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 a bad-faith actor.
The user's writing is highly personal, emotionally nuanced, and internally consistent. They share detailed, specific experiences with detransition, medical complications (PCOS, heart condition), and the social fallout, which are difficult to fabricate convincingly. Their passion and criticism align with the expected perspective of a genuine detransitioner who feels harmed by their experience.
About me
I was born female and started testosterone at 23 because my friends pressured me and I felt I didn't fit in as a woman. I initially felt relief from a hormonal condition, but the social role was a performance that wrecked my mental health and worsened my physical health. I stopped after two years, feeling completely alone and unaware that detransition was even possible. Now, a decade later, my voice is permanently changed and I'm often misgendered. I've learned that being a woman isn't about performance, and I had to find self-acceptance as a lesbian instead of trying to become a man.
My detransition story
My journey with transition and detransition is a long and complicated one, and it started from a place of deep discomfort and not fitting in. I was born female, but I never connected with the way people, especially hardline feminists, described how women should feel or act. It made me feel alienated, like I was on the outside looking in. That feeling of not belonging was a big part of what pushed me toward considering transition.
My friends at the time were a huge influence. They were all adamant that I was obviously a man and that transitioning was the right path for me. I felt a lot of pressure from them, and I gave in. I started taking testosterone. People even told me I took to it better than others, that this was obviously how it was always meant to be. But from the inside, it never felt right. I felt like a liar, even when everyone around me accepted it as my true reality. I became hyperfixated on how everyone else saw me, and it took a massive toll on my mental health, making my existing anxiety and depression much worse.
It wasn't just my mind that suffered; my body did too. I was born with a heart condition, and taking testosterone made my weight problems and blood pressure worse. The health risks were starting to pile up, and it was scary.
A big part of my initial discomfort was with my own body during puberty. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, which made my periods infrequent, unpredictable, and absolutely terrifying. My hormones felt like they were all over the place, and I felt like an insane person who would just snap for no reason. When I started testosterone, that turbulence stopped. For the first time, I felt a sense of peace and relief from that constant hormonal chaos. That relief was a powerful feeling at the start.
But the social aspect of living as a man felt like a performance. I hated how I had to dress and act to be accepted as what everyone else wanted me to be. It was exhausting. I’ve come to believe that being male or female has nothing to do with how well you play a part, what you wear, or what hormones you take. It’s a social game that most people never even have to think about, and those of us who don’t fit the mold are left to struggle under the weight of other people's judgments.
Eventually, I stopped. I detransitioned. It was incredibly hard because, at the time, I didn't know detransition was even a thing. I felt like I was the only person in the world for whom this had been the wrong choice, which was incredibly isolating and invalidating. The social stigma was brutal. Now, nearly ten years after detransitioning, I’m as close to my original self as possible, though my voice is permanently changed. Ironically, I still don’t get read as consistently female. It’s a coin flip whether people see me as male or female, and I often get assumed to be a trans woman, which is always an awkward situation to navigate. I’ve even been escorted out of a women's restroom because someone thought I was a man.
I don’t really have regrets about my transition in the sense that I learned so much from the experience. I journeyed through something terrible and came out with wisdom. I saw through the sexist and self-destructive teachings that led me down that path in the first place. I like to think I’m a better person for having gone through it, even though it was painful and I never asked for it.
My thoughts on gender now are that it’s largely a social performance. Womanhood isn’t a job you have to perform perfectly; it’s just who you are. A woman in a ponytail and overalls is still a woman. A woman with masculine gestures is still a woman. We need to stop treating any deviation from a narrow standard as a reason to question someone’s identity. This pressure hurts everyone, cis and trans alike.
I struggled a lot with internalized issues, particularly around same-sex attraction, and I see that in a lot of other people too. Becoming a man doesn’t solve that deep self-loathing. I’m a lesbian, and that’s okay. I had to learn to be kinder to myself and to stop applying the harsh judgments I placed on others onto myself.
I am strongly against the medicalization of transition now because of the sheer negligence I witnessed and experienced. The risks are not properly explained, and the long-term health complications for female bodies on testosterone are serious and downplayed. But even though I’m anti-transition, I’m not anti-trans people. I don’t doubt that for some, it’s a legitimate experience, but I believe medical intervention is the wrong answer to a deeper problem.
Here is a timeline of my journey:
| Age | Event |
|---|---|
| Teen Years | Experienced severe puberty discomfort and hormonal chaos due to PCOS. Felt alienated from descriptions of womanhood. |
| 23 | Started testosterone, influenced heavily by friend group. Experienced initial relief from hormonal turbulence. |
| 24 | Health began deteriorating; weight and blood pressure issues worsened due to pre-existing heart condition. |
| 25 | Stopped testosterone and detransitioned. Felt completely alone, unaware detransition was a common experience. |
| 34 | Present day. Living as a detransitioned female. Voice is permanently deepened. Often misgendered. |
Top Comments by /u/underwaterworries:
Ngl, folks ranting about ""centrists"" is a huge red flag for me. This tendency the lgbt community has to double down on gaslighting and abusive tactics when you don't 100% agree with everything they say has lead me to avoid them like the plague. I'd rather be a lesbian alone with no friends than get bullied and shit on every five minutes for doing the research and trying to think for myself.
So No thoughts. Just sadness, hurt, and disappointment.
Oh sweetheart. I know you're angry and upset right now. I'm not going to tell you what you need or what you should do, but this sounds like some really serious self-loathing. Your insecurity about same-sex attraction isn't that uncommon. I struggle with that a lot, too. Becoming a man will not solve it. It won't make you feel better, either.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't, especially if it alleviates some of your current distress, but maybe consider sitting in on an ACOA session(Adult Children of Alchoholics)? Find peope who are struggling who you can talk to in person.
You're not alone, though. All of us are struggling. It's how we ended up here. Even if you need to pursue transition for yourself, we're still here with you.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one, but I wonder if the way these characters are written has something to do with it as well?
Yaoi is rarely written by men. It's usually written by women for women. The characters are often not in any way accurate representations of male people and reduces them to something else. I know people would argue that they're more feminine, but generally their characteristics tend to be desexed. Prepubescent? Even when the characters are supposedly fully adult.
It's also pretty jarring how these stories tend to flip between "cute innocent cinnamon roll" and "gruesome abuse."
Though I would argue this isn't just a Yaoi problem. I draw a lot of anime-esque wlw content for myself. I used to post it online but... I'm making a harsh assumption, but I get the feeling the majority of folks who would engage with my work were born male. The vast majority of my followers were trans women.
I legitimately had nothing against trans women up until this point, but the things they would say when they would reblog/retweet my work got to be so triggering. I tried to make friends, but they would say things that were so demeaning.
I'm sure not all trans women are like that, but I worry about the way these communities drive each other. Most of the born male anime/yuri influencers that I was aware of transitioned over the pandemic. It's possible that there's something to these genres that exacerbates these gender/sexed pain points? :/ Or perhaps, people who are suffering from these self destructive tendencies tend to find themselves in these communities?
It's hard to describe what this makes me feel.
On one hand, there's definitely the second hand shame and embarrassment that I totally get and align with. How performative it is, both on the part of the trans person and the part of those around them.
On the other hand, I've been detransitioned for nearly 10 years now. I did not transition in my teens and I never got surgery, so in theory I am as close to my cis self as humanly possible beyond some unseen quirks and my voice. It's a coin flip as to whether or not I'll be read male or female. It seems to depend, and regardless I'm met with an arbitrary assumption that I'm trans one way or the other. Nothing I do fixes this. They decide. It can be sympathetic or it can be blatantly disrespectful, but it's still there. It's always awkward to pretend to be a butch trans woman. I just don't see the point in embarassing myself by correcting them.
Even a few weeks ago, cis as I am, security at a restaurant escorted me out of the building because I made someone in the restroom uncomfortable. She thought I was a man.
I've come to the understanding that I don't get to choose. I was pressured pretty heavily into transition. My friends at the time - all of whom abandoned me as time went on - were adamant that I was obviously a man. People told me that I took to the testosterone better than others. Obviously this was always how it was meant to be.
But everything about it felt wrong. I felt like a liar even when everyone else accepted it as the most true reality. I hated how I had to dress up and act like something everyone else wanted. I was hyperfixated on how everyone else saw me. It negatively impacted my health. Even beyond the anxiety and rapidly deteriorating depression, I was already born with a heart condition and taking T exacerbated my weight problems and blood pressure. The risks were starting to compound.
Being male or female has nothing to do with how well you play the part, I think. It has nothing to do with the way you dress. It has nothing to do with hormones. It's all the social play that most human beings go their whole lives being entirely unaware of. Those of us who don't fit the mold are left to struggle to find a way to cope with other people's judgements.
So the first step, and the best thing you can do for yourself, is to stop trying to apply those judgements you inflict on yourself on others. If you practice kindness on them, maybe you'll be kinder to yourself, too.
Second this. I sometimes go down the rabbit hole and start consuming this stuff, but you have to practice self care.
We can't stop this from happening. We can't change people's minds. They will push back with equal and opposite force if they are convinced all of this is true. I know exactly how I was when I started and the only person who could talk me out if it was me.
So all you can do is take care of you. All you can do is protect you. Get outside and exercise. Create things in the world that bring you joy.
So, a thought. It may or may not help you.
You are not treating womanhood as a sense of self, but you are treating it like a full time job. Taking off your dress, putting your hair up in a cute ponytail and pulling on a pair of overalls doesn't make you less of a woman. It just makes you a woman in a ponytail and overalls. A woman with masculine gestures isn't a man, she's a woman with masculine gestures.
I get that that's scary, and people might misgender you, but as a cis woman people misgender me all the time. That isn't an insecurity relegated to trans women, it's a consequence of being a woman in our society. We are not given the space to explore ourselves today without the lens of transmedicalism looming in the shadows. This belief that any deviation from certain media standards is grounds for terminating your membership to "the woman club" is not healthy or safe for cis people or trans people.
So, you might find peace in your body and yourself if you allow yourself to be yourself for YOU and not for the eyes of someone else. "Womanhood for consumption" is not womanhood, it is performance first.
I'm not saying that to discourage you from detransitioning if that's your choice, but if you're here because you're afraid you are failing at being a woman... well, that's not true. This belief of what it means to be a woman - specifically that women need to conform to "womanhood for consumption" in order to be valid women - is inherently wrong and unfair, both to you and to other women.
You deserve better than to religate yourself to a show at your own expense.
If that means detransitioning because being a woman isn't authentic to you, then that might be best. If that means staying transitioned because this is authentic to you and you were just feeling insecure, then that might be best.
For problem 2, I have no answers. I am not a doctor. I know both cis men and women who require synthetic hormones to sustain their health and well-being but I can't answer to whether or not high estrogen levels are healthy for your body as a replacement. It is kind of a moot point, like you said. Either way, you will be using a replacement. I would advise asking an endocrinologist - maybe one who specializes in male sexual health, such as at a fertility clinic - and ask them candidly if high levels of estrogen are safe for you if you were NOT using them to transition. Ask if there are long term ramifications for natal men with low testosterone and high estrogen levels. I know the answer for women is pretty grim, but I don't know if it's the same for men.
No, not really, lol. I haven't had a lot of luck even getting a therapist. The waiting lists are absurd and they never call back.
But. We can't change things. I think one of the reasons we feel so powerless is because we feel like we should. We should be able to take things back, we should be able to go a different way.
Things can only be what they are. We can't undo what has already happened. We can only focus on this moment.
And if we're being honest, even if things aren't the way we wanted them to be, we can consider the journey we made to get here. We have struggled through something no one else has ever experienced. This struggle has shaped us into the person we are now. We have journeyed to the underworld and we have brought back wisdom.
We are Odin. We gave up our eye, and in return we have seen further than other people ever have.
It's true that none of us asked for that. Unlike Odin we didn't go out of our way to make that choice. But here we are.
I have learned so much about myself in this process. I have seen through a lot of the sexist and self-destructive teachings that lead me down that path. I may not be the same as I was when I left, but I like to think the person who came out the other side was a better person.
I'm actually not at all sure when this started, but I believe it has more to do with how difficult it is to place the line. They took a pretty hardline stance on "all identities are welcome and included" and once you're there it's hard to say who is and is not trans and/or a woman, and it isn't like Her has the money to pay someone to filter through and enforce any policy on it even if they had one.
Very recently, Lex, lesbian-centric social media app that is more geared tow!rd networking, went the same way. It used to be that cis men were not welcome and would be removed, but they changed their minds...
Random thought, but I am just now absorbing the percentages they cited here.
19.7% in 2023 identify as lgbt.
7.2% in 2022 identify as lgbt.
4.5% in 2017 identify as lgbt according to this article.
The number has skyrocketted over the last few years. I know there was a slow incline prior, but... not to that degree. I wonder if that means they outnumber the rest of the rainbow now. That would explain why these apps have such an incentive to be inclusive. More users means more money. :/
Edited formatting for clarity.
Not sure I do.
If anything, the constant insistence you get from hardline feminists that women are vulnerable and chronically oppressed had a bigger impact on me because I never felt that way. People were always describing how I should be feeling, what I should be doing, and I never connected with it. It always made me feel pretty alienated.
But that's just me, probably.
I think I need more context. What is the actual content of these proposed law changes? Where are they relevant to?
Like, as described I would say absolutely not. Even as someone who is quickly developing a very hardline stance against transition regardless of age or sex given how negligent medical practitioners have been every step of the way here - heck, frigg'n artificial food dyes have been better studied and regulated than HRT - I don't believe forcing a person who has already had surgery and has been living as their chosen gender to detransition after the fact makes any sense. You're just going to cause more trauma and actively aggravate extremist sentiments.
At best you're forcing these people to get their hormones from unsafe sources. This will not stop it from happening, it just puts desperate people in increasingly dangerous situations.