Some media have suggested that many youths who have previously completed a gender transition are “detransitioning”. Their experience is often framed around the idea of regrets but rare are the articles that provide a nuanced examination of their journey. This article presents the perspectives of youths who have detransitioned or discontinued a transition regarding their experiences and feelings on their journey from transition to detransition. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 20 youths between the age of 16 and 25 years who were recruited on social media and who transitioned and detransitioned or discontinued their transition. Data were analysed according to thematic analysis. Regrets and feelings of satisfaction can both coexist. The processes of transition and discontinuation or detransition appear to be non‐linear and participants do not necessarily return to a cisgender identity. Ambiguous loss theory is applied to frame youth experiences and feelings and to suggest way forward for intervention. Highlights This paper examines the experiences and feelings of youth on their journey from transition to detransition. Their journey is experienced as non‐linear, and often comprised mixed feelings and experiences about transition and detransition steps. Ambiguous loss theory allows a nuanced understanding of feelings and experiences of their journey from transition to detransition.

Anchored in queer and crip perspectives, this essay proposes the neologism "suicidism" as a new theoretical framework to conceptualize the oppressive system in which suicidal people experience forms of injustice and violence. The thesis proposed here is that suicidal people suffer both individually and collectively from suicidist violence, an oppression that remains unproblematized in all current interpretations of suicide, including those taken up by anti-oppressive scholars and activists. I pursue three interrelated objectives: 1) interrogate dominant ideas and perspectives on suicidality; 2) make visible and denounce the power relations between suicidal and non-suicidal people; 3) enrich intersectional analyses by naming and problematizing an oppression that has been neglected. In sum, this essay proposes to analyze suicidality by asking the following epistemological questions: What and who is missing from current conceptualizations of suicide? What can we learn from these absences? How might new understandings of suicide, from queer and crip perspectives, help anti-oppressive scholars and activists avoid reproducing forms of oppression toward suicidal people? This essay is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some of the predominant models of suicide to illustrate how they all arrive at the same conclusion—that suicide is never an option—and how this results in a silencing of suicidal subjects. In so doing, I also demonstrate how suicidism is intertwined in forms of ableism/sanism. I conclude this first part by mobilizing the notion of epistemic injustice to theorize both the testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by suicidal subjects. In the second part, I explore additional interpretations of suicide that contrast with the dominant "negative" conceptualizations that seek to prevent it in all circumstances. I demonstrate how even "positive" perspectives of suicidality (e.g. the libertarian position) are founded in forms of ableism/sanism, and that even though they may critique the marginalization of suicidal subjects, they don't conceptualize their oppression as systemic, nor address it from an anti-oppressive perspective. Critiquing the "positive" conceptualizations of suicide allows me to delineate an alternative conceptualization of suicide rooted in queer and crip perspectives. Mobilizing a queer perspective to study suicide doesn't mean offering only analyses that take queer theories as a starting point or queer communities as the objects of the study. The intention is rather to queer suicide in a more holistic sense, that is, by applying queering and cripping methods, theories, epistemologies and prevention strategies to the topic of suicidality. Based on a harm-reduction and a non-coercive suicide approach, I suggest that assisted suicide should be a possibility for suicidal people, a position that relies on an ethics of living and a responsibility toward suicidal people.

There is little research at the international level to help us understand the experiences and needs of trans people living with dementia, despite population aging and the growing numbers of trans people including the first cohort of trans older adults. There is a need to understand the widespread barriers, discrimination and mistreatment faced by trans people in the health and social service system, and the fears trans people express about aging and dementia. Anecdotal evidence from the scarce literature on the topic of LGBTQ populations and dementia suggest that cognitive changes can impact on gender identity. For example, trans older adults with dementia may forget they transitioned and reidentify with their sex/gender assigned at birth or may experience ‘gender confusion.’ This raises crucial questions, for example regarding practices related to pronouns, care to the body (shaving, hair, clothes, etc.), social gendered interactions, health care (continuing or not hormonal therapy) and so on. This article fills a gap in current literature by offering a first typology of responses offered by academics who analyzed the topic of dementia and gender identity, to trans older adults with dementia who may be experiencing ‘gender confusion,’ namely: (1) a gender neutralization approach; (2) a transaffirmative stable approach; and (3) a trans-affirmative fluid approach. After providing critical reflections regarding each approach, we articulate the foundations of a fourth paradigm, rooted in an interdisciplinary dialogue regarding the interlocking systems of oppression faced by trans older adults with dementia, namely ageism, ableism/sanism, and cisgenderism.

Some authors in disability studies have identified limits of both the medical and social models of disability. They have developed an alternative model, which I call the ‘composite model of disability’, to theorise societies’ ableist norms and structures along with the subjective/phenomenological experience of disability. This model maintains that ableist oppression is not the only source of suffering for disabled people: impairment can be as well. From a feminist, queer, trans activist, anti-ableist perspective and using an intersectional, autoethnographic methodology, I apply this composite model of disability to trans identities to consider the potentially ‘debilitating’ aspects of transness. I argue that transness, like disability, has too often been perceived from two perspectives, medical or social, without the benefit of a third option. From a medical perspective, transness is reduced to an individual pathology curable with hormonal/surgical treatments, a conceptualisation that erases structural oppression. From a social point of view, transness is conceptualised as a neutral condition and variation in sex/gender identity. In this model, structural oppression (transphobia/cisgenderism) is seen as the only cause of ‘trans suffering’. I argue that, just as the medical and social models of disability provide limited opportunities for reflection on the complex experience of disability, medical and social understandings of transness, respectively, are insufficient to describe the complexity of trans experience. I explore the possibilities presented by the application of a composite model of disability in trans studies. By both problematising cisgenderist oppression and acknowledging trans people's subjective experiences of suffering through some of the debilitating aspects of transness, this composite model avoids the pitfalls of the medical and social models. The application of tools from disability studies to trans issues uncovers cisnormativity in disability movements and denounces ableism in trans movements. This will, I hope, solidify alliances between these communities and fields of study.

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assumes an able‐bodied trans identity and able‐bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assumes a cis* disabled identity. The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a nonintersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not of ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not of sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cis(gender)normative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed to be “involuntary,” and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able‐bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements.