Over the summer, I worked on two articles about non-traditional gender transitions, and interviewed 11 people about their experiences. Through email, over the phone, and at their kitchen tables, I talked with transgender people across Canada and the U.S. about navigating their transitions through the medical system—using hormones irregularly, ordering medications online, lying to doctors, languishing on waitlists, pleading with specialists, and begging to be treated with dignity.

Some of the interviews were heartbreaking. Others made me laugh: From counterfeit prescriptions to homemade hormone therapy, trans people have an impressive capacity to overcome obstacles in outlandish ways. I am continually blown away with the resourcefulness of my community, and those who persevere despite a minefield of opposition from parents, principals, politicians, pathologists, and care providers.

The week after my last interview, Jesse Singal’s controversial cover story about “detransition,” or the process of reversing one’s transition, debuted in the the summer issue of the Atlantic.

For many, the article was groundbreaking. I disagree. Singal’s piece, like most stories about detransition written by a cisgender person, goes like this: We meet a hypothetical girl who’s too young to know better. She and her parents are taken down a rabbit hole of suggested medications by an overeager activist medical team. We then meet a number of other girls who once fell prey to the same conspiracy, realizing too late that they were being led astray by wolves in white lab coats and the hairy-legged harpies of the transgender movement. Their fight against the trap of transition is a tale of science and circus, men playing women playing god, and the crises facing the modern medical system in a climate where feelings dominate over facts.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but not by much. Detransition discourse is embarrassingly formulaic and cartoonishly redundant, recycling the same tropes to create the image of a girl gone wrong. These kind of articles misrepresent facts and sow panic—over the loss of girlhood, the end of innocence, and the theft of women’s bodies from the realm of male property. It’s heterosexual border policing dressed up as clickbait.

In reality, most of what we’d call “detransition” occurs among transfeminine people who were assigned male at birth. That’s because of the amount of time, energy, and money involved in living decently as a transfeminine person—and being a transgender person in public is a high-risk exercise. Trans women, particularly women of colour, deal with hostility in almost every facet of daily life, from using the washroom to buying clothing to looking for jobs.

In some ways, “detransition” works as a temporary self-preservation tactic. Advocating for yourself is exhausting. Unless you have money and a great community to fall back on, there’s little in the wider world that’s telling you, “Keep going.” Gender-affirming care is also considered the safest approach to transgender health care.

With the exception of Singal, cisgender writers have recently begun talking to transfeminine people about their detransition experiences. But these articles are equally as misrepresentative. They function as cautionary tales, warning of the power of some mythical “transgender lobby” and presenting their subjects without nuance or context. One particularly egregious example republished in a mainstream Canadian newspaper states that detransition most often occurs in trans women over 30, but provides no context for why that may be the case.

As writers, there is no one among us who is not guilty of oversimplification. And it’s true that, in our rush to defend what rights we’ve have obtained, trans people may find ourselves fighting for narratives that more closely resemble pathology than reality. Being transgender isn’t something I believe should be understood purely in the framework of diagnosis and treatment. Yet I often find myself defending this perspective to push back against attempts at barring us from access to transition-related care.

Detransition discourse restrains how people speak about themselves and their experiences. It leaves no room for talking about trans lives as richer than just risks or symptoms. The way cisgender people write about detransition reflects assumptions about transgender experiences as binary and linear. In these stories, trans people aren’t recognized as human beings living real lives; they’re simply characters playing their part in a cautionary tale.

But when you talk to those who do detransition, their stories are far more complex. There are few people who once identified as trans that now consider themselves cisgender. Instead, they often have a changing relationship with what it means to embody their gender. They may delay medically transitioning, start and stop hormones, or redefine their relationship with a gender binary. I have at least five friends who have done this. I’ve done it myself. And many people who stop their transition end up resuming it in some capacity. We’re taught to see transition as some sort of irreversible, seismic event. In fact, we should recognize transition—and by extension, detransition—as an ongoing process of self-actualization and navigation.

People’s experiences evolve. They should be free to make choices to reflect their experiences without cisgender people weaponizing them against other members of their communities. These people aren’t representative of anything other than their own experiences. They are not characters in a grand narrative; they are human beings.

In case the cover line doesn’t catch your attention, the cover features a cute white baby being toted around in a briefcase by a set of female legs wearing an outfit that looks especially hot and uncomfortable for a summer issue—nylons, gross. The cover art also looks like it was inspired by the poster for that Diane Keaton movie Baby Boom. You know Baby Boom, that 1987 movie about juggling career and baby. It seems Diane missed the memo about just stuffing your toddler in your briefcase cause in the poster she’s actually trying to hold both the baby and the briefcase. She’s juggling, get it? Visual metaphors=fun.

Also, this is getting off topic, but I really dislike when briefcases are used as a symbol of career success. Serious career gals have expensive leather briefcases that smell of rich mahogany. And wear power suits! I could never be regarded as a serious career gal cause I have a cheap purse that I carry work papers in and which often contains Toaster Strudel remnants from the breakfast I made in the morning and put in my purse to eat on the subway but always forget about until I go to pay for something and my wallet is covered in strudel filling. We’re getting into Liz Lemon/Cathy cartoon territory here—Ack!—so I’ll move on.

Back to Slaughter’s story. Slaughter is a Princeton University professor and the former director of policy planning for the US State Department. She’s also a mother of two teenage boys. Slaughter’s piece argues that women can’t have it all—or if they can its cause they’re rich superhuman snazzy briefcase carrying robots—and that we need to abandon the myths women believe about having it all. For example, “it’s possible if you marry the right person!” Slaughter’s piece ends with some ideas on what needs to change in the workplace so that women can have it all—both children and the career they want.

Slaughter’s ideas on how to achieve better life-work balance are not particularly groundbreaking, but I think they’re important things that would benefit us all. I don’t think you have to have a career-aspiring vagina to believe that changing the culture of face time in the workplace or using teleconferencing for meetings is a good idea. I also would like to have less meetings and not check my email at night, but it’s because I like to spend my nights watching reality TV and drinking wine—my definition of having it all!

Slaughter acknowledges her position of privilege in the piece, but sort of backhandedly, as if an editor said “you better throw in a couple of sentences that acknowledges that you’re writing from the position of being an educated, white, rich woman with a high ranking government job that had a job at Princeton to fall back on when you left your high ranking government job cause our server can’t handle the number of comments on the website in response to your piece if you don’t. Also, maybe take out the part about your sabbatical in Shanghai so your kids can soak up the culture cause that will really piss people off.”

So, the definition of having it “all” still comes down to a having a successful career and a cute kid to stick in your briefcase. Seriously, we’re still clinging to that idea? It seems as dated as Keaton’s look in Baby Boom. My definition of “all” looks a lot different than this. I’m also opposed to the idea of “all” which I think has a finite quality to it and sets one up for unrealistic expectations and a never ending sense of failure. Fun!

I was thinking about how I would define “all” a couple of days ago when I came across an old episode of Sex and the City. It happened to be the episode where the gals talk about what having it all means to them. Charlotte comments that having it all really means having someone to share your life with. She says she didn’t feel complete until she married Agent Cooper. I rolled my eyes, but we all know there are way more Charlottes out there than Mirandas—sadly .

If Charlotte weren’t a fictional TV character I would ask her how that Prince Charming rescue having it all fantasy worked out for her and suggest she meet up with Katie Holmes for cosmos and some girl talk about how that fairy tale ends. Scientologists, not welcome!

Unfortunately, Charlotte didn’t help my ideas about what having it all means. She just annoyed me more. Then I heard Michael Cobb being interviewed on the radio. Cobb is a University of Toronto professor and the author of Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled which talks about how people are choosing to live alone—gasp, the horror!—and not couple up. So I’m single. Am I having it “all” now? I certainly think I am. Sadly, the perception that I have it all may not be around for long since Cobb’s interview left me with the feeling that singledom is being treated like a trend. Something with a shelf life, like hammer pants or Hollywood thinking women are funny.

Slaughter’s piece ends with the notion that we can change the conditions of women working at Walmart, but that we may need to put a woman in the White House first to do that. Good luck, with that. Sorry ladies at Walmart, you’re still screwed. When this happens, she says, “we will stop talking about whether women can have it all.” I think we should just start now.