hello violet. may i ask why you detransitioned? the general consensus according to doctors is that transitioning is the best treatment for gender dysphoria. i'm really curious about your experience because i experience dysphoria as well, and i would like some guidance.
Hello anon! Yes, you may ask! Fair warning, Iām really gonna get into it, because I think itās important that I am honest and in-depth here.
In regards to the consensus of doctors, you said it right in your question: the "best treatment" for gender dysphoria, keyword best. When you actually take a look at the science, doctors really don't know how to treat gender dysphoria. Transition seems to work for some people, yes. The author of this article (I know he writes for The Federalist. that doesn't mean this article is irrelevant!) looked at the studies often cited for supporting transition as a cure for dysphoria, and found that most of the studies were flawed and don't exactly support the idea of transition being 'the best treatment'. Again, there is evidence that transition helped some people, but overall, the data is pretty inconclusive. Many of the studies were self-selected and had a small sample size. It seems that doctors just don't really know how else to treat dysphoria -- transition is the only known treatment at this point, so only by default is it theĀ ābestā.
This was something I discovered in the midst of my transition when I was having doubts. I honestly had doubts the entire time I was transitioning, but I ignored most of it, because I was told it was ānormalā and that my doubts were actually more evidence that I was āreally transā and was just āinternalized transphobiaā. I thought this was odd but I was really invested in transition and wanted it to work so badly that I just ignored it as best I could and forged ahead.
I wish I had listened to my doubts then. They only grew and continued to resurface from time to time. Sometimes the cognitive dissonance I felt was truly agonizing and I would be alternately panicky and depressed for days. Again, the online trans communities I was in said this was normal. I tried, again, to just deal with it. Though all the while my dysphoria was curiously getting worse and worse. But by all accounts I was trans. You canāt say that I wasnāt. My experience was exactly like every other trans man I had seen online and met in person. The same shit. I hadnāt just jumped into transition unthinkingly. I had been in therapy for several years and had discussed transition at length with my therapist. I had researched and researched and researched and watched videos and thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and it really seemed like transition was my only option for future happiness, based on everything I saw and read. Watching video diaries from trans men, it was like they had copy + pasted thoughts from my head into their videos. All the memes and things -- I related. More and more evidence that this was my best bet. I would have been nuts to not transition at that point (at least, thatās what I thought). So anyone who wants to claim that IĀ āwasnāt really transā, was āa confused cis personā, whatever, can frankly fucking shove it.Ā
So why was it, well, not working?Ā At the beginning, pre-T, I had dysphoria over just a few things, like my voice, my curves, and occasionally my breasts, but not all the time. I had come to see testosterone as The Holy Grail that would save me from my self-loathing. When I got on it, the first few months were alright, then my dysphoria took a steep upturn; that is, it got much worse. Things that hadnāt bothered me before were bothering me a lot now. As the months went on, I went from feeling fairly neutral to the idea of top surgery, to leaning toward it, to feeling like I absolutely needed it immediately. It made me extremely depressed to even look at my breasts, to notice them in my peripheral vision. That was new. Then I started having thoughts about bottom surgery, which I had never had before. Dysphoria about my genitals was brand new and it disturbed me. I was concerned that my dysphoria was growing, and my hatred toward my body was becoming stronger and stronger. The more my body masculinized, I was simultaneously elated and disgusted. It was very confusing and unsettling. I loved that I looked more male and that I was starting to pass, but I became ever more disgusted with my femaleness, and the things I perceived as āfemale partsā of my body.
I wondered, then, if the dysphoria would ever end. I thought of the accounts of other trans men that I saw and had followed along; I remembered how a lot of them started with a little bit of dysphoria that grew and grew the further along they got in transition. A lot of them had felt hesitant about top surgery, then ended up getting it. A lot of them said they never wanted bottom surgery, then ended up getting it. It started to look more and more to me like a slippery slope, like celebrities who get a nose job and then cheek implants and then chin fillers and then you get Kim Kardashian and Farrah Abrahams and the like. People who keep altering and keep altering their bodies hoping that the next procedure will cure them and give them everlasting confidence and happiness and make them love themselves, but it doesnāt. It never does. Because the problem isnāt external, it isnāt your body. Thatās what I eventually realized.
I didnāt like that I was hating myself more than ever and craving surgeries and becoming obsessed with picking out āflawsā in the mirror. I felt insane. I felt like I did at the peak of my disordered eating episodes, except far, far worse. I knew that what I was doing was not healthy. Yet, everywhere I looked online, trans people were, well, doing the exact same stuff I was doing and calling it ~normal and healthy trans behavior~! It really started to freak me out. I decided to get off of all of the trans communities I was a part of. I deleted my twitter and instagram and reddit accounts and also stopped talking to my friends who were trans (thatās a bit of an extreme approach but I was really in a bad way. We werenāt very close anyway because I was so fucking depressed I had pulled away from everyone in my life. I donāt recommend anyone just cut off their friends willy-nilly).
Within just a month of being left to my own thoughts, journaling incessantly and engaging in deep self-reflection, I started to recognize that transition really wasnāt helping me and was, in fact, making things far worse for me. I realized that a lot of the things I heard in the trans community didnāt make very much sense but I hadnāt questioned it because -- well, youāre not really allowed to question things in the trans community. I realized most of them were self-loathing and encouraging self-loathing in other community members. I realized how the focus on validation was inane and vapid. I realized that āAFABā people ā females ā really had no place in the trans community and were constantly shut down and told not to share their experiences because it was upsetting to trans women. I realized if I continued with medical transition, I would be a medical patient for the rest of my life. That frightened me. I hadnāt truly thought about that before. What would happen to my vagina if I stayed on testosterone? Was I putting myself at risk for cancers or liver disease? Would I need a hysterectomy? What if I wanted to have children? What if I wanted to breastfeed? Transition was complicating those things and it just didnāt quite seem worth it anymore. I wanted to just let my body be.
The biggest reason, probably, was that I realized transitioning would be committing to hiding a huge part of my life, basically forever. That I would either have to constantly come out to people as trans and have to worry about who was safe and who wasnāt, or Iād have to go stealth, and pretend to be āone of the guysā, when I really couldnāt relate to men because I didnāt grow up as a boy. I wasnāt raised male, I wasnāt born male, and I couldnāt go back in time and change that. Men bond with each other over having shared childhood experiences, and I didnāt have those. I missed camaraderie with women so much. I missed that knowing smile that two women walking down the street make at each other. I missed the safety of womenās bathrooms. I realized I would always have the shared childhood experiences of women and that would never go away. And Iād either have to lie for the rest of my life and pretend that never happened, or Iād have to live in fear of my past being revealed if someone clocked me. And it all just suddenly seemed so stupid.
Why was I doing this to myself? Why was I making myself an outsider like that? Why was I making myself a life-long medical patient when my dysphoria wasnāt even going away? I missed being a woman. I finally admitted it to myself and I cried and cried and cried. I realized that I had never really wanted to be a man, anyway ā I just didnāt want to be a woman. I just was fed up with the difficulties of being a woman in our society and I hated being objectified and I hated being sexually harassed all the time and I hated feeling unsafe in my body. I hated being a lesbian, hated that people would make gross assumptions about me, thinking of a porn category before thinking of me as a human being. And I realized I had been taking all that anger and hurt and pain and basically directing it at myself. I had been harming myself because I was angry at the way society treated me for being a woman. And that made me cry even more. I cried for like, days straight. Iām not even exaggerating. I had so much pain in me.
I realized my transition had been, ultimately, a really elaborate form of self-harm. I was blaming myself for the hatred directed at my body by a woman-hating society. But my body had never done anything wrong. I had never done anything wrong. I was suddenly overcome by a fierce overprotectiveness of my body. I immediately wanted to detransition. I wanted to protect my body and myself, and I didnāt want to hurt myself anymore. I didnāt want to continue hating myself and rejecting myself. There was never, ever anything wrong with me, and I was fucking pissed at all the people who convinced me that there was.
And so here I am. I realized that gender is a lie and that being a woman doesnāt really mean anything other than a label that society has given to me by virtue of my female sex. People may not like it when Iām loud and opinionated and hairy and not wearing makeup and not being subservient and obedient but thatās their fucking problem! I could do those things when I was on testosterone and people didnāt care because they perceived me as male, but I hadnāt actually changed at all. The only thing that changed was that it was suddenly OK for me to be myself because people thought I was male. But I was actually free to be myself the entire time, even if some people donāt like it, and Iām free to be myself now, even if people know I am female. Fuck the people who think that masculine women must secretly be men. I realized thatās actually crazy homophobic. Fuck the people who think that lesbians are gross and would rather me āturn myself into a heterosexual manā so that they can feel more comfortable. Who cares!! Itās my life. People might think masculine women and lesbians are disgusting, and those people are heinous and wrong. Woman is just a word to describe me and other female people who are adults; thatās all, it means nothing more than that. And that was the most freeing and wonderful realization. That āwomanā carries a lot of cultural baggage, but I donāt need to pick it up and carry it with me. I can be a woman and be myself and if people misunderstand me or dislike me for it, thatās their fucking problem, not mine.
And THAT is why I decided to detransition. :)
