Top surgery was the worst thing I've ever been through, and continues to be. My chest doesn't feel like a male chest, or like it used to as a child before I grew breasts. It feels numb and empty, and my skin around the scars feels very tight. It feels incredibly unnatural and distressing on a daily basis even over a year after getting the surgery, and I wish so much that I had had these kinds of doubts leading up to surgery that could've led me to reconsider.

Do not go under the knife if you are not 100% sure you want this. Reschedule if you don't want to cancel. Do not go in with any inkling of doubt in your mind, especially enough to come and post on here.

Worse, I've heard of doctors telling parents that, to get them to agree to medicalize their kids.

I truly, deeply hate the transition-or-suicide rhetoric, be it the "dead daughter or living son" line, "death before detransition," or the whole "gender affirming care is life saving care" messaging. It truly fucks you up as a trans young person, and gets you thinking not just that medical transition will fix your mental health issues, but that it's the only thing that can. It's so messed up the way it's pushed on parents and young people.

I feel this way about Doctor Who. Ten was my absolute favorite doctor. I have his screwdriver, I own multiple long brown coats I used to wear all the time, I even cosplayed him for comic con when I was 15.

I haven't watched the new Doctor Who episodes, and feel weird about even rewatching the old seasons with how outspokenly pro-kids transitioning David Tennant is. He's the only celebrity where his supporting this stuff really hit me hard. I just idolized him in the past, and it feels awful knowing he probably would think I'm a terrible person, or misguided somehow in how I view what I've gone through. It just sucks.

"This never happens!"

"Actually it does."

"Well, good!"

Usually how it goes.

Sidenote, I can't believe you got downvoted for just neutrally stating your experience. Not even saying anything about what should or shouldn't have happened, just bare bones facts. Unreal.

novaskyd worded this well in her comment below, but it has a lot to do with gender roles. A lot of girls and young women feel like extremely uncomfortable with their attraction to men because of the hetero relationship dynamics they've had socially ingrained in their minds. They don't want to be boxed into a heteronormative female role, so the idea of a more equal relationship is very appealing, and transition becomes an attractive option.

I also want to add the aspect of social contagion, and how personality factors into it.

I'm very obsessive about media (TV, movies, books, etc.) and it's one of the main ways I connect with people and make myself happy in my free time. Male characters are significantly easier for me to relate to. I can't think of a time I've really seen myself in a female character, but I could name a collection of male characters. I think this is partially because of my own personality type just being more stereotypically associated with men, and partially because women characters are often just not as well-written.

I would read fanfic when I was a teenager that focused on characters I related to and was drawn to the mlm dynamics because they were the most plentiful (by far, like if I was looking for a het ship or a wlw ship there was not much to choose from), and as mentioned, the male characters were just more interesting because they were written better in the source material.

There have been posts here about the masses of trans people that occupy fandom spaces, and how so much fanart lately adds top surgery scars on the male characters, etc. When you're in a space, and you find people who you feel really understand you, and are like you, and share your weird interests and your complicated feelings about gender, and they're all identifying as trans or non-binary...

I struggle with this, since detransitioning. It feels like everyone I meet who I feel like I can vibe with personality/interests wise, turns out to identify as trans or non-binary. It's really weird to see the social contagion from the outside, and notice the patterns and similarities between these people and myself (obsessive interests and autistic traits being a big one). It's hard to find other nerds who aren't all caught up in the gender stuff.

Lord this comment is long. Point is, there is a lot that factors into this, and it's a lot deeper than just teenage girls being cringe and weird. I didn't fall into the exact category you're describing when I was trans, but I was struggling a lot when I was going through this stuff and those girls likely are too. And with the internet and fandom spaces the way they are, the odds are stacked against them being able to figure themselves out without gender identity issues muddying the waters.

I went through puberty normally, but I did transition as an older teen, and was very wrong about what was best for me, as were many people in this subreddit who transitioned as adults. I was 100% sure and committed to this, and was still so wrong that my medical transition (surgery specifically) gave me actual PTSD, and I feel like I wasted years of my life. I would not trust a child to know what they want long term better than I did, or any of the other adult detransitioners did. I still believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy when I was your child's age.

I'm not a parent, so I don't want to directly advise anything for someone in your situation, but I recommend looking into Jamie Reed and her activism. She worked at a youth gender clinic, and came out as a whistleblower against the clinic (and child transition practices in general) because of what she saw there. She is not doing anything out of hate, and she is not transphobic (she is actually married to a trans man), but she saw what she considered to be unethical care in the clinic, and spoke out about it. I think this would be a good place to start looking at alternative viewpoints. Here is a link to her original whistleblower article. She's also done interviews about her experience that you can find on YouTube.

Are you saying you think you may be a woman because you want to wear skirts? There are plenty of women who hate skirts and don't want their ears pierced, it doesn't make them men. Why would wanting these things make you a woman?

There are bodybuilder women who take steroids to build muscle without identifying themselves outside their sex, and there are feminine men who wear skirts and grow out their hair just because they like the look. These things you're associating with gender are stereotypical, and don't actually have to do with whether you're a man or a woman, just whether you have stereotypically masculine or feminine interests.

Yep. An array of trans/non‐binary pride pins over the past couple years, plus "Leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks" on a T shirt. I was early in my detransition when he wore that and it just tore me to pieces tbh. Like, my favorite actor of all time thinks I'm a freak for not wanting kids to go through what I went through.

The depth of his knowledge on the issue is unclear, but tbh calling people "absolute freaks" for not wanting kids to transition is really not justifiable to me. You have to be so deluded to not even see the potential for legitimate concerns about these medical treatments.

There's also specific videos and interviews I thought seemed so logical and meaningful at the time, I used to rewatch over and over, that now seem so cringe and incoherent.

Yeah. When I first detransed, I rewatched a lot of old video essays that I remembered really liking when I was trans (Contrapoints, Lily Alexandre, Philosophy Tube, etc.) because I felt myself very quickly becoming gender critical and wanted to find convincing counter arguments to the things I was starting to believe. Incoherent is definitely the right word to describe them.

If you aren't watching the videos with a pre-existing belief that trans people are valid no matter what, none of the arguments are remotely convincing. They don't even present opposing ideas in an honest way to argue against them, they just avoid any gender critical arguments that make too much sense, and portray "TERFs" as bigoted zealots with nothing behind their beliefs but vague justifications for transphobia. This seems to work fine when you're trans yourself and haven't actually engaged meaningfully with any gender critical arguments, but the illusion quickly fades once you start questioning things.

I feel you. I haven't seen fanart of a shirtless male character without top surgery scars in so long. If they're not shirtless they've got pride pins. In every couple, at least one of them is trans. Although it isn't horribly triggering for me anymore, it's alienating. And the seemingly default depiction of surgery scars in art frequently seen and created by young people concerns me.

I don't interact a ton with people in fandom spaces anymore, since before even detransitioning (mostly due to pro/anti ship drama tbh), but I still send fanart and memes back and forth with my sister, and the saturation with trans content is something I notice a lot about the fandoms for basically every new series I find. I think when I was trans, I assumed it was just the algorithm showing me (a trans person in fandom) other accounts like mine, but now even when actively trying to detox from that stuff, it's just everywhere.