Pamela Buffone is a Canadian software executive and anti-transgender activist. Buffone is and advisor to anti-trans hate groupGenspect and is founder of anti-trans group blog Canadian Gender Report.
Background
Pamela Neely “Pam” Buffone earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Ottawa in 1993 and a master’s degree from Western University in 1998.
Buffone and spouse Jason Buffone have a child and live in Ottawa.
Anti-transgender activism
Buffone’s child reportedly became “distressed” during a first-grade lesson about gender identity and expression. After complaining to the school, Buffone filed a discrimination case. The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal held a hearing in 2022, after which the case was dismissed.
Buffone founded anti-trans group blog Canadian Gender Report. Contributors of original or republished work include:
Jesse Hinty (hormones as an adult for about 1 year, no surgical steps)
Helena Kerschner (hormones as an adult for about 1.5 years, no surgical steps)
Dagny Walton (hormones āsix months before turning 18ā for about 2 years, no surgical steps)
Members of the group have spoken at anti-transgender events and maintained a website and since-deleted YouTube channel. Members also traveled to Washington, DC to lobby lawmakers and had a meeting with a member of the APA.
Members have also testified against trans-supportive legislation in addition to working behind the scenes with Denise Caignon, owner of anti-trans site 4thWaveNow and parent of Chiara Caignon-Lewis.
The group disbanded in 2020 after Hinty and Kerschner ended their long-term romantic relationship.
Chiara Caignon-Lewis is an American “ex-transgender” activist and a founder of ex-trans website Pique Resilience Project. Anti-trans activism is a family business: Chiara’s parent Denise Caignon is also heavily involved in anti-transgender extremism as owner of the website 4thWaveNow.
Aliases include:
“Chiara Canaan”
“Rachel Miller”
Caignon-Lewis claims the transgender rights movement is “nothing more than misogyny disguised as progressive feminism.”
Background
Chiara Lucia Marie Caignon-Lewis was born August 21, 1997 in Santa Cruz, California to Denise Caignon and Tim Lewis. Caignon-Lewis stated, “I was dysphoric because my father sexually abused me as a child” and because of “my internalized homophobia.”
Denise and Chiara Caignon-Lewis moved to North Carolina. In 2013, at age 16, Caignon-Lewis became an ordained youth minister, then came out as transgender shortly after turning 17. Caignon-Lewis had already come out as lesbian and was dating as one, but an incident at school resulted in few friends in real life. Caignon-Lewis turned to online communities, claiming that popular trans users on Tumblr and YouTube led to a multi-year obsession with transition:
Had I not been exposed to the cultish mindset of Tumblrās transactivists at a vulnerable phase of my life, I would not have become absorbed by a desire to permanently change my body.
Caignon-Lewis’ coming out involved texting a link to a gender clinic with no other details. Being forbidden to take medical transition steps caused Caignon-Lewis to have many family fights. At the height of the fighting, Denise Caignon got heavily involved with posting anti-transgender materials online at 4thWaveNow and elsewhere.
In 2015, Caignon-Lewis graduated from Chapel Hill High School and was sent to a Florida horse farm for nine months. Caignon-Lewis says the desire to transition subsided after that without taking any legal or medical steps. Denise and Chiara have since teamed up to be the most high-profile family in the modern ex-trans movement.
Caignon-Lewis sometimes performs music locally and has had a string of service jobs in the Triangle area, including at insightsoftware, bartaco, Orangetheory Fitness, Stoney River Steakhouse, Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille, and Hawthorne & Wood.
Caignon-Lewis has been riding horses since age two, got a Selle FranƧais cross mare named Tupelo Honey in 2011, and has been involved in competitive jumping and dressage with Honey in North Carolina and at FenRidge Farm in Florida. A self-described “huge horse nerd,” Caignon-Lewis was active on several online platforms, posting about horses and dressage in addition to identity issues (most of which was deleted). Since 2016, Caignon-Lewis has operated a part-time business called Novation Sporthorse, offering training, lessons, and marketing of sales horses.
Caignon-Lewis and three other ex-trans activists created the Pique Resilience Project in 2019 and disbanded in 2020, allegedly because two of the members stopped dating each other.
Canaan, Chiara (2018). [response to Economist piece] https://chiaracanaan.tumblr.com/post/177791904093/why-are-so-many-teenage-girls-appearing-in-gender: “I was interviewed for this magazine recently (Iām āRachelā), and have been pleasantly surprised at the positive response so far. I was dysphoric because my father sexually abused me as a child until I learned to associate womanhood with fear and shame, and I was dysphoric because I am a lesbian, but my internalized homophobia jumped at the option of being a straight man instead. Had I not been exposed to the cultish mindset of Tumblrās transactivists at a vulnerable phase of my life, I would not have become absorbed by a desire to permanently change my body.”
Buddhist Peace Fellowship (1997). Turning Wheel. “Born on August 21, to TW associate editor Denise Caignon and her husband Tim Lewis: Chiara Lucia (Clear Light!)”
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
Parents of ROGD Kids (PROGDK) is an anti-transgender front group for unsupportive parents of trans and gender-diverse children. It promotes the controversial concept “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD).
Using tactics developed by anti-abortion activists, the group organizes clinic protests at children’s hospitals that support gender diverse youth.
Background
PROGDK was created in the fall ofĀ 2017, and the website launched in December. Two key people listed are “Suzanna Diaz,” aka Monica Hegmann, and āJanine MacLean,ā who isĀ listedĀ as media consultant.Ā Since launching, their organization has grown to “over 2,300 parents.” The majority of parents come from the US (74%), and they have affiliate groups in Canada, the UK, Australia/NZ, Scandinavia and Germany.ā
āParents of ROGD Kids was created by two mothers with teenage daughters who suddenly decided they were transgender without any prior history of gender dysphoria, but with long histories of mental health issues. They were skeptical of the affirmative model. It just didnāt seem to fit in their childās case, yet everywhere they went, they were told to affirm their children. These mothers felt isolated, intimidated and terrified for their daughters.
They met online in a group of like-minded mothers. Eventually, the group arranged a secret meeting somewhere in the US. It had to be secret to avoid angry trans-rights activists. It was such a relief to find others in the same situation, and so empowering to know they were not alone, that they decided to create Parents of ROGD Kids, so that no other parent would ever have to feel so isolated and alone.
Their primary goal is to support the work of four anti-transgender psychologists:
In 2016, Lisa Marchiano posted notices to three anti-trans blogs (4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Marchianoās own Youth TransCritical Professionals) seeking survey respondents who believed they had observed āa sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoriaā in young people. This new disease model was then workshopped and developed on forums for anti-trans activists, especially unaccepting parents of gender diverse children.
In 2018, Lisa Littman published a paper about ārapid onset gender dysphoriaā that was later republished with corrections following significant negative response from clinicians and from the trans community. Littmanās āROGDā paper has been widely criticized for its methodological limitations, biased sample, inadequate conceptual framing, lack of ethical safeguards, and potential to harm transgender youth by undermining affirming care. The broader consensus in both academia and clinical practice is that the āROGDā hypothesis lacks credible scientific basis and is not recognized as a legitimate diagnosis.
In 2019, Diaz, using the pseudonym āFrances Mallory,ā published a report in anti-trans publication Post Millennial about a secret meeting of anti-trans parents:
āOne of the highlights of the meeting came when Dr. Michael Bailey, a leading authority on gender dysphoria, skyped in to speak with us. He listened to our stories with interest and compassion, then assured us that our children did not fit into the traditional categories of gender dysphoria, which have been recognized and well-studied for many years. Rather, they were exhibiting a new kind of gender dysphoria that had never been seen before. Researchers had dubbed it Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), and it is so new that it has never been properly studied. Since the meeting described in this article, Dr. Lisa Littman has published the first ever study on Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria. Dr. Michael Bailey is working with Parents of ROGD Kids to publish another study which corroborates Dr. Littmanās findings.ā
In 2023, the Archives of Sexual Behavior published the latest in its 50 years of academic attacks on trans and gender diverse youth. The first author is “Suzanna Diaz,” one of several aliases used by Monica Hegmann. The second author is anti-trans extremistĀ J. Michael Bailey.
The International Academy of Sex Research (IASR) opened an investigation into how the “Diaz”/Bailey paper was published. IASR President Meredith Chivers announced the investigation, angering Bailey, who was Chivers’ dissertation advisor.
The journal’s publisher, Springer, added a note to the article:
10 May 2023Ā Publisherās Note: readers are alerted that concerns have been raised regarding methodology as described in this article. The publisher is currently investigating this matter and a further response will follow the conclusion of this investigation.
Littman, Lisa (August 16, 2018). Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports. PLOS One https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
Cut: Daughters of the West – Alteration & Exploitation of Children is an anti-transgender 2023 film about the ex-transgender movement, with a focus on gender affirming surgery for youth.
Background
The film premiered on April 15th in Phoenix, Arizona as a fundraiser for The Gavel Project, an “anti-woke” non-profit moving from fighting COVID policies to fighting “gender affirmation policies in schools (e.g., policies promoting the sexualization of our children, including hormone therapies and reassignment surgeries for children).”
Synopsis
According to Esler:
Cut explores the impact of the current transgender craze on girls by diving into the history of plastic surgery. […] The film investigates the moral and cultural precursors that have enabled transgender ideology to thrive. Before the rise in puberty blockers, hormone therapy and double mastectomies, there was an exponential increase in teenage girls seeking breast augmentations and labiaplasties. Cosmetic surgery, and feminist icons flaunting sexual liberation, handed girls the power to permanently alter their bodies, based on trends and self diagnosis. Now, pre-teens have spiralled into a mental health crisis that coincides perfectly with the introduction of smartphones, social media and gender theory. Is this the cultural and historical legacy we have handed to girls on the precipice of womanhood. Filmmaker Simon Esler weaves the voices of experts, outspoken citizens and detransitioners into a cultural fever dream that asks: What has happened to the daughters of the West?
The International Association of Therapists for Desisters and Detransitioners (IATDD) is an anti-transgender front group. Its members are key figures in “gender critical” anti-transgender activism.
IATDD supported the “ex-transgender” movement, people who describe themselves as “desisters” and “detransitioners.” They sell their services to parents who do not want their children to make a gender transition, known as the “parental rights” movement.
Background
Like many of these official-looking “associations,” it was just a website, part of a web farm of similar sites run by a small fringe group of therapists supporting anti-transgender efforts.
The site went online in December 2020 and went offline in January 2022.
Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion is a film made by people from several factions of the anti-transgender movement, including ex-transgender activists, parental rights activists, gender critical activists, and conservative Catholic/Protestant activists.
Background
The film is distributed by Catholic publisher Ignatius Press. It’s produced by Runaway Planet Pictures and Don Johnson Media.
The film had its world premiere October 8, 2022 at the Freed Theater in Garden Grove, California.
Synopsis
According to Johnson:
Over the past few years, a transgender tsunami has swept the nation, completely overtaking the medical, educational, and counseling industries, and forever altering hundreds of thousands of young girlsā lives. What is going on? How did it come to this? Who is behind it? And what is coming next? Filmmaker and father Don Johnson traveled the country to find out.
Dysconnected is about exposing the truth behind the gender ideology industry, one that allows children to make life-altering decisions for themselves without any parental consent, explores why there is an explosion of young girls identifying as transgender, seeking to understand why the medical and counseling industries are not pushing back on gender ideology, and highlighting stories of people who have detransitioned.
No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care is anti-transgender propaganda focusing on the ex-transgender movement. It is directed by Laura VanZee-Taylor and produced by Penka Kouneva. The 2023 project is controversial for including convicted sex offender David Arthur Kendall as one of the original ex-trans activists featured.
Background
The project was originally titled Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine.
It is produced by Panacol Productions dba PKS, Inc. [Penka Kouneva Studios] and is released by Deplorable Films. Prior to No Way Back, Deplorable has distributed three propaganda pieces criticizing progressive racial policy and one criticizing progressive firearm policy.
Synopsis
Via their promotional materials:
Detransitioners Michelle, Laura, Cat, David, Joel and Abel tell the stories of their gender distress, transgender medicalization, and subsequent detransition. Without diagnostic clarity or mental health evaluations, their doctors quickly affirmed them as ātransgender,ā and mindlessly ushered them along the path of medical transition. (The āgender-affirming careā is the only treatment recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.) These young people were harmed irrevocably by the doctors they trusted. AFFIRMATION GENERATION demonstrates how the āone-size-fits-allā medicalization ā the āgender-affirming careā ā has failed these patients.
The stories of the detransitioners are examined by twelve leading experts with decades of clinical practice treating gender-distressed patients: psychotherapists Lisa Marchiano, Sasha Ayad, Stella OāMalley, physician-scientist Lisa Littman, endocrinologist Dr. William Malone, MD; Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Stephanie Winn, sociologist Dr. Michael Biggs, pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, NYT best-selling writer Lisa Selin Davis, and LGB activist & lifelong Liberal Democrat Joey Brite, among others. The 90-minute documentary cites 45 peer-reviewed medical and journalist articles.
People
They describe themselves as “life-long West Coast liberal Democrats in the entertainment industry. To take credit for this passion project would, at the very least, risk our careers.”
They collaborated with anti-trans group LGB United to make it available after it was deplatformed by Vimeo in 2022.
AMC promoted one-day-only screenings of No Way Back on June 21. Cielo Sunsarae of the Queer Trans Project led a successful campaign to get the screenings canceled.
New York International Film Awards (2023). Finalists January 2023: Affirmation Generation, Director L. E. Dawes https://newyorkinternationalfilmawards.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/FINALISTS-NYIFA-January-2023.pdf
Ky Schevers is an American writer and activist who left the transphobic “ex-trans” movement. Schevers states on the Reclaiming Trans website:
Ky Schevers played a significant role creating and promoting the radical feminist detrans womenās community. Under the name CrashChaosCats, she wrote, made videos, presented workshops and gave media interviews in order to talk about her experiences detransitioning and promote anti-trans feminist ideology. Eventually she became disillusioned with the radical feminist movement and recognized her detransition as a harmful anti-trans conversion practice. She writes now to raise awareness of the harms of ideologically motivated detransition and the role transphobic detrans communities play in organized transphobia.
Background
Gender critical troll Katie Herzog featured Schevers prominently in a widely criticized 2017 article about “detransition” that appeared in The Stranger. Schevers is given the pseudonym “Cass” in Herzog’s piece. For seven years, neither Herzog nor The Stranger updated the original piece or covered the subsequent developments. In 2024, The Stranger republished Schevers’ 2021 update.
Schevers was also mentioned in the 2018 profile of ex-trans activist Carey Callahan in the documentary that accompanied the transphobic Atlantic piece on “detransition” by Jesse Singal. Schevers is called “CrashChaosCats” or “Crash” in that publication.
Herzog claimed that many people in the ex-trans movement “detransition” because they have a harder life from less social acceptance:
That may be true for some detrans peopleāespecially trans women, who generally have a harder time passing and who lose the benefits inherent with appearing male in societyābut it wasn’t the case for Cass, a 31-year-old detrans lesbian in California. Cass was severely bullied as a gender nonconforming kid and says transitioning actually made life easier. She started taking testosterone at 20, and her community was largely supportive. She didn’t have a hard time finding work or people to date. “People were definitely nicer to me after I transitioned and they saw me as a man instead of a butch dyke,” Cass said.
Three months before Cass started taking testosterone, her mom committed suicide. “Transitioning was kind of a survival strategy,” Cass said. And that worked for a while, but over time, she started to sense that her dysphoria was rooted more in the trauma of her mother’s death and her own internalized misogyny than in gender identity. As an adolescent, she had been masculine, butch. “I got a lot of very harsh, negative messages about what it meant to be a woman,” Cass said. “It got to the point where I couldn’t see myself as a woman without feeling the horror other people felt toward me. Living as a man provided a kind of refuge until I was ready to dive into all that.”
When she was ready, Cass, like Jackie, looked online for advice, and she met a woman a few years older who had detransitioned. Her experiences were the sameāfrom childhood bullying and internalized misogyny to the sense that transitioning hadn’t really solved her dysphoria at all. They became friends, talking over the course of a few months, and then, after nine years living as a man, Cass came out as a woman.
It’s been four years since Cass detransitioned. She changed the gender marker on her driver’s license back to female and asked her friends and family to call her by her birth name, but she still passes as male, with a deep voice and a shade of hair on her cheeks.
“Psychologically, it was harder to detransition,” she said. She compares it to the process of working through her mom’s suicide. “It involved a lot more dealing with my trauma and facing the self-destructive parts of myself. It’s not fun, but it’s worth it.”
Cass still hasn’t told the health-care providers who helped her through her transition about the change. In some ways, she faults them for enabling her transition, even though it’s exactly what she wanted at the time. She writes about her experience online, and in one post, she says that a favored therapist “helped me hurt myself. That definitely wasn’t her intention but that’s still what happened. This contradiction is difficult to face and understand.”
In addition to her writing, Cass recently started posting videos to YouTube, where there are a growing number of detransitioning confessionals. In one video, which has been watched nearly 900,000 times, a young man reflects on his decision to detransition after living as a woman. He’s beautiful and androgynous, with long lashes framing bright-blue eyes. “I’m not like every other boy,” he said. “I can accept that now.”
There’s an offline community of detransitioners as well: In 2014 and 2015, Cass led a workshop on detransitioning at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. (Michfest, as it was known, had a contentious history with the trans community due to its long-held “women born women” policy. The festival closed after nearly 40 years in existence in 2015.) Last year, Cass and 15 other detransitioned women got together on the West Coast for a weekend of workshops, meditation, and shared experience. Cass thinks it was the first gathering of its kind.
As one of the detransitioned women (“Cass”) interviewed for this article, I want to say I’m happy with how it came out and am glad women like me are finally getting more representation. I think it’s a very balanced and well researched piece of writing and best of all gives a marginalized group of people a chance to be heard. I’m very excited that detransitioned people are getting more opportunities to speak about our own experiences rather than having other people talk about what they think we are and what we mean. This is one of few articles out there that actually represents my life as a detransitioned woman.
I’m dismayed but not surprised by how some people are reacting to the issues this piece has raised. My life is not transphobic and making lives like mine more visible is not transphobic either. Reading that experiences like mine should not be talked about in public is infuriating. I get to be open and honest about my life and I get to work to make my experience and community more visible. There are people out there who need to know that there’s resources and support for them if they end up detransitioning. They need to know they’re not the only ones. I made a video in response to the article and people’s reactions to it that can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuI5rBWDā¦
I would encourage people to also watch videos other detrans women made in response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqN_9rM8ā¦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN6N6F6Aā¦
Since leaving the ex-trans cult
Schevers later teamed up with Lee Leveille to form Health Liberation Now! It is “a free, trans-run resource analyzing the social and political forces acting in opposition to health liberation for transgender, detransitioned, retransitioned, and gender diverse people, as well as those questioning their gender. We pair these analyses with collections of proactive resistance strategies that community organizers can use in pursuit of trans health liberation.”
References
Schevers, Ky (June 24, 2024). The Reality Behind the Story I Told The Stranger.The Stranger https://www.thestranger.com/queer-issue-2024/2024/06/05/79545098/the-reality-behind-the-story-i-told-the-stranger
