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'Coming out of my transition was like leaving the twilight zone, but the rest of society is still in it.'
Brian Wagoner spent almost a decade of his life as a transgender woman named Brianna. In the end, he realized that he had made a mistake by changing his gender. In February, the 31-year-old decided to stop living as a woman and go back to his biological gender.
"It was like doctors cheering on a girl with bulimia for throwing up her lunch when her ribs are already sticking out," he said of the estrogen treatment he was given for years. "Doctors can make a lot of money in this place. They see dollar signs, and in the end, money talks."
Wagoner contacted The Post after reading an article from June about two young women who regretted becoming men when they were teenagers. One of these people, Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy, is now trying to get a rule passed in Florida that will stop Medicaid from paying for medical interventions like the one she had.
Brian Wagoner spent almost a decade of his life as a transgender woman named Brianna. In the end, he realized that he had made a mistake by changing his gender.
Wagoner grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in California with parents who had split up. He said he was always a normal boy.
“When I was a kid, I liked Legos and trucks,” he said. “I never wanted to wear my sister’s clothes. I never wanted to play with Barbies.” But Wagoner also knew he was gay — something that was frowned upon in his father’s household, where he lived as a teen.
Wagoner said his dad is a Vietnam veteran and “a very alpha male, super macho kind of guy. I learned … at a young age that being gay is a terrible thing. I was so paranoid about him finding out that I was.”
Wagoner started using drugs when he was a teenager but kept it a secret. By the time he went to the University of La Verne in California to study sociology at age 20, he said he regularly used marijuana, ecstasy, Adderall, and cocaine that he got from friends and dealers at his school. He said he started to feel withdrawal symptoms, stayed up for days at a time, and even thought about killing himself.
He also said that it was around that time that he became hooked on online porn. Gay porn led him to transgender fetish content, which gave him a sudden feeling of gender dysphoria, which is also called body discomfort. "Before I found this weird subgenre of pornography, I never thought about being a woman. Never. He said, "Really, it just came out of nowhere."
Early in 2012, he went on YouTube looking for information about the transgender movement. He found a Los Angeles-based clinical social worker who made videos about trans people. He set up a time to meet with her. He said that during their first meeting in person, she told him right away that he could be transgender.
“I just thought maybe I had some sort of weird fetish,” Wagoner said. “But I went to go see this therapist, and she told me I’m really a woman trapped in a man’s body and all my other problems were really because I was transgender.”
After just a couple of therapy sessions, the therapist sent Wagoner, who was 22 at the time, a letter telling him to see a doctor in Hollywood. On his first visit, Wagoner said, the doctor gave him a prescription for estrogen. "This counselor knew that I was hooked on drugs. She knew that I was very sad. We didn't talk about any of that, though. It only had to do with hormones."
Wagoner took hormone therapy and had laser hair removal done on his whole body. He also legally changed his name to Brianna. At the time, transition seemed to be a way for him to get away from his hidden identity. "I just really liked the idea that I'd be a straight woman instead of a gay man," he said. "I couldn't stand being called Brian the "f-g." I liked the idea that I could be anyone else."
He was also socially rewarded at college, where he stayed a student until he was 25 years old, for becoming a woman. "I was kind of a minor celebrity at my college because I was trans," Wagoner said. "People liked me a lot and wanted to be my friend all of a sudden."
But Wagoner was having trouble in his personal life. He said, "Transition made all of my problems worse." After he graduated from college, he used even stronger drugs, like heroin. He went to rehab four times before he was finally clean and had a steady job, which he didn't want to talk about because he was afraid that gender activists would target him.
Wagoner said he realized he didn't want to be Brianna after he stopped paying attention to "woke political beliefs" on social media and started listening to people like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan who were in the opposite camp. "Once I got off drugs and got a real job, I had a clear head and started feeling gender dysphoria again," he said. "I looked at myself in the mirror and at pictures of me when I was a little boy and thought, 'What have I done?'"
So, after living as a woman for a third of his life, Wagoner went back to being a man in February. He cut his hair, stopped taking hormones, and went back to his old name. He didn't have surgery, which was lucky, but he said that his estrogen treatment caused him to have painful urination and an inflamed pelvic area. He is also being checked for osteoporosis, which is a known side effect of hormone therapy.
He has finally accepted who he is after years of trying to hide who he really is. Wagoner said, "I really got back to being myself, and I accepted the fact that I'm gay." He even told his father he was gay, and his father, he said, fully accepted him. "Me and my dad get along now. Even though he knows I'm gay, he doesn't care. I think that if I had been honest from the start, it might have kept me from going down this path.
Wagoner thinks that doctors should have paid more attention to the other problems he was having, like internalized homophobia and drug addiction. He said, "My therapist was an activist who also worked as a psychologist." "I probably should have been taken to a mental hospital instead of being given estrogen. I just needed someone to listen to me, but this woman made me go change my body's chemistry and my whole life."
Now that he’s content living as a man, Wagoner said he hopes his tale serves as a warning to others. “The reason I decided to speak out is because here in California there really are no barriers to transition.” He said he’s even considering pursuing legal action against the therapist and doctor who helped him coast through his transition without ever investigating what was really going on under the surface.
“I just don’t want to see people have the same bad experience that I had,” he said. “I hope someone will hear this story and really think about what they’re doing and get therapy.”
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