Threats and bullying from peers and censorship from his college couldn’t stop detransitioner Simon B. Amaya Price from sounding the alarm on so-called gender transitions for children.
Amaya Price, 20, was tasked with creating an event about social change for a class at Berklee College of Music, a private music college in Boston. He decided to host a presentation Oct. 20 titled “Born in the Right Body: Desister and Detransitioner Awareness” to share his own struggles with gender dysphoria in high school and how he overcame them.
After Amaya Price received almost 1,000 negative comments on social media, including messages threatening his physical safety and recommending he drop out of school and commit suicide, the administration of the liberal arts college forced him to cancel the presentation, Boston-native Amaya Price told The Daily Signal.
But on Sunday, Amaya Price made a comeback. After Berklee failed to follow up on his requests to reschedule the event, he found his own platform.
“It was one hell of a vindication,” Amaya Price said.
The MIT Open Discourse Society allowed Amaya Price to host his lecture on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An organization called Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender provided refreshments and logistical support. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, also raised awareness of Amaya Price’s situation.
The event logged about 40 in-person attendees and 60 virtual listeners. Many in the audience were parents whose children suffer from gender dysphoria, looking for answers of how to save their children from the transgender cult, Amaya Price said.
“This is a really hard situation, seeing your kid basically completely change all of a sudden,” Amaya Price said, “and want to do these treatments with the hormones and the surgeries, which are really harmful.”
One mother, a Bosnian refugee, told Amaya Price that what she was going through with her daughter identifying as transgender was harder than surviving genocide in her homeland.
“I feel like I’ve given a lot of these parents hope, because I’m here today, I’ve been through this, I came out the other side, and I’m OK,” he said, “That’s what a lot of these parents need. They need hope. And right now how it is in Massachusetts, especially, there aren’t a lot of places to look.”
Amaya Price’s presentation highlighted the hate he says he has received on social media since announcing his event and his journey from identifying as trans to accepting his biological sex. He ended with the reminder: “No child is born in the wrong body.”
Amaya Price, who has been diagnosed with autism, said he experienced social ostracism and a mental health crisis in ninth grade, leading him to decide his problem was that he actually was a girl.
He told his therapist, who affirmed his gender dysphoria and referred him to Boston Children’s Hospital for hormones and surgeries. His pediatrician told Amaya Price’s father he could choose between having a “dead son or a living daughter,” and that the then-14-year-old would kill himself if denied hormones and surgery.
Amaya Price’s father immediately shut down the possibility of a medical “transition,” which his son now says is “the best thing he could have done.”
Amaya Price calls himself a “desister,” someone who identified as transgender but decided to live in accord with his biological gender instead of undergoing medical interventions.
After Amaya Price spoke at the Sunday event, senior researcher Ian Kingsbury of the medical watchdog Do No Harm gave a presentation on understanding the faulty “science” behind pediatric gender medicine. Do No Harm is responsible for a database of 225 hospitals that perform child gender transitions.
“Simon is remarkably brave for speaking out,” Kingsbury told The Daily Signal. “Detransitioners and desisters receive more venom from trans activists than anyone. That’s because [activists] hope to bully desisters and detransitioners into silence so they can tell the public that detransition is rare.”
“I was and remain eager to support Simon in whatever way I can,” Kingsbury said.
Two hours of Q&A followed the presentations by Amaya Price and Kingsbury.
Although Amaya Price is a reformed Jew, social media naysayers called him a neo-Nazi in the lead-up to the rescheduled event.
“Saying that I’m somehow the same as the people who previously genocided my people 80 years ago, that’s disgusting,” Amaya Price said.
The event had some “heated moments,” including two transgender-identifying individuals who abruptly left the lecture, he said. Still, he said, the event ultimately “built some bridges” and paved the way for respectful dialogue with those who disagree with him.
One person who identifies as transgender asked Amaya Price if he’d be interested in organizing an event featuring both transgender individuals and detransitioners.
“If we have an open dialogue about things, there’s a good chance the truth will show itself,” Amaya Price said. “I believe in people’s ability to make up their own minds, and I think this event proved that we can have a really productive dialogue with people who disagree with each other.”
Amaya Price said he hopes Berklee College of Music will allow him to share the experience of detransitioners and desisters such as himself before he graduates on Dec. 12.
FIRE sent a letter to Berklee Nov. 1, posted on the school’s website, and issued a “Take Action” notice decrying Berklee’s decision to “indefinitely postpone” the event.
“I hope Berklee realizes the error of its ways,” Amaya Price said, “and I hope they will extend an invitation for me to do this presentation at my home institution.”
Berklee censored his speech based on his opinion and identity, Amaya Price said, which encourages those who bullied him to be more hateful and threatening. Because he cares about his college community, Amaya Price said he hopes to see it improve as a safe place for those whose opinions differ from the majority.
Berklee College of Music didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
“It’s become really obvious to me that a hell of a lot of people care about this,” the 20-year-old said, “and a hell of a lot of people really resonated with what I had to say at my presentation.”
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
