A young woman who formerly identified as transgender went viral on Twitter earlier this month for describing the negative effects she experienced using testosterone. Now, she says a weight has been lifted since deciding to detransition.
KC Miller, 21, adopted a transgender identity at 16 and began taking testosterone after being referred to a local gender clinic by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia just after her 17th birthday. Only six months after the injections started, she received a double mastectomy to remove her breasts. Miller, who had been on testosterone for five years, has experienced a receding hairline and substantial hair loss as a result.
“It just keeps getting worse, it keeps thinning, it keeps receding backwards, and I’m not sure if it’s coming back,” Miller lamented in a now viral video posted to Twitter on October 9.
Just for some perspective: this is what almost five years of hormones does to a teenage girl. Remember, I’m 21. pic.twitter.com/DZh1ycVt6O
— KC Miller (@KCMiller1225) October 9, 2022
Miller’s video quickly surpassed 5.5 million views and was met with vitriol from trans activists, who mocked her for not anticipating that the testerone she began taking as minor would lead to hair loss so rapidly. The video amassed nearly 7,000 comments, some offering words of support, and others accusing her of “grifting” and “weaponizing” her experience at the cost of “trans lives.”
The trans-identified male activist who goes by the name of “Keffals” shared a photo of Miller alongside Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, insinuating they looked similar, to nearly 150,000 followers in a now-deleted tweet.
A “queer” digital magazine, Into, penned an article about the activists who are “clapping back” at Miller for her crime of “bolster[ing] right-wing claims.”
“The result is life-giving,” Henry Giardina of Into wrote about the commenters ridiculing Miller’s visible sadness.
Miller initially expressed reluctance to stop taking the hormones as she didn’t see her hair loss as “fixable,” but on Sunday, she announced her decision to detransition on YouTube.
“I’ve made the decision to attempt to detransition,” said Miller. “For the longest time I’ve been holding myself back from trying because I thought I was too far gone, as the infamous video said, but comments from people kind of made me think otherwise.”
Miller has reported that she is feeling better since the deluge of spiteful messages she received for her video.
“Making that decision to try and detransition has lifted a weight off my shoulders that I didn’t expect would happen,” Miller told The Daily Wire.
“I feel more at peace, maybe that’s just because of the decision and realizing I don’t have to live like this forever,” she added.
Miller, who identified as a lesbian before she transitioned, now recognizes that “social contagion” played a large factor in encouraging her to adopt a transgender identity. She was first introduced to gender ideology when she was sixteen through influencers on YouTube.
“When you see videos of people magically — as they paint it — transforming from girls to boys, it seems very alluring when you feel like an outcast,” she said.
Miller describes being gaslighted by trans activists on her viral post who claimed they “never glorified transition” or that it would “solve all their problems.”
“I went through several videos — I decided not to post it — and took clips from ‘first year on hormones’ or ‘post op updates’ where people were saying, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life, I’m so confident, I’m so happy, this is the best year of my life,’” Miller explained.
“When you see that rhetoric over and over again, and people talk about how much more confident they are, and you’re struggling just to socialize with people — that’s powerful,” she added.
When two of the transgender YouTube influencers who inspired Miller began posting videos about realizing they may have made a mistake, she began to doubt her own transition.
“One was really big in the transition space because she had bottom surgery and was open about it and talked about it, but now it’s gut-wrenching to see her,” Miller spoke of Jalisa Vine, a YouTuber with over 109,000 subscribers who in recent months began sharing tearful accounts of her detransition story and the guilt she feels for encouraging others to adopt transgender identities.
“She had hundreds of videos about her transition that she’s now hidden,” Miller recalled. “She would post about her graft site on her arm, one of her most viewed videos was ‘I hate my arm’ — it’s horrible.”
Miller recalls being told she had a “male brain in a female body” by her own doctor at 16 years old. Additionally, her mother was told by a psychologist that Miller had a “40 percent chance of successfully killing herself.”
Miller has since lost faith in the medical establishment. She now realizes that her doctor was mistaken, and worse — that she had been lied to.
“There are varying ways that people can present themselves in terms of the clothes that they wear and the mannerisms they have and so on, and that doesn’t make them one sex or the other,” said Miller. “Whatever their sex is, is what they biologically are, what they’re born as. You can have masculine women and effeminate men. And that’s the trap that I was in.”
Miller now recognizes the regressive stereotypes reinforced by transgender ideology that LGBT advocacy groups have embraced. “When you think of LGBT, it’s supposed to be all-inclusive, and ‘break the binary,’ and ‘break the gendered stereotypes,’ but it’s extremely misogynistic to suggest that if you’re a girl and you like wearing plaid and boots and doing male things and have short hair, that all of a sudden, you’re a boy,” she said.
Miller said she spoke up about her experience out of concern for the next generation of youth, who are exposed to gender ideology at a much higher rate, including via teachers who are “actively indoctrinating kids.”
She feels optimistic that with enough public awareness, real change can occur.
“The more detransitioners that speak out, the more that will feel comfortable to come forward,” Miller said. “We’re going to see a huge wave. Eventually we are going to be too loud that they can’t ignore us, and they’re going to have to address the issue.”
