This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the provided comments, this account appears authentic. The user demonstrates deep personal reflection, nuanced understanding of detransition as a mental process, and shares a specific, believable personal history (e.g., identifying as a gay man, reasons for initial transition). The language is consistent, passionate, and lacks the repetition or simplicity typical of bots. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is inauthentic.
About me
I started identifying as trans in fifth grade because I felt alienated from other girls and found online ideas that made me think my differences meant I wasn't female. I began taking testosterone at sixteen, loving the control and physical changes, but after five years of living as a man, I realized I was still the same depressed person inside. I finally understood I was chasing an impossible ideal of being male instead of fixing my real self-esteem issues. My detransition was a mental process of stopping the performance and letting go of all gender labels. I've now accepted myself as the female I always was, and I see my journey as a necessary path to finally finding peace.
My detransition story
My whole journey with transition and detransition was really about me trying to run away from myself. I started identifying as trans around 5th grade. I felt really alienated from the other girls my age and I identified much more with boys. I found gender ideology online around that time and it made me think that because I didn't look or act like my peers, I must not be a girl. I resented my body when it started changing during puberty; I hated my breasts and wanted to be skinnier to make my features less feminine.
I think a lot of this was influenced by my own low self-esteem and depression. I liked the idea of being able to completely reinvent myself. Transitioning felt like I was finally healing and fixing myself, like I was becoming who I was supposed to be. In reality, I was just chasing a feeling. I loved the sense of control it gave me, and seeing the physical changes from taking testosterone was really cathartic. I identified as a gay man, and looking back, I think I was unconsciously trying to become the type of guy I wanted to date, maybe because I felt I wasn't 'enough of a girl' for someone like that to want me.
I also suspect I might be autistic, which I think really affected how I related to my identity and my sex. The idea of myself as a man felt comfortable and familiar.
But after years of living as a guy, I had to face the hard truth: I still felt exactly the same on the inside. I was still depressed and anxious. I realized I had been chasing something that was always going to slip away. What I really wanted was to be a biological male, and I finally accepted that was never going to be possible. That’s when I started to seriously consider stopping and living as a female again. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the preferable and actually bearable path forward.
Detransition for me wasn't about going in the opposite direction and forcing myself to be super feminine. It was a mental process, about stopping the performance. I was no longer performing as a man, but I wasn't going to perform femininity either. It was about acknowledging reality and finally stopping the lie I was telling myself. The biggest thing that helped me was letting go of the whole gender ideology framework. I stopped thinking of myself as 'trans' or 'cis' and just started thinking of myself as me.
I don't have any regrets about my transition because it led me to this understanding. It was a necessary part of my path to finally realizing that material things and physical changes can't fix an internal problem. If you hate yourself, you'll hate yourself no matter what you look like on the outside. The person I really was had been there the whole time; I just couldn't see her.
Age | Event |
---|---|
10 (5th Grade) | Started feeling alienated from other girls, found gender ideology online, began to believe I was not a girl. |
11-12 | Started puberty, began to resent my body and hated my developing breasts. |
16 | Started taking testosterone and began living socially as a gay man. |
21 | After 5 years of living as male, realized I still felt the same internally and stopped testosterone. Began the mental process of detransition. |
22 | Fully accepted my reality as a female and stopped identifying with any transition-related labels. |
Top Comments by /u/BeginningBlueberry80:
It took a long time cause I was in denial about it yk. I think I just realized that despite all of this time I had spent living as a guy I still didn’t feel any better, and I knew I could never get what I REALLY wanted, which was to be ‘cis’. And as much as I wanted to be a biological male i accepted that wasn’t possible, so I started to consider living as my biological sex again. The more I thought it over the more appealing/ bearable/ preferable it seemed
Transition will not ‘fix’ you and neither will detransition.
If you’re depressed or chasing after something it’ll always slip away and you’ll never be satisfied until you get that feeling inside of yourself. This does not mean changing yourself externally.
For me, detransition was a result of an internal change. I chased transition so desperately because of the desire I had to run away from myself, even though at the time I thought I was pursuing who I “really was”. I loved the sense of control transitioning gave me, seeing physical changes was really cathartic. Until I realized I still felt the same.
In reality the person I “really was” was already there even though I couldn’t see her.
I wish you all the best. Just know that material things and physical changes won’t fix an internal, non physical reality.
Why must you feminize yourself? Or do anything you’re not comfortable with, for that matter? You don’t need to dress a certain way, or stop taking anything, or do anything that you don’t want to.
The impression I get is that you’re basing a lot of this around other people, which is understandable but it won’t lead to a solution. If you’re focusing on how your family feels, or how other trans people live, or anything else outside of yourself, you won’t be satisfied. The change needs to come from the inside out.
You say that you must be convinced transitioning is wrong, and that detransition is the correct path to go on. I felt similarly in some ways at the beginning of my desisting, and I know other people do as well. It has a lot to do with black and white thinking. In reality we all live in a grey area.
For me, detransition was about no longer putting on a performance. I was no longer performing as a male, and trying to force people’s perception. HOWEVER, this did not mean that I suddenly started performing FEMININITY either. So often I see people, myself included, thinking that desistance or detransition is just another type of transition/ performance/ facade. But the only way you’ll experience a positive result imho is by recognizing that you are already whole in yourself and you don’t need to change anything to be a certain way.
If you hate yourself, you’ll hate yourself regardless of what you do if you’re trying to chase after something.
If people see you a certain way, they’ll see you that way regardless. So if other people’s perception is what you are influenced by, it will always result in cognitive dissonance.
The best advice I could give to MOST people on this subreddit is don’t think about your life as a process of “transitioning” or “detransitioning”/ putting yourself into a box or a pre-planned path with some ultimate goal at the end. You are not defined by whether you’re transitioning or detranstioning, by calling yourself “trans” or “cis”. You are the same person regardless of these paradigms/ labels.
The only thing that made me start progressing was forgetting about gender ideology. I’m not sure how open you are to this, as you say you don’t want to feel hatred towards gender nonconforming people. Of course hatred isn’t a prerequisite for divorcing the ideology. I know how hard it is to stop thinking about things in that specific lens. Consider it though.
I definitely see how that could be the case. I have primarily male friends and so luckily I haven't experienced much of that coming from other women. Never been a fan of female friend groups, partially for this reason haha.
Thank you for your perspective x
I’ve always thought that detransition/ desisting is much more of a mental process than a physical one.
It doesn’t mean going the opposite direction and forcing yourself into the stereotypes and situations that you were running away from.
It’s about acknowledging reality and not lying to yourself that really makes a change.
Being perceived can be the worst thing imaginable. I’ve dealt with (and am still experiencing) the same thing. It’s not made any easier by the fact that your family isn’t supportive of you, or that you might compare your experience to others’.
I hope that you can get to a place where other people’s perception of you (or simply your being around them) doesn’t affect you negatively. I don’t think you need me to say that your transition status won’t change this.
If you’re happy where you’re at, and detransition is just another “escape” from negative feelings, I would say reconsider how you’re thinking about it.
Family is important and it can be terrible when your own family doesn’t give you the feeling of love and acceptance that they should, but know that there are a lot of people who can and do love you without needing to change yourself. I hope things get a lot easier for you 🙏
That's a little more complicated, and it's a lot of things. I think I might have undiagnosed autism or something similar which affected my identity in regard to my sex. I think I experienced something akin to autoandrophilia (if you believe in such a thing), not to say that transitioning was a sexual thing for me, but the idea of myself as a man seemed very comfortable and familiar. I identified as a gay guy, and I definitely was trying to be the type of guy that I wanted to date (unconsciously, maybe because I felt like I wasn't 'enough of a girl' for that type of guy to want to be with me, so I tried to be him).
I also felt alienated from girls my age when I was introduced to gender ideology (around 5th grade), and thought that I must not be a girl because I identified strongly with boys, and realized I didn't look or act the same as my peers. I resented my body a lot, as it was around 5th grade. I wanted to be skinnier so my features would be less feminine.
I liked the idea of being able to reinvent myself, too. It felt like I was healing or fixing myself somehow, because I thought I was becoming myself. Truly I was myself the whole time haha.
At this point, if there was a button to make me into a biological male I wouldn't push it. However, if I was presented the same opportunity at any point during my transition, or even at the beginning of my detransition, I would have taken it. When I decided I didn't want to continue the transition process, that's all it was for a little while, but I still thought that on some metaphysical level I was a dude. The more I settled into the fact I wasn't happy with living as a guy, the more I realized I was changing the focusing on the wrong solution to the problem.