I think it's good that you aren't just pushing these feelings aside. I know when I identified as ftm, I heard a lot of other guys say doubt isn't worth examining, and I believed them for quite a while. It's never too late to "go back", but it can certainly get harder to do so the longer you spend on T. Transitioning is a huge decision and I don't think any second thoughts deserve to be overlooked. If you want to explain more, I'd be happy listen, and I think others here will be, too. Reaching out to people with varying experiences can be hard, but I know I wish I'd done so when I was in your situation.

I think, if I'd never transitioned, I probably would have handled my dysphoria on my own. HRT didn't help me understand why I wanted to be male, it just caused me discomfort, and I eventually figured everything out for myself, if that makes sense. I won't lie, being detransitioned is important to me, but if I could go back 5 years, I never would have started HRT. Like I said, I think I would have figured myself out without it.

I think the fact that you felt trapped or uncomfortable suggests that you know what they said was wrong. If a woman can begin to identify as a man before taking HRT or getting surgery, she can identify as a woman again while still having a body changed by those things. Trans people, of all people, should know that one's body doesn't determine who one has to be or what one has to do with one's life.

It's hard to detransition when you still have trans friends, I know. It's hard to decide if you want to try and keep a balance where you can keep them as friends and still do what you need to do with your life, or say what you're feeling when you need to say it and risk losing them. I hope you can navigate through that, I really do.

Thank you for speaking up about how this subreddit has gone soft. I agree completely, but haven't had the guts to say it. As for the lobotomy part, I definitely see the similarities. I think we need more honest, emotional posts/opinions from detrans people. There are surely many of us who have complex emotions and unique understanding of transition and detransition, we just feel like we aren't welcome to speak about it. So yeah, thanks again for this post.

I also suspect we're going to witness a mass "wake up" soon. There's been a gigantic uptick in kids and young people (especially girls) identifying as trans in the past 5-10 years. When I started high school 9 or 10 years ago, I was one of ~5 trans kids in my grade ( which consisted of roughly 300 students.) When was supposed to graduate, I swear my school had upwards of 20 trans freshmen (although I admit that's largely speculation based on the number of trans flag pins/patches and visibly trans students I saw.) That tsunami of trans kids will get older, smarter and less self-obsessed, and some percentage of them are going to see the community's BS for what it is.

TBH, I wonder if your expectation for this to come to a head as a huge public scandal is a bit optimistic. I personally suspect the situation will get a week of muted news coverage, the general public will update their stance on transition somewhere in the backs of their heads without even consciously thinking about it, and then the issue will once again be confined to spaces like this sub. I think a lot of people are severely allergic to facing the fact that they were wrong; Post-scandal, I bet asking someone who's newly trans-critical about their previous pro-trans beliefs will trigger either a) an inflammatory response, or b) a sudden bout of temporary amnesia.

You don't need to go ahead with a huge change in your life just because you have it marked on the calendar, or even if you've made a deposit. Your lifelong health should always take priority over a sense of what's supposed to happen and any pressure you might feel (like the fast-approaching surgery date.) If you fear that the surgery might negatively impact your health, mental or physical, immediately or down the road, it won't hurt to wait. I think some level of doubt before a major surgery is normal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be examined.

As a detrans woman with a low voice I also find it kind of hard to tell if others would think someone else's voice is "normal," but I think you'll be fine. It's noticeably different from most women's voices, but not drastically so. my voice is deeper than yours, and over the past few years of sounding the way I do, the worst question/comment I've gotten was someone saying I should join a choir (I think she was surprised when I spoke with a deep voice and felt the need to comment, but didn't know what to say.) Obviously the reactions you get are going to be different depending on who you're around, but i think in general detrans people tend to worry about this kind of thing more than we have to. There will always be people who find us strange, but a lot of them are never going to bother us about it.

Good luck with your classes. I know a lot of places are struggling to put together a plan for the year and the uncertainty can be really hard to deal with.

To me, womanhood is a combination of biology and the shared experiences we have as a result of that biology. It's true that not every woman can get pregnant and it's true that not all women experience the same hardships as a result of our sex, but there is no woman out there whose life has not been impacted by her sex.

Personally, I've never really felt like a woman, not before my transition and not now, either. I think that's normal. I think women have always been aware of the hardships we face, sometimes to the point where it consumes our thoughts, but it's only in the last decade or so that we've been expected to have the specific connection with womanhood that a gender identity requires.

Based on what I think it means to be a woman, it makes sense to want to stay on T. Like you implied, T can help you avoid having to "tough it out" when it comes to some difficulties women face. If womanhood is partially defined by struggle, who would want to be a woman?

Whenever I think about going back on T (which is rarely now,) I like to remind myself that women have persevered through everything I face and worse for generations. If they could do it, why can't I? Why did I think taking a poorly understood medication to opt out of those struggles was better in the long run than facing them the way my mother does, and her mother does, and her mother did? If we've survived and tried our best to make things better for generations, why shy away now?

I couldn't agree more. Sometimes it feels like, for every questioning person making an honest post here, there are two people abusing the questioning flair in order to start an argument or encourage someone to say something that could risk this sub getting shut down. The people who misuse this subreddit and try to cause problems don't seem to mind lying/stretching the truth and saying they're questioning in order to post.

This subreddit is important to people. It's the first place I ever talked to another detrans person, and discovering it was honestly a turning point in my detranstion and the way I've coped with it. Things need to change here if this sub is going to keep existing, and I think it's worth the effort on the moderators' part.

I think most of us do, although it isn't always obvious. I've known trans men who have focused really heavily on yaoi, and trans women who have expected womanhood to be easy, but I think a lot of trans (and detrans) people subconsciously see life as the opposite sex as an escape from their current problems. We don't all think the opposite sex has it easy, but living as a man can certainly seem like a solution to woman-specific problems, and vice versa, I assume.