This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the provided comments, this account appears authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or an inauthentic detransitioner/desister.
The user's comments are highly personal, emotionally nuanced, and internally consistent. They describe a specific, complex history with gender dysphoria rooted in personal interests (fujoshi, art style), a medical condition (PCOS), and internalized misogyny. Their language is natural, varies in tone (from supportive to analytical to frustrated), and shows development of their perspective over time, which is difficult to fake. The account exhibits the passion and lived-experience depth expected from this community.
About me
I started wanting to be a man at 13 after getting into fanfiction and gay romance stories online. I hated my female body and thought my interests in math and video games meant I couldn't be a girl. In my early twenties, I realized through feminism that my problem wasn't my body but my internalized misogyny and the belief that I had to fit a stereotype to be a woman. I never medically transitioned and I'm so glad I didn't, because that desire completely vanished once I understood myself. Now I'm just a woman who doesn't fit the mold, working in tech and learning to live freely in the body I was born with.
My detransition story
My gender journey started when I was 13, right as I was going through puberty. I was really into fanfiction and was what you'd call a fujoshi. I became obsessed with the idea of men in gay relationships, and I couldn't picture myself as a straight girl. I started to really want to be a man in that kind of relationship. I found a lot of that material online, on places like MySpace and YouTube, and it felt like a fetish that actually gave me gender dysphoria.
When I discovered that transitioning from female to male was a real thing people did, it was like a switch flipped. I was about 15, and I dug deep into old forums to find information. I became completely convinced that I was a boy and that I would get top surgery the second I turned 18. I even came out to my mom, but she didn't know how to handle it and we never talked about it again.
A big part of my discomfort was with my body. I'm an artist, and I’ve always been drawn to sharp, straight lines. I hated the curves that puberty gave me, especially my developing breasts. My kid brain thought that if I hated curves, I must hate being a girl. I also hung out almost exclusively with boys. I was into video games, programming, and math, and I just naturally assimilated with them. I was a bit of a mess, didn't care about my appearance, and I genuinely struggled to form friendships with other girls. For most of my life, my mental image of myself has been as a man.
I also have PCOS, which gave me naturally high testosterone and I only got my period about once a year. I used to think that was a blessing, but now I see it as a health risk.
Everything changed for me in my early twenties. I hit a point where I had to ask myself the hard question: what actually is a man or a woman? I realized my initial desire to transition wasn't based on a deep understanding of that; it was entirely based on the fact that I did not want to be a woman. A lot of that, I now see, was internalized misogyny. I had absorbed the message that to be a woman was to be less than, and I wanted to escape that.
I found my answer in feminism. I realized that a man is an adult human male, and a woman is an adult human female. All the other stuff—the roles, the expectations, the stereotypes—are just cultural and they change over time. They don't define what I am. My life is incongruent with a lot of traditional female expectations, but that doesn't make me any less of a woman. It makes me a woman who is living her life freely, a privilege that generations of women before me never had. Once I truly understood that, my desire to transition completely evaporated.
I never medically or legally transitioned. No hormones, no surgery. I’m incredibly glad I didn't, because I know I would have regretted it deeply. I see it now as trying to fix a social problem with a medical solution. My problem wasn't my body; it was my inability to accept that I could be a woman who didn't fit the stereotype.
I do still sometimes have that autogynephilia-adjacent feeling, what I guess you could call autoandrophilia—the fantasy of being an attractive man. But I understand now that a fetish doesn't define my identity. I also have a lot of empathy for people who did medically transition and now regret it, especially those who were young and weren't fully informed of the lifelong consequences, like becoming infertile or having serious health complications.
My life now is about accepting the things I can't change, like the sex I was born, and embracing the limitless ways I can express myself within that. I work in a male-dominated tech field and the misogyny can be suffocating, but I'm learning to navigate it as the woman I am.
Age | Event |
---|---|
13 | Gender dysphoria began during puberty. Influenced by online fanfiction and a desire to be a man in a gay relationship. |
15 | Discovered FTM transition information online. Came out to mother, but the subject was dropped. |
18 | Had previously been convinced I would get top surgery at this age, but did not. |
Early 20s | Had a personal revelation about the definitions of man and woman. embraced feminism, and my desire to transition completely went away. |
Top Comments by /u/ruffriderz13:
Hmmm my gender dysphoria began around 13, and I’m trying to think if there was one specific thing that set it off for me. To be honest, I was (..am..lol) a fujoshi. As a teen going through puberty, I couldn’t imagine being a straight girl in a relationship, I really wanted to be a man in a gay relationship. I think fanfiction and my own fetishes gave me gender dysphoria, and when I found out transitioning was a possibility (this was 15 years ago, I really had to dig to find FTM transition information), it did become quite rapidly onset afterwards. I found forums and became convinced that I’d go through with surgery once I turned 18. I am incredibly glad I didn’t.
Omg, I was freaking out for you reading this, those vocal gaps sound scary!! But I listened to your vocaroo and you sound like meeeeeeeee literally meeeee same voice so female!! You’re definitely hyperfixating cause I could not hear anything robotic…
Okay sorry, this really sounds tough and I really feel for you. Do you have a friend to talk to? Maybe go on a walk with?
Your post reminds me of this video.
Seems like no matter the time, it’s the messenger who gets shot. Everybody is booing him but all I could feel was his pain for speaking the truth. It’s so sad what mobs are capable of.
It’s cool that this is a safe space to share those feelings. I’m totally not qualified to tell you what those feelings mean but I get it, I’m pretty sure I’m autoandrophilic and get the same pleasure from thinking I could be a hot guy that men and women would find attractive. I don’t think I’m a man because of this fetish but yeah I can’t explain why I have the fetish either
I feel ya. I also play video games and I studied computer science. Weeeeeeeeew the amount of misogyny when you're stuffed into a room with 400 boys is suffocating!
I don't have any advice lol it genuinely just sucks. I just try to do my best and not pay attention to the lowlifes, as you put it. I really have better things to do with my time. But I'm here if you wanna vent more! I sure as hell have stories hahah
This kind of reasoning really kicked off my gender dysphoria because I didn’t want to be a “receiver”. And like you said, the reasoning doesn’t apply in homosexual relationships. So of course, I disagree that men and women are defined by those roles…
I agree with everything else you’ve said. Psychological differences aren’t reliable, repressed traits are just like you said, repressed.
You put it together so beautifully. I truly feel what you’re expressing. I feel extremely alienated and nihilistic in this very second and I don’t know how to pull myself out of it. But your words are helping, even just if it means I’m not alone, and maybe things can change if we all believe there to be a better way of running the world. Tbh, I don’t really believe I can get my hopes up, but…. Thanks for sharing anyway :)
It’s tough. You’re experiencing regret. It’s okay to have regrets. You made some decisions you thought were acceptable at the time, you don’t agree with them anymore and you feel loss and grief over the consequences. It’s okay to feel upset because of it.
It’s a tough fact of life, loss… I’ll never bring my dead parent back to life, time can never go backwards, it’ll never be the same again. But life can still be good, and life can still be happy. You’re being truthful with yourself by acknowledging your regrets. That’s a positive; you aren’t digging yourself a deeper hole by denying anything. I’m sure with time you’ll feel a lot better. As your body heals from the effects of T, you’ll surely keep growing into the woman you were always meant to be.
I never transitioned medically or “socially”, although I’ve always been “one of the boys”, and when I think of how other people perceive me, my mental model of myself is of a man.
The reason I didn’t transition, although I really wanted to for a long time, was because I finally answered this exact question you’ve posed. When I initially wanted to transition, I didn’t deeply consider what a man or a woman is, I simply operated on this core belief that I did not want to be a woman. Like many others in this sub, a lot of that belief was fueled by internalized misogyny.
Socially, I operated a lot like a boy. I was a messy, kinda frumpy kid. I didn’t take care of my physical appearance, I liked video games, programming, and math. I hung out with boys all the time, so much so that I assimilated among them. I still struggle forming female friendships whereas it feels so natural to speak the “guy’s language”. From middle school to college it was all the same story. Of the ~20-30 guys I was close friends with throughout that time, only one of them saw me as a girl enough to ask me out. It genuinely took me by surprise, and a teeny bit of me thought he might be gay (that’s how disassociated I was from my femininity.)
I have PCOS and naturally high T. I would get a period about one time a year. I look back and wonder how much this influenced my development in my teens.
Sometime in my early twenties, I decided I would own my womanhood. PCOS greatly increases risk of cancer and heart disease. It wasn’t a blessing that I didn’t get my period like other women, it was dangerous. I found my feminism in that. Being born female set me up for a life of expectations, built on a long grueling history of female subjugation. My life is incongruent to those expectations, but also a memento to all the women who lived and died with way less freedom than I have - to the women who could never question their gender role to the degree I’ve been able to without the most severe consequences.
When I answered the question, “what is a man, what is a woman?”, my desire to transition evaporated. I truly believe a man is a male, a woman is a female, and any expectations around manhood and womanhood are temporary and cultural. They change. But the two sexes that advance our species have always been male and female. I’m a woman. I’m a human. How my life is lived is certainly informed by both of those facts, but it will never be constrained by any gender role I disagree with.
I'm so sorry. I'm sorry if this is out of place, but 175cm isn't terribly short either, it's a very average height. But I understand that this is about feeling regret over the whole situation -- and I truly am really sorry that you were not informed appropriately, you were a literal child and in no position to understand the consequences of being medicalized. I'm just so sorry. I hope your health improves from here on.