This is about forgiveness, which is a whooooole different challenge.

Ohhhh, my lord, yes it is. A friend of mine a while back made a kind of throwaway comment that I don't even think he remembers saying that really stuck with me: "Parents are just adults who have children." And that's it - it's not like they get classes in this or any sort of preparation (or often even help!) - they're just two adults who had sex and a handful of months later wind up with a screaming infant and absolutely no fucking idea what to do with it.

Realizing this helps me forgive my folks for the things they did to me - and I use the present tense because I truly believe forgiveness is a choice and an act we choose to recommit to. In my situation, my folks had terrible parental role models (crazy and drunk on one side, and none on the other) and they were trying to do the best they knew with what they had. Were they good parents? Good Christ, no - but I know from so much evidence in my adult life that they're good people who truly do love me and care about me, and knowing all that makes it easier for me, personally, to find a place to put all this so I can find the healing and perspective within myself that I truly, desperately need to function on a daily basis.

I tell people sometimes that forgiveness, for me, is in many ways a selfish act: I do it for my sanity, for my mental health recovery, for my healing. It's about them, but at the same time it very much is not - does that make any sense?

Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling a bit here, but please know you struck a chord in me with this. This is all very tough stuff, and it sounds like you're doing a phenomenal job of putting it where it needs to go for you. Proud of you, my friend!

Edit for typo: screaming infant. We're not at the level of technology yet where we're streaming in utero, thank god.

Part of the reason for this is that our brains are very bad at compartmentalizing emotion.

To simplify (probably way too much), our brains more or less have a context for emotion and an understanding of intensity, which we'll call "arousal" here for the sake of explanation even though I don't always mean it in a sexual sense:

None of this is terribly interesting so far. What is interesting is that the brain sucks about changing arousal level when it switches context. Say you were already on edge and very sad because something terrible had happened, then someone surprises you with something little but nice - you might suddenly catch yourself crying and not entirely understand why, right? This is happening because your noggin just reframed everything as happy but your emotions are still keyed up to the max, so the limbic part of your brain reacts like the ketchup packet your coworker gave you was a winning lottery ticket or something.

Or, for a darker example, have you ever had the experience of being very angry at a partner and then suddenly being turned on by them? You don't just get a little turned on, you get really really turned on in a very confusing way. Many people have legendary stories about "grudge fucks" or "hate fucks" that they've had, and this is the neurophysiological part of why that works.

To come back to the point here, though: BDSM exploits this mechanism intentionally to raise sexual arousal levels past where they would ordinarily cause an orgasm and keep pushing and pushing to greater and greater heights by switching contexts around (often, but not necessarily, between pain and sexual pleasure - it'll work with anything controllable, though: fear is another common driver) before releasing everything. This can be really fun! But this can also cause people to build associations between sex and unusual things: if you experience deep trauma pain from an event and then suddenly (somehow successfully) recontextualize that into something physically sexually arousing, it's going to send you off the charts - and you're going to start building an association between those two things as sexually interesting. Whether this is empowering or psychologically damaging or something else entirely I don't think I can speak to (my own trauma stays far away from my sex) - but I do know it certainly looks strange and alarming on the surface.

I have no idea if that helps, but I thought it might at least be informative.

Thank you so much for this post. I don't want to make the comments all about myself, but some of this really hit home with me.

Finally, why are we treating transition as the normal course of action for ALL people with gender dysphoria? [...W]hy are we allowing older people (like 30 and up) who haven't experienced chronic gender dysphoria for years on end and will definitely struggle to pass given how developed they are in their birth sex to transition without being honest with them about what these procedures do and don't do?

I am 41 and just coming to terms with my dysphoria and the significance of it in my life just now, and the absolute fiction coming out of people's mouths when I try to talk about this is just astounding me. I'm 6'1", am built like a linebacker, and am pretty much the archetypal "gay" "bear" - even if I wanted to transition (which I don't), the physical reality of the situation is that even with all the makeup and surgery in the world I am just never going to be able to pass. My options for presenting my gender consist of "man" or "man in drag," so I just try to take my male body and make it work the best I can for me. Some people get choices; I am not that fortunate.

I think most of these folks, the ones encouraging me to transition and make these huge life changes, if they sat down and thought about it would likely agree with what I'm saying here - if they felt like they were allowed to say it. The LGBTQ+ movement, as it currently stands, has a very hard-line push about trans people and what is and is not acceptable to say and do and feel and believe, and doing anything that even remotely slides out of lockstep from that will get you shut down in liberal circles immediately. It also, for better or worse, pushes wholehearted acceptance of transition regardless of how well a person actually conforms or appears to be the gender they are attempting to present as - the party line is that you are what gender you say you are, and that's that. But I don't think any trans person ever has wanted the end result of their transition to leave them feeling like they're their original sex but in drag - the end goal of all this is to be like and (perhaps especially) look like what you feel inside, right?

In any case, enough about me and my opinions about the movement. I wanted to post because 1) this hit home with me hard, and 2) I wanted to say that much of this is not your fault. In the process of trying to silence bullying and hate, we (as the LGBTQ+ community) have also managed to silence any voice dissenting with complete acceptance - and so many people in your situation wind up falling through the cracks because people like your care providers have been put into a position where they either don't think it's okay to or are too scared to speak up when they see this happening. I am so, so sorry.

sorry If this doesn't make sense

It makes too much sense - heartbreaking amounts of it. I hate it. I also have opinions about the medicalization of gender dysphoria - feelings, even very strong negative ones, can just be part of the human experience without being a pathology that needs a cure - but that's a whole separate post for a whole different time.

I wish I could give you a great big hug through the internet, friend. In the end, no matter what anyone says to you about any of this, no one can make the right choices for you but you. You're the ultimate arbiter of your own experience and you get to decide whether and how you'd like to change your body. Don't forget that, okay?

(Edits: Added a couple sentences at the end and fixed a ton of tiny fiddly grammar things - trying to edit in that text box is miserable.)

Finasteride prevents your body from making as much DHT (dihydrogentestosterone, a type of T) as it ordinarily would, typically lowering the amount by 70% or so. If you are wanting to remasculinize, you should probably consider talking to your care providers about stopping it. DHT isn't the only kind of testosterone the body makes and finasteride isn't going to interfere 70% with all of your normal testosterone production/utilization, just that one particular type.

Also, this may go without saying, but please don't take my words here as medical advice (I'm not a doctor and definitely am not your doctor) and please don't stop or start any prescription medication without talking to a medical professional first.

The "it felt like I couldn't be gender nonconforming without being trans" thing hit kind of hard for me. I'm older, and this was absolutely a thing when I was trying to piece together my sexual identity as a kid. I think it's really important to take this stuff in context of time, especially - gender identity exploration today vs. gender identity exploration in, say, the 90s were two completely different animals. Things were a lot harder and a lot easier both back then - it was just very different in ways that are difficult to enumerate and explain to people who weren't there in it.

I am not trans and am not a detransitioner (I'm GNC and publicly identify as a gay man for convenience), but I very narrowly avoided being lead down the primrose path of changing my identity by some very well-meaning and weirdly insistent people at a couple of very vulnerable points in my life. I see the unspeakable pain the people here have gone through and realize that the only thing that spared me the same thing was just frankly sheer luck and weird timing, and it's... really unfair. I have a sort of survivor guilt about this all, to be completely honest with you all, and at times it's a little difficult to deal with.

The only thing I know to do to assuage it is to give back, to amplify the voices of the wounded and do what I can to make you all heard and seen in times where it's convenient to ignore your pain for the sake of a clean public narrative. It doesn't make me friends, but I quit caring about who likes me on the internet and who doesn't a long time ago.

Edit: I was trying to use "GNC" as a bit of a shorthand for a very complicated situation which changed since I joined this community. I didn't think I'd need to lay this out here, but I am intersex and me, my genitals, my gender, and my hormones have had a history. I will be taking this up with the mod team and see if I am still welcome.

Edit 2: I want to be clear that I'm not upset with them - things changed (a lot) and I didn't tell anyone when I probably should've.

In my opinion, you absolutely sound female. Your voice has a certain smoky, sultry quality to it, and your laugh is beautifully feminine especially.

Don't forget that there are lots of women out there with deeper voices! It's very, very possible to sound feminine and have a lower speaking range - no one would doubt that Cher or Adele sound female, for instance, despite the fact that they both speak in typically male ranges.

My heart breaks for you. I can only imagine your pain.

People tell me to accept what happened and talk about radical acceptance etc, but what If I literally do not want to accept what happened?

This is the hardest part about acceptance.

If it helps any, please remember that accepting something is not the same as being okay with it. In many ways, a better word for "acceptance" would be "tolerance." You have had a horrible thing inflicted upon you that can't be reversed fully, and that thing has caused you both serious emotional and physical damage. The only way forward from this point, after you have grieved your loss, is to make the best of this terrible situation. It is all you can do.

But hear me out: that doesn't mean you can't still be angry, and that doesn't mean you have to forgive anyone. It just means rebuilding - that is all.

I am not a mental health professional and can't offer you anything aside from resources to help find one, but I really strongly encourage you to find someone that you can trust - therapist or not - to talk to. If you don't already have care and are comfortable DMing me the city you live in, I can look for some providers (for both therapy and medication) if you need them - I'm pretty good at putting resources together in general.

I will keep you in my heart and wish you nothing but the best. Please do what you can to stay safe - I'll be thinking about you.

Not OP - definitely not, but for some survivors of childhood abuse (like myself, and, from what it sounds like, like the OP as well) it can be the right choice.

But it's just that - a very, very deeply personal choice, one with no right or wrong answer. For me, though, it was something that I can say, at least in my own experience, was able to provide me a tremendous amount of peace.

This is really beautiful. I'm so glad you found some peace with all this - as this community can attest to, figuring out one's gender is such an awful, painful thing for a lot of people, and for a lot of us it's not exactly a straight (ha!) path from Point A to Point B.

Please know how proud I am of you for making it to this point - you went through extremely difficult times and still managed to come out on top. I see you and love you too. 💖