This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the provided comments, the account appears authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or an inauthentic actor.
The comments demonstrate:
- Complex, nuanced, and personal reasoning about trauma, autism, and psychology.
- Internal consistency in their critique of gender identity as a concept.
- A clear, sustained perspective aligned with common detransitioner experiences, including anger at medical institutions and exploration of alternative causes for dysphoria.
- A natural variation in tone, from analytical to empathetic, which is typical of a real person engaging passionately with a difficult topic.
The passion and criticism present are consistent with a genuine detransitioner or desister's perspective.
About me
I'm an autistic woman who felt completely out of place growing up. My discomfort with puberty and the trauma of being sexually harassed made me want to escape being female. I became obsessed with online gender communities and nearly transitioned, but I now see it was my OCD latching onto an identity. I've realized my body was never the problem; my trauma and anxiety were. Now, I'm focusing on my real life and building self-esteem outside of any labels.
My detransition story
Looking back on my whole journey, I think my experience with gender was really complicated by a lot of other things going on in my life. I never actually transitioned medically myself, but I got very, very close. I spent a lot of time in online spaces thinking about it, and I see now how easily I could have gone down that path if I’d been a few years younger.
A lot of my struggle came from just feeling deeply uncomfortable and out of place. I was an autistic kid who had a hard time fitting in socially, and I think that led to a lot of anxiety and low self-esteem. Puberty was especially hard; I hated the changes in my body, particularly developing breasts. It felt like they didn't belong to me. At the same time, I was sexually bullied and harassed by boys at school, which was traumatic and made me want to distance myself from being female. I had this idea that I was failing at being a woman, but I’ve come to realize you can’t fail at being what you are. It’s not a performance.
My thinking became very obsessive. I now see that a lot of my fixation on gender identity and sexuality was similar to OCD. I would ruminate constantly on abstract questions about who I was, what my labels should be, and whether I was "valid." It was like I was mentally stuck, focusing on my gender the way you might focus on your breathing until it becomes manual and stressful. I was also deeply influenced by online communities, and I see how the ideas there can act like propaganda, giving people pre-made thoughts instead of encouraging them to think for themselves.
I also struggled with internalised homophobia. I’m straight, but as a teenager, I remember wishing I weren't, because my only experiences with male attention were negative. I saw how trauma played a huge role for others, too. A close friend of mine, who identified as FTM and now is nonbinary, was sexually assaulted before developing dysphoria, and we both believe it was a direct cause.
For a long time, I bought into the idea that gender identity was a real, internal thing that drove who you were supposed to be. But now, I don’t believe in gender identity at all. I think it’s a concept that causes more harm than good for a lot of people, especially those prone to obsessive thinking. It’s more useful to see yourself as a person who just is, and to focus on building positive qualities like kindness or courage, which aren't tied to being a man or a woman.
I have regrets about the amount of time and mental energy I wasted on this. I regret how close I came to making permanent changes to my body that wouldn’t have solved the underlying problems. I benefited from stepping away from these intense online debates and focusing on real-life connections, like finding groups of people with shared interests where I could just be myself without having to explain my identity.
Here is a timeline of the key events as I remember them:
| My Age | Event |
|---|---|
| Around 11-13 | Went through puberty; felt intense discomfort and hated the development of my breasts. |
| Teenage years (13-17) | Experienced sexual bullying and harassment at school. Felt socially isolated due to autism. |
| Late teens to early 20s | Became deeply involved in online communities exploring gender; experienced obsessive rumination (OCD-like) about identity. |
| Early 20s | Realized I was close to medically transitioning but stopped after understanding the role of trauma, autism, and social influence. |
| Early 20s | Began to detach from the concept of gender identity entirely and focused on addressing underlying anxiety and building a life offline. |
Top Comments by /u/raisedonthenet:
There are no 'true' transgender people. 'Being a transgender person' is more like 'being an artist' or a scientist or a Christian or an atheist than, say, having cancer.
Many people who ended up detransitioning checked every box, just as there are people who reached the highest levels of religious ordination and ended up becoming atheists. Or people who were dead set on a certain career and ended up doing something completely different.
Transgender is more something you DO than something you are.
Psychiatry and psychological practice is yet to catch up with theory/research on the role of trauma in all kinds of mental health symptomatology. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088388/
From what I have seen 'gender specialists' are poorly trained and unable to think like research psychologists. A research psychologist would recognise, for instance, that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric construct which can and should be broken down into more discrete and precise 'ingredients', including:
- Body dysmorphia
- Depersonalisation (feeling as though your mind is not connected to your body)
- OCD symptomatology: rumination (on topics such as nature/nurture, 'what is my sexuality', the epistemology and ontology of identity); compulsive searching for reassurance on unfalsifiable things such as what label is best, how well you 'pass'; scrupulosity (e.g. am I 'valid', or 'problematic'?)
- 'Fantasy prone personality': ever notice how many trans-identifying people there are in arts, writing, and roleplaying circles?
- Sensory overload / hypersensitivity: implicated in hyperfixation on feelings in body parts or clothes, resulting in the feeling as if a body part needs to go and/or rigidity or anxiety about clothes
- Autism-related social skills deficits, leading to marginalisation and a desire to 'fit in'
Please note that autism spectrum disorder is correlated with non-normative ('queer') sexuality of all kinds, including fetishism, which results in further confusion and alienation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789215/
There are probably more, but these are some key ingredients that I have seen detransitioners implicitly describe or explicitly name in their narratives.
Many found that by targeting these more mundane 'ingredients' individually through already established psychological approaches to them, they were able to gradually dissolve the more exotic problem of 'gender dysphoria'.
I would really be interested in your specialist's response if you could show them my post.
Dumb, unimaginative, incurious clinicians with poor critical thinking skills and little to no insight into autism.
Pressure to publish or perish. The cultural sensitivity around LGB meaning that other academics/peer reviewers wouldn't look as closely at research into the T.
Wyeth needing a new market for HRT drugs after they fell out of fashion for menopause use. The makers of Lupron needing a new market for it after they discontinued its use for precocious puberty, prostate cancer, and uberine fibroids.
Parents who were frustrated with our eccentricities and internet addictions and wanted to just make us fit in with SOME real life crowd. Homophobic parents. Religious parents.
It could have been me if I were born 5 years later. It WOULD have been one of my close friends, an older autistic girl, if she had been born 10 years later.
People don't believe me when I tell them because I have learned to mask. The exact reasons why it could have been me are highly personal things I'd be oversharing if I went into.
Please hang in there for the future class action lawsuit.
I was sexually bullied and harassed by boys at school. My FTM friend who now identifies as nonbinary and has considered detransing was sexually assaulted prior to developing dysphoria and believes it was a causal factor. The Disney idea planted in our heads that straight people normally have healthy and happy sexual or asexual interactions with the opposite sex is complete and utter bull. Just going by my experiences - I don't know the actual overall data - I'd say that, even in a Western country, you're much more likely to have been sexually assaulted by the time you're age 18 than to have had any kind of positive sexual experience. (Certainly that would be true in a place like South Africa.) By that age, two of my female friends had confided to me about being incestuously molested as children, and another friend had been stalked. As a teenager I wished I were not straight (unfortunately, straight is the closest thing I have to a sexuality.)
>"I feel like a failure at being a woman"
You can never 'fail' at being a woman, because it's not a job.. It's just what you are. You can fail at being things like.. kind, courageous, creative, calm .. These are positive qualities that any person, regardless of sex, can aim to develop.
Thank you.. I'm going to stop engaging with individual cases, though, as I don't think it helps. Trans-identifying individuals are now being subject to too much conflicting and mixed messaging from all sides, and it's hurting them and the people around them. I'm just going to email trans organisations and surgeons from now on. I think the onus is really on them now and not so much on trans-identifying individuals - who are being blown to and fro in all ideological directions - to learn and do better.
The extreme distress and confusion you are experiencing right now is completely natural and to be expected.
Anyone in your situation would be experiencing distress.
What's more, many people, including highly intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate people, have made the same mistake you did. Highly intelligent and compassionate people have made other, similar mistakes (mistakes like: joining a real-life or online cult, taking dangerous drugs and getting hurt or addicted, or getting into an abusive relationship.
To me, and my friends and family who now know about detrans people, we think you are brave for allowing yourself to thinkmore honest thoughts and to feel more honest feelings about what this thing called 'transgenderism' is and how it has affected you.
Those are just my thoughts.
You seem like a thoughtful and sensitive person.
But it's funny - it's occurred to me that the common desire of feminist transwomen to set themselves ethically apart from and above other males - via feminism - is, in a very gauche stereotypical sense, masculine.
Perhaps what's really going on here - and with radfems too, actually - is a desire to live one step mentally ahead of or removed from social life rather than in and of it. Out of ... being treated as an outsider by other kids, scrupulosity, autistic or OCD desire for structure, categorisation and predictability , a strong sensitivity to empathy, shame and guilt .. ?
I think it's cool to take HRT and have a feminine name and long hair etc. while also looking after your body's health and not denying your sex. Debbie Hayton & Miranda Yardley e.g. are GC/TERF transwomen.
And if you want or find you need to entertain the idea in your mind either alone or with a partner that you are female/a lesbian in order to enjoy intimacy, I see nothing wrong with that if it remains private and in your bedroom.
Maybe it would be a good idea to distract yourself from your thoughts and feelings about sexuality and the moral quandary of AGP. Instead maybe try to put down roots in different IRL social groups you have things in common with. (I really recommend a Skeptics / atheists group if there is one near.) If it comes up in conversation, you can be honest then.
Focusing on gender is like focusing on your breathing. I once focused on my breathing involuntarily for about a week in a row. I had headaches and anxiety from breathing manually, through my chest rather than through my diaphragm. I had to make a concerted effort to learn to breathe diaphragmatically. Similar breathing exercises might help you 'breathe gender' more easily by calming you down and taking it off your mind for a time.
> They then are like "oh. So you're agender" cause they're still in that worldview
This shit lmao.
Nowadays I just tell people I don't believe in the idea that anybody has a 'gender identity' (or lack thereof) that determines their behaviour or what they 'should' do.
They are free to believe that people have a 'gender identity' that controls or should control what they do, but I refuse to partake in that belief of theirs or be held accountable to it.
Yeah.. a lot of us here have experienced preoccupation with abstract questions about identity to the point of being unable to perform everyday activities.
The concepts of 'sexual orientation' and 'gender identity', because they are imprecisely defined, are focal points for obsessive thinking.
I think one kind of faulty thinking going on here is that we think of the labels that apply to us as being like a program or subroutine in a computer, driving our behaviour. So we might say: 'my disorder/gender/internalised xphobia makes me feel or behave this way'.
This is a very abstract, generic way of making sense of our own emotions and behaviour.
It's usually more useful to try to understand our behaviour in the most basic, context-specific, and actionable terms (e.g. in situation x i usually feel y, when I feel y I usually end up behaving z.. etc.)