You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 117. LaRell and Valerie FINAL.wav
LaRell Herbert:
As a trans person, you identify an end goal, a target, being a woman in every way, shape and form, what that means. And I hyper-analyzed every woman I would see, every girl I would see, what makes her different? What makes her a female? What makes her what I want to be or what I feel like I am inside? So when I took those hormones, it felt like it was moving me towards that goal of being the female actually physically. I was convinced that taking female hormones would literally change my body physically to become closer to that of an actual female as if I was born that way. That's the information that's out there that take female hormones and it will change your body to be female. Now I have a completely shifted perspective.

Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Today I have two very special guests joining me to discuss an intersection that could not be more relevant to my interest on this podcast. I have Laurel and Valerie Herbert. They are a couple who has been through the journey together of Laurel believing that he was a trans woman and then de-transitioning. They're also interested in somatic psychology and psychedelic integration. So a lot of sort of unique intersecting topics of this podcast. I'm really interested in their relationship throughout this whole process. I'm interested in how the process of detransition impacts relationships, how relationships heal from that. So, Laurel, as I mentioned, is a detransitioner, a mentor and teacher with interests in somatic dance, breathwork, movement, and psychedelic integration. Valerie is a somatic trauma-informed mentor and teacher. She is also, like many listeners of this podcast, someone who was at one point on track to become classically trained as a therapist, but decided to go her own way after discovering the limitations of the classic licensure route. So I'm so excited to get into their story today and grateful for their bravery in sharing their story with the world so vulnerably. Laurel and Valerie, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

LaRell Herbert: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Stephanie Winn: Where to begin? I want to hear your story from the beginning. I only know bits and pieces of it. And what I think is so fascinating is that your relationship has withstood the entire process. I do know that you've mentioned, Laurel, that At one point, you had thought of yourself as a woman trapped in a man's body from a young age. So would you mind my asking, at the time that you first met Valerie, how were you thinking of yourself and what did you disclose to her about that?

LaRell Herbert: So when I first met Valerie, I was definitely harboring the belief and feeling that I was a female trapped in a man's body. But at the time I thought that perhaps getting married, that those feelings would go away because there were feelings I was dealing with my entire life. Ever since I was just a young child, I felt honestly, like I was female trapped in a male body. And I thought I was the only person on the entire planet that felt that way. By the time I met Valerie, I had learned that transgender was a thing, and I learned that the possibility of transition existed. But at that point, I wasn't thinking transition was possible for me. So when I married Valerie, I was doing so completely convinced that I was going to continue living as a man. And so I didn't tell her up front. She knew that I had feminine tendencies and that I liked wearing women's clothing at home. I did not fully disclose that I was harboring this feeling inside that I definitely wanted to transition someday, but that I just felt I couldn't.

Stephanie Winn: So your story is different from the stories of younger folk growing up today in this rainbow-covered culture where trans is being glorified. It wasn't a social contagion thing for you. Do you have a sense of what it was for you going back to a young age?

LaRell Herbert: There's a lot that I've identified. I spent most of my life believing I was honestly born that way, that it was just something I was born with, like a lot of trans people claim. But I was raised in the Mormon Church, LDS, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and also with a mother that was very anti-man. She would always degrade my father, degrade male anatomy. In my presence as a young child, I always was hearing her bad-mouthing men, acting like they were monsters. And by the age, by the time I was five years old, anytime I would take a bath, I would cover my own penis with a washcloth because even at five years old, I believed it was not supposed to be on my body, that it was so disgusting. I wanted to hide it from my own sight. And so there is a lot from my childhood that I can identify that contributed to these altered beliefs about my identity, my gender.

Stephanie Winn: Wow, so it seems like it was really rooted in shame and trauma. Mormonism, I imagine there are these very strict gender rules and that your mother must have had a lot of anger toward your father or her father, all the men who had wronged her and then that was projected onto you as an innocent little boy and then you projected it onto yourself. You internalized it and made your own body the enemy.

LaRell Herbert: Yeah, I could not. I believe that in order to maintain love, I couldn't be a boy, couldn't be a man. And of course, we all need connection as human beings. We thrive on connection and we adapt to what is necessary to maintain that connection. And that's what I believed I did.

Stephanie Winn: Wow. So in a way, this was your misguided effort as a little boy to secure your mother's love.

LaRell Herbert: Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Did you have siblings?

LaRell Herbert: I have a sister that was three years younger than me.

Stephanie Winn: I imagine there might've been some differences in the way that your mother treated you versus your sister.

LaRell Herbert: Oh, yes. It was kind of interesting because I was the golden child for many years. I was treated better than my sister was, but somehow that gender confusion was absolutely there. I was always jealous of my sister getting to do sleepovers and slumber parties and things, the things that I wanted to do as the girl I thought I was at the time are identified as.

Stephanie Winn: So it seemed like girls had more fun.

LaRell Herbert: Yes, absolutely.

Stephanie Winn: So that was always in the background for you, but you loved women and you fell in love with this woman. And Valerie, it sounds like Laurel was not sharing with you this fantasy that he had early on that he was keeping it inside. And so for you, am I understanding correctly? You're just like, oh, I love a man who has maybe some feminine traits. Yeah.

Valerie Herbert: Absolutely, which perfectly coalesce with my childhood background of having like kind of an angry, aggressive sort of controlling father. And, of course, being attracted to like, kind of the soft, gentle feminine qualities of Laurel. And growing up in a tiny bit different of a time because I'm 12 years younger than him. So I'm like an baby of the beginning of the 90s. So at my high school, it was the first I was part of the first LGBTQ clubs. And back then it was just I was just gay straight alliance, you know, so and I considered myself progressive and all that jazz. So I was like, cool, like a feminine man. Yeah, like love that. Like I come from an aggressive, fundamentalist, religious father. You know, he's leaving the Mormon Church and is soft in these ways and didn't really think much of it, actually. Hmm.

Stephanie Winn: It all made sense at the time, seemed to fit with your values and what you felt like you were needing in a relationship.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, absolutely. I will say too, for me and Laurel, and especially for me, I'll just speak for myself, but when I met Laurel, it was like a remembering. I was so deeply in love and so drawn to him and it was like a homecoming in so many ways. it was just so incredible. So I feel like our connection was so beautiful and so deep and so like alive in so many ways that it definitely caused me to maybe overlook some of those things or not to consider them, which in some ways served us, you know, because we're still together and have a really beautiful, beautiful intimacy and connection and marriage and union. So

Stephanie Winn: So there's that soulmate feeling and with the early stages of falling in love comes the rose-colored glasses and thank goodness for that because love makes the world go round.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: So you said that you've been together nine years, married eight. And you have a stepdaughter, your daughter, Valerie, who you brought into the marriage. And so tell us about the process of getting married. And then at what point, Laurel, did you share this news that you actually had this secret?

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, that was so interesting. I think that the interesting thing about the secret coming out was I mean, it's, it's, it's weird, I have to like preface, like, Laurel was raised, like in the middle of the 80s, homeschooled, like Mormons. So like, I didn't get this sense, like he was lying to me, I don't even know that he quite knew that he could transition until we were only I don't know if we were married, we were just married a couple months, and we were watching the Katie Cork documentary together, like it was new, it just come out, you know, that Katie Cork documentary, the gender revolution one. Um, And that gender revolution documentary kind of like came out and we were watching it because I love social emotional stuff, you know, sociology and all that jazz, social cultural stuff. I was a big social activist my whole life. And you know, I, we were watching that together. And I think that's when like, it kind of dawned on him that like, Well, it dawned on me, too, because I just didn't put the pieces together with the rose-colored glasses, as crazy as it seems, that he could be trans or want to transition. I just… And then I was like, is that what you actually… Is this what you are? Like, is this what… Like, you tell me these things. And he was like, yes. And it was, like, shocking to my system. And I think we just had to, like, push it underground for, like, six more months or so. And then it kind of, like, bubbled up again.

Stephanie Winn: What had happened? What had he said or done up until that point that made you think that maybe this is what he was?

Valerie Herbert: Well, I mean, word verbatim. I mean, like, it's so weird because I feel like L'Oreal is like the most trans person I've ever known. You know, if you're going to say like the most transest trans person, like I would have said L'Oreal. Like, he, like, as these trans people are talking, he's like, Oh my God, I never loved my body. I've never been able to like, I've obsessed about women's clothes. And like, he just hits all the marking points of, like a trans person. So it's just weird to hear all these people saying all these things and then be like, and here's the cure, you know, it's like, Oh my God, you know, at this point, he's drinking too, because, you know, he just left the Mormon church, you know, it's really confronting. We're we're first time in a relationship. We have a shit ton of childhood trauma. Tons of confrontation is coming up. And then here's like this like shiny little solution. Look, here's a cure. And also like being terrified at that process, and then just kind of having to like push it away. But then the same sort of thing bubbled up to the top again, where there's like, here's the problem, you guys are struggling, lots of people struggle with alcoholism, lots of people struggle with these things. And then, you know, you're gonna get a better husband or partner at the end of this.

Stephanie Winn: You know, wow. So when the when the idea was first introduced to you, Valerie, you felt like a shock and overwhelm. But also, there was a bit of a promise that maybe this would solve

Valerie Herbert: his problems the problems in your marriage yeah oh yeah oh yeah exactly and the thing about it is is that i just love laurel like more than anything so it's like yeah this is terrible and this is like scary and weird but oh like there's this really lovely narrative and the science and all of these things that make coherent sense, you know.

Stephanie Winn: And prior to that point, had you ever thought of yourself as bisexual or interested in women or trans people?

Valerie Herbert: I did. Yeah, I definitely had had a few encounters with women and definitely thought women were attractive and beautiful. And even though I'd never like wanted to partner long term with one, I did have that like element in myself for sure.

Stephanie Winn: So perhaps that made you feel a bit more open to the idea than if you'd only ever been interested in men.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, I think so.

Stephanie Winn: There's still probably quite a bit of inner dissonance that you had to wrestle with when you first started contemplating the idea that maybe your husband was going to be a trans woman.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, the nine the last nine months, I feel like I've had to re unpack that. And it's been gnarly. The grief is gnarly on my end, too. On like recognizing like how much the culture and the therapist and everybody we saw like gaslit me and made me feel like I could have no experience of my own because I would be like mitigating or preventing my husband from having his authentic truth and letting him have his moment and like his care. And this is a common experience I've seen too. I've worked with other people that have gone through this, you know, in sort of like a psychotherapy trauma thing, you know, doing trauma work with them. And yeah, it's sad and it's hard. And it was so much grief for me to like unpack, like how much I had to like push my feelings and emotions. And actually, to be quite honest, my feminine intuition and my truth away. Ooh, that was really hard. Because I deep down on the body level, I just knew like, I could feel the the and I we got into a lot of conflict about it too. You know, I did try to like slow down the process I did try to and the more resistance I put up the more he dug his heels in classic marital issues, but around a transition, right? You know, and so it just amplified our trauma patterns. Um, But yeah, I was told so quickly and so immediately by everybody in my circle and in my corners, like, oh my god, whoa, this is such a big thing. We have to celebrate him. Because I'm in such a liberal progressive circles and activism, and I think I was getting education at this time. Yeah, I was in the middle of the education system at the institution at the time anyway, and having these professional you know, x experts of their field be like, this is what needs to happen or he's gonna kill himself. And he's already troubled and drinking and struggling. And I'm like, well, okay, great. There's like a solution to our problems. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, like it's hard, but you know, like, you know, move along. I definitely was like pushed, I pushed my nervous system was racked, I developed auto chronic diseases, which I also see a pattern in many other partners. Luckily, I did the work to reverse them. But seriously, like it was really hard on my body and my nervous system. And I think that I could just feel the lack of truth constantly and. And then needing to, like, suppress myself and then support Laurel and then seeing Laurel more happy, too, and then getting more elements of him, because actually, to be frank, in this process, like he became more himself in some ways. He developed all these parts of himself that were so beautiful. He was more communicative. We had this fun lesbian partnership, but then there were so many other elements that were still so sticky and yucky and traumatic that now I can see through clearing up our polarity and our energies and our traumas how much ease we have now and how much hardship we had then, and we didn't know why. It was confusing. We didn't know why we were struggling, but we were.

Stephanie Winn: It sounds really fraught and tangled up like there's so many layers to it because you were on the one hand you kind of invited this by saying oh is this what you are like you made it okay to talk about the idea, and at the same time, you felt so conflicted. Your body and your intuition were telling you no, but you felt like you had to be a supportive wife. You were repressing all your emotions. I mean, your story sounds a lot like the story of trans widows but you've chosen to stay with him and I'm sure you'll be sharing throughout our conversation about the choices that you made every step along the way. I'm curious about how you've, and maybe this is hopping around too much, but how you went from repressing your own needs and instincts so much to a place where you're still with that same person who you repressed for And you say that you have this beautiful marriage now. I mean, repression of your own needs is so likely to lead to long-term resentments. So if it's not hopping around too much, I mean, how did you work through that?

Valerie Herbert: So, you know, the thing is, is that both Laurel and I come from, like, highly traumatized, complex PTSD, PTSD backgrounds. And so I think that we both naturally, like, suppressed our needs in different ways and, like, didn't know how to communicate validate or be there for each other. And it was really like us and me like wanting to figure out what was happening in our relationship and training and learning about like stuff like attachment theory. We're both parts trained like Richard Schwartz parts like we both are trained in IFS. Some vessel band or cult the body keeps the score like so I think I think that because I was like doing my own therapy work on myself and somatic work on myself and I was very frozen and traumatized. anyway, like from my background that I was just learning so much about myself and relationship. And so as Laurel, so we were like growing and changing together in this process, and we were becoming better people throughout it as well. And so the biggest, I think, difference for us is our our life and our relationship is a vehicle for personal growth. And we felt this way for a really long time, like we felt this way towards the beginning of the transition. So I think that that's a big element. And I mean, this is also where we can bring in some psychedelics too, because, you know, through Laurel and I's psychedelic experiences together and separate, I was able to have a lot of compassion and empathy for myself and my own experience. And, and I mean, I let a lot of my resent out anger and lashing out and stuff. And so I was also very reactive back to Laurel. So it was kind of like these toxic cycles. And, and being able to see his heart and like, how much love that he had for me and how he showed up in my life so consistently in every other way. Yeah, I think it to me, it feels like very typical of other married couples like our journey. It's just with this other element of added like, shift of like gender roles. And, you know, maybe like Laurel stealing the feminine pole and that feeling very like violating in ways. But also like, that evoking the masculine in me, which was very underused, actually. I hardly even drove myself around when I met Laurel, and I was very scared in ways. And so it caused me to branch out. So I think that like for me, resent is something that I look at on my end as like a personal accountability and responsibility to like work through. And like if I can't keep holding my partner in love and in light and in kindness and respect, then that doesn't feel good to me either. And so I think we've just both worked really hard on our own individual traumas and projections in order to have like a loving, light, playful, connection.

Stephanie Winn: When you described him as stealing the feminine pole, and I take it by pole, you mean like polarity. Yeah. Did you feel like he was copying you? I know a lot of trans widows feel like their ex-husbands were sort of like trying to steal their identity.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah. Yes. This is a twofold thing for me because yes, I did and also it was fun. It was I was like, whoa, like we're bonding and we're connecting because before this Laurel was very like cold and distant and like kind of like turning to alcohol. I look at Trent just so you know, like to I look at transition or people that transition a lot. Like I see the threat of addiction through that. It's an addiction and obsession very similar to addicts from developmental trauma and a way of like self soothing to fixate on this like one thing. And so it felt very similar. It felt like a reiteration out of addiction into like a different kind of addiction that felt less bad than the one before it. You know what I mean? Like, you know, like gave up heroin and started being a stoner. Like, I'll take the stoner, you know? It was like these baby steps up. And so it was like, yeah, he was stealing it, but also like he was interested in me and like, we're going shopping together and like, having fun together. It's interesting. There's a lot of texture in our story because of our diverse complex backgrounds and who we are individually.

Stephanie Winn: There's a way in which his process of transforming gives you a new friend, gives you a new way to connect and share things with your husband that maybe the average straight woman can't share with her typical manly husband. There was a playfulness that you experienced and you also said earlier that in some ways going through this made him more himself. This is where gender critics are going to hear this and say, is this podcast gender critical enough? They're not framing this as all bad. I think it's okay to have a perspective as I do, which says this is an abuse of medicine and a human rights violation. and still unpack, you know, how people have made meaning out of their foibles and traumas. And there are so many people who have some kind of story like this where they feel like taking those cross-sex hormones, which are definitely harmful to the body and I don't think should be available, but where they did report that it felt like it gave them access to some part of themselves. And this is something that I just, I want to try to help people understand through the way that you guys are sharing your experience, because I talked to, as you know, a lot of ROGD parents, and I hear stories, for example, of you know, the mother of a college-age son, and he's been taking estrogen for six months, and he comes home for winter break, and he cries in her lap. And she's feeling, on the one hand, kind of disturbed, like, is he okay? On the other hand, she's like, well, I'm glad that he's turning to me. And then there's this third element, though, which is that he's crying because he's on estrogen, and it's making him hormonal in a way that the male body is not accustomed to. But then if you look at what men who have those types of experiences say in the forums, they say that it gave them euphoria. They say that they finally felt like it was so incredible to be able to cry in their mother's lap. And so on the one hand, it's a little bit of a yikes. On the other hand, it's like, It saddens me that some men feel like they have to do something so harmful to their bodies in order to get in touch with their emotions. So I just want to kind of open up all of that for discussion.

LaRell Herbert: I can definitely attest to when I first started taking those female hormones, as a trans person, you identify an end goal, a target of being a woman in every way, shape and form, what that means. And I hyperanalyzed every woman I would see, every girl I would see, what makes her different, what makes her a female, what makes her what I want to be or what I feel like I am inside. So when I took those hormones, it felt like it was moving me towards that goal of being the female, like actually physically, I thought I was convinced that taking female hormones would literally change my body physically to become closer to that of an actual female as if I was born that way.

Valerie Herbert: Well, that's because you were told that directly.

LaRell Herbert: I was, yeah, that that's the information that's out there that take female hormones and it will change your body to be female. You'll grow breasts. And because when you align that with your female identity, that means you are literally a woman in every way and you belong in women's spaces. And that's what I believed back then. Now I have a completely shifted perspective. No, I did not belong in any women's spaces and that I would never become a woman. I was always and will always be a man on this earth. But the hormones it does, it gives this feeling like, oh, we're we're doing the right thing here. We're doing something that feels good.

Valerie Herbert: Right. Which is also like taking a drug, right? It's like, do we want kids to take drugs to cry in their mom's laps or do we need to heal the developmental trauma and the attachment wounding that's take place? and, and repair the interpersonal relations. So the person feels safe and embodied enough to express their natural normal capacity of their emotional range as a man or a woman. Like, I think that's like I have a whole problem with the medical model intrinsically. And I think that my suspicion of it like led to This could be like another, I'm like stopping myself slowly because I'm like, oh God, don't go there. Because I have my own medical stuff, like autoimmune diseases that I've reversed that were non-reversible and doctors that, you know, a bad surgeon that did a bunch of surgeries on my foot. So I saw really early on that like the medical system was set up to only profit long term and then studying medical sociology at the institutional level and looking at funding. It just got hairy real fast for me too. And then the psychotherapy and trauma informed in humanist perspective of like, you know, we've we've really we're really we're we're this is just symptomatic here. Like this is just the fact that this is happening all the time and it's being like pushed and we're being commodified in these ways is a symptom of like a much deeper, deeper issue of our human nature.

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LaRell Herbert: They definitely changed my emotionality. I found myself experiencing emotions that I hadn't before, being more emotional like a lot of trans people experience on hormones. So what the estrogen actually did to me physically, I did develop breasts, not very big ones. I always had enlarged breasts as I was growing up, even male. I had what they would call gynecomastia, enlarged breasts and that always screwed with me growing up. Identifying inside as female but knowing I was a boy and having boobs made it embarrassing to go out with my shirt off. I would never go anywhere with my shirt off just because I didn't want people to see my enlarged breasts. And so it was an interesting thing to take the female hormones and see my breasts come back because I had lost a bunch of weight and they went away. So I got the boobs and they were sensitive and that played into the identity, the gender identity thing. Because when you, I felt inside like female and then I start to see these changes on my body start to happen. Like I have a lot of body hair and all of that went away. It went completely away. I was completely hairless, my body on the hormones.

Stephanie Winn: Without electrolysis.

LaRell Herbert: Yeah, I had to like, I had laser hair removal on my face, because in order to make myself feel better as a female identity at the time, but the rest of the hair on my body went away. And now it has all come back now that I have testosterone back. And so it's, it's weird to see my body becoming looking more like a man again, now that it finally aligns with my sense of self internal

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, I think these trans women think they're becoming feminized because they're losing so much weight and mass and bone structure. So that's like my like personal opinion. Because by the time we got to a bio-identical functional medicine doctor, and they talked to us about why they won't give the opposite sex the wrong hormones, I was mind blown. I was like, what the fuck? You know, I'm always looking for the alternative. I use alternative medicine now. I don't see a Western. I don't have a doctor. My daughter doesn't have a doctor. We don't do that. So I was looking for an alternative. And then the alternative medicine doctors, like, yeah, you give a man body estrogen. It turns into xenoestrogens. And it will always, 100% of the time, convert to cancer. always results in loss of bone mass. It always results in these things. And I'm like, what? She's like, I'm not against trans people. I think that it's fine. They exist. But I as a doctor, can't do that because that's wrong. I'm not going to give one body the wrong biological hormones. So we did bio identical hormones to get Laurel healthy again, because he was so skinny, he was so fatigued, like 10 months ago, after six years of being on estrogen, Did he look more feminine? Well, if you think feminine is frail, yeah. Frail? That's what you internalize. Femininity is looking frail, which is also kind of scary if you think about it that way.

Stephanie Winn: So it sounds like you're getting close to that point in your story where things fell apart. But before we get there, you mentioned your daughter. So what was it like for your daughter, Valerie, your stepdaughter, Laurel, as a young child to be going through this whole, okay, meet Laurel, he's your stepdad, we're getting married. Oh, actually, he is now she and now you have two moms and what was that like for your daughter?

Valerie Herbert: You know, it's interesting understanding the brain and theta state and programming and processing because she was in that like theta state that, you know, before the prefrontal cortex comes online, she was like, five, six, seven, eight. And so, you know, part of me is like, oh fuck, we programmed our kiddo thinking, cause they just accept things, you know, at that age. And so she just like kind of graciously accepted everything and went with the flow. And it's been interesting to watch her unwind this too. I think that she feels safer now than ever, like watching the other side of this, you know, and seeing like, us come into what I call our rightful biology, our rightful nature, evoking more of the wild woman, the wild man, the truth. She can feel that because kids feel everything. They feel frequency and energy and shifts and the unknown and the subconscious. I think that she did an incredible job going through it with the best she could. Do I feel bad and sad about it? Yes. Do I feel like she really understands the difference now and she can even start to see it in society herself at 12 years old with discernment? Yeah, she does. That girl is she's super smart and super perceptive, which is really beautiful. And she's woke up to a lot of agendas now because of which is very much a gift for her so that she won't have to go through these things herself. So that's my perspective, at least.

LaRell Herbert: Yeah, I. I had to. I guess take on a bit of a stay of ignorance to it because as a trans person, you become very selfish, very self-centered. It's all about, I have to get what I need to feel good about myself and the rest of you can either come along or not. And that was kind of the feeling I had at the time. Like, yes, she is a child, but this is my life. I have to transition. I literally believed that I had to. In order for my life to go on, I reached that point where I was like, I cannot continue living if I cannot transition. And so I forced my wife and daughter to go through this with me, ignoring the effects that it was having on them because I was so focused on my end goal. And I, I have witnessed how. our daughter has watched this whole thing and has observed it and how she like kids do they adapt we all do as children we adapt to our environment and she had no choice but to adapt and and now she goes to a school where there's an LGBTQ club where there are other kids there that identify as trans, and she sees them and comes home and tells us about these other kids that identify as trans.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah. And our kid, let me preface this for your audience, she's also at a Waldorf school. A Waldorf school, and they even have those clubs now. Like she's in a non-traditional form of education with a social emotional model of wellness for development. Like that's Waldorf education. I don't know how, you know, everybody should look it up. It's a wonderful form of education, by the way. I love Waldorf. But yeah, even that school, because it's community based and it's like funded sort of like a charter, they are allowed to have that additional club in there as well. So yeah, it's been interesting.

Stephanie Winn: So you've both mentioned the fear of suicide, this idea that you had to transition. And earlier, Valerie, when you first mentioned it, I believe you mentioned the context of therapists sort of threatening you with this. Was that where this came from? I mean, was the idea first spoken by a therapist that- Yes, absolutely.

Valerie Herbert: Absolutely. So as we're going through this, it's hard to even go back in like, put myself on the ground and reconceptualize this because I feel like it's like they have like a little pusher on your amygdala, like go along, like come along. So of course, it's like, yeah, well, fucking shit. I don't want my husband to kill himself. Like, of course, like, of course, my daughter's gonna come on board. Of course, we're gonna support this. And of course, like, you know, you're gonna be like, this is what I have to do. Because, you know, Laurel takes a lot of like, accountability and responsibility for this being all on him. But we were very much at my the sociologist in me gets that we were entrenched into a system that was set up to like, guide us very quickly towards this. And so yeah, it was very scary and very shocking. And I definitely believed it. I also have like certificate in gender studies and querying studies. That's a real thing querying studies. is a thing. I have an institutional degree, certificates on gender and feminist studies. I was in the institution doing this at the time too, so I was like, hell yeah. It's just so weird the way it all coalesced and being in the middle of it all, in the institution and in my home.

Stephanie Winn: Laurel, for you as the patient in this situation, Um, had you had actual thoughts of suicide before the therapist mentioned it?

LaRell Herbert: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had been struggling for most of my life with, with thoughts that- Because for most of my life, I thought I was the only person on the whole planet that even felt this way. I didn't even know that transgender was a thing. So that was the weirdest thing to live for most of my life into my twenties, honestly believing that I'm the only person on the planet that thinks I'm a girl on the inside. And if anybody finds this out, I'm going to a mental hospital for the rest of my life. And so that caused me for a lot of my life to consider killing myself just to escape that feeling that I couldn't get away from. Yeah.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, and I believe that, yeah, you told me that too after hearing these expert things. It was just like a double arm bind, like a clink, and away you go, actually asking them to go put you in bars.

Stephanie Winn: I'm also thinking about the timing of all this, that you were newlyweds, and you were in the middle of adjusting to being in a blended family, which is no joke. I've shared that I am also in a blended family situation. I've expressed my views on this podcast that when something like a third of Americans are in blended families either as a stepparent or a stepchild? Why is the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists have a transgender resources tab front and center on their website but not a blended family, stepparent, stepchild resources tab? So here you were going through really important life experiences as a married couple and as a blended family. I imagine that, I mean, earlier you talked, Valerie, about the rose-colored glasses that you had on and the honeymoon phase of your relationship. I imagine that this was part of the tragedy of gender ideology entering your life in this way is that it took this time in your life that could have been focused on each other and focused on building your marriage and building your family and the love between you and your home. It took that and turned it into this self-obsessed, one-way medical pathway. And you both described this very imbalanced relationship.

LaRell Herbert: Yeah, absolutely. Like Valerie mentioned, me taking the feminine spotlight, as we're in a relationship trying to figure out what this is. Every, every relationship has its struggles, but then you throw in this gender identity struggle and it makes things so much more complex. And it was just, yeah, we were newlyweds. I was, Valerie is basically the only, the second person I've ever even been in a relationship with. And, and that was in my thirties. I had only been with one other person prior to Valerie. So my, worldly experience.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah. Zippo. I have no relationship experience. Like, we're more like Mormon, like just coming out of Mormonism, like still wearing the white underwear garments the whole bit. Like, so.

Stephanie Winn: I imagine that there's like this missed opportunity because you had this upbringing, Larelle, that you described earlier where your mother took out something that was obviously so much bigger than you, something Maybe going back generations, she took that out on you and projected it onto you and scapegoated you for it as a little boy. Right from the beginning, you don't have the opportunity to just love and be loved as the person that you are. Then you didn't have strong relationships. Then finally, you hit the jackpot. For those who are just listening, I'm just going to let you know, Valerie is a really beautiful woman. Like you hit the jackpot, you meet this beautiful, intelligent, strong woman and you're fortunate enough to marry her. And so it's like finally, finally you're in a place in life where there's an opportunity for this relational healing, this opportunity to be loved and to find your proper relationship, Larelle, to the feminine and to your own masculinity. But then gender ideology comes in, and it's like this big distraction is what I'm hearing, and this sort of temptation. I don't know how that reflection is resonating for you guys.

Valerie Herbert: A thousand percent. I feel like that's the thing, too, is like, especially coming from the trauma background that, like, we have and that we understand trauma, you know, it's like, dang, like, why didn't somebody like point out that this was like our imbalanced relationship with masculine feminine, like, because I am like, I am pretty like, I'm expressive, and I am very fiery, and I'm very strong, too. So that hit on Laurel's like, feminine wounding so badly, right? And, you know, and of course, like, anytime he would like be like, strong or boundaried at all, I would hit on my little girl, like our inner children were flailing, right? And so if we would have had containment, and community, I believe community, and, You know, little side note, we are building like a lot of community for for couples, not just trans couples or people going through just people wanting to have really healthy, you know, deep, intimate relating where you're integrating your shadows. And so I wish that somebody could have shown us that because this that was that it was a dead end. It was a distraction to the issues that we were having, which were really rooted in trauma. And it's an it's an empty end that just like a surgery, just like I believe medications are all of them. Actually, I have that belief. I believe they're empty ends to not solving a root cause. And that's a shame. Did we learn a lot? Do we have a lot of gifts to give the world now because of it? Hell yeah. And do we have deep respect and actually super, super strong foundation now because we've been through all of that? Yeah, absolutely. We're unshakable, you know. Our marriage is unshakable, for real. But, you know, like, would I love for people not to have to go that route? Absolutely. It was extremely devastating and… I don't know how people get through it. I don't think they do. I think less than 1% of marriages make it through. One or two, something like that. It's real small, right? Maybe 8%. I might want to renege that. I'm not exactly sure about that. But it's very low. I do know that.

Stephanie Winn: So tell us about the procedure down the medical pipeline and then the breakdown.

LaRell Herbert: I guess things have kind of changed since I was transitioning. So back in 2016, when I first started looking into it, 2017 was when I started hormones. And of course, the whole system is set up where they tell you you have to have a therapist to write you a letter. So I sought out a gender therapist online locally, started seeing that therapist for a while, then got a letter for hormones. And then I had to be on hormones and presenting as a woman for two years before they would do surgery.

Valerie Herbert: Oh, was it?

LaRell Herbert: yeah really wow because they did have these requirements of length of time that you had to present as female before and then i had to get another letter for surgery and One of my things, one of the things I recognize is that both therapists that I went to to get these letters both identified as trans. The first one non-binary that gave me the letter for hormones and then a Kaiser appointed psychologist because I'm through Kaiser and Kaiser has been known to be a pipeline into the medical gender system. And Kaiser had me go to a psychologist up in Denver and I walk in and sit down and it's a trans woman psychologist. And the first thing, even though I was identifying and living as trans myself, part of me was happy about that because I knew obviously this trans psychologist isn't going to deny me the letter of support for surgery. She's certainly going to approve me. And I was happy about that. But even still, there was a part of me that was aware of the absurdity of this. that the very person to stand as a gatekeeper to prevent me from harming myself is trans themselves. And therefore, if they were to deny me, it would be invalidating their own identity. So obviously a trans psychologist is gonna just sign that letter and hand it right over. And she did immediately. And so Denver Health is where I ended up having the surgery and the surgeons Dr. Heyer and Don Eliseo at Denver Health, they were very new at doing the surgery there. They had just started doing it in Denver Health. And they originally were going to send me up to Portland to OHSU to have it done with a Dr. Doogie there. But then when Denver health started doing the surgery, they decided they were going to send me there. And part of me was hesitant about that because I knew they're fairly new at it. And I would prefer someone who was experienced to be touching my body with knives and things, but, but I ended up going through with it because insurance was paying for it. And it felt like I was finally getting this thing that I had to get. I thought I had to have that part on my body. That was the most interesting thing because I personally, other trans people don't necessarily identify with the genitalia so much. Whereas for me, I could not stand my penis. And it obviously, I learned that a lot of that was from my childhood now. I realized my mom talks so bad about penises all the time, but my mind identified that until I had a vagina on my body, I will not be the woman I am supposed to be. And so I just, I've followed every path, made every, checked every box I had to, to arrive at that goal of having my body surgically represent how I felt inside or look. female.

Valerie Herbert: It's interesting, because as we're starting to talk about this, because I'm nine months out from Laurel waking up one day and being like in my whole like world being turned upside down again. This is the part this is an area still that sometimes I start to feel a little like, like slight bits of disassociation or stuff coming, like thinking about like the night before surgery, the day of surgery, like the weeks afterwards. It's like extremely tragic to think about, like to really go back there. Although I will say that us re-evoking our intimacy together and Laurel being on the right hormones and us figuring things out in a way that feels really, really great for us has helped a ton. It's taken unbelievable levels of really even privilege to know how to do that grief work and how to integrate the somatic byproduct of such a tragic thing to happen.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I can hardly imagine what it's like for both of you to be revisiting these memories.

Valerie Herbert: It's crazy.

Stephanie Winn: Well, almost all the stories I've heard of any kind of vaginoplasty, phalloplasty or anything of the sort have usually been very brutal with lots of complications and ongoing pain and issues. And what was that like for you?

LaRell Herbert: I didn't have a whole lot of what I would call complications except for when they construct the vaginal opening, there's a necessity to dilate it for a certain time to keep it open and That was extremely painful for me. The way they constructed it, they constructed it so tight that I could not dilate it to keep it open, and it caused me excruciating pain every time I'd try. And I'd go back to follow-up visits and tell the surgeon, I can't do this. It hurts too bad. And she'd try to tell me, use smaller dilators. And then I'm thinking, but then that's only going to keep it open too small and sure enough after a while i just could not bear the pain anymore and i had no choice but to let it close so now i was living as a female, living as a woman, actually had the right body parts on my body, but it was non-functional. I couldn't actually use it, even though I was identifying with having that part on my body. So that was extremely unfortunate. Yeah. And played into a lot of my post-surgical depression as I realized I still don't have the functionality that I was looking for.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, and you know, too, like, you know, I'd like to like caveat, I just feel like We, you know, like we've done a lot of like somatic integration of this stuff. And I feel like most trans people don't even have the under, like not the understanding, like they don't have the understanding, but the access, you know, because they are going a medical route. They're not going a holistic route. And so like we have done a lot of practices and, you know, psychedelics is part of that. Like, I don't know if like you want to talk about it, but Laurel, like even did like a large mushroom journey after this to like love and apologize to his body and like connect with it and to like, connect with that energetic cock and the sensation and the movement of the energy up the spine and really just reassociating with that. And I mean, I just, I don't know how people post-surgery are doing and reassociating, but I imagine very poorly because even with all the know-how and access and resources we have, it's been hard as fuck. Hard as fuck for us. to feel pleasure and connection again. And thank God we do, both of us do.

Stephanie Winn: But I mean… It's so, so painful what you're describing, all of it. And yeah, so Laurel, I mean, just to clarify, you said on the one hand that this is a best case scenario compared to people who have these other complications that you didn't have, even in the absence of those complications, the dilation schedule, You know, most times I've heard about this as being excruciating to the point where it seems like many, many patients are not able to do it as you were not. It is a wound. It's a surgically inflicted wound and who wants to try to do that to themselves? This is one of the things that so angers me as a person in the healthcare industry to know that here you're taking oftentimes, and I'm not speaking about you, but just knowing the mental state that a lot of these people are in, because I talk to their parents and I talk to detransitioners, knowing the mental state and the just state of self-care and life functioning that a lot of people are in when they go into these surgeries, the idea, I mean, the amount of self-care, it's kind of a twisted way to put it, but the amount of post-op, care instructions a person needs to follow for the surgery to be quote unquote successful in a best case scenario. There's what what basis is there for believing that people can keep up with that if they're not you know able to take care of their basic hygiene as a lot of people are and Then you take someone who like you say you guys are so resourced compared to many other people you're fortunate you're blessed with a good marriage and Yet, it's still excruciating to bring up these these memories and this permanent loss I I'm so sorry and thank you both of you for just being here and being brave enough to share your story so that other people can learn from it.

LaRell Herbert: Yeah. Yeah, I believe you. I, in fact, I know that at the root of most people's gender issues, gender identity issues is a lack of self-love or an inability to love oneself for the way they are. So it just, it plays hand in hand or into the pattern after transitioning. You're not necessarily going to love yourself anymore and therefore not going to take care of yourself anymore than you were before transition.

Valerie Herbert: Right, at least not for yourself. It's for external performative achievement, which is usually kind of sickly mirrors your interpersonal dynamics with your familial sort of attachment figures early on as well, like we've seen. And, you know, it's like if you have to perform in chameleon for them, then yeah, you'll do that to get your basic needs met of being loved or seen or soothed or whatever supported.

Stephanie Winn: Valerie, earlier you mentioned that you, even as the one who is not the patient, but the one who loves and is walking alongside the patient, for you it starts to make you feel a little dissociated to go back to this time in your life. Oh, yeah. I want to talk a little bit about dissociation, especially given that both of you have this background in somatic integration. Because this is something that just occurred to me the other day, and I shared a private message. I have an extra resource that I share with the parents who hire me as a consultant. It's also available to people who are members of my locals community, sort of a private series of video messages for ROGD parents. And I found myself sharing some thoughts on how they might talk to their children about dissociation. And I just want to run this by you for your thoughts, based on, you know, just what you've been through, that I think there is this, a lot of widespread dissociation in the trans-identified community, and it starts with people who are already prone to dissociation because they're autistic, because They have PTSD, or because they spend a lot of time online, these are people who are fairly disconnected in their mind and body connection as it is. And then they get into this gender ideology, and they enter an obsessive-compulsive, like you said, Valerie, very much like an addictive cycle where they're behaving in ways that further that mind-body disconnect. So they're reinforcing the disassociation that they're already prone to. Excuse me, dissociation. And meanwhile, there's a fantasy that these surgeries and hormones will help them achieve their so-called gender embodiment goals. You know, it's phrased like it's a holistic thing, right? It's this idea that you're gonna be more embodied, and it's sort of sold as the cure to dissociation, like, And so I was just sharing some thoughts with these parents on like how you might explore your child's thought process on is there an actual fantasy that right now I'm dissociated and right now I don't want to be in my body because I have this obsessive thought about how my body isn't good enough the way it is. I don't want to shower with the lights on. I don't want to touch or see myself. But when I get this surgery, when I pass, when I whatever, when this next carrot dangled in front of me is achieved, then I will, you know, some switch will flip and I will actually want to be present in my body. And I think if you examine it, it falls apart upon examination because as you pointed out, Larelle, the dilation is extremely painful. And whatever the surgery is, I've heard of people getting hooked on opiates because of these surgeries. And I've heard of women having pain in their mastectomy areas two years later. So how does anyone think that creating pain or creating numbness or creating some kind of dysfunction in their body is going to make them want to be more present in their body. I know when I'm in pain, that's when I want to check out. That's when I spend the most time scrolling mindlessly through my phone just to not feel what I'm feeling in my body. And that's just me with like normal aches and pains. So I think that there's this whole like underlying message about dissociation that we're not really unpacking. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that as people who have been through this.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, I think these things weave in hand in hand. It's something that we've talked about a ton because here's the thing. If somebody feels safe and good in their body, they're not going to any other pharmacy outside of themselves. But we live in a culture that is perpetually and intentionally shocking our nervous system into a state of disassociation. We're not meant to consume the level of information we are nowadays. We need to get back to our natural human roots. understand that just intrinsically, people are more disassociated across the board. But especially this generation of kids that is growing up with tablets in their hands during their developmental years, they're already disembodied. They have broken family systems already. Typically, we live in a very traumatized system. And then they have whatever levels of traumas and neurodiversities that contribute to the kind of like OCD or that, let's say, the looping, the obsessive brain patterns. And yeah, you go, I find that people go further, deeper into their pain that way. It's like finding the rock bottom, right? It's like, and I also say that when I'm talking about this, that people are neurochemically addicted to stress because it creates a neuropeptide that's familiar. And that's what trauma does. So I say that these people don't have a nervous system capacity or bandwidth to even feel good in themselves ever. So they're pushed out all the time. They're totally out of themselves. And are they even the ones making their choices at this point? Or are we capitalizing, commodifying off people's horrific childhood traumas?

LaRell Herbert: Yeah, Valerie mentioned my alcohol use earlier, for one. There was a long period early on in our marriage where clearly I was struggling with a lot of internal feelings and thoughts that I didn't know what to do with. I wanted to get out of my body any chance I could. There was times where I'd be walking by the freezer in the middle of the day and pull out the alcohol and take a couple shots of tequila just because I was trying to escape all these crazy feelings I was dealing with. And then when, when the possibility of transition happened, when we had that discussion and I admitted to her that that's what I wanted, there was a part of me that felt like, Oh, finally I can be myself and I can finally live in my body. But when you live with that mindset and that pattern that there's all the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I can always gain more happiness if I change something. That pattern doesn't ever stop until you stop it in yourself. And just because I transitioned, that didn't mean that that was going to change in me. Sure, there were parts of me that I felt like, oh, now I feel feel true to myself. But After transition, I still definitely wanted to dissociate and get out of my body as much as I could because then I'm struggling with living in a world that doesn't want to accept me, knowing that I was living untrue to my biology. There's all those internal knowings and feelings that I was struggling with, knowing this isn't right. I'm swimming against the stream constantly. I'm taking the wrong hormones in my body. I couldn't be in my body. I wanted to dissociate all the time. And it's like now after D transitioning is the first time in my 43 years of life that I can actually be in my body and love myself as a man.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah, I would say like a few years ago, as we like got more into like psychedelic and somatics. Both of us were able to film our whole and complete in our bodies just from our own patterns and traumas. And that's another thing that I really want to say like, I feel like this is just another trope that's in society in a lot of different facets, too. Like I'm a systems thinker. I'm a pattern spotter. That's one of my geniuses. And, you know, I think there's many other ways. And that's why I don't I think I don't take it too personal. You know, like, oh, my gosh, how? Why? Like, yes, it sucks. Yes, it's evil. Yes, it's intentionally manipulative and coercive, this system. And yes, it's happening in a lot of other ways, too. So this is a very gross and disgusting way. It's very sad. It's catastrophic. especially the way that the agenda is for the children to like, that's terrible. But I would say there's perpetually this human issue to not see ourselves as whole or good. And then our commodify, you know, shock disaster capitalism sort of commodifying and dangling any care it can in front of all of our faces to try to get us to go the direction that we need to go. And I think that's where a lot of I take the concept of like, sovereignty and like personal accountability and maturity and that a lot of people in our culture and society are disembodied, they're fractured, and they're unmaturated and uninitiated intrinsically. And so I think that again, this area is something that's happening in other areas of culture and society in different ways. This is just like a very loud flavor and frequency that's coming out that we got roped into and now understand why.

Stephanie Winn: radical bird's eye view, seeing where you two as individuals are located within something much bigger helps you take it a lot less personally and sort of forgive yourselves and each other for being affected by the times that you were living in. So tell us about, I mean, at one point you had the surgery, and after the surgery you were depressed, the dilation was excruciatingly painful, you couldn't keep up with it. Tell us about the process from that point in time to the moment, LaRal, that you woke up and realized it was all a lie.

LaRell Herbert: I lived six years in that delusion, six years as my female self, And naturally, all the issues that come up with that, there was relationship issues that would arise between us, but mainly our intimacy, trying to figure out how to find a healthy intimacy with the parts I had now, I was still identifying as a woman and had a vagina on my body that I felt like was finally something I wanted my whole life. And now I can finally have be intimate with my wife the way I always wanted to, right? But I couldn't, I couldn't get my mind on board. Psychologically, it was so weird to try to figure out how to be intimate with my wife with the parts I had. And, and so knowing the incredible benefit of psychedelic psychedelic mushrooms and allowing me to resolve stuff like this. And I also say I was scared to death that doing psychedelics would cause me to have some awakening to the reality of who I was because I knew they had that power. They have the incredible power and ability to make you see different perspectives. And every time I took psychedelic mushrooms while I was in my trans identity, I was scared to death that I was going to have Some changed, some awakening, but it never did. It always just affirmed my identity. The experiences I would have somehow just made me feel right about living as a woman. But in October of last year, our intimacy was, was struggling and I decided, okay, I'm going to try this again. I'm going to seek psychedelic mushrooms help in trying to solve or resolve the intimacy issues I'm having. And. So I laid down and allowed the experience to happen. And what happened was actually a few days prior to this, I had a dream. And in this dream, it was shown to me like the exact way that gender identity is formed in a person in a way that I couldn't deny it. I woke up from this dream. understanding that gender identity is formed, that it is not something that someone is born with, that it's formed over a person's life experiences. And as I woke up from this dream, and I started thinking about my own life experiences, and I came to the realization that my gender identity is a a program. It is absolutely a program. I wasn't born this way, even though I claimed to be born this way for so long. And also, in doing my training in internal family systems with Dr. Richard Schwartz, during the training, one of the other students that was taking the course along with me asked the instructor, do you think that gender identity is a part And I immediately perked my ears up like, Oh, what's she going to say in response to that? And the instructor said, I personally don't think that gender identity is a part, but Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of internal family systems, absolutely does believe it's a part. And the instant I heard that, I really had to start analyzing myself and my own gender identity. If gender identity is a part, then that means it was an adaptation or something that I developed over the course of my childhood. So then back to the psychedelic mushroom experience in October, it all came together. The dream, this internal family systems training, and the understanding that my gender identity was a program from my childhood, and all of a sudden I laid there in bed with My mind is totally blown. Like I have to detransition. It just doesn't make sense to live as a woman anymore. This is ridiculous. What I'm, what am I doing? I'm damaging my body from the hormones. It was almost psychedelics are incredible in the way they worked with your mind. But I, I literally felt like the hormones that were in me were speaking to me. Like the female hormones were speaking to me and telling me. We don't belong in your body. You gotta get us out of your body.

Valerie Herbert: I'm like, and this is where people think we're crazy. No, I'm just kidding.

LaRell Herbert: So then I of course was struggling with, well, how do I go back to living as a man now? I've been living here in Colorado Springs for nine years now. Everybody knows me as a woman now. How could I possibly go back to living as a man But then I was also able to, to come to the realization that I just have to, that's the only thing that makes sense. And of course, the people who think I'm crazy, they'll either get over it. And then the ones who thought I was crazy for living as a woman, they're going to be like, well, welcome back to reality. Welcome back to being a man. So then I, I went to Valerie and I said, I've got something to tell you again. And I had to come out to her again, only this time as my real, actual biological self. Totally. Told her I have to go back to living as a man.

Valerie Herbert: Yeah. And at this point, I think it's interesting to hear my perspective on this point. I don't think I've even said it out loud, but at this point, because of all of the kind of training and programming, it's like our own life became our own medicine for this journey we were on. Like that, even that journey Laurel did, that was a micro dose and some breath work, like he was pretty clear and cognizant. So, you know, we're longtime meditators, and, you know, studied a lot of interpersonal neurobiology programming pattern, the way the theta state of the brain works the way that we're in our unconscious 95% of the time. So it's like, we were like perfectly prepared, or we perfectly prepared ourselves, which whatever way you want to look at it. to kind of be able to make sense of this in some way. And up till this point, even I, we thought like together, through all the psychedelics and understanding patterns and programs and psychology and social agendas and stuff, like, maybe there really isn't that many trans people in the world. And then maybe thinking like, well, geez, maybe you are like one of the few, like an exceptional thinking, you know, I'm like, well, You know, most of these people maybe are very confused nowadays. Like you're you're an old trans person. Like you didn't have the Internet back in the day. You felt like that at three. Like you really are like the one percent. Like we can see the agenda at this point. Even last year, we're like, we can see there's a trans agenda and I'm married to a trans person. And we're like, OK, well, how do we work with this? Is there some trans? Is there some not? And so it was such an interesting time of like slowly unraveling it and being like, OK, like All right, so like, because I would even would ask Laurel, like, the more information we learn, like, how are you feeling? Like, is this true for you? Like, this has to and I kept wanting to confirm it, like, it's true for you, right? It's true for you, right? It has to be true. Because if it's not, our whole fucking life is a lie. Like it just, it unraveled, everything unraveled, especially because we, we were leaders in our communities, even like working with people like this was just crazy unraveling. And to really see the base of it all and to really have to sit with the fact in myself of like, do I even believe trans people exist in that way anymore, you know? It was just such an unraveling in so many, in so many ways for us, both. And to come to this in the way that we did, it feels really, um, unique to our own life experiences and our own journey and all the little impulses and intuitions we followed along the way, all the trainings we did, all the things we participated in to get to where we are with this.

Stephanie Winn: This all just happened last October. Yes. We've heard of the stages of grief. What have been the stages of the marital detransition?

Valerie Herbert: It's been the best worst ever. Like it's been hard, but like, oh my God, so good. It's like finally when you feel like the truthfulness and you're like, oh my God, like it's like you couldn't see something and now you can see it and you're like, oh, whoa, no wonder this was messing with us so much or, you know, no wonder we kept running into these same stuckness. No wonder we kept feeling like, oh, we just can't figure this out. At least for me, that's what it's felt like a lot. And also sad, like, oh, my God, I can't believe like, I was so medically gaslit. And like, letting my righteous anger come out, it's been big for me, like all of it, just letting myself have all of it. And trying not to like, just having somewhere to put its heart. So we've been messy in last nine months, we've, you know, I've projected that onto him, he's had moments of that coming back, you know, we've had It's hard to make sense of something so massive and not to, like, take so much personal responsibility. Like, I've watched Laurel take so much grief and shame. I love sleep.

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Valerie Herbert: I think I just finished seeing like we kind of had a really interesting and unique life path and experiences that kind of had us like unpack this in sort of an interesting way. And yeah, we've definitely had to like We definitely have to learn the art of non-attachment, like burning down what didn't work for us, alchemizing from the ashes and creating a new. We're very good at that together. That's a skill we have as a couple, of just getting that deep curiosity of what is the truest for us. The hardest part for me, honestly, was watching Laurel berate himself into the ground and shame himself into the ground. And at times during this process, at times it was really awesome and he was really stable and really like, yeah, this is amazing. I'm so grateful that I get to find this truth. Everything's led me right here. Everything is happening for me. Let's say like real high, high vibes, Laurel. But then, you know, low vibes, which is so important to grief, pain, shame of like, I can't believe I did this. How did I let this happen? How could I be so delusional if I'm so delusional here? who isn't to say I'm not delusional in every other area of my life and kind of like a little nervous mental breakdown and feeling like it was scary at times to you know, like, it's so scary to go through something like that, like, um, and, yeah, we're, I'm just really grateful. We have really good community here and support and I feel very much on the other side of this. And that's the other thing is to honor my body and my process. I was not willing to like start talking about this or coming out with this until I was integrated and associated and in an integrity with myself. Because I feel like that's a really important part of my own restoration work in this for myself is to like not let myself be pushed along and to feel like integrated and whole to talk about this. And I and I really do now I really have in the last few months felt really whole and on the other side of it able to make sense of it since the grief is The grief has, I mean, I could say gone, but I think grieving is like spiral dynamics, you know?

Stephanie Winn: So what's it been like medically? You mentioned bioidentical hormones and going back on testosterone.

LaRell Herbert: Going back to living as my biological male self naturally means now having to supplement my body with what my body no longer produces naturally. because I mutilated my body, mutilated the testosterone producers, so now I have to supplement and it's really unfortunate. We go to a place to get bioidentical hormones and they stick them, these pellets, testosterone pellets that they stick subcutaneously under my skin in my back and my body does not like it. And my body was rejecting them and trying to push them back out and it would not heal up. And so it's been, it finally healed up like the day before yesterday, actually, from the last place I got testosterone put in my body. And it's a constant reminder of what I did to myself and going along with the grief, I experienced some brutal, brutal grief when I realized, because having the surgery and having a permanent change to my body, like I did when it aligned with what I felt I was and like it was necessary. I, I wanted it more than anything in the world, but now having to look back and realize that it was all a delusion on my part. And that I never should have done it. I fell into some serious depressive states in the, in the months after October, there was a while where I, I just couldn't feel the grief. There was so much grief. I was afraid it would literally take me out if I allowed myself to experience it. And so I was glad that I allowed myself finally to process a lot of that grief to where now I'm mostly on the other side of it. I think for the rest of my life, I will. be reminded of what I lost and what I took away from my wife in doing so. There's this group called Illumen and they do men's retreats and a rite of passage retreat for men. And it's an initiation of men because throughout history, men are initiated in different cultures, but it's in our only in recent times where we've kind of gone away from the idea of initiating men. And here I was, de-transitioned, really struggling with a lot of grief and trying to live as a man now for the first time in my life, really. And we had a friend that suggested this retreat to me. And it's a, like I said, a men's initiation retreat. And I went to it hoping to get something being around other men. And it actually ended up being one of the most single transformative experiences of my life because I was at this Retreat with all these other men something. I never would have gone to in the past identifying as a woman but part of the retreat was actually allowing us to process any Unprocessed grief we had inside and so I was able to add this retreat really feel and get in the feelings of grief and my and experience my justifiable anger towards the system, towards Denver Health, towards the psychologist that brought me through the whole process, the pipeline was fed through. I, yeah, I was really able to experience that.

Stephanie Winn: It seems like there really needs to be a lot of space for grief and anger, and for both of you. And you create that space for each other, but also your community creates it for you. You have obviously strong spiritual practices. You say you have a strong community. But you also said that you were worried about how this would be received. So what is the response been like?

Valerie Herbert: kind of like when I said that I'll just like say like the first thought is like Instagram and like maybe the 6000 followers I have had for a very long time and how I used to be like a feminist, social sociologists, queer activists, like, so there's a lot of that threats. But I mean, I don't know, I've been speaking up loud about the system since around 2020. Things got louder for me on that end anyway. So but I mean, I would say that one of the most interesting things about this story is that my best friend is actually the non-binary therapist that signed Laurel's original letter. We all had dinner together last night in the beer garden. Like, it's really interesting. Like, Laurel and I very much value interpersonal relating, and our communication I don't know, I don't like getting stuck in black and whites. I like to be curious and lean into nuance and have a lot of like, interesting conversations with people. I do get scared of being called a fundamentalist Christian. Just because that's not like where I'm coming from at all. And like wanting to restore like rightful polarity or like, rewilding women and men and masculinity and femininity and like, our innate, divine templating of that or being of that, the rightness of that and restoring that. And so I think I talk about that in that regards. But the queer community here overall, we were a part of it quite a bit. And, you know, we had hit and miss. Laurel speaks with a very open heart. And so, you know. Maybe out of 600 comments on a YouTube video, he has two people that can say something rude. And so, yes, we've had people like definitely like kind of like cut us out and move away from us. But just like any process, it kind of weeds out the people that aren't really for you at this time, in my opinion. So our community has changed some but not a ton as well, because our entire community wasn't rooted in the queer movement. And I see that a lot. And that's when I say I call it like the queer trans cult, because it's like, there's no family and there's like a lost bird and then they, you know, take into the trans kind of like queer cult and we're a family cult mentality, you know, and that's not really our story. And so I see how that happens with people, but we have like a little bit deeper of a community than just that. But I have I was born and raised here in Colorado Springs. So, you know, everybody knows me and everybody knows us. We love being out with our daughter at community events and farmers markets and coffee shops like we're out there. We love being connected to the community. So, you know, it is a lot of like, you know. That things being like, whoa, wow, but I will say it's easier this way than the other way. Except for like my very like feminist like we're sort of friends or that's kind of a little edgy for me, but it's been okay, honestly.

Stephanie Winn: Valerie, you said you are best friends with the non-binary identified therapist that signed one of Laurel's letters.

Valerie Herbert: How did that come about? You know, you know, you know, I couldn't tell you because it's like it feels again, one of these things like, for lack of a better word, soul orchestrated, divine orchestrated spirit, whatever you want to say. But yeah, they are a actually renowned therapist and wrote a book called A Guide to Me and My Gender Identity. And this person isn't working in gender anymore and is moving towards actually getting a PhD in Jungian stuff and is really open to these conversations and can see the medical atrocities while also very much believing in trans care. So I would say that that my best friend is just a very mature person and we can have really we just care about supporting each other like we are like family. So we ran into each other like three or four times within one day of meeting the first time. And we just have so many friends and overlap in our community. And after Laurel saw them for like six months for that sort of like therapy, it was just for gender stuff. So we waited the therapeutic year back in the day, it was like a year, and then we all became friends. And just that never stopped. Because this person like, I love Dara more than anything, they, they're the person I trust the most with my kid, you know, they're the, I mean, we just love each other, we support each other, we're or family. And so, yeah, but it is very, I mean, we just have endless, endless kind of like interesting dynamics in our story for sure. And I can see how that could be shocking.

Stephanie Winn: You've both spoken about the anger that you've understandably felt. And I'm a big believer in forgiveness, but this is a huge test to be able to forgive the unforgivable. Your friend played a role in this, and it sounds like still believes some things that you don't believe. Also, I mean, this sounds like a very conflicted place for your friend to be in. And that's where, I mean, you're making the point that this gender affirmation therapy is really not, it's not psychotherapy, it's not holistic. It's not, let me see you in the context of your whole life, your environment, what it means to you to be a man, right? I mean, Laurel, you spelled it out so clearly, and I'm sure hindsight is 20-20. It's easy for you now as a middle-aged man who's detransitioned to see, oh, yeah, it was my mom telling me when I was five years old how my penis was evil. Of course, you know, it wasn't so obvious to you then. But, I mean, wow. Yeah, it just goes to show, I mean, the fact that you can be friends with this person just go, I mean, it just points out the contrast between real life and real relationships and how complicated they are and the online world where people are constantly tempted to sum up each other's characters based on, you know, 100 word tweet. And that is the end of that episode. Sorry for the abrupt ending. There was another 10 minutes of conversation at this point, but we had some kind of mysterious issue where the last 10 minutes failed to upload. So that information is lost. Sorry about that. But thank you for making it this far into the episode. And to find out where you can find Laurel and Valerie, all that information is in the show notes. Thanks for joining us. 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.