She was born a boy, lived 10 years as a trans woman and realized she was wrong

After living a decade of his life as transsexual woman named Brianna Brian Wagoner finally realized that his transition was a mistake. Last February the 31-year-old made the decision to return to his biological sex and live as a man again.

“It was basically like health professionals cheering a girl with bulimia for spitting up her food when her ribs are already sticking out,” she said of the years of estrogen therapy she underwent. “Doctors here can make a lot of money. They see the dollar sign and in the end money talks and rules,” he says.

Wagoner contacted the New York Post after reading an article in June that profiled two young women who regretted transitioning to the male gender when they were still teenagers.

“I liked Legos and trucks”

A child of divorced parents, Brian grew up as a typical boy in San Gabriel, California. “When I was a kid, I liked Legos and trucks. I never wanted to wear my sister’s clothes. I never wanted to play with Barbies,” she says. But he also knew he was gay which his father refused to accept. “He’s a Vietnam veteran and a bunch of men. I learned at a young age that being homosexual it’s a terrible thing. I was so paranoid about whether he would find out,” she said.

As a gay teenager Wagoner became involved with drugs. When in his 20s he went to study sociology at the University of La Verne in California, he regularly took marijuana, ecstasy, Adderall and cocaine sold to him by friends and dealers at his school. He gradually started experiencing withdrawal syndrome, staying awake for days and even thinking about suicide.

Around that time, he said, he developed an addiction to Internet porn. The gay porn it led him to transgender fetish content, which triggered a sudden feeling of discomfort with his gender. “Before I discovered this strange subcategory of pornography, the idea of ​​being a woman never crossed my mind. Never. It came out of nowhere, really,” he pointed out.

The transition

In early 2012, desperate about what was happening to him, he started looking for information about the transgender movement on YouTube and found a clinical social worker based in Los Angeles who made videos for transgender people. He made an appointment to see her and in their first session she told him she was transgender.

“I just thought maybe I had some weird fetish,” Wagoner said. “But I went to see this therapist and she told me that I’m actually a woman trapped in a man’s body and that all my other problems were actually because I was transgender.”
After a few sessions she gave him a referral to see a doctor in Hollywood who on the first visit prescribed estrogen. “He knew I was a drug addict, he knew I was depressed, but we didn’t discuss any of that. The whole thing was the hormones,” he said.

Along with regular hormone therapy Wagoner had laser hair removal all over his body and legally changed his name to Brianna. At the time, transitioning seemed like a way to escape his repressed identity. “The idea of ​​being a straight woman rather than a gay man was very appealing to me,” she said, adding: “I was so sick of being Brian, the sister. I loved the idea of ​​being literally anyone else.”

But every day was a small one again for Brian, to be able to deal with what was happening to him. He may have been a famous trans in college, but in his personal life he suffered. “The transition made all my problems worse,” he admits. After graduation he began to take even harder drugs, including heroin. He went to rehab four times before he finally got clean and was able to hold down a job where he didn’t disclose what he was going through.

Reversion to the male gender

At some point Brian realized he didn’t want to be Brianna anymore. “Once I got off the drugs and got a real job, I had a clear mind and started to feel a new discomfort with my gender. I was looking at myself in the mirror and looking at my childhood photos as a little boy and I started thinking, ‘What have I done?'”

So in February, Wagoner returned to his life as a man after spending a third of his life as a woman. He cut his hair, stopped hormone therapy and changed his name again. Fortunately, he never had surgery, but his hormone therapy caused health problems such as painful urination and pelvic inflammation, and he is being monitored for osteoporosis, a known side effect.

After years of repressing his true self, he has finally come to terms with who he is. “I really reconnected with myself and accepted the fact that I’m gay,” Wagoner said. He even disclosed this to his father, who, he said, fully accepted him. “My father and I are fine now. He knows I’m gay and he doesn’t even care. If I had been honest from the beginning, I think he might have prevented me from going down that path.”

Now he’s even lashed out at doctors because, he says, they hushed up personal crises he was experiencing, such as internalized homophobia and drug addiction. “My therapist was actually an activist who happened to be and psychologist. I should probably be put in a mental institution, not put on estrogen. I just needed someone to listen to me, but this woman made me go and change my body chemistry and my entire life.”