A man who lived nearly a decade as a transgender woman said in an interview this week that he regrets transitioning and slammed medical professionals who are promoting “gender-affirming” health care.
The New York Post reported how Brian Wagoner, who went as “Brianna” when he lived as a woman, realized his transition was a mistake when he was 31 years old. Wagoner then made the decision to detransition and live as a man again.
Wagoner reached out to The Post to share his story after seeing reports about two young women who regretted transitioning to live as men in their teenage years. One was Chloe Cole, who underwent a double mastectomy at age 15, as Townhall covered.
Growing up in San Gabriel Valley, Calif., the son of divorced parents, Wagoner said he was always a typical boy.
“When I was a kid, I liked Legos and trucks,” he said. “I never wanted to wear my sister’s clothes. I never wanted to play with Barbies.” But Wagoner also knew he was gay — something that was frowned upon in his father’s household, where he lived as a teen.
Wagoner said his dad is a Vietnam veteran and “a very alpha male, super-macho kind of guy. I learned … at a young age that being gay is a terrible thing. I was so paranoid about him finding out that I was.”
As a closeted teen, Wagoner began dabbling in drugs, and by the time he transferred from a junior college to the University of La Verne in California to study sociology at age 20, he said, he was regularly using marijuana, ecstasy, Adderall and cocaine that he got from friends and dealers at his school. He said he began experiencing withdrawal, was staying up for days on end, and even contemplated suicide.
It was also around that time, he said, that he developed an addiction to online porn. Gay porn led him to transgender fetish content — which sparked a sudden feeling of gender dysphoria, also described as a discomfort within one’s body. “Before I discovered this bizarre subgenera of pornography, the idea of being a woman never crossed my mind. Never. It just came out of nowhere, really,” he said.
Desperate for a lifeline, in early 2012, he started searching for information about the transgender movement on YouTube and found a clinical social worker based in Los Angeles who made videos about trans people. He made an appointment to see her. During their first in-person session, he said, she immediately told him he could be transgender.
The Post detailed how Wagoner underwent hormone therapy treatments, laser hair removal and changed his name to Brianna after only a couple sessions with the therapist. He added that the therapist knew he was addicted to drugs during this time.
After just a couple therapy sessions, the therapist gave Wagoner, then 22, a referral letter to see a doctor in Hollywood who wrote him a prescription for estrogen on his first visit, he said. “This therapist knew I was addicted to drugs. She knew I had severe depression. But we didn’t go over any of that. It was just about hormones.”
Along with regular hormone therapy, Wagoner had laser hair removal on his entire body and legally changed his name to Brianna. At the time, transition seemed like a way to escape his suppressed identity. “The idea that I’d be a heterosexual woman and not a gay man was just really appealing to me,” he said. “I was so sick of being Brian the ‘f-g.’ I just liked the idea of being literally anyone else.”
He was also rewarded socially for transitioning to a woman at college, where he remained a student until he was 25. “At my college, I was basically like a minor celebrity for being trans,” Wagoner said. “I got a lot of praise, and people suddenly wanted to be my friend.”
But in his personal life, Wagoner was struggling. “Transition made all my problems worse,” he said. He got into even harder drugs, including heroin, after graduating from college. He went to rehab four times before finally getting sober and holding down a steady job, which he declined to disclose out of concern he will be targeted by the gender activist community.
While Wagoner never underwent sex reassignment surgery, he told The Post that he now has an inflamed pelvic area due to the hormone therapy treatments.
“It was basically like medical professionals cheering on a girl with bulimia for puking up her lunch when her ribs are already poking out,” he said of the estrogen treatments. He also shredded the professionals who are pushing their transgender agenda onto people.
“My therapist really was an activist who also happened to be a psychologist,” Wagoner said in the interview. “I probably should have been put in a psychiatric hospital, not given estrogen. I just needed someone to listen to me, but this woman had me go and change my body’s chemistry and my whole life.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made by doctors here,” he added. “They see dollar signs, and in the end, money talks.”
“Coming out of my transition was like leaving the Twilight Zone, but the rest of society is still in it,” Wagoner continued. He noted that his home state, California, has “no barriers” to transition and is considering pursuing legal action against the therapist and doctor who helped him transition.
“I just don’t want to see people have the same bad experience that I had,” he said. “I hope someone will hear this story and really think about what they’re doing and get therapy.”
Wagoner said he has since come out to his father, who has “fully accepted” him.
“He knows I’m gay, and he doesn’t even care,” Wagoner explained. “Had I been honest from the get-go, I do think it could have possibly prevented me from going down this path.”
Townhall covered this week how Cole shared her story of transitioning and de-transitioning as a teenager during a public hearing in Florida about a rule prohibiting Medicaid funds from covering “gender-affirming” care.
“I really didn’t understand all of the ramifications of any of the medical decisions that I was making,” Cole said during the hearing. “I was unknowingly physically cutting off my true self from my body, irreversibly and painfully.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to fully carry a child and I might be at increased risk for certain cancers, namely, cervical cancer,” Cole said. “I’m not able to breastfeed whatever future children I have.”
“That realization actually was one of the biggest things that led to me realizing that this was not the path I should have taken,” she added.
Cole told Fox News Digital that parents should not transition their children.
"If you are considering transitioning, please wait until you are a fully developed adult," Cole told Fox News Digital. "Transitioning can damage your body and mind in ways that we may not fully understand."