I’m so saddened by some of the nastier comments I’ve read in response to this. I’m in a similar place where I feel very ambivalent about the physical effects of my transition, but also feel I’m “too far gone” to detransition successfully. I’m not bald, so you can’t dunk on me for that. But I look very young for my age, and as I approach middle age, I worry more about how I’ll look when I’m older. I feel like looking young for my age has stunted my overall psycho-social development. It’s absolutely had a negative effect on finding employment. No warnings for that in the informed consent legalese!

But even worse is that testosterone has caused actual health problems. Not cosmetic issues, but the sort of issues that normally show up at menopause began for me in my thirties. And no, I wasn’t made fully aware that I was risking chronic UTIs and pelvic pain by taking testosterone. This smug attitude of “well, you knew the risks!” is unhelpful, because I doubt most of us really knew the risks when we started the hormones. We might have signed the paperwork. Someone may have gone over a list of side effects with us. What did we think at the time, especially if we were young and had other mental illnesses we were dealing with? We thought: “This will never happen to me. That hasn’t happened to anyone I know, so it’ll probably be ok. And even if it does happen to me, I can take it. I really want this! I’ll risk it.”

I never, ever thought I would be where I am now. This is what the trans people lashing out at detransitioners don’t understand and don’t want to understand. Their responses to this don’t surprise me, but it’s hard not to be disappointed all the same.

Buck was one of the first trans men I was ever aware of in the media, and honestly I’m just glad he’s standing up for the needs of people afab. He’s not perfect, but I’m glad he’s pushing back against the obfuscation of the actual real health risks hormone therapy comes with. There’s so much focus on the cosmetic changes of hrt, but like… if I had known how serious the complications of atrophy of reproductive organs could be, I might have thought a little bit harder about this.

I brought up my feelings about transition and how I’d started thinking maybe it had been a mistake for me when I saw a new doctor who specializes in treating trans people. She said, “You’re not the only one.” And I thought, well, then what the hell are we doing this for? I went into this thinking that this was THE treatment for gender dysphoria, and that all other treatments were ineffective. But if the one true treatment isn’t working, then why are we still doing it?

When I started reading detrans stuff online, my overall impression was one of kindness. The kindness of people who will tell you, “maybe you made a mistake and that’s ok.” Contrasted with trans spaces, which are full of people detailing their self-hatred and (sadly) misogyny, it seemed more and more clear to me that something had gone very wrong. I do not think trans people are getting the mental health support that they need. Many people are retreating away into a life that revolves around trans “culture,” and in that way it is very much like a cult, as anything that becomes so rigidly policed and insular often is. I don’t think this is necessarily a new development, as I remember disliking online trans spaces in the mid-00s, but it’s grown tremendously and developed a whole new language that minimizes and infantilizes major life changes and medical decisions. Radical self-acceptance would have done more for me than hormones did, but it’s too late and now I have to practice self-acceptance on a very different body. It’s not the end of the world, but it seems like it should have been so avoidable.

I find my transition to be traumatic, and I have a hard time talking about it when I’m not essentially anonymous. I don’t like being reminded of it in day-to-day life. It took me years to be entirely upfront with my partner about what I’ve gone through in the name of transitioning… and then recently I started questioning myself and my choices and expressing grief, regret, and anger. There was little exploration in my treatment as to what other issues I might have had that could be causing dysphoria. Moreover, I really think I was able to induce more severe dysphoria by deciding I was trans and then finding the cognitive dissonance difficult to live with.

My identity is stable now, and I live a functional life. But my life could have been much easier without transitioning. I don’t understand people who want to make life so much more difficult for themselves socially, physically, and mentally. People are willing to sacrifice their relationships because they think that uncovering their “authentic self” will make them happy. But I don’t feel that my self now is any more authentic than the self I was pre-transition. You are yourself forever, haha.

I just want to say that I get you. I get that feeling of wanting to go back. It was easier to think I was doing the right thing and to unquestioningly support others who were transitioning. It’s like it’s all ok until it isn’t. Once the cracks in my own self-image had appeared, suddenly the fault lines in the whole trans schema were glaringly apparent. I don’t think there’s a way to put that together again.

It was growing as a person in unequivocally positive ways, such as being in a long term relationship, that actually made me wake up the most to the truth of things: that I’m female, that I’ll always be female, and that ten years of hrt was hurting my body. I’m healthier now that I only take a very small amount of testosterone (I do still take some, I’m afraid), but the dysmorphia is worse. Oh well, I guess, because I’m old enough that health trumps looks, even when I still care very much about my appearance.

And here’s the thing: I haven’t changed my name back. People still use male pronouns for me most of the time. I don’t ask them to, they just do. If they don’t, I try to work through any hurt or distress I feel. I still dress the same. If it hurts more to change things back, then don’t do it (or at least don’t do it now). Get off social media as much as possible. You are under no obligation to be a spokesperson for detransition. Get a job, get a hobby, throw your energy into school, whatever. This gender shit is worth almost nothing in the long term. Things might be upsetting now, but they will not stay that way. It’s a little corny, but there’s a quote from Winnie the Pooh: “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” You have a whole life ahead of you to move beyond this. A total stranger on the internet believes in you.

Good point, and how can we even know what’s causing, say, our ulcers, if no one talks about getting ulcers from ibuprofen use? I didn’t know that my initial vaginal issues were a direct result of the testosterone use, so I didn’t press my doctors for any kind of treatment early on (and they certainly didn’t offer any). Some people might read this and think, “hah, how dumb could you be to not think that testosterone would mess with your reproductive organs?” But I’d been on it for probably about four years before I started to experience pain. It’s much like how one might not think that the over-the-counter ibuprofen they take all the time is causing their digestive issues. I’ve been taking this for years and nothing ever happened before? Well, unfortunately this shit is cumulative and sometimes your body just says no more.

I’m sorry. This sounds really hard. The feelings you’re having right now might not be permanent, however. Major surgery can have a big effect on mood and depression that may go away as you heal and start to get back to your normal day-to-day life. I hope you have someone in your life that you can talk to right now, and also hopefully a therapist you can chat with in the near future. For now, are there things you can watch or read to distract yourself?

I find what you said about being “conditioned to be disgusted” very interesting because I think that’s a lot more common than we’d like to think. At least in my experience, I’ve been able to think myself into all sorts of unhealthy things. But knowing and acknowledging that you are the one thinking yourself into a corner and that you are not helpless and can think your way back out is the first step to resolving some of these issues. I’m also going to say that if you’d don’t see a therapist you should try to find one, because they can help give you tools to work through feelings of anxiety or disgust.

When I started buying women’s clothes again, I felt nervous and weird about it. Even though I could tell myself that it was silly, that I am female, and that it doesn’t matter if I wear women’s jeans or women’s sweaters, I still felt guilty about it. It’s gotten much easier. (It has also helped that I’ve lost weight and now I’m not guaranteed to be able to find men’s clothes that fit. An excuse!)

I know everything hurts right now, but you say you’re only in your last year of college? You have so much more life to live, and you can absolutely live that life as a woman! Your boyfriend thinks you’re beautiful? Then you are.

I completely get where you’re coming from. I spent most of my teens and twenties thinking I was ugly, and just kind of dealing with it. Sometimes it felt pretty bad, and it caused me to miss out of some experiences. I have a hard time even looking at old pictures of myself, whether they are from before hormones or after hormones. Recently I started to look at myself in the mirror and ask, “Why couldn’t I have just been a cute butch girl?” because for the first time in my life I could see it as a possibility. It definitely hurts to think about what might have been. It’s ok to be hurt, it’s ok to be sad, and it’s ok to have regrets. But you don’t have to let those regrets consume you. Your life is not over, you can make changes to help you live the way you want to live, and things can get better. It might be slow, and I’m sorry for that. But it can happen. You have lots of years left to feel beautiful.

Please contact a crisis hotline if you need it, reach out to friends and family, and just do whatever you have to do to make it through these dark thoughts right now. Then I hope you can see a professional and come up with a plan of action for processing these feelings and moving forward the way you want to. I believe in you. I believe you can be happy.

Wow, this is a lot to be dealing with. You honestly sound like you’re in a pretty good headspace about it. Like, the thing that can be kind of tiring about detrans stuff is when there’s a negative focus on the changes we’ve put our bodies through and a sense of being “ruined.” Of course you aren’t “ruined” post-mastectomy, just like I’m not “ruined” after years of hormones. We have irrevocably changed our bodies, and it’s important to make peace with that, but our bodies are still good and worthy of being loved and all that stuff. So don’t neglect your needs going forward, I guess, because you are still yourself and deserve to be treated well.

On the subject of friends, well… high school is high school. Your life will change pretty drastically over the next five years and you’ll leave behind some of the people you’re friends with now. It concerns me that all of your friends are trans and that you “make fun of cis people.” When I was in high school, I certainly felt like an outsider and was more negative than I needed to be, sometimes making fun of people I felt hostile to because they were pretty, straight, and popular or whatever. In my last couple of years of high school I started to find that a lot of these people were kind of cool and fun. Not everyone, of course, but enough. And I wish I’d been less hostile, less caught up in my own mental illness (not my fault, but still), and more open to trying to be friends with all kinds of people.

So yes, make new friends! Join a new club or take a class on something new to you. High school is a great time to try anything and everything you have a passing interest in. It’s one of the things I miss about being in school, honestly. And with your trans friends, you can support them being trans, but maybe also keep a space open for them if they are questioning themselves. You say no one reacted to your unhappy post-surgery photo, well… maybe you’ll be the person who reaches out for someone else one day. Just a thought.