Sascha Bailey, the son of the famous photographer David Bailey, recently revealed in an interview how online forums pressured him to change his gender. According to the man, he was diagnosed as transgender after only a 10-minute consultation. Gender transition preparations were set in motion, which Sascha came to regret in the meantime. With his story, he would like to provide insightful guidance to those struggling with gender dysphoria.
Sascha Bailey, now 29, said that he did not begin to identify with transgender ideology in the usual way. As he explained, most transgender people tend to think of themselves as being trapped in the body of the opposite sex for years, but the son of the famous photographer said his motives had been different and began to move towards the destructive ideology after a toxic, bad marriage.
As he put it, „it’s almost like society has a gun to its head, because if they’re not supportive of it, the only choice is to be cancelled. You are either for it, or you’re transphobic; there is no middle ground,” he explained.
„Transitioning was a way of killing myself without dying, because I was so unhappy with my life. I thought that if I could do this one thing it could change everything, I could reinvent myself as an entirely new person.” he said.
Initially, Bailey’s vision was to become like „a real-life Barbie”, and often considered ending his life. He explained that much of this anxiety came from social media and online chat rooms he frequented while stuck in a toxic marriage. It was then that the idea of changing genders took root in his head, and he was being encouraged on these forums to take the plunge and become a woman.
They say „It’s the ultimate way to solve your problems because you’re being told everything about you boils down to this one thing that is wrong, and if you can fix this one thing everything will be perfect,” Bailey said.
„I’d already been thinking about it and it’s an idea that just grew and grew,” he said, adding „It became this way of not having to kill myself, but to become someone new.”
Sascha was so convinced that transitioning was the right move, and so keen to speed up the process, that he went to a private doctor in Japan who confirmed he was transgender and prescribed him a prescription for female hormones as a precursor to gender reassignment surgery. On his return to the UK, he struggled to obtain a second month’s supply of hormones and to make an appointment for the surgery that he had plenty of time to think long and hard, eventually realizing that he had made a mistake.
„So I guess you could say that the slowness of the NHS helped to save me,” he pointed out.
„I realised two things: One, there was no actual way I can know what it feels like to be a woman because I’d never been one, so the idea of me saying ‘Oh, I feel like a woman’ was absurd. And the second thing was that I didn’t actually need to change my outside because of how I felt on the inside. I just needed to come to terms with it.”
„Thank God I didn’t do the hormones, because within a few months you’re risking infertility and the thought that I could not have children is devastating,” he says, adding that his experience „also shines a light on the uncomfortable reality, which is that we are asking kids aged 15 and 16 to make the choice about whether or not they will want children themselves and that just isn’t right.”
On the dramatic increase of children diagnosed as transgender, Sascha says, „I think we’re going to look back on this time and be shocked at how quickly we ran away with all this stuff. We need to allow people space and time to talk and explore their feelings before we rush them down the medical route.”
He also hopes that his story can be one of optimism to anyone who is struggling with gender dysphoria.
V4NA
