I agree with another comment that you may be reading too much into Elliott's body language. I think it's safe to assume he's happy until he tells us otherwise.

That’s seems a naively superficial perspective. What’s the point of reading body language and then ignoring what it’s saying? And why would it be safe to assume celebrities are honest about their weaknesses and vulnerabilities in public forums?

In ten years from now or less, if everyone in your post continues on their current paths, you will not envy any of them. At all. So try to appreciate yourself for doing actual constructive things that will pay off in building a life while the online people risk being stuck in a perpetual and increasingly desperate adolescence.

It sounds like you are the only person preventing you from putting it behind you and moving on. Maybe some therapy would help you get over guilt or other lingering issues you may feel. It doesn’t sound like you did anything that would cause significant changes to your normal development.

I am not trans but I don’t think the argument over whether or not “trans people exist” is the correct framing. The real question is how many people gain psychological benefits that are worth the physical side effects of the medical procedures recommended as treatment for gender dysphoria.

You might gain a more accurate perspective on reality. Accounting for more information than what a person tells you is not “assuming.” What do you gain by assuming that people who you don’t know are verbalizing the truth when their body language or other behavior says otherwise? Do you believe it’s safe to assume that when a politician you don’t know says he is smarter and more honest than everyone else, he’s telling the truth and you have all the information you need to cast your vote?

Liking music made by women or even fashion and makeup don’t make you less mentally masculine. If you are averse to masculine things, that could possibly be considered not masculine, but liking feminine things does not make you less masculine; they are not opposed to one another in some zero-sum game.

I think it's a success that you're learning and trying to do things to better your life, even if they are uncomfortable, difficult, or unsupported. Transition and detransition are both difficult and I don't think you're a failure for taking on big challenges. A person who studies to become a neurosurgeon and then quits because he or she doesn't like it is no more of a failure than you are--you've made an effort to try, thought it would make you happy in some way, didn't work out, and now you're trying a different change. Good luck.

Human development and sexuality is extremely complicated and there is a lot of politics and opinion involved in understanding it. The current zeitgeist is to believe that sexual preference is innate and immutable, while in the past, non-normative sexuality was considered a mental illness. My opinion is that our life experiences can contribute to our sexual orientations and there is nothing wrong with that. In other words, maybe the abuse you suffered has contributed to your sexual preference for men.

From one perspective this might seem fucked yo and abnormal, but if you remember that what is true for you is true for everyone, it’s not fucked up at all. We are all at least partly meat computers programmed by our experiences. You would be far from lonely among those whose sexual preferences were influenced by nonconsensual experiences. It’s OK if the abuse influenced your sexual development, it’s OK if you were born that way. There’s no alternate, theoretical, “right” version of yourself that is better than you or suitable to compare yourself to. You are the best version of yourself because you’re the one that exists and made it through it all.

You know, just because a lot don’t doesn’t mean you can’t be one who does. Life is demanding, but it’s a lot easier to accomplish our goals than society tells us. Consistent steady effort to getting whatever you want really pays off over time. I think most people just don’t try as hard as they could because they don’t really believe in what’s possible and the steady droning of the world is that nothing great can be achieved except by a select, blessed few. It’s not true. Good luck to you both.

There are two problems with that hypothesis, however: one is that it is very difficult to determine how to properly diagnose gender dysphoria or if it even exists. What does it mean to feel like a different gender? Identities are constructed by people, not uncovered through a process of self-discovery. For the vast majority of children, these dysphoric feelings go away without any treatment, so should such a drastic intervention be justified when no intervention has a very high success rate? Secondly, transition is a treatment for GD, but how effective is it compared to other treatments or no intervention? I don’t think there are many or any large-scale long-term comparative studies.