Since the detrans tag is filled with other things, I wanted to create a central hub for people sharing their stories from outside my anon box on @detransanonymous
The point, from my role as a mod, is not to post things only that I endorse or things that I disagree with. It's just about boosting perspectives and stories from all sides, and maybe helping detrans/questioning people who are reaching out to find a supportive ear.
I don't reblog people who are talking *about* detransition, only detransitioners and desisters themselves, unless someone posts something like an article containing a detrans person sharing their thoughts.
Posts are queued.
Goal (same as detransanonymous)
As a highly debated topic with two polarized sides, it's hard for people to get a larger holistic view of the detrans/desister perspective. I want this place to be where we can share regardless of the paths we've chosen, and where nondetrans people can learn about us, rather than being secluded to their different political pockets.
Thoughts on living with authenticity and striving to truly know oneself. I am speaking only of my own experiences in the hopes that it will resonate with someon who needs to hear this; I am not speaking out against anyone else's personal decisions. We all do what we have to do to get by, and it's all love. If you want to talk, let's have a convo in the comments to be open and truly authentic to the world.
I'm very adjusted to being called "miss" at work these days, but I'm STILL not used to being called "she". Don't get me wrong, I like it; it just still surprises me.
It's funny, I have a coworker who will occasionally call me "he" and then immediately correct, even though she's never known me as anything other than a woman. Like, genuinely funny. It amuses me. I still have a level of genderqueerness in that I don't mind being called he or they and don't really see it as "wrong". A lot of my friends who knew me as trans still use those pronouns, and it's fine. I don't have any negative feelings about it. But to the general public, I'm a woman, and that still somehow catches me off guard.
I went thru a psychotic break and i think that was like the thing that pushed me over the edge and made me realize that I’m actually just a bisexual butch woman. I’m desisting but I’m not rly changing how I dress that much on a day to day basis, and l’m also keeping my body hair because women are allowed to be hairy as much a man is allowed to do so. I’m starting to wear more skirts (well skorts technically lol) and I’m trying to find dresses that suit me while also don’t make me feel exposed if that makes any sense. You can use any pronouns for me except they/them, i’ve never rly been a fan of them, I’m still going by Avery tho. Also I will always be supportive of trans people and trans healthcare, my gender label is the only thing that rly changed about me tbh. I also feel like I can’t call myself detrans because I never medically transitioned other than taking Depo Provera for like 3 years to stop my period but I’ve been off of it for like two years now. So yeah, just a life update since I barely use this account anymore lol. I’m open to talking to radfems as long as you’re like respectful but TERFs are still on my DNI for a reason cuz y’all are insane 😭 sorry for the long ramble y’all
Something I'm so thankful for is that body hair removal is literally never on my mind. I'm never having a busy week, never sick, never stressed, and also worrying about my body hair or having to carve out time to actually remove it. The early stages of letting your natural hair grow often has feelings of anxiety about how others are seeing you, but it eases (in my experience quite quickly when you realise how little it impacts your life), and you get to be a woman who doesn't think about or make time for body hair removal, who gets to focus her attention and efforts on literally anything else she wants.
It makes me think about the study showing women perform worse on math tests in a bikini than a sweater, and I think that the self-objectification theory outlined in the study can be applied to body hair too. I don't waste my cognitive efforts on my own objectification anywhere near as much as I'm encouraged to. And also makes me so sad that I was misled as a 12 year old to think this freedom from self objectification could only happen if I transitioned to live as a boy/man. I love being a hairy woman.
I would really love for people to listen to detransitioned women and not immediately assume we’re “TERFs” and just yell about that to shut us up. My personal experience has no agenda. It exists, whether anybody likes it or not, and whether I like it or not, for that matter. I’m a real person who went through a real thing that changed my life and my outlook on that life forever. No amount of strawmen or wishful thinking will change that. I have nothing but empathy for trans people, and tbh people in general. I’m not a confrontational person and I know that there is every chance I am wrong about a lot of things. I literally just want to go into the “detransition” tag and not feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.
Detransitioned women, I think, as a group, have been through enough. We’re not the enemy.
a question for any dysphoric/detransitioned women on here, if you are comfortable answering; when you were actively pursuing transition, or were at any point entertaining the thought of it, were your (serious or hypothetical) "transition goals" mostly embodied by:
- males OR
- "sufficiently" transitioned transmasc females;
OR were they less so defined by the body you wish you Had, and more so by the body you wish you Didn't have, with the "escape route" being left vaguer and ultimately less relevant? ty!!
I’ve decided to accept that I am a woman and am sticking to staying off of testosterone. Pronoun usage remains he/him among family and long time friends as is preferred. Neutral towards literally anyone else using whatever else, as I do not care. So I’m medically detransitioned, am not pursuing legal transition beyond a name change, and have stagnated any further social transition, containing it to just those that care for and love me.
Here are some things I wish people would stop doing as I break the news
1. Immediately celebrating
This just bothers me. I don’t feel particularly happy about it. I sometimes hate it. I’ve learned full transition is not what I wanted, that doesn’t mean detransition feels any better. It doesn’t. I’ve felt equally dissatisfied with both and I still have dysphoria. I’m grieving the loss of community and an identity I thought I had while still struggling with the same mental disorder.
2. “Girl” “Girly” Heavily gendered language, for the purpose of trying to make me feel any better??
Feels belittling. I just don’t like it. The immediate reaction some people have to include me as “one of the girls” again feels as alien as it always did. I never understood the immediate need to do this to detrans people, as it’s deeply inconsiderate of the dysphoria that is still probably there.
3. “You’re agender/nonbinary”
I’m a woman that’s medically detransitioned and still has dysphoria. A nonbinary identity does about fuck all as being completely detransitioned or completely transitioned
4. Liking me more, talking to me more, being more of a friend than previously
Like okay fuck you tbh. This one makes me want to go back completely. I’m the same person, and you only now appreciate me when it seems I’ve accepted my place in society and am the way you want me to be? Fuck that. Unless it’s another detrans person which is reasonable since we are few.
5. Not really getting that I’m simply medically detransitioned
There’s different ways of transition. Like taking on the label transgender or seeing yourself as such even if closeted. There’s social, having a transgender identity in your social life. There’s medical. I’ve stopped testosterone, see myself as a woman (in the purely logical sense, not “gender feeling” bullshit) but parts of my transmasc identity remain. I’m still transmasc as far as the word matters I guess? To copy off another person like me, gynandrous feels right as I reject the transgender label due to its misogynistic and predatory history.
May add more or update the more I experience things and find more things that peeve me
Did you used to be trans? just read a post with your tags and would love to hear more of your story if youd like to share.
Yes, I'm a detransitioned woman. I've had it rough since birth, triple whammyed with genetic trauma, CSA before I formed an identity, and daily DV in my childhood home. My story is a lot to go through, and I really fear people dog piling me because they are mad that what happened to me could happen to anyone, instead of being mad it happened to anyone at all. And who will believe me when all I have is my word? But, I guess buckle in?
long storytime ahead: I'm only talking about my experiences and feelings, not necessarily my beliefs.
For as long as I can remember, I hated the body I was growing into; it felt like the source of all my hurt, and becoming a woman felt like a death sentence to me. So I came out as NB at 11, which my parents deadass bullied me for. "What are we gonna call U in Spanish?!?!" when we don't even speak Spanish in the home like that.. so I caved. If I couldn't exist in between, I felt that I needed to escape in some other way. I thought that if I didn't feel like a girl and couldn't be anything, I had no choice but to be a boy to protect myself. These weren't conscious thoughts necessarily; I just remember how driven by pain and rage I was.
I begged my dad to start hormones at 15 with "informed consent," where my dad signed for himself and forged the signature of my mom, who was begging me to wait until I was 18. My dad went along with this to manipulate the family court and me into staying with him while my mom and baby sister were in the shelter, so that he wouldn't pay child support. I'm in a state where denying your child an unreliable treatment for gender dysphoria makes you an unfit parent, so it disqualified my mom from custody of me.
If you ignored all the trauma, dissociative symptoms, CSA, and domestic violence I endured, then sure, I was a great candidate for gender identity disorder, and the doctor told us that HRT is the only treatment for my condition. But even when I admitted that I couldn't see myself growing old as a man because I saw no future for myself at all in the one therapy session I had, they still gave me my first injection.
At 21, when I wanted to detransition, they told me "retransition" was a better word and that there was nothing they could do for me. No groups, no laser, they won't do anything. I had to insist and beg for them even to check my hormone levels, to which a different provider yelled, "WHAT HORMONES EVEN?!?!" and I just said, "the ones in my body!?!?" bc dude, what?
When it finally hit me that HRT failed to treat my gender dysphoria since I was still miserable and a suicide risk and suffering from severe body dysmorphia, I cold-turkeyed T and had to push through a lot of dark moments as I basically experienced chemically induced menopause until my own endocrine system healed. At my last appointment at the clinic, my main doctor touched me inappropriately enough to be considered non-violent sexual assault. I cried and cried for months because this man had known me since I was 15, and I was basically left to deal with everything alone. They put me on a steroid that we truly know little about how it affects female bodies and abandoned me to deal with the aftermath (and we don't even really study female bodies AS IS!).
After 3 years off of T, my body and face have become more woman-like, and it doesn't bother me as much as it did when I was a little girl until misogyny enters the room. My voice still gives me heartache; singing was my passion, and it is now too difficult most days. Some other irreversible changes get to me, too. Thankfully, I can truly say for the first time in my life, I feel safe and loved by the people around me and in my life who have supported me through this journey every step of the way. So I'd say I'm on the other side of it now for the most part, my quality of life has increased a lot.
I met a new acquaintance recently, and upon me saying hi for the first time she immediately asked what my pronouns were. I was wearing a skirt at the time, so I can only assume she asked that in response to hearing my voice. After an awkward pause, I responded “I’m a woman I just have a deep voice.”
She seemed quite taken aback and uncomfortable after that. And maybe I should feel bad about that, as I know that when people ask that question they THINK they are doing the polite, politically correct thing. But I don’t feel bad because, when you ask my pronouns (in front of an entire group of people no less, none of whom you asked that question to), you are creating an uncomfortable situation for ME. I want people to feel more uncomfortable asking that question, I want this to stop being a social norm in liberal spaces.
When you ask my pronouns, I can only assume one of two things:
a) You can’t tell what my sex is. Even with me dressed in a traditionally feminine manner, something about my appearance (unlikely at this point) or the sound of my voice (probably) is discordant enough that you cannot tell if I am male or female. Which, as a woman, is obviously kind of rude to hear!
b) You can tell that I am a woman, but I am in some manner gender-nonconforming enough that you are wondering if I am an afab trans person. Which also carries with it unfortunate connotations- am I not “good enough” at being a woman because I’m not performing femininity to a strict enough degree to fit into a tiny socially acceptable box?
So no matter what angle someone is coming at this from, it’s hard not to take offense. It obviously sucks as a detrans woman, but I’m not the only one affected by this. It also sucks to hear for any vaguely GNC woman, whether she has a history of transition or not. And honestly, even when I was living as an ftm I hated getting asked this question! Way to throw a spotlight on any poor androgynous person just trying to live their life, while you get to pat yourself on the back for being a performative good ally.
The intersection of transitioning and autism is something I wish more trans affirming medical professionals (especially those who work with children) would look at more critically. And tbh double fold for trans identifying girls. I don't think it's likely that autistic people are simply more comfortable being true to themselves, in fact social pressure to mask autistic traits can infamously make that much harder. But black and white and literal thinking around gender roles, difficulty with understanding social dynamics, difficulty identifying and processing one's own emotions, and difficulty with change absolutely influence how people see themselves in the world. I'd also love to see more consideration for the over-representation of PMDD in autistic girls and women, in *so* many ways, but also specifically in how it contributes to the idea of dysphoria around periods. Sometimes you have extremely distressing thoughts when getting your period because you have an understudied female specific mood disorder. I also think being given a community and an explanation for why you never felt right and fit in after a lifetime of social isolation is so incredibly enticing. Given how often autism is undiagnosed in girls, this is often the first explanation they've ever been given.
It’s been nearly 3 years since I detransitioned now, and I still go through periods where I get incredibly ashamed of the fact that I transitioned in the first place. Not because of the effects I still have from medical transition or because I was publicly gender nonconforming, but because it was all self-inflicted. I was an adult, and I still made that decision- such an obviously stupid fucking decision. I knew it was wrong, I knew I was being pressured into it, and I still made the appointment, signed off on the paperwork, and paid hundreds of fucking dollars for drugs that I knew I didn’t even want to take. If I had been a child and it had been an adult signing off on the medications then maybe I would have given myself some forgiveness. But that’s not what was happening. It was all me. I was the fool. I did it to myself.
I'm sick of acting as if my transition and then detransition was just a process of self discovery. I was 14 and trusted adults and medical professionals told me cross sex hormones would improve my life. I was being abused at home in a way any mental health professional should've been able to pick up on when my parents came to sessions, and admitted to a psych ward earlier that year, which didn't seem relevant in any of the four sessions I had with a psychologist at the gender clinic. The day of my first testosterone injection I told the paediatrician prescribing me that I'd had some thoughts about maybe being a girl but I didn't know what to make of it and she told me she'd be 'very surprised if I changed my mind' and went ahead with so called 'treatment'. All of my dysphoria was based in shame from my body being sexualised, and asd making it difficult to process change, but this was never talked about somehow. I was an abused kid massively let down by medical and mental health professionals. I should never have been prescribed cross sex hormones. It wasn't self discovery, it was disassociation and a mental health crisis in response to years of abuse, and took years to untangle myself from. Children should not medically transition full stop. The idea that they are able to self reflect enough to give informed consent is ridiculous.
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