This story is from the comments by /u/scoutydouty that are listed below, summarised with AI.
User 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 a bad-faith actor.
The user demonstrates a consistent, deeply personal, and multi-faceted narrative over several years. They share specific, intimate details of their detransition (e.g., physical changes from testosterone, skincare struggles, voice training), discuss complex personal struggles (homelessness, trauma, poverty), and express a nuanced, evolving perspective that includes anger, regret, and self-reflection. The passion and criticism align with the expected feelings of someone who feels genuinely harmed. The history shows a real person's journey.
About me
I was a traumatized girl who saw transition as an escape from my painful reality and started testosterone at 18 with no questions asked. The changes were rapid and physically agonizing, and even as I passed as male, my dysphoria and paranoia only got worse. I finally realized my desire wasn't to be a man, but to escape the trauma of being a woman, and I stopped testosterone after nearly three years. Detransitioning was incredibly difficult and I lost friends, but through proper therapy, I found peace and learned to accept my female body. I'm now in a much better place, free from dysphoria, and I believe I was failed by a system that offered me a medical solution for a problem that needed psychological care.
My detransition story
My journey with transition and detransition is long and complicated. I was born female and had a very difficult childhood. My parents were older when they adopted me and were emotionally and physically abusive. I spent a lot of time online as a teenager, which is where I first encountered the concept of being transgender. Around age 15, my small friend group started getting into the trans trend, and it felt like an escape from my miserable reality.
I was a very masculine girl and was bullied for it. I also experienced a series of sexual assaults, which made me hate my female body even more. To me, being female meant being hunted, judged, and forced to perform. I developed an eating disorder because I wanted to be flat and small, like a boy. I craved that lanky, androgynous look. I saw transitioning as a way to reinvent myself, to become a new person and leave all that pain behind. I wanted to be one of those attractive, skinny "twinks" I saw online. It was a fantasy, a way to relive my childhood as someone else.
I started identifying as male when I was 18. I went to a clinic called Thundermist in Rhode Island. At my very first appointment with a nurse practitioner, I told her I identified as male. She gave me a packet on testosterone and sent me home. Four weeks later, I went back, signed the informed consent form, and got my first shot. There was no therapy, no deep questioning, no exploration. They just took my word for it.
I was on testosterone for almost three years. The changes happened fast. Within two weeks, my clitoris grew and became painfully sensitive. My voice dropped, I grew facial hair, and I got horrible, painful cystic acne all over my back, shoulders, and chest. It was agony to sleep. My libido went through the roof. I felt like I was losing control of my body.
Even though I started to pass as male, my dysphoria didn't go away. It got worse. I became paranoid about being "clocked." I was constantly analyzing myself—were my hips too wide? Was my binder flat enough? Was I sitting too girly? It was exhausting. I felt like a fraud wearing a costume. I also developed vaginal atrophy from the testosterone, which made sex and even urinating painful. I warped my ribs from binding too much.
I remember one specific moment that started to change things. I was on LSD, and I looked in the mirror. The person staring back didn't feel like me. It was an uncanny valley feeling of deep disgust. I tried to ignore it, but that feeling never went away. I kept taking T for two more years after that, fighting that feeling, before I finally let myself explore it.
I realized my desire to transition wasn't really about being a man. It was about escaping womanhood. I had so much internalized misogyny and trauma. I thought if I was a man, I'd be safe, respected, and untouchable. But that wasn't true. I lost the easy camaraderie I had with women. Men would say horrific things around me thinking I was one of them. I didn't get the same empathy and care I did when people saw me as a woman. The community that once supported me became insufferable and intolerant, especially when I started questioning.
I stopped testosterone gradually. My period came back after just three weeks. Some changes, like my deeper voice and facial hair, are permanent. Others, like body fat distribution, slowly shifted back. It took about 6 to 12 months to start recognizing my face in the mirror again. It was a hard, crying process, begging to see myself again.
Detransitioning was its own struggle. I lost friends, especially trans friends, who saw my decision as a betrayal. I ended up homeless for a while, living in my car during the pandemic. I gained a lot of weight, which was hard on my self-esteem. But I also found a new kind of peace. Through a lot of therapy—especially Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—I learned to process my trauma and accept my body for what it is: a female human body. I learned that acceptance doesn't mean approval. I can accept the reality of my body without liking every part of it.
I don't regret my transition because I needed to go through that extreme experience to get to where I am now. But I do mourn the parts of me that are permanently changed. I wish I had been given proper therapy to deal with my trauma and body image issues instead of being rushed onto hormones. The "affirmative care" model failed me completely.
My thoughts on gender have completely changed. I think the entire concept of gender is a harmful social construct. We're taught from birth how to behave based on our sex, and that prison is so painful for some of us that we pathologize that pain as a medical condition called gender dysphoria. I believe in sex-based realities. There are males, females, and intersex people. Everything beyond that is just personality and expression. I consider myself a gender abolitionist now.
I'm in a much better place now. I'm housed, have a loving partner who is trans and accepts me completely, and I'm working on my health. I no longer experience gender dysphoria. My body is just my body—it carries me through life, and that's what matters.
Here is a timeline of my journey:
| Age | Event |
|---|---|
| 15 | Started spending time online; friend group began exploring trans identity; experienced sexual trauma; developed an eating disorder. |
| 18 | First appointment at Thundermist Health Clinic; was given informed consent for testosterone after a 45-minute appointment. |
| 18 | Administered first dose of testosterone. |
| 19 | Noted significant physical changes from testosterone, including bottom growth, voice drop, and severe cystic acne. |
| 21 | Had a profound negative experience looking in the mirror while on LSD, leading to initial doubts about transition. |
| 21 | Stopped testosterone after nearly 3 years of use. |
| 21 | Period returned within 3 weeks of stopping testosterone. |
| 22 | Officially began social detransition, stopped binding, and started presenting in a way that felt authentic without pressure to perform femininity. |
| 23 | Was homeless, living in my car, while navigating the early stages of detransition. |
| 25 | Found significant relief from gender dysphoria through DBT and ACT therapies; found stable housing and a supportive partner. |
Top Reddit Comments by /u/scoutydouty:
You will never receive them. There is no surgery that will give you female genitals. The only surgery will remove your genitals, turn them inside out, and give you an inverted penile hole that you will have to painfully dilate every day for the rest of your life. You will not produce lubrication, you will not be able to give birth, and you will not menstruate.
You will most likely experience fistulas, infection, extreme scarring, loss of sensation, difficulty orgasming, hair growing on the inside, bad odor, and a plethora of other issues.
This surgery will not give you what you want. You are much better off coming to terms with your born genitalia and simply fantasizing about what you wish you had.
Okay I love ripping this chick to shreds because she is a p*do nutjob.
720 is an incredibly small sample size. There are over 40k people just in this detrans subreddit. Sure, not all of them are detrans. But I'm sure as shit it's more than 720.
Half a decade ago is 5 years. Exaggerating the truth is insane to me. "Half a decade" no wonder you think that's a long time Stephie, considering you think using babies in your weird fetish art is normal. We need LONG TERM STUDIES.
98% is still 2% who stopped. And in the next bubble you are claiming it is a lie. So if we use the common statistic that less than 2% of the population is transgender, and that is apparently statistically significant enough to warrant mass change in society, why is 2% desistance rate "a lie" to you?
YOU USED PICTURES OF REAL BABIES AS REFERENCE PHOTOS FOR SEX ART AND PLAYED THE "well what I drew was a consenting adult just DRESSED as a baby!" CARD. Your validity as a speaker on trans issues is NONEXISTANT, you have crossed the line into creepy territory. You smashed the line.
My favorite part about them denying our trans experience is that it's completely hypocritical to their messaging of "no one can tell us who we are, only we know that about ourselves." But you can decide who everyone else is then? Even people who might have shared your exact journey at one point? Annoying as hell.
From a post I reblogged on my Tumblr account:
"The problems with these statistics are pretty basic.
-too small of a sample size. 448 people is not representative of the trans community as a whole.
-This study is now 8 years old. You'd be lying if you haven't noticed in the last 8 years an INSANE boom of people coming out as trans. And you'd be lying if you didn't notice the current snowball of people, namely FTM people, detransitioning. Just look at the tag on this very site. Just look at r/detrans which has a few THOUSAND members already. There are more detransitioned people in that subreddit than there are who responded to this survey.
-This survey was conducted by a board whose repliers may be biased into answering one way or another due to their political and emotional involvement. ie; people who don't fit into the narrative are less likely to have responded to the survey due to being disillusioned with those who conducted it."
Thoughts?
I found it ironic that my cis friends were the ones to be the most open to me before, during, and after my transition. They don't care, like genuinely they don't care what gender I was. They just knew me for me and liked me for who I was. Didn't matter to them what I looked like.
To my ex trans friends and partners, it was clear after I detransitioned that now I was a threat to them somehow. My personal decisions suddenly affected them. And they didn't want anything to do with me. They didn't care that I'm a multifaceted being with more to me than my body and clothes and makeup. They cared about the body and clothes and makeup.
My cis friends didn't.
Yeah, once I realized hating anything female about myself was just hatred of femininity in general it all rather clicked into place. You can see it in trans communities too.
"I wouldn't want a daughter because raising her would give me dysphoria." -an actual transmasc friend of mine said that.
I've seen hatred of vaginas packaged as dysphoria, disgust with menstruation as a process, or even the entire female body and its processes being bashed to smithereens and smoothed out with a little "oh but just for me and my body though."
It's one thing to dislike the assigned roles of femininity, or compulsory femininity, but it always rubbed me the wrong way to hear just, I don't know, dehumanizing language used to describe female bodies from the voices of trans men and nonbinary AFABs.
It's like saying "Oh I could never be confident enough to wear that, but you look great in it!" to someone. If that's considered a backhanded compliment I struggle to validate the whole "female bodies are fucking gross" crowd.
It usually goes like this:
Trans person: here is how my experiences as a trans person different from cis people. I am oppressed, I had to transition while they get to be born the way they feel, I had to go through x y and z. Let's acknowledge and celebrate this constantly.
Audience: applauds
Cis person: here is how my experiences as a cis person are different from a trans pers-
Audience: TERF!!! SILENCE!! THEY'RE THE SAME AS YOU THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE YOU ADD NOTHING TO THIS CONVERSATION AT ALL!
I think it was after I started transitioning I began feeling this pressure to like, join the circus-y part of online trans personas. Like just looking outrageous and pretending I did it on purpose. It's all about competition for uniqueness.
There would be bubbles of hundreds of AFABs on various forums- Reddit, FB, Tumblr, IG- and it was usually just a bunch of circlejerking over who could be the most attractive, TikTok aesthetic, thinnest, wokest person. This was somewhat entwined with what gave me a desire to transition- escape my crappy existence and form a "new me." Also body dysmorphia/ED type things were quite the influence to me both transitioning, and then "trying too hard" to "be trans" online.
I wanted to fill some sort of gap inside me with the attention I saw bestowed upon such trans people in these niche bubbles I frequented. Thousands of likes. Comments sections heavily moderated to ban anything remotely 'problematic.' Just being praised like that, having people uplifting you in a way you would never get as a cis person.
I was "trying so hard" to pass, to stand out, to be loved all at once, in all the wrong places. I think my first bit of disillusionment was watching hundreds of others raking in pennies from mediocre OF content until the market was so saturated I saw some people start just giving nudes out for free for validation.
I wanted to be a "twink" at this stage of my journey. Unfortunately, bisexuality and coming to terms with body image and trauma issues had other plans for me, lol. I hope this kinda helped a bit.
My opinion on the matter is that the real fight right now is the argument of distinction between gender affirming care being cosmetic, or medically necessary. This is the true battle. Because if it is deemed cosmetic, (which in my opinion it IS,) then it could lead the way to banning it being done on children. If you can't even get a piercing, a tattoo, or a beer then why the hell should you get a cosmetic medical procedure?
The whole argument around it being medically necessary is "I will end my life if I do not have it." This is absolutely ridiculous and wouldn't withstand an ounce of scrutiny without all the politics, lobbying, and profit behind the trans movement.
I do not consider myself a conservative person at all, but I do hope this Supreme Court rules on this in favor of banning access to minors. It does pain me to say that because they already took away an ACTUALLY medically necessary procedure from being protected by federal law, but I digress and shan't go down that path.
I do hope some detrans people have the opportunity to say their piece in any subsequent hearings during the case. Our input is incredibly valuable, and there are a lot of people who want to silence us, which means we need to be even louder.
Unfortunately, even if it does end up being banned, I already see the result. They will make martyrs out of the children who will be denied access to transition. They will use those kids and their suffering to say "see? There really is a trans genocide!" to further their cause and gain oppression points. And it grosses me out even thinking about it.
I never understood why gender dysphoria was the only type to be affirmed. When you have body dysmorphia like with eating disorders, they don't tell you "Here's a bunch of weight loss pills and liposuction to make you 'the real you!'"
Like, if you follow the train of argument for transition, it inevitably gets to the whole "they will k*ll themselves without it."
Okay, when I wanted to k*ll myself I got put into the mental hospital and had to do like eight different therapies for years. I guess I just don't understand why gender dysphoria gets the special treatment out of all the mental disorders, why it gets to be encouraged to persist until you change everything about yourself, when every other similar disorder is treated differently.
And then they went ahead and made gender dysphorianot a mental illness in the WHO. Because there happen to be a bunch of rich trans lobbyists in the world who want others to be free to stoke their own flames of delusion. They used the "homosexuality was also erroneously a mental disorder back in the day, they medicalize being queer and it's wrong."
I just think there's a biiiit of a difference between loving the same sex, and literally trying to change your own sex under threat of su*cide.