I was also told to seek therapy before detransitioning to make sure it was what I really wanted, though it only lasted two sessions before I decided I had had enough.

The sessions would always just devolve into me defending my decision to detransition, and the therapist pushing me to reconsider. Very nasty. I was getting better, and the person who was intended to help me actively did the opposite.

Pretty much the opposite happened with me. I sat down with the therapist for about twenty minutes, said I was feeling dysphoria from an identity misaligned with my body and needed to change something, and just like that I was given a recommendation for HRT to start immediately. Two weeks later I was on testosterone blockers and a smaller dose of estrogen, and I haven't seen the therapist since.

Honestly I think it comes from a place of sympathy. Back then, I had every intention of killing myself if I had to continue living with the dysphoria I had, and I've heard that sentiment shared from other transgender people I've spoken to.

That being said, I do suspect the sympathy does more harm than good to the mental health of their patients. Validation shouldn't be the first thing you give to someone disgusted with their body. I wasn't in my right mind at that time and I needed more than just a twenty minute talk to work out all the feelings I had.

Don't worry too much about it. Like you said most people won't understand, but people who don't understand will generally take what you say at face value and treat you politely, even if things are a bit awkward. Just tell anyone who needs to know and they'll almost certainly be okay with it.

I also detransitioned in college, though I was mtf. I think a lot of people assumed I was ftm trans, and unless I knew them I just didn't bother to correct it. After the semester ended, I didn't see most of those people again.

That it was irrational and needlessly hurting me. I'll try my best to describe what caused my dysphoria, and maybe you'll be able to see a part of yourself in it. I still can't really explain without telling the whole story, so sorry if this is tmi.

I had a lot of issues when I was young kid. I had OCD, and a bad temper that I got from the father (more on that later). I had friends, somehow, but I was never anyone's best friend. And I was always the butt of the jokes my friends would make. I was very socially awkward and I needed friends, so I never challenged these jokes. Instead, I let the resentment built up, before snapping on someone who didn't deserve it. Basically, I had no idea how to interact with people.

Back to my father. He was very very abusive towards my mom. The last memory I have of him as a child was watching him beat my mom against a door before my older sister called the police on him. Eventually I came to the conclusion that anger was masculine. It was something that boys did when they were misbehaving. Since I was taught to never be angry, and actively suppressed it, I also began to suppress my masculinity. I wanted to never be like my dad. I saw my potential to become like him at an early age, and I wanted to reject all of that.

So I didn't know how to interact with people, and I was actively suppressing my masculinity. I grow up to be a feminine guy who likes to avoid conflict and just be nice to people, and I actually manage to make some good friends this time. They liked how "innocent" I was. The problem was, I was all positivity with no backbone. Any "bad" thought I had was immediately suppressed. I could never be angry, or impatient with someone. I couldn't even stand up for myself. That's what a monster does, not me. I just needed to be strong enough to take any hits that came my way without fighting back, like my mom.

Then puberty hits, and I start to become really distressed. I see myself becoming more masculine, and I become completely disgusted with myself. I begin to look more and more like my father every day, and I have no idea what to do about it.

Then, when I was 15, I saw a transition timeline on youtube, and I was completely ecstatic because I finally had a way out of my disgust. Immediately, I became convinced that this was what I needed to do. Obviously I didn't immediately do it, but it wasn't because I was seriously questioning how transition would help me. It was surface level stuff, like being labelled a freak, and if my mom would be okay with it. After one and a half years though, it came to the point where I regularly wanted to die. Like I cried myself to sleep most nights because of how much puberty disgusted me. So despite how much I hated asking for things, I finally told my mom about all of this. And because of what she'd been told about transgender people (needing to accept them, believe them, etc.), she was completely supportive of my transition.

So I won't go into too much more than that, because you can probably understand the message I'm trying to get across. I've mentioned this before in another comment, but the break that finally made me decide to detransition was re-listening to "Tale as Old as Time" from Beauty and the Beast on youtube. It's a pretty dumb way to reach an epiphany, but that's what did it. I came to realize that I was a beast trying to look like a beauty, Trying to look feminine on the outside to cover up an ugliness I had always felt on the inside. The solution was never to reject masculinity, it was to embrace it. To be a better man than my father.

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"I'll stop feeling like my body is me" is a pretty deep statement tbh. What is you exactly? Would you feel this way about other changes to your body as well? Say you had an arm amputated or you got a nasty scar on your face. Would you be able to accept this? Should you be able to?

Behind all of this, there's also the idea that the "you" inside your brain is more "you" than the body that makes you up. That definitely isn't something I could break down easily, but it does make you wonder why there's even a misalignment to begin with, doesn't it? Is it just from some weird accident where you were given a female brain inside of a male's body at birth? Or is this an identity you've built up over time?

This never-ending scrutinizing was basically what quieted my dysphoria, as I came to conclude over time that the source wasn't rational.

Not anymore, no. Most of my dysphoria came from being disgusted with my masculinity, as well as the misalignment I felt over being a generally feminine male my whole life. Once I decided to embrace my masculinity, there really wasn't a reason to feel dysphoria anymore.

If you still feel dysphoric, I strongly encourage you to write out your thoughts and find the source of your dysphoria. In my experience, there's no better cure to the condition than understanding just how irrational it is.

Oh man this hits really close to home for me. A lot of what you've said here are reasons I was suicidal for somewhere between 2 and 3 years.

Transitioning wasn't just about feeling free to act feminine, which I did as a male for most of my life. It was the fear of losing my feminine face, getting broader shoulders, etc. Stuff you pointed out like getting more body hair and potentially going bald genuinely terrified me until maybe a year and a half ago, when I started to really question my motivations for having these fears.

I think you should really ask yourself why you're afraid of puberty, too. Why specifically does having a more rugged face scare you? Why going bald? For me at least, a lot of these fears came from not wanted to age period, not just aging as a male. Estrogen helped me keep up this young, happy-go-lucky persona that only cared about being nice to other people. "Peter Pan", you could say. I liked being cute on the outside because it covered up an ugliness I felt on the inside.

This is pretty silly in hindsight, but what tipped me over into deciding to detransition back then was a nostalgia trip I was on, where I was re-listening to a bunch of Disney songs I used to love as a kid. I eventually got around to "Tale as Old as Time" from Beauty and the Beast, where somehow everything clicked into place and I started crying. Maybe if you go back and watch it too, you'll see what I mean. Or you can just laugh at what an idiot I was back then lol. Either way.

You haven't thought your feelings through to their depth. Ask yourself why you want to transition, and then ask yourself why you still want to stay detransitioned.

Don't stop asking yourself until you find where the two ideas fundamentally meet, then your motivations should be more aligned with each other.

In my opinion, the most important thing is to be honest with yourself about the source of your dysphoria. And to elaborate extensively on why that dysphoria suggests you need to take hormone replacement therapy. I personally didn't do that, instead blindly accepting that I was a "woman trapped in a man's body" simply because I had dysphoria, and eventually regretted taking HRT. For me at least, the more I understood my dysphoria, the less it affected me.

One other piece of advice – don't suppress your dysphoria. I tried for about one and a half years being "okay" with being male before transitioning. That only delayed the problem, and the dysphoria I had just got worse and worse until I cracked under the pressure, eventually concluding that transition was the only way I would ever be happy again.