How could they be anything other than scared? This is uncharted territory, and everything they've been told is that they have to listen to people who say they're trans. No one knows what to do when a trans person says they aren't trans. They were all hoping they could hope for it (hell, didn't most of us when this showed up in our lives?), and they were told that hoping for it is bad. So now it's baffling, scary, confusing.

You did what you needed to do. You've lived the life that's been given to you to live, and you've learned that it's not the life you want any longer. They may not be able to support you through this - but that doesn't change your right to know who you are, and to be that person no matter what. All you can do to convince them to support you is to show them a person who's continuing to grow into themselves. I hope they're able to see it, and to follow you down this twisting road. Either way, I'm sure you'll find people to walk it with if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Detransition stories feel threatening to a lot of people because it highlights the idea that it's an option. The amount of resistance (both internalized and external) that many (maybe most?) trans people encounter around their transitions pushes them (okay, us) into a corner where it's "I have to do this or I'll die", so being confronted with the notion that some people transition and then find it's not for them opens the door up for that kind of overwhelming doubt and defensiveness all over again.

From my experience so far of: presenting as a femme guy for two years, transitioning and being on HRT for two years, and now having been (temporarily) off HRT and letting myself let go of gender labels as much as possible for a few months, I don't see anything surprising in this.

I don't have anything against surgery. I wonder every day whether I'll someday go down that route. I know I dream about it. But I've spent many years now in therapy, both talk and somatic, and having found religious faith in the course of this journey. I've socialized with my share of trans people.

What's clear to me is that even if bodies are the genesis of the issue, they're not the substance of a huge part of it. The social isolation, the psychological wounds, the physical dissociation, the self-doubt, the way he stigma and debate around all of it prevents people from seeking normal resources for being healthy - none of that stuff goes away because you've had surgery. Even if it helps you love yourself and feel good in your body, people need vast resources to heal all that other trauma. Without access to them, of course people will remain unhappy or even commit suicide. It was never reasonable to look at surgical intervention in isolation as a "cure", given how far-reaching gender's effects are in every aspect of our lives.

From my own struggles with my transition, I do believe that a lot of people can find ways to live without surgery. During my last relationship, my partner convinced me to stop considering full GCS, and although I still dreamed of having an orchiectomy, I'd started building out a fantasy of my future in which I was a woman with a penis and was happy that way. The abrupt end of that relationship, and the revelation of how deeply I'd been manipulated by someone who never supported my transition in the first place, kinda ruined the delicate emotional balance I had found, but I know that it's a place I'm capable of sitting now.

I'm not sure whether mine lost sensitivity or not, but I definitely had a big shift in overall sexual sensation while on HRT. I felt like I was just getting the hang of it when I went off, and now I can't even remember what it felt like. Since stopping, arousal has gone back to being pretty much centered around my penis. I was never huge on prostate stimulation, but I've definitely been able to get off on it since stopping.

identifying as nonbinary as a "stopgap identity" is a pretty problematic suggestion, and would only really confer any kind of comfort in circles where trans identities are accepted enough that non-passing binary trans people would probably feel safe enough to skip it.

The way to "move away from the rhetoric that life is hell until you get hormones" is to push harder for society to support people in exploring their gender. We tell people "you're only a man/woman if your body is like x/y/z", so of course people are going to seek out hormones as validation of what they're feeling/experiencing. So much of this conversation takes place in a vacuum where mental health resources are available, accessible, and adequate, and where there are "reasonable" alternatives to the ridiculous lengths trans people often go to in seeking validation. That's just not the world we live in.

It's hard for me to even conceptualize such a thing; gender norms seem so self-evidently tied to the different ways that bodies, especially sex-linked characteristics and reproductive capacities, exist in and move through the world that I can't ever see them "going away". My assumption would be that people would seek to change their bodies however they want, because there would be no injunction not to.

My decision to transition was motivated by the realization that I wanted a "female" body, and that if I called myself a woman then society would allow me to have it. I'm not talking about reproductive capacity or any of the stuff that we all know can't change. More the "shallow" stuff that's about how it feels to be in a body that takes up space in a certain way. I was treated as male before, but I was also openly and comfortably gender-non-conforming and had navigated that life for a while. I'd essentially stepped out of male roles as much as it seemed like was possible without modifying my body, and found that I wasn't satisfied with the life I'd found.

Since transitioning, I've found some acceptance as a woman, but mostly I've just occupied nonbinary space both intentionally and by others' judgments of me. I'm honestly not sure I would care, if my body was the way I want it to be. Call me whatever you want - but whatever I'm doing sure doesn't look "male".

Now that I'm on the flipside - off HRT, but presenting female - I'm getting the opposite of what I'd originally sought, and I find that I'm much less motivated to worry about how people see me. I'm getting sir'ed again, which had stopped happening. But I just kinda...am not worried about it. My body looks like this, so of course they're gonna say that. I don't have to care. It's awkward once my name comes up, or if they look at my license, but thanks to quarantine I don't really have to interact with people anyway.

I'm fond of saying "look, being trans isn't the only thing that's wrong with me" and gesturing at my pile of psych meds. Therapy is important regardless of your gender situation. I know plenty of trans people who are doin' their thing but don't have access to anything approaching the therapeutic resources they (and lots of other people) would need to have fulfilling lives. Until and unless we're doing better at responding to the mental-health needs of the general population, putting further restrictions on transition-related resources seems dicey to me.

Working against dichotomous thinking is a huge part of coming to terms with gender, no matter which side of transition you wind up on. I see multiple places in your post where you're highlighting extreme versions of potential situations. It can feel "more reasonable" to throw up the worst possible scenario on both sides, because it makes the decision process feel "realistic". But in reality it creates an indecision trap, where the only possible way to resolve the pain you feel - picking a course of action and following it - is cut off by the habituated belief that either choice is going to be terrible.

For myself, I've been working on creating little spaces where I can feel the bad feelings without needing to have made a decision. The pandemic is helping with that - I don't leave the house, and when I do my face is covered, so there's little to no external pressure on me to have a simple gender. Making space to feel, "yep, I'm male, this is it" for a while, and then feeling, "yep, I'm female, this is it" later, and watching it happen back and forth in positive and negative ways has been helping me to see more clearly that the instability of my perspective is the real source of turmoil. I do still need to eventually arrive at some sort of gender. I'll either be back on HRT or not. But for now, I'm learning to see the difference between "stuff that sucks because of gender" and "stuff that sucks and also gender", and it's helping me feel more comfortable with going with the flow and accepting what comes.

So yeah. Make space for yourself. If it doesn't feel good for you to be around trans folks right now, then that's okay. The hard part is letting go without writing them off forever in the process. Remember: what you feel and do and say right now is only about right now. It won't solve tomorrow or Forever, and it doesn't have to. You'll have regrets, you'll lose things, you'll get hurt, you'll make mistakes, it'll be embarrassing - but the more you're able to let each moment be just one moment, the more you'll feel yourself being led by your heart and not your fear, and you'll start seeing which things stay steady even when everything else gets chaotic.

It's the hardest thing in the world. Please be gentle and loving with yourself. This hurts really, really bad. But you're going to make it.

I'm here because it's a new concept that detransition is ever an answer. The existence of detrans people in no way invalidates the existence of trans people. It just illustrates that our society has to continue working toward a better understanding of how we reckon with gender. Telling people who they are and refusing to listen when they object hurts people. Telling people "you're whatever you feel like you are!" leaves people open to different sorts of hurt. Neither is the right answer, and we just have to keep listening to the people on every side of it who are getting hurt, so we can understand how to better guide people to the lives that fit them best.

From your description of your relationship with your sibling, it sounds to me like "going about this" at all could be counterproductive. You say your mother set you up as an antagonist in your sibling's life, and that your attempts to check in have been met with hostility. Confronting your sibling about things they don't want to talk to you about could very well result in them pushing you away even harder.

I come from a pretty borderline background too, and my attitude has for a long time been that I try to be an ally to my friends and family, even when I'm pretty sure what they're doing isn't going to work - because telling them what I think has never gone the way I hoped it would. Especially with someone from your family background - unless your sibling is coming to you, whatever you offer is going to feel for them like an attack, and they'll bite back.

As far as their gender situation - how old are they? You say you went through a questioning phase in your sexuality, and that you remember not liking some of how your body was developing, so you know that these things are fleeting feelings sometimes. If it is a passing feeling for them, pushing them might lead them to attach shame feelings to that part of themselves, making them protective of it and leading them to seek comfort less carefully in gender non-conformance. Even without BPD in the mix, folks who are exploring their gender can be really reactive to people "expressing concern", and if they perceive you as critiquing them you may lose the chance to talk to them at all about it. I know you're concerned for them - but without being able to talk to them, you run the risk of trying to stop them from doing things they weren't even considering, which could feel condescending to them.

Preferring they/them doesn't necessarily indicate that someone has a desire to medically transition - it pretty much just means they're not comfortable with people identifying them by their assigned gender. Before I ever decided to transition, I crossdressed openly for years, and I would tell people "I don't like 'he' because it reminds me of where I've been; I don't like 'she' because it reminds me of what I won't ever get to have; 'they' gives me space to breathe." For a long time that was comfortable for me, and it gave me the time I needed to make my decision carefully.

If they ask you to use they/them pronouns (and not before then, because they blocked you and you only know about this by stalking them), using those would likely be huge in establishing some modicum of trust. The only reason you'd use they/them is if you heard and accepted what they said - so using it would make clear that you're listening to them and respecting that they're the one in control of their life. They might make decisions you don't feel good about, maybe even ones they later regret - but it is their life to screw up themselves, and trying to stop them will just exhaust you and infuriate them.