Yup, I know exactly what you mean. A decade ago my relatives would mutter nasty things about trans women and crossdressers they saw, and now they're all like "trans women are women, they have fEmAlE bRaInS, pronouns are just being polite, trans athletes have absolutely no advantage in sports," et cetera and so on.

It's like they just flipped straight from one type of brainwashed to another, without a single independent thought in between. I was talking to one of my brothers and he said, "well I don't know much about chromosones, but are you really saying that trans women aren't women??"

And that's not a typo. He thinks chromosomes are called chromosones. Yet he's appalled at my "ignorance" about trans issues.

Some context on me: I couldn't find a flair that's quite accurate, since I've been on HRT (MtF) for about 2.5 years already, but I've had major doubts the whole time, both about my own transition and about the movement as a whole, and I don't necessarily recognize "gender identity" as a valid concept.

Honestly in an extremely tough spot right now, I don't feel like I can quit HRT, but I also don't exactly feel like I can continue, especially with all the long term risks. To be perfectly frank I sort of regret being born at the moment. I realize that sounds overly dramatic, but it's the truth. Looking for any kind of information or advice anyone has.

Well, I kept all my pre-transition clothes and stuff, and HRT hasn't even had a huge effect on me, so I can still quite easily pass for a regular cishet guy. This means that discrimination was never an overwhelming problem for me because I've always been able to socially detransition whenever I want to. My main goal from the beginning was just being comfortable in my own body, not necessarily being perceived or treated a certain way by others.

I'm considering medically detransitioning also though, for, well, medical reasons. I get scared thinking about how HRT could end up damaging my health and probably shortening my natural lifespan, maybe by only a few years, but maybe by decades. I'm also not sure if it's good in the long term for my mental/emotional health to tie my happiness and self worth so much to my physical appearance.

I wonder sometimes why body image disorders like anorexia are cured by trying to get patients to accept their healthy and natural, if perhaps imperfect, bodies, but then gender dysphoria is cured by encouraging our discomfort with how we naturally look, trying to keep us dependent for life on medical treatments which, strictly speaking, make us less physically healthy. Like, imagine if the standard treatment for anorexia was referring you to a specialist in prescribing as many weight loss pills as you wanted, or if depression caused by not feeling muscular enough was cured by steroid prescriptions. Or if hypochondria and germaphobic OCD were treated by lifelong antibiotics.

I mean, I know the currently accepted consensus is that gender dysphoria is completely different from all other psychological issues and needs to be cured in a totally unique way, but what if that turns out not to be true? In the past I tried therapy to fix these problems without HRT, and it wasn't entirely effective, hence the HRT, but I do lie awake at night sometimes wondering if I should have tried harder.

Some good points, but shouldn't you be a little more open to the possibility?

I don't think for ONE damn second that hormone treatments consistently lower cognitive function. I think this is a crackpot theory supported by confirmation bias. I think if trans people are struggling with cognition, it is most likely due to depression or other reasonable causes. There is no PHARMACOLOGICAL reason for hormones to affect the BRAIN in this way, and to ONLY affect transgender people.

It seems plausible to me that just about any drug or any food could have some effect on cognitive function. Even the air we breathe, depending on things like pollution, co2 levels, even altitude, can have an effect. It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that injecting myself with artificial hormones multiple times a week could have an effect also. I'm still gonna do my injection tonight, but just, in the long term, I think this deserves a little more consideration and hopefully higher quality studies in the future. One second of consideration, at the very least.

Isn't there plenty of evidence of hormone levels affecting the brains of cis people too?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5209560/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2021.712237/full

https://eje.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/eje/155/6/1550773.xml

https://universityhealthnews.com/daily/memory/low-testosterone-can-raise-risk-of-dementia-symptoms-and-alzheimers/

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I'd very much like to believe that you're right, cause I don't actually want to stop HRT. It's just that if it's gonna end up reducing my intelligence or giving me Alzheimer's or something, you know, that's not ideal. I feel like it already has caused me a minor amount of cognitive impairment, though that could obviously be placebo.

I've found that the only way to get anywhere close to curing a fetish is to slowly replace it with another fetish. Sort of like when you have a song stuck in your head and it helps to listen to a different song. Actively trying to get rid of it usually just makes it worse.

Again, I really hope you're right. I'd rather stay on HRT, but I'd hate it if I'm on it for 20 years and then finally a high quality study comes out proving conclusively that anyone on HRT for 20 years gets brain damage, or something like that. I generally don't worry about it obsessively, but seeing this screenshot has definitely unsettled me.

Sorry, I realize this is technically the exact opposite of what you asked, but one of the main reasons I'm scared to detransition is that I'm only like 5’4, so it's really hard for me to live up to the standards of how a man is supposed to look, but I'm not sure if staying on HRT is worth it because who knows what it will do to my health in the long run. So I can definitely understand your problem.

For what it's worth, I never thought there was anything wrong with tall women. I think taller people usually look better than shorter ones, regardless of gender.

As embarrassing as it is to admit I do have this obsession with being seen as "one of the good ones", so I bend over backwards to prove to "cishet" people that I'm not easily offended and I don't care about pronouns or whatever the fuck, and yet I've found that no matter how much I try to appeal to their sensibilities they obviously still perceive me as just as much of a freak as they perceive someone with ze/xir pronouns and a neon green mullet.

Haha I know exactly what you mean. There are plenty of valid objections to trans ideology and culture, but sometimes the people voicing these objections are just rationalizing their bias against gender nonconforming people. I used to get messages from terfs and stuff trying to trigger me about politics or biology or something and I'd have to be like, sorry, I realize you want to have an argument and I'd like to cooperate, but I don't even disagree with what you said. The reasonable ones would chill out, but a few would just keep trying to start arguments with me by saying even more stuff that I agreed with. It got tiresome.

I always see people online talking about how the LGB needs to drop the T because the T has ruined the LGB's reputation in their eyes, but what's even the point in doing all that when people treat me, a somewhat masculine woman, the same way as they treated me when I was a full-blown trans man?

Totally get this too. People say that only the T is a problem and it would be fine if I were just a feminine man, but you know what happens when I wear a pink men's shirt? People get mad and call me the same slurs they've always called feminine men.

All we can really do is make our own choices about how to dress, what to believe, and all that based on what we really think is right, not what we think will appease anyone else.

Yeah I know exactly what you mean. I was always a lot smaller and weaker than average, and it makes it extremely hard to see myself as a man who's attractive or worthy of respect, so I'm really scared to quit HRT, but I'm also scared of what kind of health consequences I might face if I stay on HRT too long. I feel like I'm being forced to choose between a happy but fundamentally fake and unhealthy life, or a longer, healthier, but unbearably miserable life.

I don't know. I wish I had a solution for you. All I can say is I understand.