You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 114. Maia Poet FINAL.wav
Maia Poet:
from a very young age, from the age of 12, was this false belief that my female body, existing in its natural and healthy state, is existing in a state of pathology, and that it could be corrected with hormones and surgeries. And when I realized that actually, that my body was the only thing that was allowing me to survive this and to make it into the bomb shelter, me imagining myself in a hospital room, an elective radical double mastectomy, and hearing a siren and having to somehow run. and realizing that that would be impossible. I would not have been able to predict that and schedule it. You know, you can't predict a war. I mean, the day before this attack that's just changed all of our lives, I was doing a peace event with Jewish and Arab children. And the next day I wake up and my world is shattered.

Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Today I'm here with Maya Poet, and boy does she have a fascinating story for you. Maya is a 24-year-old Israeli-American writer, researcher, and public speaker. She began identifying as transgender at the age of 12 and has recently desisted from a trans identity that lasted half of her life. Maya is reflecting on her experience of desistance in hopes of providing insight for young people struggling with gender distress and for their parents. I will add from my previous conversation with Maya that she lived, essentially lived as a man in the Middle East for several years and narrowly escaped October 7th. So Maya's story is absolutely fascinating because it brings together several important issues that are getting a lot of public attention right now between the conflict in the Middle East and the gender madness, Maya bridges both of those worlds and has such a fascinating personal perspective. So I'm really glad that she reached out to me and that we get to talk today. Maya, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

Maia Poet: Thank you so much for having me on.

Stephanie Winn: So the last time you and I talked, which was a private conversation, I found myself so in awe of your story. I think I said something like, have you just learned that anytime something bad happens, that it's probably the hand of fate protecting you from death? Because that's happened about three times where some seeming inconvenience or something actually resulted in you not getting killed. between living in Israel and being in bomb shelters and then the fact that you would have been there at the festival on October 7th had it not been for a ride bailing out or something like that. I mean, your story is just wild. You have this really personal perspective because there's so much that's happened since October 7th with regard to Israel and Palestine that I think it's easy to eclipse the fact that the event that was interrupted on October 7th was an event of young people coming together to thrive and flourish culturally and promote peace. the movement that you were a part of. So can we maybe start there, like you as a young 20-something living in Israel, being part of the community that was about to be at that festival. Give us a picture of what was going on there.

Maia Poet: Well, a lot of things have happened recently that I'm still trying to process. I can't promise that my story is going to be presented in the most, I guess, chronologically accurate way. That's fine. I guess I could start on October 6th if we're looking to before October 7th.

Stephanie Winn: Great. Tell us about October 6th, 2023 in Israel.

Maia Poet: On October 6th, I was actually doing a peace event between Jewish and Arab children. We were hanging out in a Bedouin village, a bunch of Arabs and Jews. There were the kids who lived in the village and we brought our own kids, of course. That was a mix of just Jewish and Arab kids. And we had all kinds of fun together. We did arts and crafts. We played songs. A lot of the kids were very young and they didn't speak each other's languages, but that didn't stop them from having a fantastic time. And it was really heartwarming because In the middle of this village, there are all kinds of rocks and sand and things that kids can trip over and get injured doing. We had a few kids fall down and cry. It was really the nearest adult to them who helped them up and who kissed their boo-boos, so to speak. It didn't matter whether that adult was of the same religion or spoke the same language as them. And so on October 6th, after I had returned from this event, I wrote a really long post on Instagram about how incredibly optimistic I was that these kids had such good outcomes and these kids really thrived in that type of an environment. And I think I said something along the lines of, you know, peace is possible, probably not under the rule of our politicians and all these warmongering outside countries that want to get their grubby little hands mixed up in the Middle East, and certainly not by the terrorist groups in the region. But if we just teach our kids that they're each other's neighbors and each other's potential best friends, and not each other's enemies, that things can really turn around. We just need to invest in our kids. And of course, then on October 7th, I went to sleep and a few hours later, I woke up to a siren in my whole world as I knew it. And the world of Israelis and Palestinians more broadly just changed in ways that none of us could have ever imagined.

Stephanie Winn: Wow, that's such a rich picture of the innocence and optimism that you had, that the other volunteers had, that the children had. These children who didn't deserve to inherit the guilt of their ancestors, and you were feeling so optimistic in that moment. Flash forward to now, do you know where those children are? Do you know if they're still alive? Do you know what happened to them?

Maia Poet: Yes. These kids so far, thank God, are still alive because they're all Israeli kids. Some of them are Arab and some of them are Jewish. Although some of them are Bedouins in the West Bank. I was in a village by the Dead Sea. And, you know, so far, nothing has harmed those kids, and I really hope it stays that way, but I imagine that all of them are just incredibly traumatized if they weren't before, because this would have been… I mean, some of these kids are not even old enough to go to school yet, and some of them are in their first years of their education, so they're very, very young. and the attacks of October 7th and the following events were difficult enough to go through as an adult, so I can't even imagine having these events, being a young child and not having any understanding of what's going on, except for hearing sirens, hearing explosions, and not knowing why everything changed so much, especially… after that event in the Bedouin village and how optimistic it was and how peaceful it was, just the whiplash of really just a few hours, how that changed everything. I can't even imagine what those kids are going through. Those are the people that I really I think about them every day. I mean, I think about a lot of people every day. I lost people on the October 7th attacks. I was supposed to be at the Nova Festival. However, because my friends are a group of Arabs and Jews, Middle Easterners are not known for their planning skills, we'll say. It's a really chaotic region of the world. And, you know, I'll give another example, like, if you want to go to a Palestinian wedding and they tell you that the wedding starts at six, really, you should be there at nine, because you'll, you know, the wedding will be, you know, three hours behind whatever the stated time is. And everybody just knows that you're supposed to show up at nine, even if they say to show up at six. So certain chaos is just ever present in that region of the world. And yeah, we couldn't find a sober driver. We kept trying to figure out who that would be. There was no public transportation, because it would have fallen on Shabbat. And anyways, it would have been very far, it would have been hard to access by public transportation. So we couldn't count on that. We needed a sober driver. That fell through. And the ticket prices just kind of kept going up, and so we just didn't go. And really, the lack of planning on my friend group's part is what saved me. But it didn't save all of my friends, unfortunately. So that's been very difficult to cope with. So I have a lot of people in my thoughts these days. Yes, it's just an unbearably horrible situation that it's really even psychologically very difficult to process everything that happened and the magnitude of the tragedy.

Stephanie Winn: I can hardly imagine. Thank God for chaos in a way that it saved you, but do you have any survivor's guilt knowing what happened to your friends?

Maia Poet: Oh, absolutely. Yes, it was worse when I had just come back from Israel. There were a few weeks where I just couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. It was a really distressing time and I'm not normally a very depressive person. My homeostasis is actually quite joyous and optimistic and energetic. This first few weeks really took it out of me. I was just coping with all kinds of questions like, my friends are good people. Like, why did this have to have to happen to them? Yeah, definitely. There's been some survivors guilts.

Stephanie Winn: So let's go back a ways now that we sort of started in the middle with this up close and personal picture of what your life was like as one of the people who very well could have been at that festival, like what your world was. It was this world of youthful optimism, of Jewish and Arab children playing together, it really tells such a different side of the story. So zooming out a degree from there, for those of us who, I mean, I know, most listeners have never been to that part of the world. I went to that part of the world once when I was a child, because my Jewish grandparents moved to Israel in their last few years of life to be taken care of by my aunt and uncle and cousins on a kibbutz so I did get to visit Israel when I was, I believe, like 11 years old. I have a sad story about how I wasn't able to go into the Dead Sea because of an injury. I'd been looking forward to it for months. That was a special experience for me as a child. Other than that, I'm pretty naive. I've said I don't get involved in something as massive as this conflict if I'm not really willing to spend my time doing my research on it. So considering how you have this inside perspective that is so different to most people who have rarely if ever been there. Just give us a portrait of this other side of the story, the people who wanted peace, who wanted coexistence from both religions.

Maia Poet: So I don't know how many there are of us. I assume that, I mean, my Palestinian friends who are involved in this type of peace activism are often much more paranoid about having their picture taken and having it posted somewhere. We often have to cover some of their faces, especially the ones who live in the West Bank, because it's much more socially detrimental for them to be involved in this type of activism. But I would say that there are definitely a portion of us who are willing to do all sorts of things just to hang out with each other. I mean, as an Israeli citizen, when I became an Israeli citizen, automatically there were certain parts of the West Bank that I just wasn't allowed to go to. Did that stop me? No, not even remotely. But I did find kind of sneaky ways to weasel around some of the checkpoints and really convoluted routes of taking multiple taxis and walking through villages really quietly at night, not speaking any languages, not drawing any attention to ourselves. I would say that there is definitely a cohort of young people who are Israelis and Palestinians and also some internationals. who will go to all kinds of lengths to make some kind of on-the-ground peace possible, even though the explicit purpose of our group is, you know, we're not a peace activist group. We're just a group of people of all ages, ranging from babies and toddlers to older adults who have retired, and everybody in between. from all kinds of different backgrounds coming together because we want to be together. We don't want to be constricted by our society's sort of, I guess, accepted rules that we shouldn't be together and that we… that we're each other's enemies, and I fundamentally don't believe that. I believe that Arabs and Jews are cousins, and that's actually not a belief, that's a fact. We're cousins. We come from the same region, and our fates are inextricably linked with one another. I mean, when Israelis suffer, Palestinians suffer, and vice versa, because we live so close to one another. We are absolutely intertwined to the point where if either of us wants stability, you know, Palestinians aren't going anywhere, and neither are Israelis, and nor should they. And so nobody's going to give up on the land, and we… A lot of people say that's the reason why we have to be friends with one another, but I argue that we have to be friends with one another because Arabs and Jews, in my opinion, could really be like the world's best power couple when we work together. We… because of our qualities as people and the combination of both our similarities and our differences is really such a powerful one that we really ought to work together. And so there is definitely a subculture of that. But to say that To say that we're a majority, I mean, I don't know if we are a majority. I couldn't say one way or the other, but a lot of people have told me that the type of work that I do is dangerous, and maybe I'm naive and young and think I'm invincible and therefore don't totally believe them, but… It is generally understood to be a pretty unconventional thing to do, although there are a lot of young people who do get involved and even more who want to get involved but are worried about what the others will say, are worried about the status of their safety in the process.

Stephanie Winn: It's such a different perspective to look for the commonality. Because we all are familiar with the fighting, but to belong to that same region of the world and to both not be strangers to the intimate experience that this conflict has caused. I'm not here to make any political commentary. Like I said, I'm not nearly well-researched enough to do that, except to acknowledge atrocity as atrocity and grief. So tell us about your cultural background, because you have ties to both Jewish and Arab culture.

Maia Poet: Yeah, so I'm Jewish, and the Jewish roots are from the former Soviet Union. So I grew up speaking Russian and English and I went to many different schools growing up, just like six different schools before I went to university and we only moved houses once. So I got to experience lots of different academic environments. But in one of the schools that I went to, they were offering an Arabic program for the first time ever, and that would have been my seventh grade year. And I decided to take Arabic. And from the moment I walked into that Arabic classroom as a naive seventh grader, I had realized that I had just made the best decision of my life. But my calculus was different back then because I walked in and my teacher was extremely attractive. I was definitely in love with her. That's honestly the only reason why I put any effort into Arabic. I was drilling conjugations. I wanted to pick up Arabic calligraphy because she'd wear shirts with Arabic calligraphy on them. I just wanted to do everything I possibly could to impress her. In the process of trying to impress my Arabic teacher who I was madly in love with, I actually fell in love with the Arabic language. And because I fell in love with the Arabic language and culture, and because Russians and Arabs have a certain understanding that makes them, you know, very endeared to one another, culturally speaking, just, I mean, basically Arabs and Russians really vibe with each other. And in the north of Israel, they actually frequently get married. So I know a lot of kids are, well, young adults who are like half, half, half Russian and half Arab. But anyway, so I, Because my Jewish roots are in the former Soviet Union and under communist rule, religion was illegal and being Jewish as an ethnicity, that was written on your documents and it was still incredibly unfavorable. A lot of traditions, cultural traditions and anything really connected to religion, including the cultural traditions that are connected to religion, I have disappeared. So a lot of Jews who leave the former Soviet Union, they really don't know much about any kind of Jewish holidays or Jewish practice, unless really they move to Israel, for the most part, because that's the dominant culture. So I didn't have a really strong understanding of myself as a Jew. I knew that this word somehow applied to me, but the only reason that I actually reconnected to my Jewish roots was because I had studied Arabic and because I'd had teachers, Palestinian teachers included, like teachers of Palestinian origin, who had encouraged me to reconnect to my Jewish roots. And so that's really the only reason that I, yeah, that I wanted to go to a synagogue in the first place was because I had studied Arabic. So that's sort of another reason as to why I see our fates as Jews and Arabs as being incredibly interconnected. I owe my understanding of myself as a Jew to the Arabs who more or less raised me, at least for several hours a day that I was at school. My fondness for Arabs and Arab culture and literature and music is because it played such a foundational role in my reconnection to Judaism. I really, I'm very passionate about the peace process. And I know that's a very unconventional story. I haven't heard anybody else who's expressed something similar, but because that is my unconventional story, you know, I'll go about life in a pretty unconventional way. And my entire time in Israel was really, including the role of my trans identification, the role that that played in the way that I interacted with Israeli society. I mean, I integrated into both extremely religious Muslim-Palestinian and Orthodox-Jewish pockets of the society as a man. And I integrated myself very well into them because of the languages that I spoke.

Stephanie Winn: I love sleep. Sound sleep is a crucial foundation of good mental and physical health, from mood and concentration to metabolism and cellular repair. And I sleep very well thanks to my 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover. My side of the bed is programmed to be warm when I get in and cool down to a neutral temperature in the middle of the night so I don't wake up overheated like I used to. How would you customize your bed temperature? Visit 8sleep.com and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST to take up to $200 off your purchase. Even if they're already running another sale, this code will get you an additional $50 off. Eight Sleep currently ships not only within the USA, but also to Canada, the UK, select countries in the European Union, and Australia. Thanks for considering purchases that support the show. Wow. Okay. So that's bridging into this whole other fascinating side of your story. But first, I just want to acknowledge what you've shared. And it seems like part of that too is your Russian background and the specific time and place that your family came from where people were not allowed to be religious. So you were sort of Jewish by ethnicity only, but it was this sort of state-induced disconnection from your cultural and religious heritage that left you feeling like a longing for something. It's almost like a form of intergenerational trauma that you knew that there was something that you wanted to connect with from your ancestral past, but there had been this blockage to accessing that because of tyrannical government. That's one way of framing it. I don't know the history exactly behind that, but that's just how I'm hearing it. I do think that that is a familiar story for some people just personally having grown up a lot around Russian Jewish kids myself, and some of them are my best friends in middle and high school and feeling that heritage in them too of like, I'm Jewish, but I don't really know what that means. That is a familiar story, I think. The fact that you, as a Russian Jew, didn't feel like you had a connection to your Judaism until you met Arabs, and that it was the Arabs who invited you into connection with your Judaism because there is so much commonality and rich cultural heritage there. Now, you mentioned it, so we'll just go there now. You were living there as a man, pretending to be a man. And you call yourself a desister. So just to catch people up to speed, you never medicalized, but you presented yourself in such a way that people clocked you as male. So tell us that story.

Maia Poet: Okay, well I guess the story really starts in the United States in the year 2012 when I got an iPad for my 12th birthday and I grew up actually in a very different type of city than the one I moved to in Israel because I grew up in a very progressive American city and I'd seen gender non-conforming people before. The vast majority of them were men who were very obviously male, but they were crossdressers. And I'd come into contact with the idea of a sex change. That's how it was phrased back then. And this whole phenomenon was framed as, you know, a woman's soul in a man's body. And that idea was very generally overwhelmingly accepted before transgender ideology began to subsume every single Western institution and really sink its claws into everyone, including the youngest of children. So I had been familiar with the idea of sex changes and I'd always been a very passionate internet researcher about whatever topic of interest I had at that time. I'd say my first very deep intellectual obsession was with the world's tallest people. I'd seen them in the Guinness Book of World Records and I wanted to know why they were so tall. And I think this happened when I was around eight or nine years old. So I'd gone on the internet and I'd done research and realized that these people suffered from a condition called acromegaly, which is essentially a pituitary tumor, which impacts the release of growth hormone. And so these people become incredibly tall, but it's asymmetric growth, so it's extremely dangerous. and they often die very young, and I was really obsessed with this condition. I felt like it was on my shoulders as a young child to try to solve it, to try to figure out, is there a way to remove this tumor without impacting the surrounding functions of the brain? Like, I got really, really deep into the rabbit hole. And I didn't care about anything that was going on around me except for this very, very rare pituitary tumor. So I developed a lot of research skills from that obsession. And one day, you know, a thought popped into my mind, which was, you know, I wonder if these sex changes, if you can go the other way around, meaning starting from female and going to male. I wonder if that's a possibility. So I went on the internet and I found my answer. So I started identifying as trans at the age of 12 in 2012 before anybody else my age had even heard of it. And it was a very difficult time. Of course, my parents, they were not affirming. They were ahead of the curve on that one. I think it's the Soviet Jewish paranoia that really saved me in this case because, yeah, I think that probably paranoia is a trait that's selected for in Jews. simply because of the fact that the paranoid Jews survive and the other ones stay in the area where a genocide is happening and they die. So I think that evolutionarily speaking, paranoia serves a really important function within Jewish communities. And I think that's the place my parents were coming from. And I think that's probably, you know, what ended up saving me in the end. But even though they weren't affirming, the trans identity stuck around for an extremely long time, for 12 years of my life. I only very recently desisted. And so I mean, there's a whole story there. And I actually wrote a book about it with an Israeli social worker, the link to which I'm sure will be in the in the show notes that has all of the details between, you know, 12 years old and now. So I'll skip over most of that. But at some point, my parents realized that the trans thing was going away.

Stephanie Winn: Wait, hang on a sec. So you certainly don't have to include all those details. And yes, we will put your book in the show notes. But So it started off as an intellectual obsession. Similar to your obsession with the world's tallest people, it was this rabbit hole of this is a thing that exists. This is a concept that the idea of FTM. But was that all? I mean, you said you were 12, so presumably you're going through puberty. You also said that around that same time, so seventh grade, you had a crush on your Arab teacher. So I'm imagining this is around the time that you're discovering that you're a lesbian. Was there a connection there?

Maia Poet: Oh, I mean, I'm sure there was. But something that's interesting to note is that I actually didn't understand that what I was experiencing was a crush. I didn't know what crushes were because my family is extremely intellectual and I've never particularly enjoyed the type of content that would have exposed me to what a crush is. I've never particularly enjoyed fictional TV, movies or books. I've always preferred non-fiction. probably because in order to enjoy any kind of fictional content, you have to have some kind of a tentative grasp on social cues and social norms and being able to interpret people's nonverbal behavior in order to sort of fill in what their intentions are. And so because I was not able to do that, and because I still am, that is not my strength, I would say, I never really enjoyed fictional content. So basically, I didn't know what a crush was. And actually, I think the Arabic class played a massive role in this because I had this crush on my teacher, but the crush situation became much more visceral, actually, during one particular instance in Arabic class with one of my classmates. Every American young person who was once a child in the American school system is familiar with the cultural ritual of being handed a stack of worksheets and being told to take one and pass them down. So we were engaging in this classroom ritual, and there was a time when my hand briefly brushed by the hand of one of my female classmates. And immediately I had had all these sensations in my body that I did not know how to make sense of. Like my heart rate skyrocketed. I became flushed. My body was heating up. My mouth became dry. I was losing my mind. I felt like I couldn't even construct a single coherent sentence. And I really didn't know what was going on. And all of these feelings and sensations swirling around in my body, I just really didn't know how to make sense of them. And like the good little researcher that I was, I went on the internet, I went into WebMD, and if you type in anything into WebMD, including just normal aches and pains in your body, you will get search results saying that you're going to die of at least like five kinds of cancer and at least two kinds of neurodegenerative diseases. So I thought I was dying. I mean, I was convinced that I was developing some kind of condition that would kill me very shortly. And so when I ended up going into the trans rabbit hole, that actually kind of gave me an alternative of maybe these types of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases don't explain these symptoms, and maybe it's this. I guess a lot of things were happening at that point, and another thing I think that would be interesting to note for these purposes is that most people who have gone through middle school notice an interesting phenomenon where boys and girls tend to separate. I mean, they almost become allergic to each other. And it's not that they're particularly co-ed, you know, in elementary school, but they're more co-ed than they are in middle school. And I'm guessing that that's probably because you feel awkward around the target of your attraction, especially when you're really young, before you actually want to explore that. you become really awkward. And so boys and girls really tend to separate. And I ended up going with the boys because I felt none of these awkward, odd, destabilizing feelings around them. And I could basically just be a normal person. Whereas around the girls, I felt incredibly awkward. And if one of them would smile at me, I would lose my mind. It felt like my brain was falling out of my head. I didn't know what to do with myself. I was super flustered. So I wanted to be like my male peer group, and I admired their style, their haircuts. I wanted to dress like them. I was also obsessed with the Ellen DeGeneres show, and I really liked her style. I thought she was dapper, and so I was emulating myself much more after my male peers. Really, I had no interest in emulating myself after my female peers. And this was definitely problematic in the household that I grew up in because of those cultural values and the sort of, you know, I mean, being a nonconformist in the Soviet Union, that is like certain social death. I mean, there is no cultural tolerance for that kind of thing. And especially if you're Jewish, you really can't stick out. You have to be as normal and as… as adjacent to the dominant culture as you possibly can be in order to gain that type of social acceptance. Like in the Soviet Union, a Jew could be twice as competent as everybody else around him, but would only be able to, maximum, become number two, not number one, because there's no way for a Jew to be number one. And so I think that's sort of the reasoning as to why my parents, they didn't want me to stick out, and I stuck out in a lot of ways from the very beginning.

Stephanie Winn: That explains, sorry to interrupt, but I just want to acknowledge that it makes so much sense the way that you lay it out. It's so endearing to hear the story of this little middle schooler who nobody ever told her what a crush is, let alone the fact that she might have one on a girl. And then you actually think you're dying. It's such a sweet story. And then the way you describe it just makes so much sense, you know, that kids are sticking with their same-sex peers because that protects them from these overwhelming, scary feelings of feeling like they're going to die. And so that's why you hung out with the boys. You didn't feel like you were going to die around them. It all just makes so much sense the way you explain it. Then you add in the cultural factor of, and I can appreciate how you have so much compassion for where your mom was coming from. I think you obviously have an interest in peace and understanding and world bridging and there are some really divisive narratives in the culture right now about parents who ostensibly reject their children, and a lot of it is about the trans stuff, but there's an element of that that goes back with regard to Parents not accepting that their children are gay. What I've learned is that it's not as black and white as some people want to portray it. You have extremes on the ends of people who are, I'd be so happy if my kid was gay. In fact, I'd prefer it. I've met parents like that. I've met a dad who was like, I hope my daughter's a lesbian. I hate men for her. I've met parents on that end of the spectrum. And then I've met parents who like, you know, it would really not be okay with them. But I find that that's few and far between. And for a lot of parents, it is somewhere in between where they're not necessarily gung ho to support their kid being gay, but it's not because they would hate them. It's because of, you know, they were really looking forward to grandchildren, or In this case, you have compassion for your mom coming from, like you say, this Jewish paranoia that is so embedded in the ancestry of people from certain backgrounds, and that it wasn't necessarily about hatred or anything like that, just so much as her motherly instinct to protect you. and her own life experiences of discrimination. That's part of what was feeding into it. That doesn't necessarily mean it was any easier for you. I see how all of this would lead to you identifying as male, but please continue.

Maia Poet: Yes. I'd say that my bridging of the world's thing, that is a function of cognitive maturity. I did not always feel like that. I was very angry and resentful as a child because of how my gender nonconformity was reacted to. Growing up makes you realize that your parents are not gods, but they're actually flawed human beings, and that most parents who aren't psychopaths and narcissists, which would be a very small minority of parents, genuinely do all what's best for their kids. And sometimes because of the background they come from, or the time they were raised in, they don't understand that society can be much more accommodating these days. And so they sort of project an older world view onto their child's modern existence. Now I have a lot of empathy, but it wasn't always the case. It's proof that even the most fraught and tough parent-child relationships can be repaired, but sometimes it does require on the child's part as they grow up, a lot of soul-searching, a lot of research, and just a lot of trying to reconcile different facts and events. It's a facet of growing up. But yeah, so I was trans identified from, from that time on. And at some point, I think around the age of 19, my parents had sort of picked up on the fact that the trans thing wasn't going away. Although, although I, we didn't talk about it. I mean, after I initially told them, I did not. talk with them about it. And they got the feeling that it didn't disappear. And basically one of the stipulations made for continued financial support through my studies was that, well, one, I didn't medicalize. And secondly, that I would go to study abroad in a country that didn't support all of this stuff. And that's basically how I ended up in Israel. And the reason I chose Israel, actually, it wouldn't have been a very straightforward choice, but I used to be one of these pro-Palestinian campus activists back in the day. Not one of the super rabid ones, definitely not the type of people that we've been seeing on college campuses recently, but I was definitely aligned with the pro-Palestinian side, you know, because I'd been raised by Arabs, essentially. At least my moral, you know, my moral upbringing I was very, very influenced by Arabs and also by the left because I grew up in a progressive place. And there was one time at actually a debate camp, because I was a high school debater, so I'd go to these debate camps, and they gave a super one-sided lecture about the Israel-Palestine conflict. And it was given by some random white dude who, like, wasn't Jewish, wasn't Arab, wasn't Israeli, wasn't Palestinian. Really, he was nothing. He wasn't even very intelligent or insightful. He was just there. He was like breathing, and that somehow made him qualified to give us a lecture. And he gave us a lecture which delved into all kinds of anti-Semitic tropes, although he was using those as arguments. So, and I was the only Jew in the room, so all eyes were on me. And at the end of that lecture, I basically thought, oh my God, I'm responsible for all of the world's problems. So a lot of guilt and a lot of need to rectify perceived wrongs that my people had done. And the Jews, my people, I wasn't even very connected to at that point. I was really only connected to Arabs. So I became a pro-Palestinian campus activist and one of the Jewish organization on campus saw that there were a few token Jews being weaponized on the pro-Palestinian side of things. And the director of this Jewish organization invited me in and he said, I can tell you're very passionate and intellectually interested in this conflict, but I have a feeling that you're not getting the whole story. and we're gonna do a trip to Israel where we study this conflict at an institute in Jerusalem. We'll pay for all of your expenses. Just apply and if you get in, you can come with us. And I thought, sweet, let's go. So I applied to this program, myself and my girlfriend at the time, and we ended up going to study at this institute. And from the moment I landed in Israel, I was shocked because everything, I realized pretty quickly that everything I learned about this country and the way it was demonized was absolutely wrong, that I was being lied to. And I mean, it was really shocking to land in Israel just because I immediately saw Jews just walking around, like religious Jews, tons of them. And I didn't even realize that there were that many of us that were still alive, to be totally honest with you. So it was touching. And also from the perspective of somebody who had really wanted to practice my Arabic skills that I'd been developing. I was for the first time in a country where a lot of people speak Arabic. So it was just a perfect environment and I really blossomed. And after the instance it was over, my girlfriend and I did a little bit of our own traveling. We'd gone to the West Bank. And there was a time where we were transiting from one city to the next and we'd gotten off in the wrong city with our massive suitcases and we were wandering around Nablus, which is a city in the West Bank. with our massive suitcases, just trying to figure out who could give us directions. And we ended up stumbling into a coffee shop, and the coffee shop owner comes out and greets us. He sees us with our suitcases. He can tell we're tourists, and he becomes very excited, because I'm guessing they don't get a ton of tourists over there. He invited us in, and he spoke decent English, and he gave us free hot dogs and free coffee, and just welcomes us in, and we have a fascinating conversation. And my girlfriend and I are sitting there, we look around and we notice that the only people around us are men. And that's because in most Arab cities, you know, the Arab culture is a very homosocial culture. So it's very, very sex segregated. And so in most cafes in the Middle East, in Arab cities are sex segregated. And so I was having this conversation with this owner of the coffee shop and I told him that I spoke some Arabic. And so we'd switched to Arabic and he asked me a question and referred to me in the masculine. And that's the moment in which I realized that he perceived me to be a man. And so I realized that actually my girlfriend was the exception to the no women in the cafe rule. And at that moment, something in my head clicked, which is that while in the United States, my presentation would get me clocked as a masculine female, In the Middle East, I could really live out this dream that I'd had ever since I was 12 and live my life as a man. So after this trip to the West Bank, my girlfriend and I ended up in Jerusalem, praying at the Western Wall, which is also sex segregated. And I'd walked onto the men's side of the Western Wall, and this 18-year-old kid from New York greets me, and he says, excuse me, sir, are you Jewish? And I told him that I was, and he asked me if I was above the age of 13, and I thought, ouch, because I was 19. But… I told him that I was, and he asked me if I'd engaged in this Jewish ritual, which is the wrapping of tefillin, or I guess in English you'd call it tefillin. And there are those black leather straps that Jewish men wear to say their prayers. And there's a box that goes with a Torah scroll inside that goes on your arm and one that goes on your head. And it's a ritual that Jewish men who are 13 years and older are obligated to engage in. And I told him that I'd never done this. And he asked me, so not even at your bar mitzvah? And I told him, well, no, I'd actually never had a bar mitzvah. And this kid, he becomes super excited. He yells to some of his friends in Yiddish, next thing I know, we're all holding hands, dancing around in a circle, singing songs. And then we hear the Shabbat siren come on, which indicates to everybody that the Sabbath is going to start shortly and that they need to get home to their families. And so this kid who had walked me through this whole ritual, he asks me to give him my phone. And he wants help with opening the camera app. And I had to teach him, you know, to press on the white button to take a picture, because this kid had clearly never used a smartphone in his life. And he tells me to stand next to the wall. And so I ask him, where would you like me to stand? And then he says, well, where would you like me to take your bar mitzvah photo? And I said, excuse me, sir, what do you mean? And he says, Mazal Tov, you're a bar mitzvah now. You know, you can share this picture with your friends and family and they'll give you a ton of money. And I thought, well, I'm never going to do that. But I was diplomatic and I told him, thank you. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was waiting for me because the women's side of the Western Wall is incredibly somber and the women can't pray loudly, they can't sing because God forbid a man might be aroused by the sound of women enjoying themselves in their prayer. So she was out of there, she was in and out, but this whole process for me, the whole Bar Mitzvah that I didn't know happened until it was over, took quite a while. And really, this event in my life cemented both my Jewish identity and my male identity. And when I had to pick a study abroad location, of course, I was going to pick Israel. So I picked Israel. And what started as a year study abroad in which at the university, everyone knew me as a woman because that was what was written on my documents. So I lived that life. But then I lived a simultaneous double life where outside of the university, Everybody knew me as a man and very few people actually knew that I was female.

Stephanie Winn: Can I ask you a question now? How did your girlfriend see you?

Maia Poet: By the time I had moved to Israel, I had broken up with his girlfriend.

Stephanie Winn: This was your first trip to Israel and this was the trip where you decided that you would be moving there? So you were with her at the time, and then you weren't with her when you moved there?

Maia Poet: When I was with her, that was back in the United States. We went on this trip together. And then when I decided to come to Israel, it was actually originally just supposed to be a one-year study abroad thing. It was only later that I realized that I loved it so much that I wanted to stay. But I mean, the girlfriend, I mean, you obviously can't hide the truth from an intimate partner. And she was bisexual, so it really wouldn't have phased her either way. Although the first seed of doubt, I would say, that was really planted in my mind about this path of transition, and it was the seed of doubt, which, by the way, I didn't delve into, and I didn't follow up on it, I just kind of pushed it into the back of my mind, was actually when my girlfriend and I were reading the book Stone Butch Blues together. and the main character in this book is a butch lesbian from several decades ago who actually transitions. She described her life and the feelings she was having, both in relation to her own body and in relation to the relationships and the dynamics she'd had in partnerships with women. All of it was incredibly relatable to me and for the first time, these feelings that I was having. were described not under a trans label, but actually as a subset of a specific type of lesbian experience. And this main character transitions, and while it's easier for her in the social world, like she works in a blue-collar work amongst men, and that's what a lot of butch lesbians at that time did. She had that life, but in her private life, it caused a lot of turmoil because she lost touch with a lot of the lesbian community because they stopped perceiving her as as female and that was the and I would have been about 19 at this time and really that's the first time when I got you know when this idea came into my mind of like it was an oh shit moment I realized like oh my god I've never given myself a chance to live as a lesbian But because in the year 2018, there weren't really any lesbian communities among my age group to speak of, I just pushed this thought into the back of my mind and just went on living my life, you know, with the end trajectory or goal of my life still being that of transitioning and living as a man.

Stephanie Winn: And so with regard to your girlfriend, you said, like, obviously you can't hide physical reality. But was she affirming you? Was she calling you a different name and pronouns? And how did that affect your relationship?

Maia Poet: Well, this girlfriend of that, she was my first girlfriend at university. So when I was 18, I had a girl, you know, secret girlfriends in high school and stuff like that. But this girl was my first, you know, relationship under this new identity that I had constructed. And yeah, she affirmed all of it. So that was, I mean, The extent to which that affected me, I mean, it was what I was going for, but I haven't had any relationships since desisting because I've desisted fairly recently. I haven't had any relationships in which I have to come to peace with myself as a woman and as a lesbian.

Stephanie Winn: So this is still, in some ways, it's new for you because it's so fresh desisting and you haven't had this experience. You started to have doubts several years ago. You started to recognize that you had never given yourself a chance to just be a masculine woman who loves women. But it's still sort of unrealized in a way because you haven't dated from this desisted perspective yet. Correct. All right. Any single ladies listening in the region of I don't know if you want to specify your location or not. That's completely up to you.

Maia Poet: Well, in the region of the West Coast, we'll say Pacific.

Stephanie Winn: Maya is single and looking to mingle.

Maia Poet: Absolutely. Yeah, I'm looking for a lady who will, you know, let me buy her flowers and treat her like a queen and someone who's a real intellectual partner as well. Yeah, I would love that. That would be the dream, honestly.

Stephanie Winn: So where did we leave off? I think I interrupted you because I was curious about the relationship dynamic there. So there was this first trip was the year abroad and it sounded like what brought you there was a combination of your, did you say it was your parents requiring that if they were going to pay for college, you said that you needed to spend time abroad in a place that didn't believe in the trans stuff, which backfired on them because they didn't realize that if you go to a country where this stuff isn't open, you could just hide and be read as man by having short hair and a certain demeanor or whatever, a certain style of dress. So it sort of backfired on them, this idea. And I also wanted to know, would you have medicalized? if it weren't for that? Was there a part of you that wanted to?

Maia Poet: Oh, absolutely. I was planning on medicalizing and that's actually part of why I wanted to become an Israeli citizen because I knew that my parents were so against it. And as paranoid as they were, I was equally paranoid that they would try to stop me. So that's part of the reason why I wanted to immigrate to Israel was actually you know, because they do offer these treatments in Israel and gender ideology really is catching up, although with sort of a 10-year delay. I mean, most American trends hit Israel about 10 years after they hit the United States. But these treatments are offered and they're covered under the national health insurance. And that was really the goal. But what really saved me was actually being illegal in Israel for several years because of the hellish nature of Israeli bureaucracy. they didn't know whether to process my case as an American case or as a case from the former Soviet Union. So they basically tossed me from, you know, between a bunch of different agencies. And yeah, so I was illegal for several years and didn't have any access to healthcare or to, you know, worker's visa. So I worked all kinds of cash jobs in the ultra-Orthodox community, again, LARPing as a man, as an Orthodox Jewish man.

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Maia Poet: In regards to the whole minor inconveniences or even pretty major inconveniences saving me. That actually, that absolutely happened. So because I was illegal and couldn't medicalize for several years, I experienced a lot of crazy things which kind of forced me to rethink my entire trajectory. So I would say that my journey to desistance really started. I mean, it lasted for a very long time, but it really started in May of 2021 in a bomb shelter. I'd experienced that story. Yeah, absolutely. I was. So in May of 2021, I'd experienced my first war in Israel. And it was a destabilizing and shocking and petrifying experience. I heard a siren and I didn't know what was going on. I was with a different girl that I was dating. And I heard the siren, I looked at her and I was like, what are we supposed to do? And she says, well, we need to run to a bomb shelter. And then I asked her, well, do you know where the bomb shelter is? She's like, no, I'm new to this apartment. So the first couple of sirens, we just stood at the lowest level of the apartment complex because you're less likely to get hit by a rocket or debris of rockets if you're on the lower level. And eventually we'd figured out where the bomb shelter was and we were just running back and forth, back and forth. And bomb shelters are just incredibly depressing places to be in, especially for somebody of my generation, because there's no Wi-Fi in there and you can't distract yourself. You're just hearing sirens and you hear the explosions of when the rockets get intercepted by the Iron Dome. And these explosions, they shake the foundation of whatever building you're in. It's just utter terror. And especially if you don't make it into the bomb shelter on time, like there were a few times when I hid under a tree and I just saw rockets go past, you know, right over my head, just one after the other. They ripped through the air. It's a terrifying experience. So in between trips to the bomb shelter, I went on the internet, I went on Instagram, which in hindsight was a mistake, and I saw the things that my lefty American friends were posting about this war, basically justifying that Israelis should live under rocket fire. and justifying the actions of Hamas, a terrorist group. And the logic behind their position was essentially that they were pro-Palestine, but their pro-Palestinian position was not even remotely similar to my pro-Palestinian position, because unlike any of these people, I actually have Palestinian friends, including friends from Gaza, who still live in Gaza, who I'd met abroad. And while they wanted to justify, you know, anything done in the name of the Palestinian people, No matter how atrocious or heinous. I just wanted this all to end. I mean, I noticed that the West was really treating This war like a soccer or football match where they were just rooting for one side But I wasn't of that opinion. I was rooting for this whole thing to stop and And I was young and naive and I basically thought, OK, well, these people just, you know, I used to believe what they believed. And I've been lucky enough to have an experience that showed me that I was being lied to. And a lot of these kids I knew from debate. So. I trusted their reasoning skills and I trusted my ability to form a coherent and persuasive argument. I knew some basic things about ethos, pathos, and logos. I knew which logical fallacies to stay away from. And I thought, well, I just need to provide them with some credible data and evidence to show them that Hamas is a terrorist group, which not only endangers Israelis, but also drags Palestinians into endless wars, uses them as human shields, and ultimately their goal is to destroy Israel at all costs. And one of those costs is that it really doesn't matter how many Palestinians die in the process. And I thought, well, surely this will convince them that they're not seeing the whole story and that they shouldn't support the same genocidal regime that wants to wipe out Israel, that in the process is willing to wipe out as many Palestinians as they can get away with, and that teaches Palestinian children from the age of toddlerhood that their biggest aspiration in life is to become a martyr and to engage in terror attacks and suicide bombings. I thought that if I just presented them with a credible argument that they would look into it and that they would include this into their logical calculus. I ended up being wrong in that assumption. And instead, all of these people just became angry at me. They called me a colonizer and a settler sympathizer, and a lot of them just blocked me.

Stephanie Winn: I just need to set the scene just so listeners hear it one more time. You are taking a break from hiding in the bomb shelter as these terrorist attacks are happening around you and the earth is shaking. You are in danger. Everyone around you is scared for their lives. And you step outside to check Instagram and people safe in the comfort of their American homes are calling you a colonizer for trying to say that maybe there's more to this story. That is wild.

Maia Poet: Yeah. It was one of those paradigm-shifting moments because… At that moment, even though I didn't have the words to describe it, because it's really hard to think eloquently when there are rockets flying over you, so I was just generally scatterbrained, but I did realize, I had enough cognitive wherewithal to realize that something is up. There's something going on here that I'm not understanding. These people who I thought were… you know, people who I thought I could trust their reasoning have proven themselves to be untrustworthy. So that was one paradigm shifting moment in which I realized that the Western left was really hypocritical and incredibly inconsistent because I realized that clearly these people don't care at all about the Jews and that became pretty evident that their anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism. So that became very clear to me. But an interesting aspect of this whole phase of my life is that because I was researching for, because I was searching the internet basically for credible data and evidence to show them that there was more to the story, you know, we know that algorithms are incredibly powerful. And at this time, the newest iteration of the culture wars had already started raging in the United States. And the pro-Israel position, as I had begun to learn, was affiliated with the right wing of these culture wars. So I was looking up pro-Israel content, and I was getting more content that was critical of the left, and including critical of gender ideology. So that's really what started the process of me realizing that actually Something is going on here with, you know, first of all, that transgenderism had absolutely exploded because I got into it really early and I was never entrenched within the trans community. Even at my university, I just chose to hang out with the Arabs instead because I found, you know, the queer cohort to be insufferable and not curious and not intellectually stimulating. And certainly their aesthetics did not allure me in any way. I mean, I wanted normalcy. Normalcy is what allured me to You know wanting to live as a man because I just didn't have any models of what it would look like to grow up and be a lesbian to be a butch lesbian. I had basically ruled that out from the moment that I was 12. So I was not entrenched within the trans community, and I didn't realize just how insane it had become with the men and women's sports. And just with all, I mean, as soon as non-binary had started to happen, a couple years after I had gotten into trans, I already wrote it off as not the same thing that I was, because I wanted to assimilate. And these people wanted to stick out. So I never, I didn't sort of see the trans community evolve from being a really niche and rare thing to being, you know, to subsuming every Western institution. But I'd started to see that basically being sucked into the internet rabbit hole with COVID and just in this phase of my life. And then the stories of detransitioners had started to pop up. And so the first detrans story I saw, I saw a little thing about it on YouTube and I clicked on it. And people have asked me before, like, how did you feel clicking on it? And honestly, the answer to that is that my worldview had already been threatened a few times before, and I emerged perfectly fine from it. So I was actually pretty intrigued. Not only your worldview, but your life. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. And the first detrans story I saw, I mean, With this first wave of detransitioners, I didn't relate to their stories at all because they had gotten caught up in the peer social contagion, the peer-to-peer, the type of phenomenon that we talk about a lot these days, which is mostly with teenage girls. One girl will come out as trans after spending a lot of time on the internet, and then her entire peer group will follow, or at least a large portion of it. And these girls were this first wave for, for the most part, very feminine and heterosexual. And I thought, well, These are the people who regret transition. I'm not like them. Therefore, I am a true transsexual. Therefore, I won't regret it." So I stayed in the true trans camp for a couple of years before seeing all kinds of logical inconsistencies and having the time to grow up and being mature enough to battle with the cognitive dissonance. and to realize that, you know, actually the classic true transsexual really is just a very gender nonconforming homosexual. And so when I had that realization, you know, that's the moment in which I realized that actually a great injustice is being done to all kinds of young people who are very nonconforming, whether it be in their presentation, their gender presentation, or whether it be because they have ADHD or autistic traits or something of that nature. So that made me really think twice about it. But from the moment that I started to encounter that content, it was still years before I had decided to actually pull the trigger on desistance. And really living through war gave me a chance to have sort of second thoughts about it because You know, especially with the type of war that we're seeing now between Israel and Hamas, which is an extremely long and drawn out war that could not have been anticipated to be this long and drawn out. And this undoubtedly impacts supply chains. And because I'd been researching this whole process of transition for a decade at that point, I knew that after several years of taking testosterone, it poses massive risks to the integrity of the female reproductive system And that there have been cases of women taking testosterone and basically needing to have an emergency hysterectomy because of the level of atrophy, becoming septic, essentially. And when your reproductive system is removed, your body's natural ability to produce its own hormones goes away. And so therefore you'd be reliant on pharmaceutical companies for the duration of your life. And because I knew that I wanted to live in the Middle East and specifically in a country that's incredibly prone to war, I knew that I couldn't rely on supply chains and that this whole situation would become incredibly tenuous. And if there's anything that's more unhealthy than, you know, flooding your body with copious amounts of cross-sex hormones, it's having absolutely no sex hormones in your body. and not being able to access them, sort of the uncertainty around whether or not you're going to be able to access these hormones. And that's another moment in which I realized, like, I really have to think twice about this. But even at that point, even when I'd intellectually realized that this path was dangerous and would really impact my ability to live the type of full adult life that I wanted to, I really didn't see another way to live. And so even with that understanding, it was still several, it was still quite a long time before I decided to actually desist. And what really pulled the trigger on that were two main events. The first one is that I ended up in a, in one of these GenSpec conferences, and I had met detransitioners in real life, including butch lesbians. And that was the first time in which I realized that there were people who were very similar to me, and that they were not, in fact, true transsexuals, which is now an idea I don't buy into. But I realized that there are a bunch of women who take this path and they still regret it. It still causes them harm. And that's the moment that I, as far as taking these ideas from the intellectual and putting them into the personal, that I realized, oh, my God, I need to give up this dream that I've had for half of my life And I didn't know what that was going to look like. So after this conference, I came back to Israel and I was really grappling with these ideas and really struggling through probably the most major cognitive dissonance I've ever been through. Because I know everybody over there in the city that I lived in, because of the languages I speak, I speak the most commonly spoken languages over there. And I'd really sort of integrated into, you know, all kinds of different cultural backgrounds and sectors of the society. and including people who are very religious who knew me as a man. So I saw absolutely no way of being able to disentangle myself from that. But really, when the October 7th attacks started happening, at some point, like, you know, even after I'd sort of psychologically desisted and realized that, you know, it's dangerous that I am, one, an adult human female, which means that I'm a woman, that it's dangerous for adult human females to take testosterone, and that it's a very uncertain outcome, You know, even though I had understood all of these things, I was still living my life as a man, but I'd opened up to a few of my close friends who did know that I was female about my reservations around this whole life path. And so then the October 7th attacks happened. And for me, the extent of my transition really was just, you know, introducing myself under a male name and wearing a binder. And at some point, I'd woken up to a siren on the morning of October 7th, and I didn't have time to put a binder on, so I just had to run to a bomb shelter. And so then I'd put my binder on because everybody in that neighborhood knew me as a guy. And so I was really conscious about not revealing the truth and not letting anybody see the fact that I had breasts. But at some point, I'd realized that, you know, I can't continue to sleep in this thing. I'd spend a couple nights wearing the binder, which is incredibly dangerous already in some of these peace events that I'd done in Bedouin villages. But with a siren, you need to be able to get a few hours of good sleep at least so that you can wake up and be alert enough to make it into the bomb shelter and not fall down the stairs on the way there or whatever. And so at some point, I just realized, like, I can't, I don't know how long this is going to last, and I just, I can't spend all of this time in a binder. So I took the binder off and I just layered on a bunch of shirts. And that was the moment in which I had to feel my body move naturally as it does without constricting anything. And I really realized how capable my body actually was, because I was able to get myself into the bomb shelter within a very short amount of time, because you really don't have that much time from when you hear the siren until when there's an explosion. And I realized that my body was actually much more capable than I gave it credit for. And I really had to sort of be in touch with myself at that time. And that's the moment in which I really realized that, you know, I basically… I don't even know how I've totally processed that entire arc of this story, because it was bound up with, you know, seeing my friend being executed by terrorists on livestream. So, like, a lot of things were happening. But… to have to, previously, I mean, what really underpinned my trans identity from a very young age, from the age of 12, was this false belief that my female body, existing in its natural and healthy state, is existing in a state of pathology. Like, I thought that my female body was existing in a pathological state and that it could be corrected with hormones and surgeries from the moment that I was financially independent of my parents. And when I realized that actually my body is all I have and it's the only thing that's going to save my brain, you know, because I had existed in my brain for my entire life, that my body was the only thing that was allowing me to survive this and to make it into the bomb shelter and that I might be, you know, that I was this close to ruining my body, to altering it in permanent ways that would make it much harder for me to get out of these situations, including, like, I was already in the bomb shelter, you know, there's no Wi-Fi, you're basically just stuck with your thoughts, and I was… And I was going in between listening to podcasts that I downloaded, like the General Waterline's podcast. I'd learned to cope with the terror of this type of situation by downloading some podcasts ahead of time, so I was listening to those. And then when my phone would die, I was just stuck in my head again and I just… my brain was already primed to think about this medical scandal, this whole transgender ideology as, among other things, a massive medical scandal. I was thinking about imagining myself in a hospital room recovering from a double mastectomy, an elective radical double mastectomy, and hearing a siren and having to somehow run. and realizing that that would be impossible. And, like, you can never predict. It's not like I could schedule my quote-unquote top surgery, which is the euphemism used for these radical procedures. I would not have been able to predict that and schedule it. You know, you can't predict a war. I mean, the day before this attack that's just changed all of our lives, I was doing a peace event with Jewish and Arab children, and the next day I wake up and my world is just shattered. So I couldn't predict that, and I realized, like, you can schedule a surgery, you can schedule it and get time off work, but what if a war happens and I wouldn't be able to get to a bomb shelter? So really war is what sort of forced me to snap back into reality and into my body and to realize that this track that I had planned for my entire life was built on false premises, that it was dangerous, and that on top of struggling with the personal tragedy of having to deal with all of these losses, I had to figure out how do I come back from this? How do I accept myself for what I actually am? And what does that even look like? Because my entire life I've lived as a guy. So I really had to try to figure out how to navigate all kinds of complicated social interactions and just re-envision my future outside of this idealized version of I'm going to grow up, I'm going to pass as a man, take testosterone, get these surgeries, I'm going to get a hot girlfriend, you know. I'm going to grow up, I'm going to have this life. I think maybe for the subset of kids that you might work with, the more modern cohort, I think for a lot of them, this whole trans idea is a way of stunting their development, their psychological and physical. development in the way that for a lot of other kids eating disorders might but for me the trans framework really gave me a vision and a framework by which to grow up and become you know a productive adult member of society because I but as you know as a pseudo straight man I really just couldn't envision doing that as a butch lesbian I didn't I didn't have a framework by which to do that. So now there are just a lot of things since desisting that I've had to figure out, like, you know, how to re-envision myself and what it looks like. Like, who am I under these lies? And it's hard because a lot of these, you know, this sex deception that I was engaging in, I didn't have to go to very great lengths to do it. I mean, in these conservative countries, they don't know what a butch lesbian is. They just assumed that I was a guy that looked very young. And I didn't have to act or talk in a different way in order for people to think I was a guy. including even afterward when I'd reintroduce myself to people as a woman with, you know, Maya, with my name. And whether I was speaking to them in Arabic or Hebrew, if I was speaking, you know, about myself in the feminine, they just corrected me and thought that my Arabic or my Hebrew was bad and that they just heard my name. Like, people are willing to suspend their disbelief. Like, because of cognitive dissonance. So it's not as if I was engaging in some kind of super crazy radical sex deception that I had to entangle myself from, but I was actually behaving in a very natural way in many regards. And so now I have to figure out, like, What of it is a lie and what of it is the truth? Because the lie was not super far from the truth in a lot of superficial ways, but in fundamental ways, it was denying reality. So there are just a lot of things now that are kind of going through my mind at this stage of desistance, and part of the reason I'm doing these interviews and giving speeches like the one I gave at Detrans Awareness Day is really me trying to make sense of the last half of my life and hoping that the insights that I've garnered throughout this time and the insights that I can get from talking to really, you know, interesting and intelligent people like yourself who are therapists and who are thought leaders, like, coming to some conclusions and hoping that maybe my story can provide some insight for people on the other side of the screen, maybe for young people and for parents. That's me answering questions you did ask and lots of questions that you didn't ask.

Stephanie Winn: Where to begin? It's like, talk about first world problems, the contrast in your story. My body is all I have for running from literal terrorist attacks and maybe I can't afford to hinder my body and maybe I shouldn't be at war with my own body when there's enough war going on in the world. Also, in some of the places that you've been culturally, it made more sense for you to walk in the male role. Now that you're back in the USA, probably, maybe even, I wouldn't be surprised if you were having some culture shock being back in your own country. I experienced culture shock returning to California after living in Hawaii for a year and a half when I was 18, 19. I can imagine you're still going through some culture shock, even though this is home in some ways. And yeah, sorting out like in a culture where you're safe and gender ideology proliferates, but you've detached from it, and you are protected in this country. to be whatever kind of woman, whatever kind of lesbian you want to be. And it's really it's about your mental freedom at this point. Like, yeah, what what do you keep and what do you let go of with regard to the way that you lived your life during that time that you were presenting as a man? And I'm sorry that we don't have more time to get into some of the questions that are, you know, that I have lingering for you still like about looking back on the time that you had your bar mitzvah, for example. Like, you know, what is your perspective on that nowadays? I think it'll just have to wait until we get to chat next time. But I want to thank you, Maya, for sharing your incredible and unique story. I don't know that there's any one particular moral to the story, but I think your story speaks volumes and can be so many different things to so many people because it's such a unique perspective on multiple intersecting social issues of our time. So I just thank you for being yourself and sharing your story.

Maia Poet: Thank you so much, Stephanie. It was a real pleasure to be on and I hope that we can have more conversations in the future because this was one of the more enlightening interviews I've done so far. And I just really appreciate you helping me sort of process all of this, all of this stuff. And I really hope that something about my story you know, is helpful to people. And yeah, just thank you for everything.

Stephanie Winn: Of course. And you mentioned a book that'll be in the show notes. Do you want to tell people what that is or tell people anything else about where they can find you?

Maia Poet: Yeah. So you can find me on X, formerly Twitter, as they'll remind you in all of their pesky email notifications, at ThePeacePoet99. Also, I've written a book in conjunction with an Israeli social worker that I'm working with, and she's the only person in Israel who is who is speaking out against the dangers and harms of gender ideology with her name and face attached to it. And we've been working on a series of books for both little kids who, you know, as sort of an antidote to I Am Jazz for the younger population. And they're available, the books for little kids are available in a bunch of different languages. not just in English, I mean English, Hebrew, I think Danish, Polish, just tons of languages. And then there's a book that I actually wrote with this social worker about my life, or based on my life. And it really goes through just all of this sort of how the trans identification started and just up until the end of it and what I'm grappling with now. And that book is more for teens and young adults. And I wrote that hopefully to provide a perspective for the more sort of gender nonconforming types of gay kids who might not see a story of desistance or a path of desistance that is currently reflected within sort of mainstream media. So hopefully my book can can sort of fill that gap and for both for parents and young people. So.

Stephanie Winn: OK, awesome. Thank you, Maya. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit sometherapist.com. Or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at sometherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.