This story is from the comments listed below, summarised by AI.
Authenticity Assessment: Not Suspicious
Based on the provided comments, this account appears to be authentic. There are no serious red flags suggesting it is a bot or a bad-faith actor.
The user's comments display a high degree of personal, emotional, and medical detail that is consistent across a long period. The narrative is complex, nuanced, and deeply personal, focusing on their specific experiences with transition, detransition, relationships, fertility, and body image. The language is passionate and contains the anger and pain you would expect from someone who feels they were harmed. The account shows no signs of scripted or repetitive talking points and instead demonstrates genuine engagement with other users' unique situations.
About me
I was a tomboy who felt uncomfortable as a female and mistook my low self-esteem and trauma for gender dysphoria, so I transitioned to male for six years. I had top surgery and took testosterone, convinced it was the right path until I met my boyfriend. He made me feel safe and beautiful as a woman, helping me see I was trying to escape being female, not become male. I deeply regret my transition, especially the permanent surgery, and I'm now detransitioning back to living as a female. I'm focused on healing and exploring reconstruction, believing transition should only be a last resort.
My detransition story
My journey started when I was a teenager, around 17. I was a tomboy and always felt uncomfortable with the expectations placed on me as a female. I hated my body, especially my breasts, and the idea of having sex as a woman disgusted me. I now believe a lot of this came from repressed sexual trauma and low self-esteem. I mistook these feelings for gender dysphoria.
I came out as a trans guy and lived as one for six years. I was on testosterone for five of those years and had top surgery to remove my breasts. At the time, I was completely convinced this was the right path for me. People in the trans community looked up to me and saw my transition as a success. But after the surgery and being on T for a while, doubts started creeping in. I was in deep denial because the idea that I could be wrong about something so life-changing was terrifying.
A major turning point was when I started dating my current boyfriend. He was the first man who made me feel loved and beautiful as a woman. With him, I realized that sex as a woman could actually be a positive and pleasurable experience. It wasn’t just the physical act; it was the way he treated me and made me feel safe and feminine. I loved it. This helped me see that my desire to transition was more about escaping being female than truly wanting to be male.
I also realized I had severe body dysmorphia, not gender dysphoria. My face and body weren’t nearly as ugly as I thought they were. I was just a tomboy, and that was okay. I learned that straight guys can be into tomboys, and I could feel cute and sexy without changing my body.
Now, I am detransitioning back to living as a female. I deeply regret my transition, especially the top surgery. I feel incomplete without my breasts and worry about my fertility, though my doctor is somewhat confident I might still be able to have children. The thought of not being able to carry my boyfriend’s baby one day is heartbreaking. I’m exploring breast reconstruction options, but it’s uncertain and frustrating.
My sexuality also shifted. I identified as bisexual before but now I find I prefer men and, for all practical purposes, am straight. Accepting that was its own challenge.
I benefited from therapy, but even my therapist, who is a trans woman, was shocked by my detransition and the failures she saw in how the medical community handles this. She supports me, but our conversations about my regrets are sometimes difficult.
I feel that I was influenced online and by the broader trans community to believe transition was the answer. They often downplay the risks and permanent consequences. I didn’t have realistic expectations. I now believe that if you aren’t absolutely sure you’re trans, you probably aren’t. Transition should be a last resort for those with severe, unrelenting sex dysphoria, not an escape from other problems.
Here is a timeline of my journey:
Age | Event |
---|---|
17 | Started identifying as a trans man, began social transition |
18 | Started testosterone (T) therapy |
23 | Had top surgery (double mastectomy) |
23 | Began to have serious doubts about my transition |
24 | Started detransitioning back to living as female |
24 | Stopped taking testosterone |
Top Comments by /u/shittytoyota:
HA! I lived as a trans guy for 6 years, was on T for 5, and had the mastectomy. I really, truly used to believe that what I was feeling was gender dysphoria. Other people in the trans community—younger ones and older ones of all stripes—looked up to me and felt inspired by the apparent "success" of my transition.
After the mastectomy happened and I started seeing the real effects of T was when the doubts started marching in again. I knew something was wrong, but I was so deeply in denial that all of this could be for absolutely nothing. It's already a hard thing to admit when you're wrong—it's a whole different animal when you've made a drastic decision to significantly alter your body and life in a way that usually also greatly affects the people around you, whether positively or negatively. Even considering the slightest possibility that I had been wrong about something so monumental was so horrifying I just by default had to double-down on my belief that I really was trans. My mental health steadily declined for the next couple years, until I started the mental and emotional process that kicked off my detransition.
People need to realize that, (1) the vast majority of detransitioners did not start off as the classic transtrender, and (2) that most of us truly believed we had gender dysphoria, enough that we didn't at all anticipate that we would regret making what we all knew was the huge commitment of transition.
We all had lots of different, often serious, psychological and personal issues that led us down this path, and we are the evidence that it is too easy for people suffering with such issues to come to believe that what they are experiencing is gender dysphoria, to transition thinking that it will relieve some of those feelings and to then profoundly regret this permanent decision.
It's especially easy when, as many of us seem to have been when we started our transition, you're a very mentally unstable teenager still figuring out who you are and you have people in the trans or medical community telling you, sometimes insisting, that this might be the right thing for you.
I'm so, so sorry you're going through this pain. I'm hopefully not infertile, but I can imagine how much hurt you must feeling.
I thought at first that I had been on T too long to be fertile anymore, and it was the worst despair I've felt in so, so long. Part of my detransition was meeting the first cis man who ever made me feel loved and beautiful as a woman, which helped me come to terms with my true feelings about all the things I had denied to myself just because I had sworn off anything female, including motherhood.
Pre-T I was absolutely sure I would never ever want children. I handwaved it and said that adoption would always be an option. And then I got into my first actually good, truly loving relationship and my biological clock hit me like a train. I just looked up at my boyfriend's handsome, sweet face at some point and saw the rest of our lives flash before my eyes. I imagined all the pains and joys and worries and bliss of carrying his baby for nine long months, holding his hand tight and enduring the pain to deliver the life we created together, getting to watch his face when his eyes rest on his little newborn and he's struck with the realization that he's really a father now, and all those anxious feelings and doubts that all new dads experience will just wash away for a moment as they're replaced with simple love for his child. I imagine squeezing his hand so hard with my eyes full of tears of joy and exhaustion and saying "We did it. We're a family now." I had no idea that I would ever want this more than anything back when I was 17-18 and making irreversible decisions about the rest of my life.
I found out there's a good chance that I still actually am fertile, which was one of the biggest reliefs I've ever felt. My gyno can't be 100% sure though because it's still early and she hasn't exactly seen any cases like mine before. All I know is that now if something goes wrong and I find out I wouldn't actually be able to have a baby...it would be the worst heartbreak I've ever felt. I don't know how I would cope. Every day I have to supress my fearful thoughts that that's how this ends, not with my and my husband's beautiful baby in my arms but with a pile of broken dreams and regrets and knowing that it was my fault and that I would never ever be able to forgive myself.
It's gonna be easy for people to tell you "Just adopt!" and think that will make you feel better. But I know that's not gonna be enough to make you feel better, because now I understand the powerful, primordial and deeply-ingrained biological need to create a life with the person you love.
This experience has actually been a big part in me really exploring spirituality for the first time. I've been researching fertility gods and goddesses and finding little prayers and rituals I can do—it helps me feel like I'm sorta doing something instead of feeling powerless to my fears.
It's really hard in your case, because there isn't exactly any uncertainty about your fertility. I assume since you mention surgery that your balls are probably gone :( If you still have them, you never know, though! The human body is resilient and can do unexpected things. Ask different doctors—a lot of people forget that most doctors actually know very little about medical transition and how it works.
There is the hope that medical science could make it feasible at some point to recreate sperm cells for you out of your stem cells, but I think we detranners also know better than anyone not to pin all of our hopes on medical science fixing our problems. Do you maybe have any close male relatives who would theoretically be willing to be sperm donors? Finding a way for your child to still in some way be biologically related to you would probably help a lot.
Even though it doesn't help me much, I try to tell myself that there are sort of "non-biological ways of reproducing"—you pass along who you are to your child, not just your genes but also your belief systems and your values and your memories and wisdom, and in many ways this is gonna make them who they are more than their genetics. But again I understand this feels like a shitty consolation prize when one of your body and brain's most fundamental impulses is to pass along YOUR DNA.
My comments are always really long, sorry 😅 I really, really hope you can find peace with your situation. Just thinking about infertility makes me feel so unbelievably sad 😥 Time to go outside and pray to the universe that one of these eggs inside of me will become my living, breathing child one day.
This is called Erotic Target Identity Inversion, which manifests as a paraphilic desire to become the person or thing that one is sexually attracted to.
I don't know a ton about how it works psychologically or if there's psychotherapy out there for it, but I would recommend browsing and reading all the research articles that are out there about ETII, autogynephilia, autoandrophilia and Blanchard's transsexualism typology.
It's a little harder to go back hormonally as an mtftm, especially in terms of fertility. I would stay on your hormones until you can see your endo because you can't be sure yet if your body will be able to start producing testosterone on its own again, especially right away. I'm ftmtf, though; maybe other mtftms will know more.
But as long as you have your balls, there's still hope for future fertility and being able to survive on your body's natural hormones. It's all kinda case-by-case because it depends on your body's own biology.
I know it's agonizing to have to just wait without any clear answers when you're scared and wondering what the rest of your life is gonna look like now :( I really hope you hang in there and that things turn out for the best. ♡
Some people seem to unironically believe that all or most detrans stuff is an "alt-right psy-op" or some shit planted by the tyrannical cishets to scare trans people away from transitioning or to convince people to deny them healthcare.
If transitioning is definitely, unquestionably the right choice for some people, then why do they feel like they have to hide the reality of transition and the potential regret that comes with it? If you hide this stuff from people, especially kids and teens whose brains aren't even developed enough to truly conceptualize how these decisions will impact the rest of their lives, how can you claim that transitioners are being given informed consent?
I figure the answer is that the people who are most in denial about all this are probably actually the same people who will be using this subreddit in another few years. They wouldn't care if they weren't terrified by how much they relate to some of our experiences, and now they know that feeling 100% confident at the beginning that they were making the right choice doesn't actually mean a whole lot.
As long as you're finding the things that make you feel comfortable being you in your own body 😊
I was really unsure and nervous at first. The crossroads of trans and cis is a really weird intersection to find yourself at.
For me, allowing myself to just kinda sit at that intersection and feel like I didn't have to know if I was one or the other was really helpful. I kinda tried to embrace that temporary state of androgyny and give myself time to explore my gendered feelings. It helped give me the clarity to realize that I really did want to be female again. That's just my own experience, though.
Let us know how things go, friend! 😁
That sounds really rough, I'm so sorry :( I'm dealing with the opposite problem right now, although this is probably a bit easier to manage. Depending on the state you live in, what insurance you have and whether or not you can find a sympathetic therapist there may be a possibility of getting insurance to pay for the removal of your implants as gender-affirming care as though you were an FTM. How exactly the medical community is going to be handling detransition is still really up in the air right now.
Have you tried binders for FTMs? Gc2b's are by far the best ones, although I would worry if wearing one might potentially rupture your implants and cause damage.
I'll tell you what I kinda knew deep down when I decided to transition as a dumb teen but then let myself be convinced that my doubts were just induced by transphobic rhetoric:
If you aren't already sure that you're trans, you very likely are not. Being gender-nonconforming, even extremely gender-nonconforming, does not make you trans.
Even if you could somehow be 100% sure (as in, if you could run a magic brain scan and confirm the presence of some inherent trans quality within you), transitioning still may not necessarily be the best choice for you.
If you are truly trans, then your sex dysphoria is so intense that you see no other option than medical intervention. But keep in mind that you may end up spending the rest of your life on hormones and getting surgery after surgery after surgery, and it still may never make you truly "pass" as female.
That doesn't even include the other potential medical downsides to transition—your sex drive will be extremely low (which can affect not just your mental health but your romantic/sexual relationships), you may develop potentially irreversible health consequences later in life as a result of years on cross-sex hormones, as an mtf you would likely mostly or completely lose fertility. Even in the short term, hormone replacement can be an exhausting process emotionally.
If you end up having your balls removed so you don't have to take anti-androgens along with your E, then you will be making yourself a life-long medical patient—as in, your body would no longer have the ability to survive on its own without hormone injections, whether you remained as a trans woman for the rest of your life or detransitioned and returned to living as a male. And sometimes you have to seriously ask yourself ridiculous things like—if society becomes more unstable and access to basic medical care becomes much more scarce, what happens then? Even if that doesn't happen, can you be sure that you will always have access to an endocrinologist to whom you will be dependent on to live for the remainder of your life? And that's not even getting into the unyielding existential nightmares that many poor MTFs find themselves in with SRS.
I'm not trying to scare you, but I am trying to make you aware that there are a LOT of important things to consider here that a lot of us detransitioners didn't think about when we were blinded by the desire to feel gender euphoria and (more often than not) rushed ourselves into life-changing medical interventions that turned out not to be right for us. It's easy to get swept up in this romantic idea of magically becoming a whole different person and forget what the actual, tangible consequences will be like when you realize you're still the same person in the same body you've always been in and always will be.
Ask yourself why you think you need this. The point of medical transition is to treat your psychological discomfort with your biological sex—despite the false promise that is often sold that transition can do anything close to meaningfully changing your biological sex.
People will likely generally be polite and may see you and acknowledge you as a trans woman, but most people will always be able to clock your biological sex no matter how feminine you present, and you will probably always have to notice that even the most trans-friendly people don't always treat you exactly the same as any other female. Most people try their best to be kind and respectful, but at the end of the day our brains are hardwired to spot people's biological sexes, and we act on that subconsciously. You will notice this, even among the most ardent of self-proclaimed trans allies. This is a sad reality about mtf transitions, and it is only somewhat less true for ftm transitions.
If you think that transition will make you look like a 8/10 cis girl, then I would say transition is absolutely the wrong choice for you. Transition is only right if you have truly realistic expectations about what the results might be (which is already very difficult to know what to expect), and this includes the possibilty that you may end up at best looking like an ugly cis girl or even that you may end up looking to most people like a guy in a wig for the rest of your life. If you think straight guys and/or lesbians are gonna be all over you, you need to rethink that too. It MIGHT happen, but it's extremely unlikely. Most people are attracted to one biological sex, not one gender identity or presentation, and changing your gender identity is more likely to simply limit your dating pool than to expand or alter it.
If the possibility of all this scares you more than continuing to live as a male who just wears whatever fun things you want, please reconsider the idea that you are trans. You may find that you just love being a feminine guy, and that's okay.
If your questions about your gender identity persist, I would recommend that you explore it more in your real life than with other people online. The online trans community is very unwilling to acknowledge when transition is probably not the right choice for someone, and they often greatly downplay any and all negative aspects of transitioning or living as a trans person to people who are in the process of questioning their gender identity. If you get lost in some of the things they say, you will come out with a heart-breakingly unrealistic idea of how your potential transition will go, whereas just having some IRL experience of exploring and reflecting on your own personal feelings about your individual experience of gender will tell you a lot. Dig deep, be honest with yourself and ask yourself a lot of questions. How long you've felt this way? What caused you to start feeling this way? Did this idea truly come from inside you or from the influence of the internet/other people/social media? How much of this is part of a sexual fantasy for you?
I don't want to scare you away from transitioning IF it is something you truly cannot go without. But you will only know if it's right for you when you have a fairly clear, realistic, and relatively unemotional conception of how transition will go for you, and that's almost impossible to get just from talking to the online MTF crowd who often frame their inability to pass as 10/10 cis women as being the result of societal transphobia and not an inconvenient matter of biology and the limits of medical science. Always remember that most of us really truly believed we had that clear conception when we started and that we were all "truly trans" and really had valid gender dysphoria. Turns out, we totally didn't! But almost all of us similarly fell down online rabbitholes full of rhetoric that helped us explain away what should have been obvious signs we weren't really trans or just shouldn't have medically transitioned.
Sorry for writing a whole-ass novella. I just hope maybe it helps you figure some things out. Best of luck, friend.
Ooh boy here we go:
That gender dysphoria wasn't any of the things that were broken inside me.
That deep down I didn't want to be a guy, I just wanted to escape from being female.
That my face and body weren't nearly as ugly as I thought they were.
That I definitely had/have awful body dysmorphia.
That I just needed to love myself enough to work on myself more and figure out what made me feel comfortable in the body I had then.
That I would end up feeling weirdly incomplete without my breasts.
That I could be so completely wrong about everything and regret it so much.
That I would find myself crying in the arms of the man I hope I end up marrying one day, wondering if I'll ever get to experience the pain and joy of having his baby and starting our family together. (Luckily, my gyno feels somewhat confident that things down there are pretty normal and I won't have to worry too much about infertility. Fingers crossed.)
That being a tomboy and having a few slightly androgynous qualities for a girl didn't mean I had to feel like I was a hideous, unlovable, undesirable failure of a woman.
That sometimes straight guys are actually into tomboys.
That it's actually possible to feel cute/sexy/beautiful as a tomboy.
That I could learn to feel good about the feminine curves of my body.
That ROGD is a thing.
That I would be able to find an amazing guy who's exactly my type and loves every last bit of me.
So you're an ftm who's at least in some way already transitioned, right?
Pre-transition I was always a tomboy who had a rough time with femininity (and figuring out my sexual orientation lol), although I'm kinda now for the first time ever enjoying expressing myself more femininely while also being my same old tomboy self when I feel like it.
I'm like you—bisexual, but at this point I prefer men to the point where in practice I'm straight, and when I realized that detransition was the right choice for me it was a hard thing to digest that I was now pretty much a straight girl. Still is a little bit. Dm me if you wanna chat.