If you were to see Jade Martin on the street or come across one of her selfies on social media, you’d simply see a vibrant woman in her early 20s. She has doll-like features enhanced by tasteful makeup, a hyper-feminine sense of style, and long, brunette curls that fall to her mid-back.

If you were to see Jade Martin on the street, you wouldn’t know that the very feminine identity she now radiates actually caused her emotional pain from a young age, leading her down the rabbit hole of transgender ideology. And, as a result, permanent bodily changes.

“I think [the transgender identity] was an escape from the bullying that I had been experiencing at school,” Jade began in an interview with Independent Women’s Forum. “It was somewhere to belong because I didn’t belong with other kids. It was also a way of just escaping girlhood.”

Martin recalled hitting puberty before any other girl her age. Though she said she had a great home life, Martin felt scared and isolated going through physical and hormonal changes ahead of her peers. On Tumblr and on other social platforms like YouTube, however, Martin could digitally connect with strangers who similarly felt ostracized by their peers. Since early puberty caused the bullying Martin had experienced since kindergarten to progressively increase, internet communities served as an outlet for her to leave bullying behind.

“Along with just being isolated, it was perfect because these ‘trans people’—who were little girls like me—were telling me that this was the way to feel confident and this was the way to belong,” Martin said.

When Martin was around 12 years old, she began to socially transition from a girl to a boy. She picked out a boy’s name (Jaden), told her friends to refer to her using “he/him” pronouns, cut her hair, and began wearing a chest binder.

Fan communities she was a part of for YouTubers, books, or other fictional media inadvertently exposed her to sexualized content from a young age. Martin recalled coming across graphic “fan fiction” written by adults. Some of the authors openly admitted to having sexual fetishes for “boys” with female genitalia.

“I had gotten myself into situations where I was talking to older men that were sexualizing me because they fetishized trans boys,” Martin said.

While Martin was attending high school, she recalled feeling pressured toward chemical transition due to the progressive ideologies she was exposed to in the classroom. She told IWF that administrators and teachers used pro-LGBTQ+ imagery and messaging in the classroom, and students got in trouble if they misgendered a peer. What’s more, gay male students who did not identify as transgender were allegedly allowed to use the girls’ restroom.

Martin said that the indirect encouragement to transition came from not only her own friend group and the people she met online, but from other students and teachers too.

“When they found out I was trans, I was praised for it,” she said. “They would always ask me when I was going on testosterone, if I was going on testosterone. They would give me information on how to go through that process, what therapists they went to, what place they went to, or how they went to Planned Parenthood.”

At that time, Martin felt apprehensive toward taking testosterone since she wasn’t yet 18 and was still living with her parents. However, Martin was able to get a gender dysphoria diagnosis and a testosterone prescription while she was still a minor. A few days after her 18th birthday, Martin began injecting testosterone, which she continued to take for three years.

During that time, Martin gained a significant amount of weight, grew facial hair, and the hair on her head became thin and started to fall out. She felt overwhelming fatigue and was “numb emotionally,” to the extent that she doesn’t remember forming sentences in her head.

Though she previously loved to sing, Martin said that testosterone “completely crushed” her vocal range. Among the many elements of her past life that Martin said she will always grieve, the loss of her singing voice is one of the most impactful because she said that something which was once so comfortable and effortless is now not physically possible.

Martin recalled two pivotal moments that opened her eyes to the realization that transition was a mistake. First, a boy Martin was dating at the time admitted to cheating on her. She began questioning that relationship and what she envisioned for her future. In her mind, she saw herself dressed femininely at her wedding and being the mother to a child. Martin said she also couldn’t imagine “Jaden” as an adult, whether that was her as a pregnant trans-identifying man or undergoing a double mastectomy to achieve a more masculine upper torso.

After that relationship ended, Martin began dating someone else who she said triggered deeper feelings within her. She then understood how much she desired a husband, to be a mother, and to feel like a beautiful woman.

“I wanted to feel like myself again because I was hiding behind that transition thing,” she said. “My goal was not to look like a boy but to hide myself, to become unrecognizable.”

Eager to not hide anymore, Martin went “cold turkey” off of testosterone. Though she doesn’t regret detransitioning, she felt that this hasty decision is the reason she then developed gallstones.

“I was covered in them, and saving my gallbladder was not a choice,” Martin told IWF, explaining how medical professionals thought the gallstones were caused by the rapid hormonal fluctuation. However, Martin was hoping to detox from testosterone quickly because she and her then-boyfriend wanted to conceive a child. She continued:

“I was doing everything to get my period back and just trying to conceive. I tried to eat certain foods, I took birth control cleanses, vitamins—anything you can think of—because I was just so paranoid. And I honestly didn’t know if I’d ever get my period back. It was estimated that it would be about a year before I got it back.”

Three months later, Martin finally got her period back but still wasn’t sure if she was ovulating and therefore capable of conception. “Scared and hopeless,” Martin was constantly in and out of the hospital from unexplainable pain. In addition to the gallstones, doctors also discovered that she had a recurring, bursting ovarian cyst.

Though she never underwent sexual reassignment surgeries, Martin had “two agonizing surgeries” to correct complications from rapid hormonal imbalances caused by her injecting testosterone. Martin stated that her family has no history of ovarian cysts or other health issues quite like her own in their early 20s. Aside from some sporadic period cycles, Martin said she was very healthy before transitioning.

Despite the hormone injections causing her a host of adverse effects, Martin said her body still appeared feminine because of her short stature and small figure. Additionally, she recalled that her breasts were still visible even though she wore a chest binder. Since she couldn’t escape the body she was born in, Martin said she stopped running. However, the body she could have grown into has now been altered—both in temporary and permanent ways.

“I wish I would’ve known the body and life I would’ve had if I never discovered testosterone and gender transition,” Martin told IWF. “How is it possible to grieve something you’ve never known?”

When a female begins injecting testosterone for a gender transition, she may experience some significant changes to sexual function. Martin shared that this sexual health element of transition is often one that female detransitioners may feel embarrassed to speak about, or they just avoid the topic entirely.

As in her own case, Martin shared that it’s typical for a woman’s sex drive to increase and for vaginal discharge to change while on testosterone. After detransitioning, however, Martin said that unless she’s in a relationship, her libido is very low.

“It hurts because I will never know what it would’ve been like to actually experience intimacy and sex in the normal way,” she said. “Sex is always going to be amazing, but it hurts to think that I’m not experiencing what other women are experiencing to that same level.”

Martin also explained that it’s typical for a woman’s clitoris to grow in size and sensitivity while on testosterone and that the growth can be very uncomfortable. In her own experience, this discomfort is at its worst when taking a shower or putting on underwear.

“It’s uncomfortable not because of the size, because that isn’t so bad for me. It’s just the sensitivity. It’s weird. It’s like a mixture of having absolutely no sensitivity, but it’s still too sensitive,” she said. “But, there’s no going back. There’s nothing I can do to change that.”

Today, Martin is one of several detransitioners online who are bravely documenting how they became ensnared by the gender ideology movement and what happened to their bodies as a result of it. Martin said that while she has come in contact with many supportive people online, she feels very wary of individuals who insult and ridicule young people currently undergoing transition.

“That was us at one point, and at the end of the day, that stuff is not funny—it’s really sad. I don’t think those people are getting anywhere by insulting innocent people,” Martin told IWF. “There’s a way to get your argument out there without dehumanizing people because we [detransitioners] are not any different. We were in their shoes at one point, and one day those transitioners might detransition also.”

Now that she has come to terms with her feminine identity, Martin said that young people struggling with their gender identity need to be supported by finding ways to cope with insecurities, rather than just being granted unequivocal permission to make permanent medical changes.

“There is no cure to happiness. There is no cure to insecurity. We all struggle, and that struggle might be a lifetime,” Martin said. “There is no one solution. The solution is to learn to be okay over time. Eventually, your little insecurities won’t be as big of a problem.”

If you were to see Jade Martin on the street or online, whether that’s through social media or her video game streaming channel, you might not visibly see the insecurities that sparked the loss of her female teenage and young adult life. But like many other young women, Martin felt deeply vulnerable in her gender identity. Some grow out of it more quickly than others, but if exposed to deceitful ideologies at too young an age—whether consciously encouraged or inadvertently abetted—developing girls are indeed at risk of missing out on their girlhood, forgoing a deeper sense of purpose through marriage, and permanently impacting their future fertility.