I spent £250,000 to look like a Korean woman… but I’ve gone back to being a MAN
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Oli London has come a long way since the ‘depressed’ influencer who shocked the world in 2018 with the announcement that he identified as Korean.
At the time, the 33-year-old ‘transracial’ man had spent £64,000 trying to look Korean, just over a sixth of the £300,000 on ‘harmful mutilations’ he would undergo in search of ‘validation’ .
In the space of just a few years, the influencer with millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram underwent surgery, undergoing 32 procedures, including nose and chin surgery and shaving of his cheekbones.
During that time, Oli’s gender, sexuality, and racial identity fluctuated wildly from bisexual to transgender to transgender Korean women, but in 2022, something in him snapped.
He told MailOnline: ‘I suddenly realized that the more surgeries I have, the more unhappy I am.
Oli London, 33, is in a state of detransition after undergoing surgery to become a transgender Korean woman.
Oli London photographed in 2022 as a Korean woman, before deciding to go back to being a man
Oli underwent more than 30 painful feminization procedures in her quest to look like a Korean woman.
“I used to spend hours in church praying for clarity and then I realized I had made a mistake.
“It was a case of mutilating myself more or stopping and trying to go back to my old self.”
Now, one year into his transition to being a man, Oli has become an amazing new voice in the cultural debate on gender identity and reassignment surgery and has written a new book about his journey through his own life. gender.
And he has a lot to say.
After announcing his detransition, Oli claims to have received support and criticism from all corners.
He explained: ‘Many people were very nice to me, the conservatives and the Christians.
‘Trans activists were disgusting and vile to me, what they said was horrible.
“I have been targeted by hate campaigns, they are trying to cancel my book and they are sending me death threats, saying I should be stoned to death.
“It’s all because I said boys shouldn’t transition and women should have safe spaces, how is that controversial?”
Oli, photographed as a five-year-old boy in 1995, said he always struggled with his identity.
When he was a student, Oli traveled to South Korea and had his first surgery.
Oli said he was driven by dissatisfaction with his masculine body and craved validation.
But what do you think made a shy boy from London grow up and ‘mutilate’ himself more than 30 times?
Tracing the roots of her own gender dysmorphia, Oli says her experiences more or less mirror the condition’s cliché talking points.
He explained: ‘I was born male and as a child, I would sometimes dress up in girlish costumes with the bag and heels. The first cassette I bought was Cher and I played with Barbie, not Action Man, but a lot of kids do these days.
“When I became a teenager I was teased and bullied for my appearance, I had severe acne and a big nose. None of the girls would want to date me, they said I looked too girly, they called me girly.
“These are some of the reasons I think I developed body dysmorphic and eventually got depressed.”
Oli’s dissatisfaction with his body and appearance pushed him to seek solutions, however drastic.
He explained: ‘I always questioned my identity all my life.
‘When I was 23 years old I went to South Korea to teach English.
“It’s the plastic surgery capital of the world, a million procedures are done there every year, there was pressure for me to change there, to prove the bullies wrong.
“At first I had my nose done, the surgery was pretty scary and it went wrong so I had to do it, the first few went wrong and it became an addiction.
“I loved the way Koreans looked, so I became obsessed with looking like them, I started trying and using surgery.
‘In 2019 I returned and they operated on my jaw, my chin, I shaved my cheekbone and they operated on my nose. It gave me temporary happiness so I had more in Turkey and USA.
Oli after spending £250,000 to look like a Korean woman
For more than a year, Oli lived as a transgender woman, but says she always wanted more surgeries no matter how far it went.
‘I always questioned my gender identity, now that I had surgery I looked more feminine and in 2021 I began to think that maybe I am a woman.
“So I had more surgeries to feminize my face into that of a Korean woman, I thought why not, so many people want to look like Kim K, how is that such a big deal?
‘I felt good for a period of time. I got to a stage where I was just shooting between the two of us. I considered doing body surgery that would be irreversible and then I withdrew.
“It was self-destructive, people who have this surgery think it’s a solution and they deserve to go through the pain, but there’s another way.”
Since stepping away from the operating table, Oli says he has found greater clarity about himself and now understands the pattern of erratic behavior that has dominated his 20s.
He said, ‘When I announced that I was Korean, I was going through a mental health crisis at the time.
‘The reason I wanted to be Korean was that I was accepted there. The identity was trying to fit in, it was chasing validation.
I want people to learn from what I did.
“It’s perfectly normal for people to explore themselves and their identities, but when it comes to someone’s medical transition, people shouldn’t rush it.
‘Don’t expose yourself to pain for temporary solutions. There will be regret once you cut off body parts.
After finding his faith, Oli is now “happier than ever” and lives as a new man.
“I had a husband, but we got divorced,” she says, “I’ve always been bisexual, so I want to date a woman next, since I’m a man again.”
And despite being one of the most high-profile trans people in recent memory, Oli has a perhaps surprising answer to a question that has baffled both Sir Kier Starmer and SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon: What is a woman?
He said: ‘A woman is someone who is born a woman, you cannot change biology.
“When I had all that surgery, I felt like a woman and looked like a woman, but I wasn’t, I was trans.
“Know that if you want to live in the body of the opposite sex, you have to respect women.”
Oli says that now he has lost the transition and is the happiest he has ever felt.
Oli has written a memoir ‘Detransition’ about her journey through gender identification.
He is also particularly critical of the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, a law that lowered the minimum age for a person to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate from eighteen to sixteen, and removed the need for a Gender Recognition Certificate. medical diagnosis and evidence of having lived for two years in your acquired gender.
This, according to Oli, spells trouble.
He said: ‘The thing about self-identity is that a lot of young people like to explore who they are
“What they had in Scotland before the new bill was fine, now they have removed the security of spaces for women, as anyone can tell they are a woman.
“It’s harmful to let everyone bypass all the checks and balances that protect everyone.”
Detransition: A Memoir is available for pre-order now at Amazon.