The College Fix has been following the story of Simon Amaya Price over the fall semester, a 20-year-old neurodivergent Berklee College of Music student who was blocked from giving a campus presentation titled “Born in the Right Body: Desister and Detransitioner Awareness.”
Berklee administrators had indefinitely postponed (a.k.a. canceled) the event ostensibly due to safety concerns — Amaya Price had faced a deluge of threats and bullying because of the controversial nature of his presentation.
He ended up giving his speech at the nearby MIT in late November thanks to the MIT Open Discourse Society, with support from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Amaya Price graduated last week and in a Boston Globe op-ed published Tuesday shared more information about his background and why he felt it was so vital to speak on transgender desistance and detransitioning:
In middle school, my peers targeted me with homophobic bullying. They called me slurs, threatened me, and made me afraid and uncomfortable in my own body. At 13, I told my parents that I was bisexual. A year later, I declared that I was a girl. I demanded — with the support of my therapist and pediatrician — access to cross-sex hormones. My father opposed this for three years, and I hated him for it. Today, I am thankful he stopped me.
At 17, I started the long process of desistance and social detransition. I asked my girlfriend at the time: “Would you still love me if I was a boy?” A couple months later, our relationship ended and many of my so-called friends abandoned me. Now at 20, I find myself once again the target of the same hate I received in middle school — in a shiny politically correct package. …
Stories like mine are becoming common. More and more people of my generation are desisting and detransitioning, realizing that rejecting yourself at a cellular level is not the route to a happy life. I am one of the lucky ones. I never took cross-sex hormones or underwent irreversible surgeries. Unfortunately, this is something I cannot say of many of my friends, people like Ritchie Heron and Chloe Cole who do not have the option of moving on with their lives as if nothing happened.
Many of the same people who embraced us while we were trans, who are quick to condemn homophobia, have turned their backs on us, calling us “transphobes” and “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), sending threats, and comparing us to Nazis both online and in the street. It’s no wonder so few of us speak up.
Read Amaya Price’s full op-ed at the Boston Globe.
MORE: MIT provides ‘event response ambassadors’ for those upset by detransitioner awareness event
IMAGE: Amaya Price / Linamalshy / Instagram
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