My journey started when I was a teenager, around 14. I was deeply uncomfortable with my body, especially when I started developing breasts. I hated them; they felt foreign and wrong on me. I was also struggling with severe anxiety and depression, and I had very low self-esteem. I spent a lot of time online and found communities that explained these feelings as gender dysphoria. It felt like I had finally found an answer. I was influenced by what I read and by friends who were also exploring their identities. I came out as non-binary first, then later as a trans man. I thought it was the only way to escape the discomfort I felt.

I started testosterone when I was 19. I was so sure it was the right path. The changes were exciting at first—my voice dropped, I grew facial hair. For a little while, I felt better. It felt like I was finally becoming who I was supposed to be. But the underlying issues, the depression and anxiety, never really went away. They just got quieter for a bit.

I got top surgery when I was 21. I was so focused on fixing my body that I didn't stop to question if I was fixing the right problem. After surgery, I expected to feel free, but instead, I felt a strange emptiness. The high of "fixing" my body wore off, and my mental health problems came rushing back, worse than before. That’s when I started to seriously question everything.

I began to realize that a lot of my initial discomfort wasn't about being the wrong sex, but about the trauma of female puberty and the pressure I felt as a young woman. I think I had a form of body dysmorphia, not dysphoria. I also started to understand that I had internalized homophobia; accepting that I was a masculine woman who liked women was harder for me to face than the idea of being a man.

I started seeing a new therapist who wasn't just automatically affirming. We worked on the root causes of my distress—my depression, my anxiety, my issues with self-worth and my discomfort with my body. This non-affirming therapy was what actually helped me. It allowed me to untangle my mental health struggles from my identity. I realized I had used transition as a form of escapism from my other problems.

I stopped testosterone when I was 23. I don't consider myself trans anymore. I'm just a woman who went down a very long and difficult path to understand herself. I have serious regrets about my transition, especially about the top surgery. I'm now infertile because of the hormones, and that is a profound loss that I have to live with every day. My body is permanently changed in ways I can't reverse.

My thoughts on gender now are that it's not some internal feeling you have to search for. For me, being a woman is just the reality of my female body. I don't "feel" like a woman; I am one. I think we need to be much, much more careful about medical interventions, especially for young people who are struggling with other mental health issues. I was not mentally stable enough to give true informed consent to such permanent changes.