I was just thinking about this the other day, wanting to write a post about it but not sure how I would phrase it.

2X has definitely been a help for me to reclaim my femininity, but just a week ago or so, all the posts on my feed from 2X were suddenly not at all focused on women’s issues and thoughts anymore but rather an onslaught of selfies by MtFs, with titles like “here’s me from a year ago before estrogen vs me today!!”, and “oh so we’re posting our transition photos now? Yay!!~ here’s mine!!”.

The few other posts I saw were on the same theme, being “support-posts” about how “trans women are women!”, and nothing else.

Maybe it happened incrementally, but to me it felt like it happened overnight, and it really rubbed me wrong. There are plenty of subs like that, and not every sub needs to be made into a trans-timeline-selfie-sub. If I wanted that, there are at least 10+ other subs with posts like that posted all around the clock that I could go to.

I went to 2X for intellectual discussions, not to look at people’s validation-selfies, but I don’t know, maybe this is what that sub will be like from now on. The sub’s moderators certainly seem to be very diligent in removing every comment or post that mentions anything about the sudden change in content of the sub, so this could quite possible just be the start of 2X’s transformation.

Edit: just went there to check again, and oh man. Out of the 20 top posts, all 20 were trans selfie validation posts. I had to scroll for quite a while before I could even find one post that was a discussion post and not a transition selfie. It’s really itching in my fingers to write something there questioning why the sub suddenly has made such a 180 in content and why all the posts are trans selfies now, but I know that that would just make me get insta-banned...

Whenever celebrities suddenly come out as transgender, I wonder if they’ll get hormones + go the surgical route or just decide to stay looking the same. And I wonder what the reaction of the public of the world is going to be to seeing them physically change like that, if they get to see it in stages and not just an “immediate change” like with Caitlyn Jenner.

And I also wonder how Ellen->Elliot is going to handle their career from now on. Will there still be a third season of Umbrella Academy or is the sudden change of the character from a woman into a man somehow going to be incorporated in a story that already has a novel that it is based on that has no such change in it?

Altogether, feels strange to see this, as someone who was a vocal advocate for trans people before it was “popular” in mainstream culture and who saw myself as ftm (and sometimes still do) until I found this sub and started questioning why I would rather identify myself as a male. It feels like all these celebrities coming out as trans now are ten years behind compared to my experiences, and it feels odd.

And most of all, I wonder whether any of them will dare to detransition if they end up feeling that that might be what’s right for them, or if the fear of backlash from the trans community will be too much.

It’s a sub made by trans people who don’t like this sub because we don’t hugbox and constantly affirm and validate them - so they pretend that that is the “actual” sub for detrans people.

But the mods there are not detrans, they’re trans, and they don’t allow anyone to mention anything about questioning the validity of the concept of transitioning, or saying that feelings of dysphoria might go away if someone gets proper treatment for depression, ocd, anxiety, ptsd etc, because that threatens their own strongly held beliefs.

They made that sub so that they can tell people who are questioning to go there instead of here, to control what detransitioners and desisters are allowed to hear and say, and silence every opinion and emotion that doesn’t explicitly affirm and validate them. They tell people that this sub is a secret alt-right incel hell hole no one should visit, because they can’t stand that we are questioning their narrative.

According to them, we are all supposed to say that the reason we have detransitioned/desisted isnt because of any fault with gender ideology or medical malpractice or toxic gender roles or abuse, but because we ourselves “realised” we weren’t actually trans and didn’t actually have any dysphoria. This way they can continue to tell themselves and other trans people that the trans ideology is watertight and that no one should question it.

Basically, they’re policing what detrans people and desisters are allowed to say and feel, trying to control the narrative, and they require you to not question the concept of transitioning or gender dysphoria in any way - we are only allowed to detransition/desist and talk about it if we follow their opinion that that means we didn’t actually have “real” dysphoria in the first place, so that we don’t threaten their feelings of self-validation and self-importance.

How did your thought process go when you decided to make this post?

”Ah yes, let’s go to the detrans forum, the one safe place where detransitioners and desisters are allowed to talk about their experiences and thoughts without getting immediately censored, and then tell them that I think they should all censor themselves because they don’t agree with me! That’s a great idea!”

The sheer entitlement of you demanding that everyone needs to agree with your arbitrary opinions regarding the existence of this nebulous concept of “gender” and “gender identity”, lest they are “hateful people” who need to censor themselves, truly is astounding. Many of us who have been through the trans cycle ourselves simply don’t believe in the theoretical concept of brain gender and gender identity ideology anymore, and the concept of transgenderism is not an immutable truth. Do you understand that?

To come here to our one safe space and try to police people here and saying that everyone of us are “transphobic” if we don’t subscribe to the idea that gender can be changed, and thereby implying that we should all be quiet because all such “transphobic” content should be removed / banned / not mentioned in the first place in your opinion, shows quite a bit of entitlement, don’t you think?

We are not obliged to agree with you regarding your opinions on gender simply because you think you are right, and we are not obliged to be quiet about our own opinions either - especially not in our one safe space.

We don’t exist to appease you, though. Yelling “transphobia!!1!” at people who don’t agree with your opinions regarding gender ideology doesn’t change our views as desisters and detransitioners. Many of us who have been through the trans cycle ourselves simply don’t believe in the gender and gender identity anymore.

We are not obliged to agree with you regarding your opinions on gender simply because you think you are right, and we are not obliged to be quiet about our own opinions either in our one safe space.

Good article, thanks for linking it! I wish there were some sort of petition for recognition, or international detrans medical patient organisation, that we who care could all join so we would become a united front that people would have a harder time disregarding and ignoring in the global debate on these issues.

The people who have had this physical and/or mental trauma inflicted onto them by medical “professionals” deserve a voice, a group that advocates for them, therapy, and medical help for the complications they’ve gotten through botched surgeries.

I’m sorry but no, a trans person can never have an identical body to a cis person - they can have an aesthetic approximation.

The actual biological function of body parts and organs and tissues within the body don’t change because of plastic surgeries to the outside of the body or surgical removal of some select larger structures, and a large part of growing up female is centred around trying to work around and “overcome” and conceal those anatomical functions to be allowed to take place in society and be taken seriously.

If you mean “general body shape after taking artificial hormones and mostly while wearing clothes”, then yes, a few transwomen can look entirely female, but general body shape is not really the only thing we’re talking about.

I don’t think it’s weird at all for you to feel like that. It feels like a very logical and understandable reaction and conclusion.

You were a child, were put under anaesthesia, and a man you don’t know personally did permanent things with a scalpel to a part of your body where other men would go to prison for even trying to touch, for no medical reason.

It would be a violation to amputate any part of someone’s body if it’s done for no medical reason, and the fact that it was your chest means there’s inherently a sexual component to it - and this is before even touching the can of worms of the scope of what his personal motivations are for having chosen that extremely specific line of work.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have the “right” to feel violated just because you don’t know “exactly what happened” during your time of unconsciousness or can’t read his thoughts. Even if his conduct had been exemplary and the purity of his motivations had been impeccable, it would still have been an extreme violation of an inherently sexual nature, committed by a man in a position of massive power.

OP says she’s a desister, but she also says in other subs that actually, her gender identity changes “from day to day” depending on who she meets or sees. So she is not a desister. She is a “trans gender fluid” who thinks gender is something you can change from moment to moment - not an actual desister or detrans.

She has absolutely no idea what it means to be an actual desister, and even less knowledge (or empathy) with actual detrans people. She says it’s solely people’s own fault what has been done to them, even though she isn’t even part of the detrans/desister community (since her “transness” shifts at the flip of a coin according to herself) and she even has the audacity to tell people here who have had botched surgeries, permanent health complications and/or bodyparts amputated to stop talking about it here because “otherwise real trans people won’t have as easy access to gender affirming care” (Perpetuating the no-true-Scotsman fallacy of saying we should all shut up because none of us were “really” trans to begin with according to her, so we have “no right” to weigh in on the subject of our own lives).

She’s in comments on this post saying that she thinks underage kids should have access to puberty blocker medication, and that puberty blockers are “reversible” - which they’re not - because “most transitioned people don’t regret it” - which is a completely baseless statement considering how many people keep quiet (or commit su*cide) due to the massive stigma and shame and self-hatred that exists surrounding detransitioning and the utter hatred we get from the trans community, meaning the actual number of people who regret transitioning is impossible to gauge.

She’s here on this post telling people that gender identity and gender dysphoria “absolutely can’t be influenced by others” - even though she also has posts in other communities where she says her gender changes depending on who she sees.

Please remove her from this community, she is just cosplaying as a desister. She’s just here to try to make desisters and detrans people shut up in our own safe space. I think she likes knowing she’s hurting people.

Absolutely. And also, using love-bombing at the same time to trigger even higher dopamine highs in each other.

After learning more about the physiological processes behind these intense happiness spikes, I’ve realised that what they’re doing (and what I was doing) when they “validate” each other online is pretty much just a spin on what’s called a “praise kink” in BDSM, where the submissive one / the one who’s cared for receives praise and loving compliments by the dominant / caretaker and is told how good they are and how beautiful and worthy and loved they are, with the specific purpose of triggering as large of a dopamine spike from it as possible, sometimes so strong that it even leads to an altered state of mind where everything feels “fuzzy” and soft and wonderful.

In BDSM, they call this altered state of mind “sub space” - within trans circles, they call this golden, fuzzy, wonderful feeling “gender euphoria”.

It is basically a drug-high where you - instead of taking a pill or injecting a substance to release dopamine - create the same extreme dopamine spike by priming your body into releasing all the feel-good signal substances your body itself has made and stored within your neurones (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin etc) all at once.

But it is not a state of mind you can stay in indefinitely. Signal substances are quickly broken down / reabsorbed by your body, and after the signal-substance-induced high leaves you, you have no healthy signal substance level left and get what is pretty much withdrawal symptoms. In BDSM, they have protocols for mitigating that, with “aftercare” to make sure the person doesn’t go into what they call “sub drop” afterwards, which is when you basically get dopamine withdrawals so bad your body gets cold and starts shaking and you lose mental control over your feelings and get anxiety and go into panic or hysteria.

Within the trans circles though, there is no such “aftercare” after the dopamine spike you got from people love-bombing you when you posted an image of yourself online hoping or asking for validation. You dip down below and feel awful about yourself and your life and the world - ie sub drop, or with trans words, dysphoria.

Once you learn about what is actually happening physiologically to people that makes them feel so good and then so bad, it’s such a sad thing to see people actively striving for it online and doing it to each other because they desperately want to chase the high and also give others the “gift” of feeling it for themselves. They all become each other’s enablers, and they are not helping each other at all in the long run, no matter how much they think they are.

Euphoria is not a state you can stay in, and chasing euphoria will not bring you happiness or mental health.