My whole journey with gender was a long and confusing one, but I’ve finally found a place of peace with myself. It all started when I was a teenager. I never felt like I fit in with the stereotypical idea of what a woman should be. I liked having short hair and hated wearing dresses. I think a lot of my initial discomfort was just with puberty itself and the changes my body was going through; I really hated my breasts and felt incredibly self-conscious. My thinking was very black-and-white back then: I thought that if I didn't like these feminine things, then I must not be a woman at all.

I started identifying as non-binary first, which felt like a safer middle ground. I changed my clothes, my appearance, and my pronouns. From there, I slowly leaned more into a transmasculine identity. I started passing as male, and for a while, that felt like the right answer. But it created a new, huge problem for me. I am a lesbian, and I felt a deep, painful loss of connection to other women, especially the queer women and lesbians who had been my community. There is a special sisterhood and a way of loving that exists between women that I desperately missed. Even though I was accepted in male spaces, I felt completely out of place because I couldn't relate to their life experiences. I didn't feel safe with men or straight women, so losing my place among queer women was incredibly lonely.

The period where I knew in my heart I was a lesbian but was living as a straight man was one of the loneliest times of my life. I realized I don't love women the way a straight man does; I love them the way a woman loves another woman. That connection is unique and precious, and I had given it up.

I was terrified of the idea of detransitioning. I had spent so long building this identity, and the stigma around going back felt overwhelming. In a weird way, coming out as a woman again felt harder than coming out as trans had been. But when I first came across another detransitioned woman online, it was like a light went on. I spent months researching and obsessively thinking about it. I finally realized that through all my different phases and identities, the fact that I am a woman had never actually changed. A woman can look or act like anything—she can have short hair and wear pants! Once I truly understood that, I stopped giving a fuck what people thought.

Detransitioning has been the most freeing thing I’ve ever done. I regret that I felt so much pressure to medically and socially transition in the first place, and I wish it was more normalized to experiment with your gender without it feeling like a mandatory, lifelong commitment. If I had known detransition was a common and okay thing to do, I would have done it much sooner. I don't have any regrets about the journey itself because it led me back to myself, but I regret the years I spent feeling lonely and disconnected from my community. I am so glad to be back, living openly as a butch lesbian woman.

Here is a timeline of my journey: