This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the provided comments, the account "earl-k" appears authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or an inauthentic detransitioner/desister.
The user demonstrates:
- Personal, nuanced reflection on their own experience as a gay male desister, including feelings of shame and sexual motivation.
- Consistent, developed viewpoints on gender ideology, therapy, and personal growth that evolve over time.
- Self-awareness about their posting habits, the sub's rules, and their place within the community.
The passion and criticism expressed are consistent with a genuine individual who has experienced harm and holds strong opinions on the topic.
About me
I'm a gay man who started questioning my gender because I felt alienated from my body during puberty and couldn't fit into male stereotypes. My desire to transition was fueled by online influences, a need to escape myself, and a compulsive sexual fantasy I mistook for identity. Taking hormones only made me more depressed and anxious, and I now see my struggle was really about anxiety, low self-esteem, and internalized shame about my sexuality. Non-affirming therapy and physical training helped me confront my underlying issues and build resilience instead of running from discomfort. I've detransitioned and am now learning to accept myself as a gay man, regretting the time I lost and the permanent changes I made.
My detransition story
My journey with transition and detransition is deeply personal and complicated. I’m a gay man, and looking back, I believe a lot of my desire to transition was tangled up with internal struggles about my sexuality and a kind of obsessive thinking I’ve always had.
I never felt like I fit the typical "male" stereotype, especially as a young gay man. Puberty was an incredibly difficult time for me; it felt like a form of psychosis. My body was changing in ways that felt alien and wrong, and I developed a powerful discomfort with myself. I now see that a lot of my feelings were less about gender and more about a general anxiety and low self-esteem. I hated the expectations placed on me as a man and felt a deep sense of shame.
A huge part of my initial interest in transitioning was influenced by what I saw online and the friends I had at the time. The idea of becoming someone else, of escaping the person I was, was incredibly appealing. I now recognize this as a form of escapism. I also have to be brutally honest and say that a sexual component was involved. As a gay man, I’m very aware of how powerful and sometimes destructive male sexual energy can be. For me, the desire to transition was, in part, motivated by a sexual fantasy. It’s deeply embarrassing to admit that I was prepared to alter my entire life because of a compulsive sexual idea, but it’s the truth. The online communities I was in didn’t help; they framed this compulsion as a valid identity and encouraged me to pursue it.
I did start taking hormones for a period. I never had any surgeries. During this time, I was deeply depressed and anxious. My thoughts on gender itself have changed completely. I don't think "gender" is a useful concept anymore. I think people can develop obsessions about many things, and because sex is so important to humans, an obsession with wanting the characteristics of the opposite sex creates a profound psychological disturbance. I see now that my issues were more related to body dysmorphia and an inability to cope with the social pressures of being a gay man, not an innate identity.
I benefited immensely from non-affirming therapy. A good therapist helped me work through my underlying issues—my anxiety, depression, and obsessive thought patterns—without automatically affirming my desire to transition. This was crucial for me. It helped me separate my real mental health struggles from the idea that I was born in the wrong body. I also started working with a personal trainer, which taught me a valuable lesson about discomfort. Being physically challenged helped me build mental resilience and realize that not all discomfort is bad or something to be immediately escaped.
I absolutely have regrets about transitioning. I regret the time I lost and the permanent changes to my body from the hormones. I regret being swept up in an ideology that medicalizes personal pain and offers irreversible solutions to temporary problems. It breaks my heart to see how this ideology has impacted others, especially young people who are just uncomfortable with puberty and societal expectations, and butch lesbians, a community I have great love and respect for, who seem to be disappearing.
My detransition was about coming back to myself. I am a gay man. I am comfortable with that now, even with all its complexities. I don't believe in gender ideology anymore. I think it’s a regressive force that reinforces stereotypes and has caused a lot of harm.
Here is a timeline of my journey based on my experiences:
| Age | Event |
|---|---|
| 13-16 | Experienced intense discomfort and anxiety during puberty. Felt disconnected from my body and male social expectations. |
| 19 | First started seriously questioning my gender, heavily influenced by online communities and friends. |
| 20 | Began identifying as non-binary as a first step. |
| 21 | Started taking testosterone. |
| 22 | Underwent non-affirming therapy which helped address underlying anxiety, depression, and OCD-like obsessive thoughts. |
| 23 | Realized the sexual fantasy element driving my transition and stopped hormones. Began the process of detransitioning. |
| 24 | Fully re-identified as a gay man, working on self-acceptance and physical health through exercise. |
Top Comments by /u/earl-k:
Puberty is a form of psychosis lol.
I wrote a long post which I subsequently deleted. It was the first time I’d ever put those particular behaviors and thoughts in writing. I was surprised at how hard it was to give a psychological account. I still hold the memories of the person who did those things. What’s left of them. But I no longer understand that person’s thinking.
This is a reasonable argument. Also that there was a violent attack on women (some of whom were elderly) in NZ by activists a few days before and a t r@ns day of vengeance (of unknown extent and seriousness) scheduled for a few days subsequent.
But it's human nature to try and match events to your own agenda and there have been crimes with much greater bizarre coincidences in the past, so retaining some skepticism before drawing a conclusion is always prudent, especially this soon after the event with so many facts still unanswered.
Also, female mass shooters aren't non-existent. Some are missing from most databases because of the FBI's "minimum of four dead victims" criteria. Amy Bishop & Sylvia Seegrist killed 3 each. Laurie Dann (also a school shooter) killed 1 & wounded 5.
i think part of is has to do with shame. For men detrans/desisting is often motivated by the realization that there was a powerful sexual fantasy element to the desire to be trans. It's frankly embarrassing to admit you were prepared to (or did) change your whole life because of a sexual fantasy.
Edit: spelling *sigh*
I started with a personal trainer about 9 months ago. I outlined on our first consultation that I wanted the intensity of our sessions to begin low and very gradually ramp up. In our first session he pushed me to the point of feeling a bit ill by the end of the workout. (I was in really terrible shape and looking back now, he was babying me 😳)
My first instinct was to feel offended, outraged and invalidated. He hadn't listened to me and i was being bullied! 😠😭
I had caught the zoomer disease and hadn't even realized it! Aside from the physical health benefits, a little discomfort, emotional and physical is good for your psyche! Being challenged is good for you! I try hard not to judge other people's suffering and you can find real narcissistic, abusive gaslighting everywhere, it's the curse of our time. But it is within your power to control how you perceive, respond to, and interpret the world around you. And the key to dealing with these things is to be the master of your own mind. I believe that strongly for myself. But it's not easy. Finding ways to exercise your tolerance for low level mental discomfort is one way to increase your resiliency to real suffering.
And BTW I have had years of therapy. I'm still a big believer in it. I'm grateful to every therapist I've had, they've been excellent and I've been lucky. But one thing each of them could have done better is to have put exercise on the agenda even though I'm in excellent physical health and appear very fit.
Perhaps idiosyncratic, but personally I don't think 'gender' is a particularly useful concept. People can develop obsessions/compulsions about a wide variety of things. By definition that means the individual has developed an exaggerated sense of importance for them. The fact that sex is so important to humans means that developing a compulsion over wanting to posses the primary and secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex is bound to create a profound psychological disturbance.
But that compulsion doesn't tell us very much about the class of people that possess those characteristics. Undoubtedly some aspects of human behavior are heavily conditioned by sex (aggression, desire to nurture) and some are purely cultural (wearing dresses, makeup). But I don't think it's useful to posit an abstract model of gender along a spectrum to explain those differences, and in many ways gendered thinking is a regressive way of thinking about everyday life.
I'm a gay male and this is really a post best answered by other females (thanks for allowing me to reply by not tagging it, I hope i'm not abusing the privilege), but I love butch lesbians. 😍😍😍 My mom was one. It's been heartbreaking to see their disappearance in young millennials and zoomers.
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If you want a personal project that's where where I would direct my energy. 😂🤣
This is a good observation. The author is on the autism spectrum and female, and she does know many trans and detrans people, but she's (apparently) never considered herself trans.
She's definitely modeling the situation as: there is something real and innate we call 'trans' and all 'gender dysphoria' is a sub set of that. But we also have this other type of dysphoria in people who have undiagnosed autism and that dysphoria is being treated inappropriately (because it's not informed by their autism).
Should that dysphoria be called 'gender dysphoria' (just because it's related to their autism doesn't mean it can be treated to magically go away)? But in any case their autism should obviously be taken into account with whatever treatment is used to treat the dysphoria.
You don' need to apologize for posting. That's what the sub is for! It's not a substitute for friends. It's not substitute for therapy, but it can be helpful. I can't know what i think unless i write it down and hate journaling so I feel various forums and social media have been helpful on a lot subjects, personal, professional, recreational, etc.
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Mods will let you know if you stray off topic (by deleting you post lol)
This makes my blood boil. For years the Guardian had senior women writers on the beat reporting on gender ideology. Rather then seriously engage the issue with investigative reporting, they refused to allow the women to report on it, edited gender issues out of their articles and ultimately force them out of the paper.
e.g. this article by Suzanne Moore is over two years old. She now works at The Telegraph.
I'm in 100% agreement with this post. It's obviously important and there really isn't an alternative to enforcing super-strict moderation to protect the sub. Also this IS a sub for emotional support first and debate second. Conflating 'triggering' with with 'safety' is one of the great curses of our time. As is people adopting the persona of emotional fragility and weaponizing it. I strongly believe that you can learn to be indifferent to what people think and say abut you. But heated debate on a sub explicitly for mental health support is not the best forum to learn that emotional maturity.
i'd also mention that I've deleted the last several posts that I've made. You can go through my earlier post history if you want to read the tone of what I've written on the forum. I've always tried to put being supportive and helpful front and center on the forum. But you can also see some of my posts are in technical violation of the above and at least an interpretation of older slightly less emphatic rules.
Maybe it's a good thing, but I don't think I'll be able to participate on this forum anymore. Not a plea for any change. I wouldn't know what to suggest if it was. But it's feedback that I do feel it's important to provide.