My partner was on T for 10 years and had a mastectomy. She stopped T in 2016 but has not made any changes to her body nor substantial changes to her appearance to make herself look more like a conventional woman. She mostly lives publicly in the same way as she did when she saw herself as transgender (i.e. works as male etc.) but discloses to select people her birth name and that she sees herself more like a butch woman who transitioned.

This kind of scenario was once explicitly under the heading of "detransition" but I think most people are thinking of detransitioning as meaning you explicitly want to re-feminize in some way or another these days. I think women like yourself are often pushed to the margins of whatever community they try to understand themselves in (trans people, lesbians, detransitioned people) and I really wish there was a solid support network for those in your position. It is a very lonely and strange place to be that I think very very few people understand.

While this is the best way to handle things with more casual friends in your life I'm deeply worried about using this strategy long-term in any sort of serious or intimate partnership. OP, when you say "partner", do you mean that you two are seriously committed to each other or are you using it to mean someone more like a fuck buddy? Because if you two are in it for the long haul then your choices will always be in some sense about your partner very directly. Even if you can somehow isolate the reasons why you want to discontinue taking testosterone from your care for your partner, your beliefs about transition more generally, etc. (i.e. anything that would vaguely imply that your partner has things to consider that he might not want to regarding medical transition) your partner will have to watch you detransition and that will be genuinely difficult for someone who both is trying to justify continuing and (hopefully) cares about you.

A lot of people who detransition or stop various aspects of transition end up in a really unhealthy place where they're continually trying to mince words about their transition, denying that it could ever be bad just except for them in these very specific ways and you know, it's still awesome and great if you choose to do it, it's still awesome and great even if you have horrible complications and your doctors are abusive and you're living on the floor of a queer house so long as you say you like doing that, etc. etc. etc. and I think that honestly fucks a lot of people up long term. You absolutely have to find space to discuss the reality of what happened to you and that you are not alone in it, that your experiences overlap both with people who are detransitioned and those who continue to transition, that you weren't just a "faker" and it wasn't just an "oops" that this didn't work out for you, and so on. If your relationship is interfering with your ability to do this you will have to have some really difficult discussions with your partner. It's not fair of him to ask you to shut up about your experiences, muzzle you about what you say about your needs, or constrain your ability to act in your best interests just because it might kinda sorta imply transition's not a bed of roses and he needs it to be a bed of roses for some reason or other. (Turns out you don't even need transition to be super rosy to continue doing it, and he's going to run straight into a very painful wall repeatedly if he needs the world to tell him this in order to feel ok with his decisions. It is really honestly best for the both of you to have some variety of this talk until you two can work out a way of communicating stuff that is not existentially threatening.)

You said your partner didn't react well when you discussed regretting oophorectomy in the past. What happened with that? How did he respond to you? Was he entirely self-focused or was he still able to show concern for you and respect for your feelings? Does he have a problem in general with thinking you're implying stuff about him or judging him or is it only with transition stuff?

I keep meaning to write a big thing about this someday but to control myself: the three biggest things I did to deal with chest/breast specific dysphoria is to stop comparing myself to men, stop being inspired by images & descriptions of mastectomy, and to just rip the bandaid off and quit binding or actually wearing bras entirely.

The first one helped every aspect of my dysphoria. I used to just stare at men constantly and would be envious of shit like their toe hair, which is so stupid in retrospect but it occupied so much of my time. Don't look so closely at men either in images or real life. If you obsessively admire a male celebrity or character as part of a fandom do your best to put that down. Whatever you do do not compare your own body, or female bodies in general, to men's bodies. If you catch yourself doing it, note it and redirect your attention gently elsewhere. I had to go pretty separatist about this to heal my issues (i.e. socialize mostly with women, read/listen/watch etc. mostly to women, etc.) which I'm not sure is fully necessary for everyone but was for me. Normalizing how women look and act without judging them for it in comparison to men was also a big part of this because my dysphoria also shaded into judging women pretty harshly sometimes & I also had to lower the stakes for myself of appearing visibly female which at first was easiest to do around women I trusted.

I also had to quit looking at transition-related material online. I was lucky that I never got into watching youtube videos about transition or trans celebrities but if you're in that boat it ends up driving a lot of insecurity about your own body and frames your issues as something that can only be fixed through surgery and hormones. I looked at a lot of pictures, which was in some ways worse, because it's relatively easy to pass and look cool/happy/intense/whatever in a photo but obviously harder to do this in a video or day-to-day. I have notice in trans youtuber & instagram accounts that trans men have a lot of tricks they use to make themselves look less female & to not break their passing persona. For example the ones held up as "passing goals", you rarely see them in full body shots moving around, you rarely see them express genuine joy with another person (which is when the lady voice tends to squeak out), they edit their speaking over and over again, they limit their body language very carefully and the angles at which they appear, etc.

If you know a bunch of trans men or other kinds of transitioning female people IRL it can be difficult to manage. Luckily I did not have a social circle full of transitioning people while I was in the process of coming down from my most acute dysphoria. Honestly given that I do know a number of trans people now it is more "triggering" to my dysphoria than anything else. I keep in mind that they are very much still female people, and although they are like me they've chosen a different way of dealing with their issues and my way is not thereby incorrect just because it's different. My way is working for me, and I don't owe them having to buy into their explanations of what's going on just to find commonalities in our experiences.

The last thing is complex but when I quit binding I went back to sports bras and realized a few things, mostly that I found those also very uncomfortable and that I was constantly tempted to use them in a binding kind of way (which I did prior to buying an actual binder). So I stopped wearing bras. It took me probably 6-8 months to adjust to the physical sensations and to no longer experience any pain, and took me a little over a year to no longer have my breasts be constantly appearing in my consciousness as a problem or something that seemed out of sorts. It's taken me until recently to fully adjust emotionally to all of it and to no longer see my body as a bad jumble when I look in the mirror. I still slouch a bit but I'm fixing that slowly-- I think that's the hardest thing to fix, honestly, and I see a lot of trans men post-surgery still fucking slouching!!!

The OP never stated she did not want to wear men's clothes, merely that she was seeking resources for managing dysphoria without medical transition. Many gender non-conforming women who do not transition or who are managing detransition choose to wear at least some men's clothing. You can wear men's clothing as a woman without measuring yourself against it as a failure to be male. Typical women often borrow or wear certain men's items for fashion or comfort or practicality reasons; you don't even have to be particularly nonconforming or lesbian or dysphoric to do so.

Your experience with your father seems pretty unusual and is clearly influencing how you are handling your daughter's situation. You have a really disproportionate reaction to even someone mentioning your daughter choosing men's clothing. My mom also reacted with ridicule and contempt at the idea of masculine dress and it made it clear to me that it was shameful and absurd for me to want to seek masculinity and also be female. It led me to use clothing to want to hide myself because I thought being female was the problem.

Women with or without dysphoria can learn to choose clothes that are comfortable for them and facilitate free movement and activity. For example, my sister wears a lot of men's clothes because she's always been tomboyish and does stuff like work on her car a lot, and she's also got very wide shoulders. She doesn't wear men's pants too often because they don't fit her butt and thighs. Learning to choose comfort and ability to act is ultimately more important than the gender of your clothes.

I actually got more masculine after desisting from seeing myself as transgender and this included increasing the proportion of men's clothing I wear. I probably wear about 60-70% men's clothing, about 20% unisex or unknown pieces I got from thrift stores, and the remainder is non-feminine women's clothes that fit me well. I usually modify men's clothing if I find it restrictive (i.e. I will hem and/or sew gussets in my pants) and I'm careful to try to find well-fitting pieces to begin with. I have always struggled with finding women's clothes that fit me as I have a long torso (so shirts always ride up) and for some reason women's pants tend to snag on certain parts of my body and fall off others. Women always complain about the fit of women's clothes-- they are made to fit an averaged body which does not really exist, and then sized up or down in standardized increments that don't necessarily reflect actual changes typical of very small or very large women. I am sure many women find women's clothes generally more well fitting than men's clothes but this isn't always the case, and women often select from the men's section for certain purposes. Even my very judgmental mother wore men's flannels and button down shirts to do work outside because her women's clothes didn't allow her to do these things.

The majority of detrans women I'm contact with (to be fair, I self-select for this) all remained fairly androgynous or masculine post-transition. I think in early detrans world this was more so the case and it's more likely to be the case for lesbians. I did not transition but desisted prior to transitioning and I actually got more masculine, not less, after I decided not to do it. My partner is 4+ years detrans and still dresses essentially the same and passes as male at work/in public; I am not sure what she will do in the future but I very seriously doubt she will ever seek to substantially feminize herself.

Post-detransition femininity is also not always sustained. A number of detrans women really go hard on femininity immediately after detransition for a variety of reasons, which are really difficult to concisely sum up and often differ between women who date/partner with men and those who don't. Unfortunately it's been a persistent problem in detrans-world that the most vocal people are often those who are most raw and still figuring things out and so you might see a lot of presentational femininity or weird mix-and-match presentations in public detransitioned folks who have not yet found a stable post-detransition identity nor a good and sustainable way to deal with the effects of their transition history. Many end up with a presentation that is pretty neutral for a woman.

I also want to note that those who fall on the "very masculine" end of the spectrum often don't make their appearance public through pictures and video for the same reasons anybody with a stigmatized appearance or who is subject to social judgment doesn't & there's a very clear pattern in what kind of detransitioned woman gets attention and who does not. If you are detransitioned with a visible transition history and not really interested in making your story about being a fucked up sob story of a ruined failed freak, just look at my body for God's sake, bless you, but you will be ignored.

It's been a long while since she was active but I would recommend the perspective of a woman who goes by CrashChaosCats, her Youtube is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW6W-xWXxmZZGQ8ZSrRfs-Q and she used to write on Wordpress & Tumblr under that name.

Transitional life phases (i.e. going to school, new relationships, etc.) are EXACTLY the spot where people tend to make a mistake about gender decisions, especially people prone to identity instability or general life ambivalence. I decided to hack out my decision to not-transition when I was moving out of my parents house for the first time, getting into the first relationship of my life, etc. etc. and although I've maintained my decision, I regret having a more stable and peaceful environment to work through some of the really difficult spots.

If you have any sort of proneness to letting your environment dictate who you are I would recommend against any sort of presentation or identity decisions right now because you are walking into a lot of changes that you haven't even had a chance to understand from the perspective of your current self nonetheless one which has made major, socially relevant life changes.

I'm glad you are getting a handle on your mental health and are sober now. Give yourself some time to settle into that state before you throw more at yourself. It's genuinely hard to process and maintain healthy habits and it gets harder to do so the more life changes happen (what works in one environment might not work in another, or under different stressors, etc.) Part of good mental health & decision making skills long term is learning not only how to stay well in one environment but flexibly adapting to many. Work on learning that skill before you touch the gender stuff.

It's not always clear what the difference is. I have both but the symptoms kind of are entangled with each other enough it's not really easy to tell which one is which. There are some theories of ADHD/autism which state they are conditions that shade into each other, or that certain forms are not really meaningfully distinguishable from each other. There are clearly people with one and not the other but there are a hell of a lot of us with some sort of oddball overlap. If you don't think you need a formal diagnosis you don't need to go get one but for real, your description of social alienation from other women is super familiar to me (it's pretty similar to how I experienced the gendered social world when I was your age) and it's one common even to more "feminine" autistic women.

lumpy i'm not going to tell you what meaning to find in your life but you seem really trapped within a paradigm your parents set up for you. i understand it feels so completely confining because you are literally trapped forever in the body which they turned into your cage. i remember a tweet i read by somebody who said that transitioning children is turning their bodies into the closet and i don't think i'll ever forget it. i understand why you'd want to leave this world when the whole world is set up to facilitate people like them and it seems inevitable that more people like them will continue to do shit to people like what they did to you. i am not always sure why i keep fighting even though i often feel just as doomed as you do. i think i had to get to a point where i had a space outside the doom. the people who said you ought to sever yourself completely from your family are right-- you can't find any space away from the doom until you do this.

i know that you so badly want them to accept responsibility for what they did but i know you probably know that they will not. this is not something you can do to children if you're capable of accepting responsibility, and taking responsibility is not a skill adults spontaneously learn if they're so deeply invested in denying what's happened to you. they won't accept responsibility even if you die because of what they did. so long as you will be alive honoring your pain will have to mean that they do not get the gratification of continuing to gaslight and abuse you and this means no contact with them. you can't know what's next or how to find a way to live until you really let yourself know who they are & let go of the idea that they will be someone else, someday. they didn't see you when you were young and they don't see you now. you said yourself you can't build a life on a lie. see what happens when you go forward actually looking at the truth about your parents.

i really hope there will be another side to your pain some day. you have a very powerful story. you might not be able to live an "ordinary life" but it sounds like you don't want to live whatever it is your parents bring to the world anyway. good luck