I'm a 22 year old desisted and dysphoric white womyn from Canada. I am primarily male attracted and diagnosed with mild autism + ADHD. I consider myself AAP/AHE/AGAMP.
I socially transitioned and identified as non binary transmasc from 11-19, fully renouncing my trans identity by the time I was 20.
It's been nearly two years since, and after bouncing around various spaces in other areas of the internet in a state of repression, I'm still figuring out who I am and where to go.
This blog is intended to be a diary of my personal thoughts on gender, as well as a way to connect with others, especially those with the same questions as me. Making friends as a detranser is very difficult, and my DMs are always open.
Pro trans, TIRFs, TERFs, transmeds, feminists of all shades (and transfeminists), etc are all fine to interact.
Info on some of my interests and views below the cut!
My views are heavily under construction, not super cohesive yet.
I think I'm generally a centristy difference feminist with liberal values. I'm not a radfem, despite agreeing with a lot of radfem takes on gender identity-- I'd consider myself gender critical.
I'm also a neoBlanchardist, and categorize myself as AAP/AGAMP. I'm "too TERFy for the TRAs, too TRA for the TERFs."
I'm fairly pro sexual freedom despite risks, including kink and BDSM. I'm critical/mixed towards commercialized sex and think the industry causes immense harm, but have not figured out what I think solutions should be.
I believe above all else that the political is personal.
My interests include: sexology, psychology, sociology, feminism, true crime and survival (tasteful and sparing), evopsych, medieval history, Lana Del Rey, Nicole Dollanganger, fictional men crying and kissing and hitting each other, MLP, Breaking Bad, AHS, various other movies and shows and artists (ask me!!!), perfume, online subculture documentation, tarot, fanfiction/OC creation/general creative writing, art making, and OCD rumination. I'm also trying to get back into reading.
I do sorta wonder if women are likely to identify with so many labels and categories they perceive as "more marginalized" because the marginalization they experience as women already isn't taken seriously even in progressive spaces
THE THING ABOUT NONBINARISM is that you do not actually feel like a person at all and the world seeks to make what it wants out of you at every turn and you have so very few chances not to comply; and so to cope you invent a new world within your own mind, and in it you can be anything you want. and you can spend all this time with yourself as an undeniable, definitive subject and a tangible, definable being, when everything outside of you tells you you are anything but that. and no none of that makes you special but it does make you DESPERATE. sollipsism is the maladaptive crutch of someone whose personhood cannot survive a collision with anything seemingly more objective than herself. idc if you think it's cringe when women try and cope. goodnight
i will admit that maybe therapy wont help everyone with dysphoria, or in general. however, i did learn somethign from my one-in-a-million therapist that i wanted to share, and its one of the biggest reasons i advocate a lot for recognizing the mind and body as a single unit (or a part of the same whole, but different parts of it. the point is to see them as together)
i really think people spend most of their time these days like,,, looking in the mirror proverbially.
my therapist told me the story of narcissus, which i knew, but he asked me to read this one psychologists take on it. this paper by this psychologist took on a different perspective of the mtyh and told us how it was about how your reflection cant love you back. but these days people spend so much time looking in their reflection-- observing themselves in one way or another-- hoping to find a point when they can 'love themselves'. it doenst happen like that. it cant happen like that. that person reflected back you in the water isnt you nor is it another person. it is an image of a person, and it cannot love you in return even if you decide to love it
what ive found when we spend so much time in that state of observation, is we view our bodies and mind as completely separate entities. and from my experience its that separation and growing disconnect that becomes the breeding ground for dysphoria. the more you can close that gap, and see your mind and body as tandem entities, the less you will feel that. unfortunately, the nature of dysphoria makes that one of the most difficult things to do. it makes facing the reality of our bodies painful. but the only way out is through.
I think shifting my understanding of dysphoria from something I "have" to a set of feelings that I experience has been really fundamental and important for managing that dysphoria. This for me has meant that I no longer see myself as a person suffering from a condition, but I experience flare ups in dysphoria the same way I experience any other negative emotion, which is that I sit in it and it is uncomfortable and maybe it causes me some pain but that's fine, and I note the feeling and ask myself what brought that feeling on and then I move on and do my best not to focus unduly on it. I think many dysphoric women especially have traded the constant self watching that is so central to how women are forced to do femininity, for the constant self watching that dysphoria can encourage, and in both cases it is not healthy to be constantly concerned with and trying to actively alter how you are perceived.
The experience I have reading a lot of radfem stuff on sex and kink is "idk man I think it depends" "idk man I think it depends" "idk man I think it depends" over and over LOL
I guess @ other detransitioners; How do you get over the need to prove you were "real"? Do people listen when you tell them the political sides of detransition, the disillusionment?
I feel like saying "I identified as ftm for 15 years, on T for 10, and got top surgery" just doesn't feel like enough cred. My mind didn't change, I don't 'identify' as a woman, my dysphoria is still here.. Just, learned to deal with it.
I did not go nearly as far in my transition as you did! It's both unbelievable and unsurprising that you extensively transitioned and yet people still want to discredit you.
Talking with pro trans people is also difficult for me. Most have an idea of transness as an internal thing, like being gay, so they're able to shrug off any detransitioner/desister pretty easily. We either are still trans and in denial, or we never were.
However, I've found I can talk to more people if I frame it as my own experiences rather than a framework that could apply to gender in general. If I say it's about *my* journey with dysphoria, and how I'm still dysphoric, rather than saying I was trans and then I wasn't, they're more open. This involves setting aside the views that came from these experiences, but it does make forming a connection more possible, and then from there you can build on what you've said. Many pro trans people are pretty terrified to burst the trans bubble so to speak and will kneejerk react to anything they see as a threat to it (which detransers are).
If you're only talking about your own experiences with dysphoria, you can also get into more of a convo about what dysphoria even is and how the trans community conceptualizes it.
As for getting over the need to prove I was "real", I sort of... abandoned it. I realized most gendies have zero coherent idea of what being trans is, and that's like, the point.
Like if I'm talking to a transmed or something and they say I wasn't trans, I can go "sure, that makes sense", because according to their fairly consistent framework, I wasn't. I was dysphoric but non binary and ambivalent about medical transition. They have standards for transness that I didn't meet. To them, I genuinely was never trans.
Meanwhile, gendies are more frustrating because they don't have a framework to begin with, and they aren't willing to reckon with the implications of detransition of any type. If they're claiming I was never trans, and I say I'm still dysphoric, they're likely going to say I'm actually still trans and in denial and ignore everything else I've said. Or maybe they'd say dysphoria doesn't make me trans then, and ignore everything else I've said. Or maybe they'll use my non binary identity, varying levels of dysphoria, and not medically transitioning to discredit me, despite this being against their stated views on transness. "Everyone is valid" to them until somebody isn't.
For me it doesn't really matter anymore if someone thinks I was "really" trans. Pro trans people and I have entirely different conceptions of what transness is anyway, and their conception is pretty.... self servingly inconsistent lol. If they're not ready for the bubble to give a little, then we're simply not going to get anywhere.
Lrb something I've really struggled with during my desistance is establishing myself and my own beliefs instead of relying on others for validation. I think post detrans it's very common to have zero sense of self and look for another box, usually either radfem or hard conservative, and I'd like to see more detrans/desistance activism focused on providing active support for detrans/desisted people outside of political categories and what box they fit into
The most convincing lie any of us has ever been told is that there is a truer version of ourselves being held captive or sabotaged by an uncooporative body. That lie has caused so many of us to waste entire lifetimes punishing ourselves for what we are. To me, self love has required that I end the delusion. I am my body, my body is me, nothing more, nothing less. So I begin to love myself, instead of resenting myself. I am exactly as I exist in this moment.
perhaps if some of you saw feminism as part of shared female culture you'd have an easier time seeing that all kinds of women can express complicated ideas wrt their oppression. feminist theory can expand on those ideas in an academic and political way, but everyday women are at the heart. abstraction to an endless degree leads to false categories, false dichotomies, false myths, false objectivism. every woman is an everyday woman, and every woman has a capable mind.
