Kim Petras Admits She Feels Some ‘Regret’ Opening Up About Her Gender Transition at Such a Young Age

Kim Petras is looking back on her early years in the spotlight.

The German singer-songwriter, who began gender-affirming surgery at a young age and has openly discussed the transgender experience, admitted that she may have been a bit too transparent as a child.

In a recent interview with The Fader, Petras gave more insight into the track “Brutalist” from her new album Detour and how it relates to her gender transition.

The track, she explained, is “the story of my dad and I driving around in Germany to get my hormone therapy when I was a kid.”

“He used to show me buildings along the way and teach me about architecture,” Petras said. “There was this particular brutalist post office that we were obsessed with. It was something we could bond over.”

“We came back to the city every few months or so to get psychological assessments of how [the treatment is] going,” she said. “[One day we noticed] they knocked [the post office] down and built an apartment building that was a classic modern apartment building. We were like, ‘Ugh, they ruined the city,’ you know?”

Petras, who became known as the youngest person in the world to undergo gender-confirmation surgery, explained how people have said that she “ruined my body” and “ruined my life” due to her choices.

“They don’t know me at all,” she said.

“I was 12 talking about it, which I kind of regret because privacy was really blurred, [but] I was really unashamed of talking about it because I was a kid and I was like, ‘This is the way it is,'” Petras explained. “Now that I’m in America, there’s so much shame around sex, sexual education is such a taboo, and it’s such a weird climate right now especially about trans kids in particular. They’re the enemy right now.”

“In this political climate I’m happy I can stand for [the idea that] trans kids can transition and then be a grown up and happy and make [those] choices,” she said. “I made the right choices that I’m proud of to this day.”

Petras said that undergoing gender-affirming surgery “saved my life.” However, she pointed out, “there’s people who are like, ‘This saved your life, but you ruined everything.'”

“I felt like my dad and I were guilty [of that with the apartment],” she told the magazine. “There’s people living in this modern apartment building now probably like, ‘We love it here,’ and we’re like, ‘Nah, it’s basic and y’all ruined it.’ I thought it was interesting to compare the two.”

Detour, Petras’ third studio album, will be released on Friday, May 29.