This story is from the comments by /u/A_D_Tennally that are listed below, summarised with AI.
User Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the comments provided, the account appears authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or an inauthentic detransitioner/desister.
The user demonstrates:
- Personal, consistent narrative: They share a detailed and consistent personal history of being a desister (considered transition but did not), gender dysphoria since childhood, and an Asperger's/autism diagnosis.
- Complex, nuanced views: Their comments show deep, nuanced engagement with complex topics like autogynephilia, social pressures, and the intersection of autism and gender identity. This complexity is difficult to fake.
- Emotional resonance: The tone is passionate and often frustrated, which aligns with the stated reality of many detransitioners and desisters who feel harmed. The advice given is practical and personal, not scripted.
The account exhibits the hallmarks of a real person sharing their lived experience.
About me
I'm a masculine woman who felt from a very young age that I should have been born a boy, and I considered transitioning for years. I ultimately decided against hormones and surgery because of the health risks and the reality that I couldn't change my biological sex. Getting an autism diagnosis helped me understand why I never fit into female stereotypes and feel stronger in my identity. I now manage my dysphoria by dressing in men's clothes and focusing on my hobbies and friendships. I still sometimes wish I was male, but I've found peace by embracing my life as a gender-nonconforming woman.
My detransition story
My journey with gender started when I was very young, around six or seven years old. I was a classic tomboy. I loved superheroes and toy fire trucks, and I absolutely refused to wear dresses or the color pink. I felt different from other girls and wished, deeply, that I had been born a boy. When puberty hit, it was awful. I hated the changes happening to my body, especially the development of my breasts. I remember sobbing and begging my mother to let me have them removed, but she firmly said no surgeon would amputate healthy tissue. I knew she was right, but it didn't stop the pain.
For a long time, I seriously considered medical transition. I identified as a trans man for years. But I never ended up taking hormones or having surgery. The main reason I didn't was that I realized the potential health risks, like a much higher chance of heart attack or stroke, weren't worth it for me. I also came to understand that I couldn't actually change my sex. I was born female, and that is a biological reality.
A huge part of my experience is that I'm autistic. Getting that diagnosis later in life helped me make sense of so much. It explained why I’ve always felt like an outsider and why social expectations, especially around gender, never made sense to me. It’s very common for autistic women to be gender non-conforming. That knowledge helped me feel stronger in my identity. It wasn't that I was meant to be a man; it was that I was a woman who didn't fit the stereotypical mold, and that was okay.
I also struggled with internalized messages about what it means to be a woman. I saw the female role as being about weakness, vulnerability, and being objectified. I hated that. I think part of my desire to be male was an "identification with the aggressor"—a subconscious desire to be strong and safe in a world that often isn't safe for women. I have a naturally disagreeable, independent personality, and the idea of being forced into a feminine box felt suffocating.
I managed my dysphoria in non-medical ways. I only wear clothes from the men's department. I keep my hair short. I don't remove any of my body hair. I never wear makeup, perfume, or jewelry. Presenting this way makes me feel like myself and eases my discomfort. Sometimes, because of how I dress, I pass as male, and that feels okay. I also focus intensely on my special interests, like learning about marine chemistry or Old English, which gives me a sense of purpose beyond my body.
I’m predominantly straight, but my presentation makes dating very difficult. Most men aren't attracted to a woman who looks like me. I’ve accepted that I will probably never have a partner, and I’ve found fulfillment in other things: my hobbies, traveling, and cultivating close friendships. Reading about celibate gay Christians, like Eve Tushnet, helped me feel less alone in navigating a life outside of a traditional couple relationship.
I don't regret not transitioning. For me, finding a way to live as a gender-nonconforming woman was the right path. It allowed me to stay true to myself without risking my health. I do still live with dysphoria. I’ll always wish I had been born male. But I’ve learned to hold that pain while also focusing on all the other good things in my life. I don't use the terms "trans" or "cis" anymore. I think of myself as a biologically female person with sex dysphoria, and there are many ways to live with that.
Looking back, the pressure I felt wasn't to transition, but to conform. Well-meaning friends in school and even my only boyfriend tried to get me to be more feminine, insisting it would give me confidence. Trying to wear dresses and be girly only made me deeply depressed. It was when I finally embraced being a masculine woman that I found any peace.
Age | Event |
---|---|
6-7 | Started refusing to wear dresses/pink. Wished I was a boy. |
12 (Puberty) | Felt intense distress and dysphoria over female puberty. |
Teen Years | Identified as a trans male and seriously considered medical transition. |
20s | Tried to present more femininely at others' urging; became deeply depressed. |
Adult (exact age n/a) | Stopped identifying as trans. Committed to living as a GNC woman. |
Adult (exact age n/a) | Received an autism diagnosis, which helped reframe my experiences. |
Top Reddit Comments by /u/A_D_Tennally:
I simply stopped thinking in terms of cis and trans. I realised that everyone has a sex, and quite a lot of us are unhappy about our sex for various reasons and to various degrees, and there is a wide range of ways of dealing with sex dysphoria, and dealing with it by presenting masculine but stopping short of hormones and surgery was the best way for me to choose, the way that maximised my chances of preserving my physical and mental health. By a lot of definitions I still am trans, but I don't use that term any longer because I think there are other terms that describe reality better.
Frankly I no longer expect members of the general public with no personal experience to have any sophistication about this. I mean I'm pleasantly surprised if it does happen, but...I'm a female person who lives part of my life passing as male; I have a breadth of gendered experience that most people don't. For a lot of people, especially in the US, agreement with gender ideology simply means that they are trying to be nice and accepting and socially liberal, and I take it that way.
Does the idea of autogynephilia ring any bells with you? You are giving what sounds like a fairly classic autogynephilic case history.
If indeed this is part of your sexual orientation, can you think of a way you can fulfil it that might perhaps be more limited or compartmentalised, but still satisfactory to you? Would periodic cross-dressing be enough, for instance?
We had two boys in our school year who were still small, high-voiced and baby-faced even at 15, while the other lads towered over them. They were both destined to be fairly short adults, but otherwise they were just on the late end of normal going through puberty. By the time we graduated they'd grown a bit and their voices had changed, etc. They both dealt with the situation gracefully, but I can't imagine it was easy.
In the film Skate Kitchen, the main character recalls that when she was 11 and started puberty she'd stand in front of the mirror punching her chest to try to make her breast buds disappear. She's now 18 and a heterosexual, somewhat GNC young woman happy to be so. In Su Friedrich's Hide and Seek, a wonderful documentary-drama about growing up lesbian, we see the main character's discomfort and embarrassment about getting her first period at 12 and a half. We know puberty is hard. We know! Some people just need to be reminded.
I quite seriously think that cissing all over everybody and insisting on state-your-pronouns ends up tipping a lot of people over into identifying as nonbinary. They don't feel trans as such, but they certainly don't feel comfortable identifying as cis because that'd mean they're happy to be seen as some pornified female stereotype or some toxically masculine male stereotype, so they must be enby, right?
I don't think dysphoria is necessarily a mental illness. I mean, it is in the sense that it is about emotional distress, but there are sometimes good reasons for people to want to swap sexes. And it's very common for little kids in particular to want to. Most grow out of it, manage to make an accommodation that more or less suits them as they grow up, but some of us don't, and that doesn't mean we should be pathologised and othered. I think our distress calls attention to some real problems: misogyny, sissyphobia, the various varieties of LGB- and acephobias, and even just the cruelties of nature that inflict early puberty on little children and distribute physical prowess and the burden of reproduction so unevenly between the sexes.
The 'perverts' and predators are definitely real and definitely a problem, and while some managed to get past the old gatekeeping process, the new no-gatekeeping stance has indeed rather opened the floodgates. But I don't think absolutely everyone who fits an AGP or crossdresser profile is a walking menace. I've come across a couple who struck me as thoughtful, gentle people and sincere in their emotional and political affiliation with women even though that affiliation had ultimately sexual roots. Also, just in case you were thinking women are purer and don't transition for sexual reasons, some do: read Lou Sullivan's diaries. The pushiness about it is largely a male-entitlement phenomenon, though, I agree.
> I'm still feminine presenting and passing and i haven’t stopped hormones, but is that presentation not offensive too?
Not to me, a feminist woman. I think a lot of people who would call themselves gender-critical feminists care above all about women's spaces, and you are conscientiously staying out of those. Thank you for that. It's really decent of you. IMHO that's you doing your bit to defer to the needs of the many, and you can rest easy otherwise.
Womanface is not really a term I use, but if I did I would use it to refer to misogynistic mockery, not a male person presenting feminine because they're happier that way. I present masculine and it's not manface, even in a punching-up way: it's just me. I guess I wish that you didn't have to take hormones to feel more comfortable in yourself, and that you didn't have to pass, but we live in an imperfect world. If you don't want to detransition, you don't have to, and you are not doing something bad by staying on the hormones. And I cannot see how you are a burden on society in the slightest.
What I did was sort of reconceptualise it. I basically rejected the notions of trans and cis as incoherent and now I think of myself as a biologically female person who is dysphoric about my sex, as many people have been before me and many after me. Sex dysphoria is a common form of human distress and there are many ways of managing it. Some people can only really manage it with hormones and/or surgery. Others find ways to manage it that stop short of that, and my view is that the non-medical avenues should as far as practicable be exhausted before the medical avenues are turned to.
Are there things you want to do that you feel you can't do as a man? Have long hair? Wear pink? Be gentle and sensitive and nurturing? Love the arts? Make, I don't know, daisy chains? (Just some random ideas, not trying to put you in a stereotype box.) There are ways of doing all of those things as a man. They aren't easy necessarily, they're probably in some ways more difficult than being gender-nonconforming as a woman, but they are possible.
To some extent, we see things through the lens of our own experiences. I have Asperger's, and a lot of trans-activist types (a lot of trans-identified people, full stop, as you observe) are either outright Asperger's or not diagnosably Asperger's but definitely at the obsessive and socially awkward end of the normal range of personality and behaviour, and I think this really influences the tenor of much of trans activism: rigid; one-track; lacking in both an intuitive and an experience-based realistic understanding of human relationships; fond of social scripts that Must Not be deviated from; and hung up on the exact literal meanings of certain words. Not all trans activism is like this but there's a definite broad streak of it running through the movement, and it makes me cringe: it's like seeing the worst of myself writ large.
While I wouldn't go quite that far, I do think it's an unpleasant bit of philosophical manoeuvring when people answer "but I'm a woman and I don't feel like one, being a woman doesn't feel like anything separable from my embodiment, inside I just feel like myself" with "well, but that just proves you REALLY DO feel like a woman, because if you were trans you would feel really uncomfortable being a woman, it's like how you don't normally think about your ankles but if they were broken you would because of the pain".
Also frequently what people mean by "I feel like a woman" is "I am an otherwise unremarkably gender-conforming male but find myself saddled with a sexual and romantic yearning to perform femininity" but most people don't want to think about that.
You may find this article helpful: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/whats-so-bad-about-a-boy-who-wants-to-wear-a-dress.html
Sarah Hoffman (pseudonym) is the parent of a 'pink boy' who kept a long-running blog about her family's experiences. Here is an early post from which you can navigate to the rest of the blog: http://www.sarahandianhoffman.com/2009/09/you-must-be-a-girl/
Has anything been going on at school? Has he been teased or bullied for liking feminine things, so that maybe he figures life would be easier if he were a girl?