy—someone unstable, moving back and forth between genders. He was always thinking about what others would say. Now he is trying not to.