Whose Body Is It Isabella Malbin

SAVE YOUR SPOT! ⁠Safeguarding in the Age of Gender Disinformation, Dissociation, & External Validation SeekingRecover Your Instincts & Cultivate Resilience with Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology⁠ Join us LIVE on Saturday, April 13 or watch the replay



Many of you probably remember Leigh Janet Marshall’s story of childhood trans identification, followed by sterilization and detransition. Leigh is back today for an update on her journey since her appearance on the podcast nearly one year ago.

After the recording, Leigh was met with both heroism and villainization. Peers claimed that she had weaponized her experience to harm 'true trans' sufferers and even condemned her for supposedly using her life experience to ‘fuel right wing extremism.’ The silver lining to the process of sharing her story was the revival of sisterhood in her life but it also came with a difficult period of over-identification with detransition.

Now, she is ‘detransitioning from detransition.’

Leigh reminds us that in politicizing our identities, we remain in our intellect and has written her testimony indulging the overactive, analytical mind in a productive way, while giving her the space to remember that thoughts are not the full truth, and identities are merely waypoints on a lifetime’s worth of shifts and evolution. Through this process of reacquainting with the body, she has also healed from violent panic attacks and disordered eating. Joining ‘the real world,’ in her words, and dropping the stories she held about how others would condemn her for her past, she has made connections ten times over what she lost.

Read Leigh's full testimony →⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Upcoming Class: Safeguarding in the Age of Gender Disinformation, Dissociation, & External Validation SeekingRecover Your Instincts & Cultivate Resilience with Amy Sousa, MA Depth Psychology Join us LIVE on April 13 or watch the replay



When nine-year-old Elle found out she was going to be a big sister, she was overjoyed. She helped raise her younger brother and as they grew up, she was happy to act as a support, confidante, and the first-call-in-a-crisis. But when she became pregnant, her brother’s attitude toward his sister changed completely. He never acknowledged her daughter, never wanted to look at or hold her as a baby, and Elle ended up falling out with him. She did not understand why he turned on her until many years later, when her brother called her to let her know that he was ‘a lesbian woman’ now. 



He shared that his treatment of her stemmed from his jealousy of her, for one thing he'd never gotten to get his nails done with their mother. Elle began looking into autogynephilia and realized that her brother was living in a porn-sick, sex-obsessed alternate reality. He had quit working and started an OnlyFans, where he dressed up as an underage girl. He spent $14,000 on laser hair removal, plus hormones, and surgeries. He demanded financial support from their mother and let bills pile up until creditors were harassing his parents. 

While Elle's parents have extended themselves financially, emotionally and physically to support her brother, finding support for themselves has not been easy in the trans-affirming culture.





Connect with Elle: doitwritecontent@gmail.com

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It’s not exactly Millennials' fault that many of us are stuck in extended adolescence. We’re bearing a wound around adulthood that didn’t start with our generation. We’re working under fluorescent lighting instead of under the sun, hustling in the city instead of in the small tribes we evolved from, and striving for the “empowerment” the Spice Girls promised. Endocrine disruptors surround us. We work with screens instead of with our hands. The conveniences of living non-biologically are certainly comfortable, but they come with consequences: we've become soft, immature, our vitality compromised.



Many women in our thirties are rethinking the cultural programming that discouraged us from having our babies at an age that would afford us the energy and resilience to more easily bear the challenges of motherhood, while garnering the support from our own parents. There are plenty of benefits to building up wisdom, life experience, and financial resources before you have kids, but there’s grief too. What happens when we exclusively put our self-worth into our careers or accomplishments instead of embodying the portal of life and death that is our birthright as women?



Today's guest, body worker and poly-vagal nerve practitioner Danielle Evans, helps people heal their nervous system. Danielle shares about her process deprogramming from liberal feminist rhetoric and discusses how the surface of our skin connects to the deepest layers of our nervous system. Danielle reminds us that the body remembers everything from pre-birth to our present moment, and explains how we can self-source safety in our body and quiet the anxious mind.



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Growing up Latter Day Saints, Olivia was held to very strict expectations. The church and homeschooling offered glimmers of women’s spiritual power, but Olivia needed greater freedom of expression. For instance, she chafed at her family’s outpouring of grief when she revealed she was interested in dating women. She tried to be patient with them as they grieved her inevitable separation from them in the afterlife, but she felt rejected. This, along with the restrictions internalized from her childhood, drove her to confuse authentic liberation with the so-called "liberal" ideologies she encountered in adolescence.

It began with RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show seemed misogynist to Olivia, but her friends made it very clear that she’d need to adopt even the most appalling caricatures of womanhood, “trans lesbians” if she wanted to maintain access to her social circle and dating pool. She understood “you either get with this agenda or you die socially,” when she witnessed the ostracism of lesbians who resisted. The logical conclusion of this liberal feminist propaganda was her full indoctrination into another religion, with its own set of patriarchal expectations. Following in the footsteps of her liberal feminist friends, she became a “sugar baby” and started an OnlyFans. Her “manager,” aka her John, soon became her pimp, supplying her with drugs to cope with the effects of being trafficked, all the while filming her degradation for other men to consume. She believed her non-binary identity would somehow protect her from the sexual violence women experience, disassociating from her female body even as men tortured her. It was not until she realized that her choices were exposing not just her, but her girlfriend, to extreme violence, that she knew she had to exit. Olivia has since found her own source of spirituality, bodily integrity, and a reclamation of womanhood through connecting to her matrilineal line and finding the healing power of plants.

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For Charlie, it all started at age five, jealous of boys, because they got to take their shirts off and stand to pee. By age seven, she had a therapist who told her and her parents that this was symptomatic of something called gender dysphoria. Ecstatic that she would get to ‘be a boy,’ Charlie was ushered down the medical path, with her vital records and name altered at age nine, and later put on puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones. Her family asked her if she was sure she wanted all of this. Her response? “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life.” All twelve years of life experience couldn’t have prepared her for the changes testosterone would bring. At age fifteen, she had started to wonder if the path she was on would prevent her from ever getting married or having a family. It wasn’t until encountering a Reddit thread about complications of testosterone such as bone and heart disease and dementia that it occurred to her that her doctors had never told her that these "life-saving treatments" would have long term negative effects on her health.

The process of coming out a second time, this time as a lesbian woman ready to detransition, was even harder than the first time. After telling herself the story for so long that she’d take her own life if she ever got her period, she developed an eating disorder, to keep delaying womanhood even without testosterone. Now nineteen, Charlie has found peace in her body and within her circle of family and friends, but she wants to challenge people to consider what would have happened if her childhood therapist had recognized her anxiety and depression instead of entertaining the ludicrous concept of being stuck in the wrong body.

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Kristin Hauser joins us today to talk about cultivating female fertility outside of the medical model. She has been working in the fertility space for over ten years, as an acupuncturist and sex and relationship coach. Kristin has seen all manner of fertility issues, from women later in their fertile years, who’ve been working to the point of burn out, to the less talked about, younger women whose cycles were damaged by hormonal birth control. Inventions such as intrauterine insemination, IVF, to surrogacy, are touted by the fertility industry as the best path to motherhood if you don’t conceive within a few months of trying.

As an acupuncturist, Kristin tried to serve women within this model, but soon realized it was out of integrity for her. She encourages women and men to consider their fertility as an extension of creativity, of their physical and spiritual wellbeing, and she uses a variety of methods that never require invasive testing or surgery. In this episode Kristin discusses fertility struggles are a catalyst for sexual reawakening, and how staying out of the mainstream medical model, women can come into motherhood in power.

Kristin's class Restoring Your Fertility and Ovarian Vitality is a great place to start for women who want to truly understand their bodies and improve their fertility with ease and without medical intervention.

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⁠Take the master class: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗟𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗩𝗙, 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗮𝗰𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗨𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 →⁠

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