That was my intention is posting this, that even the most masculine, the ones who are “too far gone,” can still come back and do what feels impossible. I was terrified of detransitioning because I felt i was too masculine to ever look like a woman again and a lot of detrans women that I would see weren’t as “far gone” as I was. I hope that maybe someone who is on the fence or is scared of detransitioning because they are very masculine presenting now can see that it is possible with a little bit of hope !

I’m not super sure to be totally honest. I started having doubts in 2020 when I was one year on testosterone. I think I started to miss femininity because I was so hell bent on rejecting it that I started to get curious about what it would be like. I shrugged those feelings off as internalized transphobia funnily enough. I kept moving on with my life. Then those feelings started to come back, and I was planning for top surgery. I started to really think about the surgery and the recovery and if I really wanted to go through all that pain, if I could afford to just take off work. I started to wonder why I wanted this in the first place. Why did I do any of this in the first place. What am I doing with my life? I started to really think hard about my wants and desires and how for me, in this life, being a man wasn’t one of them. It was fun as a teenager, sure. But as I started to go into adulthood, as I thought about my future and growing old as a man, I started to really miss femininity. I realized how special it is, and I asked myself what I spent so many years running away from. Why didn’t I want to be a woman? Why did I reject it so hard? Why am I not allowed to be a woman? Who’s stopping me? And it snowballed from there :’)

I personally hate it because it groups detransitioniners as a whole into a political stance and only gets us more hate. I would love a documentary BY detrans women talking about their experiences that doesn’t involve some sort of political agenda or trying to convince people that all trans people are this evil shadow cabal. Just something that focuses on detranstioners and their stories.

it depends who you ask i think. if you were to post this in a trans subreddit or the “actual detrans” subreddit (which is modded by trans folks), the replies will be full of “that’s normal, it’s normal to feel instant regret because it’s a major surgery” or something along the lines of that, some may even bring up how removal of breasts results in severe hormonal changes, though there aren’t any clinically significant studies that show this happens.

i think it’s telling that asking in a place like this yields different responses. when i first started regretting hormones after a year on testosterone, I used the aforementioned framework to guide me through my grief and anxiety around regret. I said, “I’m just experiencing internalized transphobia, I’m just not where I want to be with my transition yet,” to help mitigate my feelings because nobody was talking about regret openly and honestly. I stayed on hormones for a few more years until that feeling returned. I looked at myself in the mirror. I passed 100% of the time. I had a beard, a deep voice that wasn’t nasally with a female inflection, a fully male sounding voice, an adams apple, I was tall and muscular. I looked at myself and thought, “okay… what now?” It was in that moment I realized what you realized today. It was this ruminating obsession of chasing the next big thing, of checking things off the transition to-do list in order to feel whole. To feel happy. To get that happiness and true alignment with body and soul I was promised. It wasn’t until that day that I looked at myself deeply and realized that no amount of surgeries or hormones would truly give me that. I would always be chasing. After hormones, the top dysphoria gets worse because now I just look like a man with breasts and societally, I can’t walk around like this. After top surgery, the next is a hysterectomy, and then bottom surgery, and then maybe jaw fillers? Facial masculinization surgery? Maybe body contouring to make me as brick shaped as possible? There will always be something readily available and a surgeon ready to do it. This is when something inside me shattered like glass. I realized I had made a huge mistake.

Depending on who you ask, you have a long road ahead of you regardless. If you listen to the folks here, we mourn your loss with you. We have resources here for those who have lost their breasts, their healthy breasts which nothing was wrong with physically. There is a sisterhood here, almost, in terms of grieving and grappling with that loss. There’s resources on how to move forward with this loss, on how to move forward with the terrifying reality that maybe this was a mistake. The mantra of this sub, I feel, is that “it is never too late.”

If you listen to the other detrans sub or a trans sub, the response will tell you to keep onward. That this is the right call. That you’re almost there , you’re still high on emotions from surgery, you just need to let yourself recover and simmer down and within the next few weeks you’ll be fine! And maybe you will, and I really do hope that for you! But, that sinking feeling will never go away. That doubt may never go away. And that doubt may entice you to push yourself further than you originally might have surgically.

I sincerely wish you all the best and am giving you all the strength you need for a healthy healing :) No matter what conclusion you end up landing on, just know that no matter how far you’ve gone it really is never too late.

More over I started to divorce femininity and womanhood from suffering and humiliation and shame. I realized that I can be a fun and quirky and whimsical young lady and be safe. I always saw woman as a completely separate category from man, almost beneath it. Like instead of just a comedian, it’s always “female comedian.” I just wanted to be me, and I think part of me associated me becoming my “radical true self” as becoming a very masculine person because everything that I was and am is frowned upon when done as a female, as a woman. If that makes sense?

I would look over all of my justifications for why I was trans. “I don’t feel like a woman.” What does it “feel like” to be a woman? Is being a woman, is gender in general, just a feeling? etc etc. “I don’t like my body.” What about my body exactly don’t I like and why? Is it because of the way female bodies are objectified, is it because I never felt like my body could belong solely to me because of the societal view on women’s bodies? etc etc. “I can’t be a girl like other girls.” How does one even “be a girl” properly? Why cant I be a girl in my own way? There are millions of different ways to be a woman. Once I realized that woman isn’t it’s own separate lesser than category from men and that NO woman truly “feels like” a woman because being a woman is not “a feeling,” it’s just a type of human being. I started really deconstructing all of these ideas of gender. I also at one point just got so tired of all of the confusion and back and forth. I was tired of blood work and being my endocrinologists little experiment which I know he viewed me as lol. I was tired of being on this “gender journey” and my whole life being encompassed by this “gender journey.” I just wanted it to be over. This, combined with my deconstruction of gender ideologies (for lack of a better term, i know gender ideology is a charged way to put it) and my longing to experience femininity on my own terms all combined into the overwhelming ache to detransition.

I think this in part is a huge pillar as to why trans people are extremely hostile against detransitioners. The fact that we WERE trans is the fatal flaw. It disproves virtually everything we know about what being transgender really is and what it really means to be transgender to begin with. It completely dismantles every argument and highlights every contradiction, pulling back the curtain and showing how the entirety of what we know about being trans and all of the medical journals, all of the data, is being held together by duct tape.

Seriously, if we were “never really trans,” then what does “really being trans” even mean? It isn’t medical transition that makes you trans, that’s gatekeeping, that invalidates trans men pre T/surgery and trans women who are pre e/surgery. So maybe it’s the gender dysphoria which every single person in this subreddit was professionally diagnosed with and sought treatment for? No, it’s not that either, because we didn’t actually have GD, we were misdiagnosed with it, but it’s still OUR faults for medically transitioning and listening to the only person in the room who has a doctorate or is a whole mental health profesional who’s job it is to properly screen, analyze, and diagnose their patients and we should feel stupid for it. Even if we did have gender dysphoria that wouldn’t matter because as you know, you don’t need gender dysphoria to be trans. Maybe it’s in the structure of our brains? No, that’s been debunked time and time again, that there is 0 difference between the structure of a male or female brain. So seriously… What is it?

What is the difference between a real trans person and a detransitioned persons “trans self”? How does their dysphoria differ if at all?

The simply reality is that there is no such thing as a “real trans person” and a “fake trans person,” and there is no way to make that argument without literally being transphobic lmfao. There is no “real gender dysphoria” and “fake misdiagnosed gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria is defined as feeling discomfort and discontented from you assigned sex at birth and wanting to transition to change that, point blank period. Being trans by definition is not identifying as the sex/gender you were born as, which for however long that period of time was, all of us did identity as a different gender at one point. The difference is we took a different route, we wanted to do things differently and didn’t settle for the “only solution” or “only treatment option” for gender dysphoria of gender incongruency. We wanted to understand the root cause of what was causing the gender dysphoria, and take a different approach to it with a fresh perspective.

I was 16 when I started hormones and at 20 i was gearing up to get top surgery. in the back of my mind I was like kind of debating it. It’s weird. part of me wanted to get it because I felt that I really needed it, that it was “life saving care,” that it was the final piece to complete my transition. This thought process combined with being on social media and only really surrounding myself w that school of thought I eventually started parroting a lot of the talking points and stuff. the main thing that kept me away from it was money. My mother (bless her heart!!) intentionally hid the fact that she had insurance from me because she knew that if I was covered I would have done it (and obviously looking back now, I would have deeply regretted that.) Two weeks after I had this breakdown over how much I hated my chest, I detransitioned and regretted my entire medical transition. I was weeks, months, away from getting a major irreversible procedure done. I sometimes look back just so confused as to what changed like, how did I go from wanting this so badly that I had genuinely convinced myself I was depressed without it, to being so relieved I didn’t do it? Weird.

i remember when i was 15 years old and had come out as ftm. i spent a lot of time online. i was super entrenched in online trans spaces, all my friends were trans too, everyone around me was trans and all the content i watched was other trans guys and their transition journeys. i was so into it all, it was all so real to me, it’s still so vivid i remember it like it was yesterday!

i was always pretty socially awkward and had a hard time making friends at school. i had a low self esteem. like really low😭. i hated looking at myself. i would pick myself apart, my facial features, my body, and i would just cry. i felt so ugly as a girl. i was a bit of an ugly duckling when i was that age. i hated the idea of being not only “ugly,” but also weird, as a girl. it just made me feel worse. the internet was a safe space for me because there was little gay people in my phone who understood me and made me feel slightly more confident in my awkwardness.

i don’t remember when exactly i wanted to be a boy. i think after seeing some of my friends come out and one youtuber who i admired come out, it started to get the cogs turning for me. i really liked the idea of being a boy. i liked the way boys were funny, the way boys were charming and confident even when they weren’t the most attractive. i liked how boys didn’t have the same expectations as girls did. weird and off putting boys have an awkward charm to them, unlike off putting girls. we were just kind of outcasted. being a boy seemed to be so freeing. being able to be shirtless, being able to be loud and obnoxious and funny with other boys. not caring about what society thought about my physical appearance or my body. i could just be a boy. my friends and others seemed to be having success with this idea, of just being boys. as the days went on i started to develop gender dysphoria. i wanted to be a boy. my life would have been so much easier. i was a bit of a tomboy, too, and my facial features were so strong, i felt like i SHOULD have been born a boy. i would be so much better received, better translated if i was born a boy. i would have friends, i would be funny, i would be so carefree.

so i transitioned. my dysphoria got better after i was able to live out my teenage years as a boy. my internet friends praised me and my transition, after every injection, after every milestone i had so many people validating me. i grew into a man. i was everything i’d hoped i’d be, my transition was a success. but something deep down in me still didn’t feel right. i don’t know why. i was the happiest i’d been in years, i felt confident, i was living out my dream. but something in me was still missing. i still had so many unresolved issues that i was masking with the success of my transition. i still, fundamentally, was deeply insecure. i still struggled to make friends. i still felt depressed, i still felt anxiety, i still didn’t feel right.

my 4 year testosterone anniversary was a week away. i decided then, after 7 years of transition, to try to understand why i was feeling dysphoric in the first place. after i realized what the root causes of that dysphoria was, i was left at a crossroad. i could either continue to transition or make amends with my birth sex and try to enjoy being a girl, being a woman, and making peace with that. i decided then to stop hormones, and make amends with my inner child almost. to tell her there was nothing wrong with my mind or my body, i wasn’t born wrong. i was just a bit troubled. i wanted to do right by her. she deserved better!

that was one year ago. i’m 21 years old now and a lot happier now. i just feel more comfortable. and you know, being an off putting strange girl is a bit charming too! sending you the best of luck !

you have to live your life on your terms. i journaled about this when i was first detransitioning, about the fact that all of the people who may/are criticizing you aren’t the ones having to do blockers, having to do testosterone injections once a week, having to go get massive amounts of blood drawn once every 3 months, having to get poked and prodded by doctors constantly, etc. they do not get to decide that for you. you deserve to be yourself as yourself, for yourself. you deserve to love yourself as a woman and as a girl if you so choose! you deserve to have parents who support you in that choice. listen to your logic and your heart and let it lead you. sending love :)