Fashion model learning to be a man after being pushed to transition

In Catholic churches across Manhattan and Brooklyn, Salomé captivated the congregation, uplifting the faithful with her soulful singing and skilled organ playing. The New York Archdiocese Organist Training Program enrollee’s musical gifts had her booking gigs across the city.

But for years, Salomé’s bashful smile and angelic voice concealed a secret — one not even known in the shadows of the confessional. She was a he; Salomé was born Miles.

His story is one that’s becoming all too familiar: A child with unconventional interests, swayed by strange ideologies on the Internet, is hustled by doctors into a life of medical dependency — only to find himself questioning everything years later.  

“They very quickly put me on hormones without really any discernment. Looking back, if I were a doctor, I would think this is a much larger decision than the kid thinks that it is,” he tells The Post.

Miles Yardley, as his female persona Salomé, arrived in the Big Apple in 2022 from his native Pennsylvania. He (then she) quickly became the toast of New York’s downtown fashion scene.

Yardley signed a modeling contract, was featured in a Marc Jacobs perfume ad shot by famed photographer Juergen Teller, exhibited for Enfants Riches Déprimés, and strutted Fashion Week runways for designers Batsheva and Elena Velez — all while singing in parishes and mentoring Catholic schoolchildren in music.

Soon Yardley was a regular bohemian socialite, a fixture on podcasts, even flown to Romania to meet the Tate brothers, with virtually everyone unaware of Salomé’s secret.

But a deepening Catholic faith and a medical scare led Yardley to question how he’d been living his life. Just as quickly as he’d burst onto the scene, early this year Yardley gave it all up and ditched Manhattan’s trendy underbelly for a fresh start in sunny California.

“I had to move to LA to detransition because I was like, I don’t want to have this conversation with people. I don’t want to tell the people hiring me or the parents of the students that I teach that I’m actually a man. I just couldn’t deal with that,” Yardley, now 27, tells The Post from his new home in Los Angeles.

At 15, Yardley found himself a patient in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s gender clinic. He’d been late to start puberty and had interests in singing and dancing. Classmates began to ask if he was gay or a girl. He’d never heard of transgenderism. “I had not questioned my own identity before other people started asking me questions and putting that on me,” he says.

After only his second appointment, a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia doctor put Yardley on androgen blockers and later estrogen therapy, calling him “the perfect example” of a transgender child.  

“I thought that there would be less social friction for me if I looked like a female because so many people were assuming me to be that way. And I was not super comfortable with people assuming I was gay,” Yardley says.

For many years, everything seemed fine. He graduated from high school, taught music at a West Philadelphia Catholic school, and enrolled in Temple University to study music.

In fact, he felt that being transgender gave him an edge. As a singer, his voice remained a soprano.

He then met an in-crowder from New York who persuaded him to move to the city and pursue modeling — “but only if you lose 20 pounds.”  

“I think I benefited from the [trans] identity in terms of being a model, being a socialite, a party attendee in New York City, and it was a cool, cosmopolitan, artistic thing to be doing with your body,” Yardley says.

“I had entered a different world, where everyone thought I was really cool.”

In April 2024, Yardley was diagnosed with pituitary adenoma — a type of brain tumor — and has hypothyroidism. Both conditions have suspected links to hormone therapy.

At the same time, Yardley was becoming closer to people at his church, which he found a welcome reprieve from the cattiness of couture life.

“I realized that I’m hurting myself. I’m poisoning myself. I’m sterilizing myself.  The normal things that bring meaning to normal people’s lives I’m shut off from because I can’t have children in this state. I can’t do the normal things that bring normal people meaning,” Yardley says of the moment he began to question the experts and trans ideology.

“When you’re 15, you think, ‘Well, I’m a weird person. I don’t need to worry about that.’ The long-term consequences were unimaginable to me.”

Since quitting estrogen in January, he’s come to recognize other negative side effects.

“I was really crazy on the hormones,” he said. “I was mentally unstable and cognitively impaired. And generally fatigued, tired, not strong at all in ways that I’m only now coming to really understand.”

Yet the path has been a solitary one. The medical establishment abandoned Yardley on this new journey to live authentically. While doctors were all too eager to put him on life-changing medications, there’s no protocol for what to do if a patient stops treatment. When that happens, doctors seem to simply lose interest.

“I’ve asked multiple doctors for advice, and they don’t know what to do,” Yardley says on stopping hormone treatment, a process that “makes you feel [physically] awful. It’s been difficult.”

“They just say, ‘You should ask someone else.’ At a certain point, how many other people can I ask before I just figure it out on my own?”

Even before President Trump’s second term — in which the backlash against childhood gender transitioning has been swift and damning — the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Australian state of Queensland had moved to ban or restrict puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors.x

In a landmark June ruling, the US Supreme Court upheld a state ban on so-called gender-affirming care for minors. This month, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into more than 20 doctors and gender clinics for minors. The nation’s largest youth-gender clinic, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, closed up shop Tuesday, citing the Trump administration.

The White House also just announced it will cut federal funding for hospitals that provide minors with gender-transition procedures.

Yardley has joined the fight, although he’s never thought much of himself as an activist. He’s suing the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for medical malpractice.

Yardley’s hair is now cut short and dyed a brassy blond. He says both old friends and strangers are sometimes confused about how to address him — a problem he never had when he lived as Salomé.

“I’ve tried to enter the men’s restroom a few times, where someone was like, ‘Hey! The women’s room’s over there!’ ” he says. “It was super awkward. Nobody ever redirected me as a woman.”

He doesn’t know yet if his medicalized youth has rendered him permanently sterile. But it’s not all gloom.

At his new home, Yardley has started a band, Pariah the Doll (he’s calling the debut album “Castrato”), and launched a clothing line, Eunuch for the Kingdom. He’d like to meet a nice Catholic girl and settle down — but he’s also preparing for a life of celibacy, should it come to that.

“Having spent 10 years in the female role, I don’t really know how to be a man. That’s a scary jump for me,” Yardley tells The Post.

Still, he holds no ill-will toward those who set him off on this course — and that includes his own mother.

“I wouldn’t even say that she was supportive of it. It was just, like most parents, she trusted doctors because if you are a boomer, like she is, you have no reason to distrust doctors. Their legitimacy is pretty firm in your mind as someone of that generation. So I don’t blame her.”

As for those doctors, Yardley is surprisingly merciful. “I don’t believe, as a Christian, that people are setting out to do evil for evil’s sake. I don’t think anyone has that in their heart,” he said.

“But I think it has a lot to do with an overreach of professionals and a lot to do with money. Hospitals make a lot of money from these procedures. They benefit from having lifelong patients, which is what transgender people are. You need the hormones to maintain the identity.”

If he could go back, would he change any of it? “There’s no way to live your life without making mistakes or going down the wrong path,” Yardley says.

“My life would be totally different if I made different decisions at 15 years old, so I can’t really conceive of a different path. I don’t live in a regret state. In many ways, I’m extraordinary lucky.”

He does, however, wish that doctors would learn to be more open-minded.  

“If you’re a gender-nonconforming kid, you should be allowed to be yourself.  I think that was the biggest problem. I didn’t feel like I could be confident in who I was. And if that person happens to like singing and dancing and cooking and Barbie dolls, who really cares? You can be a boy who likes that,” Yardley says.

“At the time, nobody in my life told me that was possible.”