Conservative detrans people get a voice because conservative media is willing to give them one... when I try to speak to other left leaning people about detransition, I get shut down HARD. When non-conservative outlets try to talk about detrans issues, they get caught in a hate storm, admonished by groups like the ACLU, and end up apologizing... and the people involved find themselves in the middle of it. So yeah, of course the only detransitioners with a voice lean right... if they want people they agree with politically to share our experiences, they need to actually LET us.

I hate this idea that it's totally okay for trans and left wing people to hate us, and that we're also bad people if we end up hanging out with people who are willing to show us respect and empathy. Are we just supposed to live miserable, lonely lives in the name of "not hurting trans people's feelings"? Nah, I might not agree with gender critical folks on a lot of things, but they'll talk to me like a human being in a way that even my closest "friends" from pre-detransition won't — so I'm gonna talk to them instead.

Also, even if conservatives are commenting hateful things under the video... why is the detrans creator getting blamed for that?! Is a trans content creator also responsible for transphobic comments on their videos? No, of course they don't believe that. We can't win.

I agree with your general sentiment and I am not anti-transition, but I also think you should understand that you are in a very different situation than someone who did take hormones or have surgery. I will suffer for the rest of my life because I was able to walk into a doctor's office and walk out with a prescription for T the same day, without anybody bothering to check if I was mentally okay first.

If asking for some precautions to be taken in the medical process is transphobic, then yeah, a lot of detransitioners are transphobic, I guess. But honestly, most of the blatant transphobia I see comes from desisted people, not people who medically transitioned.

I certainly don't think this is the full story, but my pet theory is that FtMtF women — at least ones who medically transitioned — are more likely to seek out community and advice because T affects so much. Not to say that estrogen is not a serious hormone, or that trans women don't go through a second puberty too (or that the social/psychological impact of detransition is not very real for MtFtM folks), but the masculinizing effects of testosterone are significantly more visible to others. A lot of women here have trouble passing as their birth sex; I have never seen a man here complaining that everyone sees him as a cis woman. Again, not at ALL trying to minimize the struggles of being MtFtM, just that, hormonally, it is more difficult to undo an FtM transition. Surgery is a whole other thing that this doesn't really carry over to, but I think HRT is much more common than surgery.

Like, from what I've seen here, for every "holy shit, how can I live as a man with breasts?!" post, there's a dozen "How the hell am going to pass as a woman with a deep voice and beard, my life is over" ones. T is so much harder to undo (same reason trans women often struggle). So I think it's partially because detransitioned women are simply more likely to come here needing advice, or to open about it.

Also, this is speculation again, but I think many girls struggle hard with puberty and getting an adult body because it starts so young for us. Average age to start your period is 12 — potentially still in elementary school! I was 11, and it fucked me up to be a child still and realize that I could get pregnant, that I would have decades of dealing with this super painful and inconvenient thing, and to be told "here's a thing to collect the blood — if you leave it in more than 8 hours you might die" while still having adults control my access to the washroom most of the day. It also sucks to be so young and be sexualized because you have hips and breasts. So a lot of us feel very dysphoric, but then grow up to realize that we aren't actually men, it's just that our first taste of womanhood was overwhelming and traumatic. I think that's why you see so many girls who are only dysphoric after puberty, too.

If you disclosed to me that you were a trans woman I wouldn't be shocked, but it wouldn't be my assumption. So I guess to me you seem androgynous but female leaning, which is how many of us start out. If detransition is what you want and you stop T, I think you'll easily reach a point where people don't think twice about your sex.

That you can never completely escape the 'trans' in your gender, even if you're stealth. As much as people like to insist there aren't, there are real, tangible differences to living as a cis person vs. as a trans person, and some people (*cough* me) transition and find that difference to be worse than just living as a cis person. Some people feel the opposite. Maybe living as a trans woman is preferable to living as a cis man for you, maybe it's not — only you can know that. I just didn't understand this when I transitioned, and I felt betrayed when I realized I was gonna have to deal with it acutely for my whole life.

Also, on a personal level, I wish I'd known I was autistic. I didn't get diagnosed until I was an adult and had already transitioned, and it turned out that acknowledging how my autism affected/affects me made a lot of my gender dysphoria into human dysphoria. I really did have dysphoria, but in the light of autism a good bit of it was actually about trauma, physical discomfort, and general 'I-don't-know-how-to-connect'-ness. I wish I could have seen my place in the world through that lens instead of gender.

Hey — good on you for being willing to engage with these difficult thoughts, and for questioning what you're told! Questioning everything/everyone/yourself is an excellent habit.

Time to think sounds like the ideal option, to me. If you're interested in the autism angle, maybe you could ask your doctors if they can set up an assessment for you in the meantime. You could explain that you really want to understand yourself and your motivations as much as possible before you make permanent decisions. That shows real maturity, and I hope they'd see it that way too and help you out with it.

Only other advice I have is to not make this decision based on fear that this is now-or-never. It's not. You can always come back to it in the future.

I wish you all the best OP, in whatever decisions you make 💜

Unfortunately this seems to be a fairly common experience. Some people are so stuck in their personal feelings about the subject that they are unable to care about the well being of dysphoric people as a whole.

I also think that some people who spend a lot of time in trans online spaces start to truly feel like everything is life-or-death all the time — the more extreme of those communities will have you believing that everyone is transphobic and that you are constantly surrounded by people who literally, genuinely want trans people dead. They really think that detransitioners are a threat to their lives, because if some people regret transitioning there will be restrictions placed on hormones, and if someone has to wait 6 months for hormones they'll kill themselves.

I recognize this is unsolicited, but as someone who has been through this I want to share that I think there are two (realistic) options in this kind of situation, if you want to remain civil with this person and keep them in your life: 1) you both agree to disagree and don't talk to each other about gender/trans issues at all, or 2) you acknowledge that your friend will not empathize with you and that this upsets you, and you distance the friendship for your own well being. I don't think getting him to see reason will work, sadly — at least not right now. He isn't ready to truly consider your perspective.

I'm sorry you aren't being heard by the people in your life. You deserve to share your story <3

You'd think we'd want to shake hands and try to come to a compromise that allows us to explore the idea of why people are trans, while setting out precautions and means to try and minimize the damage of wrongful transitions but these types especially made it clear they don't want any of that.

This is what made the whole thing fall apart for me tbh. I realized they don't want precautions because they know it topples the whole "everyone who so much as considers that they might be trans 100% definitely is" thing. I was shocked at how aggressively people screamed transphobe at me for suggesting a system that is less restrictive than what most places currently have (informed consent with a therapy requirement).

I just think it's selfish. They don't care about us, just themselves.

Me too <3 It sucks to have such a strong physical reaction to talking about it, but it makes sense — we've been hurt, and it's incredibly, incredibly hurtful to have people deny that, or be outright uninterested in preventing that trauma from happening to others. It totally is infuriating.

Personally, I've decided it's not worth it for me to debate random trans advocates. There is no amount of rational argument or evidence that will change their minds (and many legitimate neutral sources will just be labelled as transphobic anyway). I've pivoted to focusing my activism on the general public, who are more likely to see reason and less likely to spike my blood pressure, lol.

I agree with you and have absolutely nothing against individual trans people, am all for trans acceptance/rights, but I have to admit that I have been really soured on the larger "trans community" from the way I've been treated since detransitioning. Even when I was actively trying to be a good, involved ally, I was treated with so much disdain and anger. You say you don't assume anything bad about people just because they're trans (and neither do I), but my experience is that they DO assume bad things about me, and treat me accordingly.

I am very, very much not into the hateful generalizations, and a lot of what is said on this subreddit makes me uncomfortable (like, I seriously disagree with the post you're talking about), but I feel like it's worth acknowledging that it actually is unfair and shitty for trans people to treat us that way. I think the lack of acknowledgement of our experiences, and that we often ARE cut off from the support of our own communities (and that those communities probably told us it was fine to experiment even if it turned out we weren't trans, only to hate us for not being trans) can actually lead people to become angry at trans people. It did for me, for a long time. I just got so tired of being told to accept and be 'fine' with trans people being nasty to me unprovoked. I got tired of trans people insisting that my own experiences didn't happen. I got tired of being told that my very existence hurts trans people. It may not be wrong on the level of a doctor, but it is wrong, and if I treated trans people that way I'd rightfully get called transphobic.

We don't have to deny that trans people often treat detransitioners poorly — and that it's wrong of them — to agree that trans people don't deserve to be treated poorly by detransitioners, in my opinion.