It perturbs me when I see people write that detransitioners “were just confused cis women”. At best, it’s a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of our experiences. But often than not, it’s an attempt to neutralize and silence women who are getting too loud or causing trouble.
At no point during my transition or detransition was I “confused”. I was many things, but confusion wasn’t part of the equation. If I had to only one word, it would probably be something like, “deliberate”, “driven”, or “ambitious”.
The insistence that detransitioners are helpless or confused is a two-pronged attack, both a shutdown and a theft. If a detransitioned woman is painted as confused, it implies that she is unable to make a sound choice, and/or can be easily manipulated by an outside force as a result of her confusion. It removes her agency from her story, and casts her in a secondary, inactive role in her own experiences. It renders her story open to reinterpretation by ideologically motivated parties of all kinds (be it conservatives, ROGD moms, doctors/surgeons/psychiatrists, trans activists, people across all parts of the political and moral compass). It’s an old trick; it has been used against women for ages.
Every step of the way, I was doing my best to make careful decisions that were in my best interest. I had a boatload of problems, and when presented with my options, I used what I knew at the time to address those problems as best I could.
I made lifechanging decisions at a young age, with limited information, incomplete knowledge, like all people do. Many of those decisions are not ones that I’d repeat or recommend to anyone else. Many of those decisions led to outcomes that I am not satisfied with, even if other people are satisfied with similar results. I’m especially dissatisfied by the parts of these experiences where I enlisted the aid of outside experts, who ended up causing me more harm than help – real harm, real physical and mental and financial harm. I’m especially dissatisfied by the broader social context I made these decisions in – I’m dissatisfied by things that were outside of my control, and sometimes beyond of my awareness. None of this means that I was “confused” or unable to think critically.
Both then and now, I’ve wanted the very best for myself and those on similar paths. I yelled back then, and I yell now, because we deserve better!
We aren’t confused. We have demands. We want freedom, agency, safety, respect. We want quality medical care. We want improved, honest information made available to people. We want people to listen and actually incorporate our experiences into their workflows, learn from the things that have harmed us, so that they don’t keep happening. We want apologies from those who have caused us harm. We want peer support, actual allies, not just people looking to indoctrinate and use us. We want to be taken seriously. We want these things and more. We want so many things. We wanted these things then, and we still want them now. We haven’t stoped wanting, and therein lies the problem. Nobody likes an unsatisfied woman.
Enduring a trip to hell and back doesn’t make a woman confused, it makes her resilient and pissed off.
Ive spent the past few months reading some radfem and detrans related stuff, just curious and trying to educate myself. Then quite recently Ive basically started to feel like "oh shit maybe i actually should detransition" and its freaking me out. Im not sure if im just going crazy being in quarantine and making rash decisions, or if all the time as home gave me time for introspection to come to this conclusion. i feel so lost lol
tbh, this is how i found myself on a path to full detransition, not just stopping hormones. i just wanted some perspective—what i found was a full paradigm shift.
you didn’t ask for advice, so take or leave this: you don’t have to figure it all out right now. give yourself permission, space, and—importantly—time to see how you’re feeling, to understand what you believe about gender and sex and all of this messy shit. and if you get a handle on how you feel about that, then see what you want to do. you don’t even have to DO it yet, just see what you want. and if you continue wanting it, take small steps toward that thing, then pause and ask yourself how it feels. do you feel more authentic? do you feel less confused? are you afraid, and if so, what of? are these fears realistic? are they worth confronting anyway?
the time in quarantine has absolutely given you time for introspection, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reach a conclusion just yet. there are actually no rules to how your life must go. that’s entirely up to you. all i can suggest is, spend the time asking the questions that come up for you, and try to answer them. try to figure out what YOU believe and why you believe it; am i living a life that satisfies me? am i living in a way that excites me? don’t worry about anyone else, what they might think of you, how they might react to your questioning or any conclusions you draw—the only person for whom those questions and answers matter is you. ultimately, you’re the person who is guaranteed to be with you your whole life—so that’s the person whose opinion matters most.
Either I genuinely have good ideas in the shower or the lack of ventilation deprives my brain of oxygen to the point where anything seems profound, but I feel like I’ve finally figured out the root of my dysphoria.
The gap between the way I want to look, act, talk, and be perceived and the way society expects those things of me is huge. Large enough for me to never feel comfortable in my “assigned role”. But at the same time, uncomfortably small. Too small for the expectations to ever be fully out of reach. My deviation from the norm is often seen as unacceptable, but never unfixable. I am still female, I am still a woman, and even if I need to learn absolutely everything about how to woman right, people refuse to give up on trying to teach me. And until two years ago when I came out as a trans man, I largely refused to give up on trying to teach myself.
I was always confident that my dysphoria was the real, innate, unfixable-without-transition kind, because I genuinely wanted to be male. The idea of getting to be masculine as a woman offered me absolutely no relief from the unbearable discomfort I felt existing inside my own skin. The idea of getting to be male did. Men don’t suffer from this pressure, masculine women do. And while I won’t claim the pressure ever fully disappeared while identifying as a trans man (feeling it very strongly over the past few months is the only reason I’ve managed to come to this realisation), at the very least I was chasing the promise of relief. And the distress when I didn’t fully get it - when I still had to face my body and realise that it looked like something that could fill the role I was and am so deeply uncomfortable with.
I feel almost stupid for coming to this realisation after being told over and over and over again that trans men are just trying to escape gender roles. But the difference for me is that the way it was talked about from either side never made the dysphoria that could come from this seem real. I’ve attempted suicide over my dysphoria, over the distress at the idea of never being able to become male. I’ve taken a knife to my chest before. I’ve never seen myself smile as wide as I did the first time I saw myself in a binder. I cried from happiness when I got my first packer because my body finally felt right. Everyone around me has told me how big of a change they’ve seen in me since I came out, how much happier I seem. With how dismissive people sound when they bring up transitioning as the result of gender roles, I never could’ve imagined it to be the root of my dysphoria. Mine was real, and severe, and had been with me for as long as I could remember. Any suggestion that seemed to invalidate that was not only offensive, but painful.
This realisation doesn’t fix my dysphoria and there is very little I as an individual can do to fix the underlying causes, neither for myself nor anyone else. But I wanted to share and maybe get some people to reconsider how they view dysphoria, whether their own or other people’s. I honestly think the way it’s currently talked about is harmful to a lot of people.
The absolute worst part of being detransitioned is having absolutely no idea what to say to anyone to save them from what I went through.
Being a teenager and not caring about long-term detriments, thinking others' experiences don't apply to me, being nebulously lost and angry, seems to be universal.
I have thought on it for years now and I cannot imagine what anyone could have said or done to stop me. I don't know that it's like this for everyone, but I think I had to live this experience to know that it doesn't work. To know WHY it doesn't work. I just wish I could translate my journey into some profound scrap of advice for even one person.