This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the provided comments, the account appears authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or a bad-faith actor.
Reasons for Authenticity:
- Personal Experience: The user explicitly shares a personal detail: "for me it helped to take estrogen (i'm a biological woman)." This first-person narrative is consistent with a desister/detransitioner perspective.
- Nuanced and Passionate Arguments: The comments are not just slogans; they contain detailed, nuanced arguments about gender, biology, and psychology, showing genuine engagement with the topic. The tone is passionate and sometimes confrontational, which aligns with the warning that detransitioners can be "pissed off about this topic."
- Practical Advice: One comment offers specific, practical advice on managing period pain and menstrual products, which reads as genuine, lived experience rather than a scripted bot response.
- Internal Consistency: The views expressed across different comments are internally consistent, focusing on biological sex, critique of gender ideology, and the social causes of gender dysphoria.
There is no evidence in these comments to suggest the account is inauthentic.
About me
I was a tomboy who started feeling my breasts were wrong when they developed, and I thought becoming a man was the answer to my deep unhappiness. I took testosterone and had surgery, but the initial excitement faded and my underlying depression and anxiety remained. I now see my drive to transition was fueled by internalized issues and a form of escapism from accepting myself as a masculine woman. After stopping hormones and getting the right therapy, I'm learning to live as a female and cope with the permanent loss of fertility. My biggest regret is permanently altering my healthy body when what I really needed was to challenge the negative ideas I had about being a woman.
My detransition story
My journey with gender started when I was a teenager. I was a tomboy and never felt like I fit in with other girls. I hated my breasts when they developed; they felt foreign and wrong on my body, like they didn't belong to me. I now believe this was a mix of puberty discomfort and body dysmorphia, not a sign I was born in the wrong body. I was also struggling with depression and anxiety, and I had very low self-esteem.
I started reading a lot online and was heavily influenced by what I saw in trans communities. The idea that I could be a different person, a boy, was a form of escapism for me. It felt like a solution to all my problems. I thought if I could just change my body, I would finally be happy and comfortable. I socially transitioned in my late teens, asking people to use a different name and pronouns. I thought I was non-binary for a while, but that eventually shifted to identifying as a trans man.
I was convinced that medical transition was the only way to fix the deep unhappiness I felt. I started testosterone in my early twenties. The changes were rapid and, at first, felt exciting. But the initial high wore off, and the underlying issues—the depression, the anxiety, the feeling of not being right—were still there. I had top surgery to remove my breasts. I don't regret the reduction in physical discomfort, but I deeply regret the permanent alteration of my healthy body. I am now infertile, and that is a serious and painful loss that I have to live with.
Looking back, I see that a lot of my drive to transition was related to internalized issues. I struggled with internalized homophobia; it was easier to think of myself as a straight man than to accept being a masculine, potentially gay woman. I also see now how my thought patterns mirrored OCD; I became hyperfixated on my sex characteristics in an unhealthy way. I benefited immensely from non-affirming therapy that helped me challenge these fixations instead of indulging them. It helped me to see that my problem wasn't with being female, but with the negative and sexist ideas I had about what being a woman meant.
My thoughts on gender have changed completely. I don't believe people are born with a "male" or "female" brain. I think men and women have general, group-level differences, but there is so much natural variation that you can't point to any one person's personality and say it proves they're in the wrong body. A masculine woman is still a woman. A feminine man is still a man. I also strongly disagree with the idea that you can be born with a phantom penis or vagina; it doesn't make biological sense to me.
I don't hate trans people, and I believe everyone deserves basic human rights and respect. But I see the ideology I once believed in as a kind of personal belief system, almost like a religion, that I no longer subscribe to. My detransition was about accepting my body as it is and finding pride in being a gender nonconforming woman. I found other masculine women to look up to, and that helped more than anything else. I learned to appreciate aspects of being a woman and even femininity on my own terms.
I have serious regrets about taking testosterone and getting surgery. The health complications and infertility are a permanent reminder of a choice I made when I was deeply unwell and influenced by online communities that offered a simple, drastic solution to complex problems. I am learning to live with the consequences.
| Age | Event |
|---|---|
| 13 | Started puberty; began to feel intense discomfort with my developing female body, hated my breasts. |
| 16-18 | Heavily influenced by online communities; began to socially transition and identify as non-binary. |
| 19 | Shifted to identifying as a trans man. |
| 21 | Started testosterone therapy. |
| 23 | Underwent top surgery (double mastectomy). |
| 25 | Realized I had made a mistake; began the process of detransition. Stopped testosterone. |
| 26 | Underwent non-affirming therapy which helped address underlying OCD, depression, and anxiety. |
| Present (27) | Living as a detransitioned female; learning to accept my body and cope with infertility. |
Top Comments by /u/_intrusive-th0t_:
It's equivalent to calling someone islamophobic for thinking mohammad was a bad person (he had sex with a 9yo) or calling someone antisemitic for not thinking jews are god's chosen people and israel is their homeland, or calling someone anti-christian (?) for not thinking jesus can biblically be the messiah
i don't have to accept your personal belief system to think you deserve human rights or to not hate you as a person :/
there's a difference between saying that gay people are doing something wrong and just not using the same (implicitly sexist) definitions of gender that trans people use
it's more like you're the religious evangelical who is accusing everyone else of being anti-christian/islamophobic/antisemitic for not sharing your religious belief system
People who are born without limbs actually rarely develop phantom limb syndrome compared to people who become amputees later in life. So the idea that you can be born with a phantom penis/vagina (or even more silly, phantom breasts-- no girl is born with breasts...) is not really plausible
My point is more that there's no evidence that people are born with body maps that "know" which sex characteristics they're supposed to have. I've heard transwomen claim to have phantom breasts which is an absurd concept to any woman because we all remember what it was like to be a little girl without breasts and it didn't bother us
gender dysphoria shares a lot of traits w OCD so making people focus on their own biological sex can backfire. it may be more helpful to praise other GNC people and to challenge trans people's implicit judgments about gender in general instead of trying to make them focus on the things they're already hyperfixated on
What was once about systemic racism in society or disproportionate violence against blacks became “cops are bad to everyone”.
Cops commit police brutality against and violate the rights of non black people all the time so I'm not sure what you mean by this lol
I definitely don’t agree that most trans women who discuss the term woman are referring to being objectified or submissive to men, for example, and that has definitely not been my experience, nor was it part of my feelings when I identified as a trans woman
ok, what was it then?
There's not really any evidence that the brain is mapped to expect certain genitals. For example phantom limb syndrome rarely occurs in people born without limbs vs. people who had limbs amputated later in life. In the rare cases where people with congenital limb deficiency do experience phantom limb syndrome it could just as easily be attributed to lifelong use of prosthetics that train the brain to expect a limb there vs brain mapping.
So the idea that you can be born with a phantom penis, phantom vagina, etc. doesn't seem plausible to me. If phantom vaginas were a thing then presumably we would also see trans animals trying to gnaw or rip off their own penises and we just don't see that.
I think there are a lot of causes of the disorder that are honestly pretty clear but most people are not comfortable with really digging into them. Autogynephilia and internalized homophobia are the big ones. People get uncomfortable because the main reasons people want to transition are related to sex. But what else would motivate someone to fixate so heavily on their sex characteristics aside from idk sexual trauma?
The social expectations, types of work, typical hobbies, and clothing that we culturally associate with men and women emerge from biology and don't vary much by culture. Women do most of the childcare, as a universal rule.
they actually vary quite a lot aside from a few things like childcare, home construction, etc. and to a great extent this is just a natural result of physical differences between men and women like breastfeeding, muscle mass, etc.
that said i do believe there are psychological differences between men and women that are biologically driven. but these differences exist on a group level, like height, not on an individual level. in this sense saying that someone has a "female brain" is a bit like saying a man has a "female height" just because he's short
If you look at colonialism, and how it affected gender social constructs, we’re just going back to the way things should be.
not every indigenous culture had third genders and the ones that did mostly had very strict/regressive gender roles and had to create extra categories for people who couldn't conform. those cultures wouldn't have accepted a masculine woman as a woman or a feminine man as a man.
third gender isn't transgender. no indigenous culture accepted biological males as women, and the third gender role was never chosen by the individual, it was forced on them by society (usually for being effeminate, gay, or intersex). that's quite literally what a social construct is which is why it's dumb that the trans movement tries to equate the social construction of gender w self id when they're completely different things