This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on these comments, the account appears authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or a bad-faith actor.
The comments demonstrate:
- Consistent, nuanced personal narrative spanning decades of lived experience.
- Complex, evolving ideas about identity and acceptance, not just repetitive talking points.
- Self-reflection on related mental health (BPD) and its connection to identity.
- A distinct, non-aligned viewpoint that critiques both trans and gender-critical communities, which is consistent with a genuine individual navigating a difficult personal issue.
The user's perspective is that of a desister (someone with gender dysphoria who did not medically transition), and their passion stems from a deeply personal, long-term struggle.
About me
I was born male but my internal identity has always felt female, which caused me a lot of pain for decades. I never medically transitioned, and through therapy for other mental health issues, I learned to separate my internal self from my physical body. My path was about accepting that I could be a man on the outside while knowing I have a female identity on the inside. Now, I see that female self as my private reality and I've made peace with the contradiction. I'm moving toward a place where both parts of me can coexist as one whole person, free from the struggle.
My detransition story
My journey with gender has been a long and complicated one, and it’s taken me over four decades to reach a place of peace. I was born male, but for as long as I can remember, my core internal identity has felt female. This wasn't about wanting to be a woman; it was a deep, internal knowing that a fundamental part of who I am is female. For a very long time, this caused me a lot of pain and confusion, a feeling I now understand as crippling dysphoria.
I never medically transitioned. When I was growing up, I didn't even know being trans was an option. For me, the path wasn't about changing my body to match my mind, but about learning to accept that both could be true at the same time. I could be a man on the outside and know I have a female identity on the inside, and that was okay. This wasn't repression. Repression is when you try to deny a truth. For me, acceptance was about finally affirming that internal female identity and giving it validity, without needing to change my pronouns, my body, or my outward life to prove it to anyone.
A big part of my struggle was tied up with other mental health issues. I was diagnosed with clinically significant symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and a lot of that revolved around a shaky sense of self and identity. Working through those BPD issues in therapy was crucial. I came to believe that a lot of the emptiness and pain I felt wasn't just from the gender mismatch, but from being disconnected from my core self altogether. Once I started to really figure out who I was and learn to love that person, the gender issue became less overwhelming.
My female identity shows up in my life in specific ways. I’ve always identified more strongly with female characters in stories and with women in my career and hobbies. I feel a real sense of kinship and pride in women's achievements. In my dreams, I'm often just myself, and that self is female. It’s not a dream about becoming a woman; I just am one in the dreamscape. It feels like if I could look past my physical body, my inner essence is a "her."
I’ve come to see that medical transition is one solution for dysphoria, but it’s not the only one. For some people, it’s the right path and they are happy. For me, the right path was acceptance and integration. I had to decouple my internal identity from my physical body. I think of it like that movie Avatar—acknowledging who you really are on the inside while also accepting your physical reality. It’s about holding that contradiction and making peace with it.
I don't have any regrets about not transitioning because I never did. I found a different way that works for me. I’ve become detached from gendered language; when someone calls me "sir," I understand they are just referring to my objective physical sex, and it doesn't feel like an attack on my internal identity anymore. That identity is my private reality, and I'm comfortable with that.
I don't really identify as trans or cis. I think those terms can be misleading. The idea that most people have a gender identity that matches their sex might not even be true—maybe a lot of people don't have a strong internal sense of gender at all. My goal now is to move toward a more genderless ideal, a place where both the male and female parts of my identity can coexist as one whole self, freeing me from the struggle altogether.
| Age | Event |
|---|---|
| Early Childhood | First awareness of an internal female identity. Felt a strong kinship with female characters and people. |
| Various | Experienced significant gender dysphoria and identity confusion. |
| Adulthood (40s) | Diagnosed with BPD symptoms; began extensive therapy focused on identity issues. |
| 45 | Reached a point of acceptance, affirming my internal female identity without feeling a need to change my male body. |
Top Comments by /u/RaspberryInk:
I don't agree with the thought policing. I don't think ignoring or dismissing the conversations helps anyone, including, and especially trans people. I don't know that having a trans-denial echo chambers like GC is all that useful, but subs like GCdebatesQT were taken down too. Now the only places that I'm aware of where you can really discuss gender openly are this sub and /r/honesttransgender. I participate in the other trans subs a bit, but there is definitely a "right think" and "wrong think." It's not a place for challenging ideas as a path towards truth.
Physical transitioning is one treatment for a mismatched gender identity, but it's not the only treatment and it's not the right approach for everyone. People conflate identifying with a subgroup and the psychological concept of identity (ego-identity). People conflate psychological gender identity with which gender feels more right. People conflate gender identity with gender expression, and both with sex. People conflate gender dysphoria with body dysmorphia. Even the words "trans" and "cis" are rarely used like the dictionary (or Gender Unicorn) describes them. There are so many overloaded and misused words. The whole landscape of "gender" is a wasteland of confusion and gatekeeping and the people with gender issues are the victims. IMO, it's important to be able to talk about this stuff. We need to be able to argue about, disagree, and learn.
TBF, and just to temper some of what I just said, there are personalities who don't like subversion, debate, arguing, etc. Some people get hurt and upset by that kind of environment, especially when it's personal. I'm not like that at all. I seek out discussions that I disagree with. For me, this is one of the best ways to solidify my own opinions. I fight for what I think is true, and if it breaks down, then something needs reconsideration. For some others, this does nothing but hurt them. I get why some people would want GC and all its siblings banned, but, in the process, they took away one of my venues for exploring my own gender (mostly the GCdebatesQT sub). It should have been enough to quarantine the good ones and only ban the worst ones. I mean, we still have /r/MGTOW. If we can tolerate that cesspool of women-hate, we really should have been able to tolerate GCdebatesQT.
Acceptance. Accepting your mismatched gender identity and physical body, and just allowing them to be different.
I really like analogies, but I don't have a great one for this. Maybe if you think about something like the Avatar movie--acceptance would be acknowledging who you really are and allowing that to be true, but also accepting your physical presentation, and allowing that to be true too. Allowing your identity to be decoupled from your physical body.
One of the big hurdles for me was confusing acceptance and repression. It's an odd mixup, since they're basically opposite. Acceptance is not denial. It's not resigning to your physical body and denying your gender identity. For me, one of the biggest steps forward was making a conscious decision to fully affirm my gender identity. I'm male. My gender identity is female. I'm not going to change my pronouns for that, or call myself trans, or anything else, but I'm also not going to deny who I am on the inside. It is what it is, and that's okay. One path to being at peace with this is just letting it be.
"Acceptance" makes it sound like this is an easy, passive thing, but it's really not. It's taken me over 40 years, multiple therapists, and a lot of work to reach a point where I really feel like it's working for me. Medical transition isn't easy either--surgeries, hormones, changing your legal sex, social stigma--it sounds extremely challenging. I doubt there's any easy answer for a core gender identity issues--just different ways for different people.
I was diagnosed with clinically significant BPD symptoms quite a while back. I worked on these for a long time in therapy, and have since mostly recovered. One of the most challenging things for me, that took the longest to sort out, was identity. Not going to go off on a tangent, but there's a compelling argument to be made that a lot of the other symptoms are a result of the identity problems, e.g. the emptiness, impulsivity, dysfunctional relationships, fear of abandonment.
I've also had a female gender identity since a young age. I was actually meaning to create a thread on this, because it irks me that "identity" is so often conflated with what you feel like or a personal preference. I'm talking about the same thing as identity in PDs--your actual core sense of self (ego).
One of the things I've experienced since a young age is that I identify much more strongly with female characters in books, movies, and TV. I identify more strongly with women in my career field, in my sports, in my hobbies, etc. I feel a natural surge of kinship and achievement at the success and the "firsts" of women, especially in things I'm passionate about. I look at these women and in some way, I see myself reflected back at me.
I'm also often female in my dreams. I'm not dreaming of being female, but dreaming about whatever it is I'm dreaming about, and just being myself. It feels like if I could look in a mirror and look through my body, into some sort of inner essence, I could see "her."
I've worked out the BPD issues in therapy and through a lot of hard work on my own. I never did transition, and maybe because I'm older and didn't hear about trans things growing up, I've never called myself trans. This gender identity thing is still the same as it always was. I'm 45 now, and I've accepted that this is part of who I am, and is very unlikely to ever change.
I don't know you and I'm admittedly projecting a lot here, but my experience is that if you keep working on the identity issues you can get to a point where you're happy with who you are. If you're happy with who you are, you can be content with your body, even if your body doesn't match your core identity. I've experienced crippling dysphoria, but it's become less and less over the last several years, since some breakthroughs with identity.
I mean, of course, work on this with your therapist, but offering up my own hindsight, gender identity is not the problem--being disconnected from who you are is the problem. Once you learn who you are, develop more of a solid sense of self, and learn how to love that person, gender stops being so much of a problem.
I've had exactly the same experience.
The trans community seems to have a perception that medical transition is the only solution for dysphoria. It is one solution, and some people seem pretty happy with it, but it's not the right solution for everyone.
I've grown pretty detached from it. I just associate gendered language with physical sex, which for the most part is fairly objective--at least, I'm not confused about my own physical sex.
Gender identity is a deep internal experience. I wouldn't expect other people to be able to use special language for that. The more comfortable I've become with it the more I've just accepted that it's a private reality. It does influence my life, but not in ways that should really impact people around me.
As someone who's been living over 40 years with mismatched sex and gender, I don't think "numbing it out" really works. If you gender identity is part of the core of who you are, blocking it out is just going to cause suffering. You'd be denying the reality of who you are, and no matter how hard you try, we can't lie to ourselves forever. Even if you can push it out of your conscious mind, it will still cause you to suffer. Just google "impacts of repression psychology" for several of the common consequences.
IMO, the solution is to acknowledge it, accept it, and let it be true. Validate your gender identity as being a real and true part of who you are. That doesn't require transition. People can change their appearance if they want, but your gender is the same no matter how you look. Even the overly simplistic "Gender Unicorn" illustrates this.
Gender is in our heads. That doesn't mean it's not real, valid, and/or immutable--gender identity is hugely impactful, but it's still ultimately as internal reality. I'm sure people transition for a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones is validation. If other people look at you and see your gender, and you look in the mirror and see your gender, it becomes easier to admit to yourself it's true. The "trick" is to allow it to be true without insisting on external validation.
If your gender identity is female and your body is male, just let that be so. You don't have to decide between a female body or denying your identity. Holding this contradiction is uncommon, probably even less common than trans, but there's nothing wrong with it.
This might not help you at all, but one of the things that helps me is this... If you'd been female since birth, AFAB, a cis girl growing up, and a cis woman, and then one day you went to sleep, woke up, and all of a sudden you're a man, what would your inner experience be? You would know who you are on the inside, but you could also look in the mirror and see someone else on the outside. What if you just chose to live in this new reality and make the best of it... knowing who you are on the inside and on the outside, and letting them both be true.
It's all a bunch of mind games, really. I don't mean that as if it's self-deception. The process of becoming comfortable with our sex and our gender is a matter of self-perception, which we can influence to a certain extent. I don't think we can change our core gender identity, but I do believe there's quite a bit we can do to change our relationship to our body and our gender.
I think the same applies for this. When we hear "sir" or "mister" we have a deep, automatic response to that, and it takes time and a lot of practice to lessen the power of the connotations of those words.
For me, it felt like giving more validity to my gender identity helped, as opposed to pushing back. Validating who I am feels like external assessments of my sex are less of an affront to who I am. Anything related to my external presentation is water off a duck's back--I'm still me on the inside. I'm not minimizing the struggle, though--I'm sure it's different for everyone, and my process might not be the way for you.
I think one of the problems is how society perverts "mental issue." People think if it's a mental issue you can just snap yourself out of it, or maybe take some meds, a little therapy, and *poof* you're cured. They conflate "mental" to be part of your conscious experience, and are mostly clueless as to what core ego identity issues really are. The trans and non-trans communities both do this.
I'm male, and for me, there's an important part of my psyche projected into "her." It probably started as a coping mechanism and a fantasy, but now it's like there's a core part of who I am that only exists in that projection (her).
I've tried to deny that part of myself, but it's never worked for me. I can stuff it away for a while, but I'm never entirely happy, and it always comes back. Denying that part of me ends up denying a bunch of healthy things I need, and it ends up just bubbling over into a painful emptiness, impulsivity, etc.
I think it's easy to get the impression that this means I'm trans. Like "my real image" of myself is this other sex, and if I only changed my sex to match that image I could be free, whole, happy, or whatever words. I just don't think that's it either, though. The body we have and the sex we're born with is also real.
I've been trying to practice acceptance... just letting both my outer physical experience and inner identity be true. That definitely helps, but I don't think that's entirely it either. Lately I've been practicing a different sort of "acceptance," in that I've been looking towards this genderless ideal. Non-binary, agender, androgyny, "two spirit" or whatever you want to call it. Not trying to change anything about my physical body or how I express myself, but more in allowing both aspects of my identity to be equally who I am. The hope is this will help bring it all back together so I can just be myself and finally be free from this whole gender fuckery.
Anyway... good luck. I get it. I hope you're able to find something that helps you feel whole and happy.
I think this is good advice, but I would just add that "affirmation" isn't necessarily a bad thing. You don't need to change your pronouns, change your body, or call yourself "trans" to acknowledge and accept your experience with gender identity.
I'm sure this isn't for everyone, but in my experience, acknowledging and accepting the gendered part of my identity has really helped me with being happier and more content with my body.