Victoria
Detransitioner and public advocate
After more than a decade living as transgender—including years of DIY hormone use that caused lasting health damage—Victoria detransitioned and began speaking publicly. Her concept of "empathy hijacking" has particular resonance in Europe, where online hormone procurement is easy, gender-affirming communities overlap with broader subcultures, and safeguarding debates are intensifying from Helsinki to The Hague.
Victoria spent more than a decade living as a transgender person, relying on DIY hormone use that caused lasting health damage before she detransitioned and began speaking out. Her account stands apart from many detransition narratives because of its close attention to the overlapping subcultures she moved through: communities organised around gender identity and BDSM networks, where she observed strikingly similar social dynamics operating in parallel.
The analytical core of her story is a concept she calls "empathy hijacking"—a mechanism by which predators deploy the language of victimhood, trauma, and allyship to gain trust and access within vulnerable communities. Victoria argues that both spaces created conditions in which this tactic flourished: marginalised identity provided cover, and the expectation of unconditional affirmation silenced scepticism. The insight carries direct weight for European practitioners and policymakers grappling with how ideologically saturated environments can become unsafe for the very people they claim to protect.
Her experience resonates across the continent. In Sweden and Finland, where clinical protocols for gender-related care in minors have been substantially tightened following systematic reviews, her account of DIY hormone procurement underlines the risks patients accepted when formal pathways were unavailable or delayed. In the Netherlands, France, and Germany—where debates about the boundaries of affirmative practice remain live and contested—her concept of "empathy hijacking" offers a framework for understanding how critical voices can be suppressed inside communities that centre care as their founding principle.
Victoria shared her story with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman in The Dark Side of Gender Ideology, BDSM, and Detransition – Victoria (Episode 7, 3 April 2025), one of the more analytically distinctive conversations in the Beyond Gender catalogue and essential listening for European clinicians and safeguarding professionals.
