If you woke up tomorrow and you were a natal woman, what would you do? Not "be a girlfriend," because there's no guarantee of that; I'm 34 and a natal woman, and I've never had a boyfriend. It happens. (In fact it happens frequently. I know a lot of women who are mid-thirties and involuntarily single.) What would you do? What would your job be? What would your hobbies be? What kind of exercise or games do you like? Would you learn a new language? Would you practice any religion?

Could you maybe give yourself permission to stop worrying about gender and romantic relationships for say, six months, and get off the Internet, and focus on something else instead? Gender's still going to be there when you get back to it (worse luck), but if there's nothing else in your life you're always going to be miserable. I would be miserable if all I thought about was how I was a 34-year-old woman who'd never had a boyfriend. There's more to life.

Disclaimer: I'm not trans, so can't speak from personal experience. Having said that, after a fair bit of reading my impression is that nobody really knows how dangerous it is, because there isn't that much research into long-term cross-sex hormone administration. Anecdotal stories, yes… but as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data. A common complaint among detrans and some trans people is that they feel like they're being used as an experiment, because doctors can't really answer their medical questions. The data is just really patchy; and I would guess that's why you got two doctors telling you two completely different things.

… But they were also slaves. I mean, if you're doing brutal manual labor all day every day, and can be beaten and raped at will, the question of "who do I really feel like, inside," or "who am I attracted to," frankly doesn't even arise. None of that would matter, because you had no choices to make. You didn't get to decide how to present yourself, or who to marry, or anything.

Anyway, slaves didn't have each other. Families could be broken up at any time by the sale of individual members. It's one of the cruelest features of chattel slavery, and distinguishes it from European serfdom. (Though not Russian serfdom, I've recently learned; you could be sold there too.) I'm sorry, but you seem to be implying that it's more depressing to be LGBT in the modern West than to be a slave, because "at least slaves had each other," which is… extraordinarily dismissive of the historical experience.

Agree that it's necessary. Also… is "gatekeeping" just another name for differential diagnosis? Because it kind of seems to be. Like, you go to the doctor, you tell her your symptoms. It's her job to figure out what's going on. Even when the symptoms are predominantly mental, and thus rely on self-reporting, we still expect psychiatrists to sort out whether e.g. you have MDD or bipolar. They don't just accept the patient's self-diagnosis and fork over the lithium. Why should this be the one exception?

Agreed. Even without major body image issues, seeing myself in a full-length mirror made me very self-conscious as a teenage girl. Not so much with my clothes on, but definitely if I was nude. Seeing myself naked in a mirror made me feel guilty, I think. I almost felt like I was looking at porn, or that it was somehow indecent for me to see my own body? I have OCD with (inter alia) repugnant sexual obsessions, so that was probably part of it; but the obsessive thinking element, at least, might not be too far off-topic. (On the other hand, maybe this experience is more common than I assumed and it's just part of female objectification? Or maybe I'm just insane.)

But DEFINITELY talk to her first. And you don't need to present it as, maybe this is encouraging you to think you're trans; it might be better to frame it more as, whatever the cause of your dysphoria, maybe this is making it worse?

Yes and no? I was on a benzodiazepine drug for about 10 years for anxiety, and then some studies came out showing the entire class of drug increases your risk of dementia; so that was an unexpected long-term effect (and you better bet I got off the benzo).

OTOH, I don't feel like I was pressured into it in the same way. I mean, no one told me, it's benzos or suicide. The drug was presented in a kind of… idk, a dispassionate cost-benefit-analysis way. It just turns out they didn't know all the costs. Whereas from some of the stories I've read, once you're in a transition context both some (maybe most?) doctors and some patients act like the normal rules of medicine don't even apply; they just assume that transition is the only possible outcome, so there's no need to do differential diagnosis, or get second opinions, or weigh side-effects, or consider multiple treatment options, or any of the things you'd do in basically any other medical context. So yes, failures are common across the board, but this field seems particularly bad. There's this dangerous combination of very little medical knowledge + enormous political certainty.

From what you say about your ex's social circle, it seems likely she sincerely believed a lot of the standard trans narrative. Unfortunately, at least some versions of that narrative say that questioning means you're already trans, that nobody transitions for the wrong reasons, and that detransition is a hateful myth. Idk if your ex was in that camp, but if she was, it could be that her ideology prevented her from seeing you clearly, however much she loved you.

I'm sorry. It's a really hard thing to deal with when you know that someone loved you but you also feel like they badly failed you. I had untreated, undiagnosed OCD and panic attacks between the ages of (at least) 9 and 23. In most ways my parents are great, and they accepted the diagnosis when I got it, and said how sorry they were that they didn't figure it out sooner, and encouraged me to take my meds when I was nervous about them, so it's nowhere near as bad as your situation… but even so, I still kind of feel like, if they really loved me how could they not see something was wrong? For fourteen years. I think about being 12 or 13 and panicking and feeling like I couldn't breathe—just drowning in this hideous, primal, animal fear—and trying to tell my mom and being told, just think about something else, or, not now because we have guests. It still hurts. But like… at the same time I know they really did love me.

And I wish I could say I've come to some sort of resolution, or figured out how to feel, but really the only conclusion I've reached is that love doesn't always bring knowledge, and we never know people as well as we think we do. Our own experiences and beliefs filter everything we see; the inside of someone else's head is unknowable. In my case, my parents have never experienced obsessive intrusive thoughts, so when I tried to explain what was going on they probably imagined something like regular anxiety. And in your case, I suspect your ex was already prepared to believe you were trans, based on the other people she knew and her own gender beliefs. And once she saw you as trans she interpreted every sign of your distress as confirmation of how badly you needed transition, and your doubts as internalized transphobia. I expect she did love you; but you can love someone and still give them terrible advice, if you have a false understanding of their situation. Again, I'm so sorry you're going through this. (Even if you have gone through worse.)

And then there's the whole issue of her cutting you off, and not really even explaining why. The one thing I wondered when I read that was, it sounds like you broke up with her and detransitioned around the same time. Are you sure her silence is because of the break-up, and not because you detransitioned? It's just, if she helped persuade you to transition, I'm wondering if now maybe she can't handle the idea that it was a mistake; like, is there any chance she feels guilty? Or that she just doesn't know what to think of detransition, or what to say to you anymore?

"I felt like I was never going to get out of this mental prison, in which I was the rope and the two arguments… were just pulling at my arms in either direction".

Okay, this is kind of a different take than other people have had, so feel free to dismiss it or whatever, but that quote above really struck me. I've had OCD since at least the age of 9 (I'm now 34), with sexual and religious obsessions and predominantly mental compulsions. ("Pure O" isn't actually devoid of compulsions, it's just that the compulsions are mental/invisible: checking, rumination, replaying thoughts and conversations, etc. Like an itch in your mind.) What you're describing here really, really sounds like OCD; and the fact that it "feels real" doesn't mean a thing, unfortunately. OCD always feels real. At times it feels like the only thing that's real.

Idk. It is definitely possible that I'm just stuck on the OCD angle because that's my own experience. But if you do have OCD, then even resolving your gender doubts might not end the problem; the OCD could just switch targets to some other awful thing. So you might want to try to find a therapist who specializes in OCD, at least to see if they could confirm or refute a diagnosis—probably avoid therapists that specialize in gender stuff, because they're apt to tell you it's all true, and if it is OCD that'll make things ten times worse. The good news is, if you haven't had previous episodes of compulsive rumination, and it's just starting now as a young adult, there's a decent chance this is a short-term thing for you. Permanent cases more often start in childhood.

Like I said, maybe this is just me, and feel free to take or dismiss this for whatever it's worth. Either way, good luck.

People have said a lot of good things here. The only thing I want to add is that if it's been about a year since you decided to detransition, some of your increased distress might be some kind of anniversary effect? (If you do find a therapist who deals with trauma/grief, they'd obviously be better positioned to evaluate that; but when I saw the timeline, that was the first thing I thought of.) That doesn't make it any less ghastly, but it might make it more temporary. Good luck and hang in there.

Second a (subtle) policy of avoidance. Does the coworker know that you're detransitioned? I was just thinking, if so, that might be enough for him to sort of avoid you, without any need for you to take further action? Detransitioners probably make transitioners at least as uncomfortable as vice versa. Unless he's a confrontational person, I guess, in which case his knowing might make things worse. = /