My journey with transition and detransition is complicated, and my feelings about it are mixed. I was born female and from a young age, I felt a deep and profound discomfort with my body, especially when I went through puberty. I hated developing breasts; it felt completely wrong and foreign to me. This wasn't a fleeting feeling but a severe and prolonged distress that started after puberty and only got worse as I got older.

My mental health was terrible. I struggled with severe depression and anxiety, and I had very low self-esteem. I was suicidal and felt that I couldn't continue living in the body I had. At the time, I believed I was a trans man. I saw my condition as a medical issue, a kind of wrong development in my brain that made it incompatible with my female body. I believed that for people like me, with this severe and life-threatening dysphoria, medical transition was the only option because therapy and medication hadn't helped me. I felt I had no other choice if I wanted to survive.

I took testosterone and I got top surgery. I do believe that, for me at that time, it was a necessary step. The improvement in my mental health was significant enough that I felt the serious health risks and permanent changes were worth it. It saved my life when I was in a very dark place.

However, my perspective on the broader conversation around being trans has changed a lot. I still believe that for a small number of people with severe gender dysphoria, like I had, medical transition can be a last resort that helps. But I am deeply suspicious of how it is handled today. I think the current ideology has gone too far. I've seen people being pushed into identifying as trans, and I find it sickening. It feels like they are mocking a serious medical condition and, in the process, ruining the lives of healthy individuals who are just confused or going through something else.

I think there is going to be an absurd amount of people who detransition in the coming years because the criteria for getting treatment has become too loose. Transition should be a last resource, only for those with severe, prolonged dysphoria that persists past puberty and whose life is at risk. It's a serious decision with permanent consequences.

I don't regret my transition in the sense that I believe it was the only thing that kept me alive at that specific point in my life. But I do have regrets about the permanent changes to my body, and I live with the health complications from taking hormones and having surgery. I am now infertile, which is a difficult reality. My views on gender are medical. I don't think my body was wrong; I think my brain had a developmental issue. But since we can't fix the brain, changing the body was the only solution available to me at the time.

I've benefited from being part of communities like this one, which have helped me understand the complexities of my own experience and see how the conversation around gender has become degraded. It's shown me how we've gone backwards in many ways.

Here is a timeline of my journey: