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Reddit user /u/love_mhz's Detransition Story

Transitioned: 16 -> Detransitioned: 22
female
low self-esteem
hated breasts
took hormones
regrets transitioning
depression
influenced online
got top surgery
now infertile
body dysmorphia
retransition
puberty discomfort
anxiety
benefited from non-affirming therapy
autistic
eating disorder
This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
On Reddit, people often share their experiences across multiple comments or posts. To make this information more accessible, our AI gathers all of those scattered pieces into a single, easy-to-read summary and timeline. All system prompts are noted on the prompts page.

Sometimes AI can hallucinate or state things that are not true. But generally, the summarised stories are accurate reflections of the original comments by users.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious

Based on the provided comments, the account "love_mhz" appears to be authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or inauthentic.

The comments demonstrate:

  • Personal, nuanced, and empathetic advice that is context-specific to each user's post.
  • Consistent perspective advocating for careful consideration, healing comorbidities, and acceptance, regardless of the user's ultimate choice to transition or detransition.
  • In-depth knowledge of community terminology (e.g., desister), historical context, and common co-occurring conditions (like eating disorders and ASD).
  • A human-like writing style with natural digressions, rhetorical questions, and varied sentence structure.

The passion and strong opinions expressed are consistent with a genuine detransitioner/desister who has experienced harm.

About me

I started as a teenager who felt completely out of place in my female body when I developed during puberty. I was told my depression and anxiety were just gender dysphoria and that hormones would fix everything, so I started taking testosterone at 19. I eventually realized my discomfort was tangled up with my autism and other issues, and that medical transition wasn't the answer for me. I stopped hormones and have since gone back to living as a woman, though I now live with permanent changes like infertility. I've found peace by working on my other mental health and learning to accept my body for what it is.

My detransition story

My whole journey with this started when I was a teenager. I was deeply uncomfortable with my body when I hit puberty; I hated developing breasts and just felt completely out of place. I now see that a lot of this was tangled up with other issues I was dealing with, like depression, anxiety, and a really low self-esteem. I was also diagnosed with autism later on, and looking back, I think that played a huge part in how I experienced my body and social expectations. I felt different from other girls and that feeling got interpreted as being a different gender altogether.

I found a lot of information and community online, and the message I kept getting was that if you were uncomfortable with your sex characteristics, you were probably trans. That questioning your gender meant you were trans. I was told that my other mental health struggles were probably just symptoms of untreated gender dysphoria and that they would get better after I transitioned. I wasn't encouraged to work on my eating disorder or my self-image first. The advice was to try hormones to see if it felt right.

So, I did. I socially transitioned in my late teens and started taking testosterone when I was 19. For a while, it felt like a solution. It felt like I was finally fixing the problem. But the initial high didn't last. I started to realize that no amount of hormones or surgery was going to give me the "fantasy body" I had in my head. I was becoming a forever-patient, bound to medical care for the rest of my life, and that thought started to feel heavy and scary.

I began to understand that my gender dysphoria was intertwined with other things—my autism, my body dysmorphia, and my eating disorder. They were all connected, and I had tried to solve them all with transition. I started to detransition in my early twenties. It was a process of slowly stopping testosterone and going back to living as a woman.

I don't regret my transition in the sense that I needed to go through it to learn what I know now. But I do have regrets about the medical interventions. I took testosterone, and while I didn't have any serious health complications, I am now infertile, and that is a permanent consequence I have to live with. I also got top surgery, and while I don't miss my breasts, I sometimes regret the permanence of that decision too.

My thoughts on gender now are that it's not as simple as being born in the wrong body. For me, it was more about a deep discomfort that came from a lot of different places. I believe you can be a happy person who experiences gender dysphoria without medically transitioning. There is a lot of relief in giving up the fight and learning to accept your body for what it is. Therapy that wasn't just about affirming a trans identity was really helpful for me in figuring all this out. It helped me separate the dysphoria from the other issues.

I benefited from taking a step back from the online communities and just connecting with nature and my own body through physical activity. It sounds hokey, but it grounded me. My advice to anyone questioning is to take your time. This feels urgent, but you have plenty of time. Work on healing your other mental health struggles first, because no matter what you choose—to transition or not—you’ll need a healthy mind to be happy.

Age Event
13 Started feeling intense discomfort with puberty and developing a female body.
16-18 Socially transitioned to male; began identifying as transgender.
19 Started testosterone hormone therapy.
22 Stopped testosterone; began the process of detransitioning.
23 Officially re-identified as female; considered myself fully detransitioned.

Top Comments by /u/love_mhz:

11 comments • Posting since February 11, 2020
Reddit user love_mhz explains the difficult position parents are in when their child comes out as trans, noting that while full affirmation is presented as the only supportive option, there is a complex space between that and rejection that isn't easy to navigate.
25 pointsJul 12, 2020
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I feel you. But I also empathize with parents. If you are not already familiar with the subject except having an awareness that some people transition, and your child comes to you and says "I am deeply unhappy, I think I know why and how to fix it," what do you do? Support comes naturally to many loving parents. If you reach out to other parents in the same situation you will be told that anything but full affirmation may as well be condemning your child to death. There's a grain of truth there -- the statistics so often mangled relate suicide and family rejection. There's space between total affirmation and rejection or abuse, but what that actually looks like isn't easy to know.

Reddit user love_mhz (desisted) advises someone unsure about starting testosterone to wait, weigh the pros and cons, and ignore accusations of transphobia.
23 pointsSep 8, 2022
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It's your body and your life. People who might call you transphobic for having doubts or fears probably won't be in your life when you're 40 and 60 and 80.

I think it's wise to wait. Think through your hopes and fears, weigh the pros and cons. Develop perspective and realistic expectations. Early transition can give you a few extra years living as a man, but waiting can help you feel more certain and secure in your choices.

Reddit user love_mhz explains that life is worth living as a detransitioned person, finding joy in body acceptance and relief in no longer being a "forever-patient." They advise taking time, using therapy and physical activity to accept your body, noting that no amount of medical intervention can create a "fantasy body."
21 pointsFeb 11, 2020
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Yes, life is worth living as a detransitioned person. There is joy to be found in accepting your body for what it is, and relief in giving up being a forever-patient, bound to medical care. You can be a happy gender dysphoric person. You can be a happy trans person. You can be a happy detrans person.

My advice is to take your time. You have plenty of it, even though this may feel urgent. Work on truly accepting your body -- therapy can help, so can any type of physical activity and connecting with nature (hokey as that may sound). This will serve you no matter what you choose, because no amount of HRT or costly surgeries will give you a fantasy body and it very difficult to be a happy trans person if you cling to that idea.

Reddit user love_mhz explains the difference between a "desister" and someone who is "detransitioned," clarifying that both terms are valid for someone who socially transitioned for three years but had no biomedical interventions.
18 pointsApr 21, 2020
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Generally speaking the term for someone with your experience is "desister." You desisted.

I don't think it is offensive at all for you to call the process of reidentifying as female after three years of being socially transitioned "detransitioning" or to consider yourself detransitioned, and this sub is most certainly for you! But, if/when you want to use clarifying language, calling yourself a desister/saying you desisted will communicate having spent a period of having been trans identified without having any biomedical interventions.

Reddit user love_mhz explains the link between autism and detransition, noting the higher prevalence of left-handedness and other "brain differences" in the ASD population. They state that clinicians often don't see autism as a reason to stop transition, as many autistic people pursue it, but better information about ASD might have provided a different lens for understanding one's experience.
15 pointsJul 5, 2020
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There is also a documented higher prevalence of left-handedness amongst the ASD population. There is, in general, a higher chance of autistic people being "brain different" in ways that are not strictly autistic. To the clinician who views being transgender as a separate, innate brain difference, it is not necessarily surprising that they don't consider ASD to be a differential diagnosis for gender dysphoria or to contraindicate transition. Many diagnosed ASD people pursue transition. If you had received better information about ASD and had that as a lens through which to understand your experience, maybe you wouldn't have transitioned, but maybe you would have. A therapist probably wouldn't have stopped you if you still really wanted to.

Reddit user love_mhz comments on a post about detransitioning, challenging the idea that trans people were unknown in 2002 and questioning assumptions about a sibling's community and motivations.
11 pointsApr 21, 2020
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Woof.

There were people who transitioned back then, see Magnus Hirschfeld.

2002 wasn't "before trans was even a thing," at that point there had been decades worth of prominent trans people within and beyond the LGBT community. Adults were all broadly aware of the concept of trans people... sorry, it annoys the eff out of me when people act like this was never a thing people knew about.

Is your sibling's community toxic, or is that an assumption you're making?

What you leads you to conclude this transition is rooted in a fetish as opposed to deeply felt gender dysphoria?

I've heard, here and elsewhere, of older people who have been transitioned for a very long time detransitioning. But I wouldn't put money on any individual trans person detransitioning after 18 years.

Reddit user love_mhz explains how they were told that discomfort with sex characteristics, questioning, and other mental disorders were definitive signs of being trans and that the only way to know for sure was to try hormones.
8 pointsFeb 21, 2020
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I was told that being uncomfortable with sex-related characteristics meant that I was trans. That if I questioned, then that meant I was trans. That various mental disorders are symptoms of untreated gender dysphoria, that only could be resolved after transition, not problems that need to be resolved before you can responsibly make huge, life-altering decisions. That the way to know for sure is to try hormones.

I don't think it's so cut-and-dried as there being "real" trans people who are born that way and always benefit from transitioning and unfortunate non-trans people who mistakenly believe(d) themselves to be trans.

Reddit user love_mhz questions the authenticity of a story about a mother's interview, citing skepticism over an alleged email sent to "sausageroll.com.au".
7 pointsMay 22, 2020
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She even gave an interview to a popular news magazine where she discussed the abuse they allegedly suffered through with her Australian ex-husband.

Would be interested to know if this exists, because this story sounds super fake. Forgive me for not immediately buying an email (was there even an email?) sent to "sausageroll.com.au"

Reddit user love_mhz comments on the slim chance of detransitioning after many years, arguing it's unreasonable to expect a long-term transitioner to "wake up" and detransition.
6 pointsApr 22, 2020
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There's a person on r/detrans who is detransitioning after 17 years. I made a point of saying it happens. The chances are just slim at that point. It's ridiculous for OP to berate her sibling hoping he will "wake up". There's no reason to think he will ever decide to detransition.

Lili Elbe was not the only person Dr. Hirschfeld treated, nor do I see transition as being dramatically different in social terms whether the transitioner is intersex or not.

Reddit user love_mhz (desisted) advises a questioning user to explore their attachment to gendered dynamics, suggests reconciling with oneself for mental peace, and strongly recommends moving out of a red state.
5 pointsAug 20, 2022
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Perhaps it's worth exploring why you feel attached to the gendered dynamic in your personal relationships. If your boyfriend was gay and interested in you as you are right now, would that bother you?

I tend to think it's better to find a way to live without needing perpetual contact with doctors and pharmacists, if that is possible. I tend to think reconciling with yourself as you are is a major part of finding mental peace as a gender dysphoric person, regardless of whether you choose to pursue biomedical intervention and/or permanent social transition.

Regardless of all of that, GTFO of your red state. At the absolute least, get yourself to the largest city in your state. This is an ancient coming-of-age rite for our people.