Former trans experiences

I am too young to transition in any way, and I’m glad. If I were a few years older, I would be on testosterone and gotten my breasts removed.

Everyone told me I was trans when I said I experienced gender dysphoria. So that’s what I accepted. Even if it didn’t quite feel right.

By @c-butch:

Right now I’m living life day by day, recently contemplating my gender journey through a new lens. I am 47 and transitioned from female to male nearly 15 years ago. It brought great relief to me for many years, the testosterone made me feel connected to my body in a way I never experienced before, and top surgery was liberating. I had very large D size breasts and they were extremely uncomfortable.

Before I came out as trans I went to a doctor to consult on breast reduction, he refused to make them A or B size like I wanted. Because I’m tall and broad shouldered, he told me it wouldn’t look right and a C was as small as he’d go. It made me sick to have a man tell me what looked good on me and that I was wrong.

Anyhow, I went on to become a very well known ftm activist, so my anonymity is important here. Several important people in my life passed over the last few years, and I’ve been able to get closure with some relationships connected to them, including the relationship to my female self.

Recently I’ve had feelings of reclaiming my previous masculine female identity and I’ve fantasized about de-transitioning. I’m not sure where all of this is taking me and I’m here to learn and communicate with others who have had similar experiences.

I’ve been taking low doses of T already, and this weekend I shaved off all my body hair, except facial scruff because I still like it. I feel like a dyke again, I’ve been thinking of myself as a trans masculine female. I think eventually I might going out in the world one weekend and see if I can pass myself off as a dyke again.

Hi, I’m grateful that I found other de-transitioning and re-identifying women on here. I’m 48 years old and I medically transitioned FTM 26 years ago.

I started T in 1992, underwent mastectomy in 1994 and hysterectomy in 2003. I was considered ‘very passable’ by social standards. I served as an FTM support group facilitator and transgender youth advocate, and I worked as a cultural competency trainer for human services organizations wishing to better serve transgender clients. At no time during the early years was I aware of any doubt/regret/grief or did I ever have any reason to think I was misdiagnosed. In fact, during my ‘honeymoon period’ of the first 10 years, I was blissfully happy. (Anyone who wants to proclaim that I was ‘never truly trans’ is out of their fucking mind).

However as time went on, if pressed, I could admit that there were some things about my transition I was deeply disenfranchised about. My mastectomy surgery was complicated by a post-surgical infection that resulted in a failed nipple graft; this resulted in full loss of sensation and additional scarring on one side that I had not expected and I experienced extreme shame about this. My boyish chest and my plans for shirt-free living had not materialized to my satisfaction.

I also identified as a gay male and I experienced a level of sexual rejection from gay men (which I had frankly never experienced from straight men when previously living as a woman). I let this eat away at me and really undermine my sense of self. I began to feel extremely inferior and inadequate about not having a penis and extremely shameful and loathsome about having female anatomy. I eventually did find love and settle down. However, for the first 10 years of my relationship, I was convinced that at any moment my partner would leave me for a ‘real man’.

I began to experience a growing sense of despondency regarding the fact that my transition had come to a plateau and there were still no truly viable options for phalloplasty. My previous experiences with surgery made me very doubtful that the scar tissue, possibility for necrosis, loss of sensation, etc. were risks I would ever be willing to take.

Regular check ups revealed that I had an ovarian tumor and needed a hysterectomy. After this surgery, I experienced another post-surgical infection and had to be re-admitted for IV antibiotics. About 5 years after that surgery, I began to experience painful sex and frequent UTI- which doctors diagnosed as atrophic vaginitis attributed to estrogen deficiency and long-term use of testosterone. I began treating it with a topical estrogen and a prophylactic antibiotic regimen. The antibiotics gave me yeast infections. Now I was in a position to require life-long medical intervention to treat the side effects of life-long medical intervention. The irony was not lost on me.

The good news is that my intimate partnership persisted and eventually I was able to finally experience being present in my own body during sex without the mental gymnastics of having to fantasize about having a penis. What I experienced was a genderlessness/formlessness/freedom that I could only describe as spiritual. This happened very gradually through no effort on my part to change my orientation or identity. And this experience was not at all rooted in ‘internalized transphobia’; which is an explanation that some folks would offer to debunk the validity of de-transition as an act of liberation.

However, this experience of freedom from dysphoria and being at home in my body also came with a high degree of cognitive dissonance. I felt slightly guilty; like I was somehow betraying our queerness by no longer mentally exercising a strictly boy-on-boy masculine identity. And it was challenging to my self concept to learn that the very thing that made me want to be male in the first place (feeling a phantom penis) was something that now was not only unnecessary, but was actively causing my own suffering.

I began to desire wholeness and being at-home in my body without despising my anatomy and without wishing for other anatomy. I finally realized that I was grieving my natural, non-medicated pre-transition experience. Even though I could not remember a time when I hadn’t wanted to be male, I now knew it was possible to love myself as a female bodied person and I began to wonder how my life would have been different without the need to filter every moment through the lens of wanting desperately to be male.

Furthermore, I came to despise the masculine role I’d taken on. I realized that I no longer had the close bonds with women I’d enjoyed before and that I was grieving this level of intimacy. And I could finally really see evidence of white male privilege in my own life and I became saddened and appalled at my failure to be an ally to women and people of color. During times when I tried to speak up on behalf of challenging sexism and gender stereotypes, I felt that my words were misinterpreted as ‘mansplaining’ and that my passing as male so successfully meant that I was forever an outsider to the people who I shared such a fundamental experience with. I started to hate my own paralysis and complicity in the toxic masculinity and racism which mainstream culture is so clearly seeped in.

In therapy, I eventually came to the conclusion that I transitioned too young (age 22), under the wrong circumstances (abusing street drugs) and for the wrong reasons (self-loathing rooted in misogyny and untreated trauma at having been a rape and abuse survivor). This gave me a new lens with which to think critically about my choices and the desire to heal these parts of myself that I abandoned by unconsciously seeking to obliterate them through transition.

For the last 3 years I’ve been exploring de-transition through wearing ‘femme’ and/or androgynous clothing, using gender neutral name and pronouns, and reclaiming my body. Sometimes when I wear fitted clothes and I can still vaguely see my own curves, I am aroused by my own femaleness. I’ve removed 90% of my facial hair and 60% of my body hair through laser treatments. I’m taking a modest dose of estrogen and Gabapentin to cope with debilitating hot flashes but I also still require a modest dose of T because I am now almost entirely inorgasmic without T (although I previously hadn’t been before taking T). I am now so permanently masculinized that I am perceived as MTF- although I sometimes pass a female if I’ve had a very close shave and I am dressed very stereotypical ‘female”, and if I use my voice very quietly.

My instinct is telling me to proceed with legal and cultural de-transition more fully because now that I’m learning to appreciate my body, I’m finally feeling more pride and alignment with being female and desiring to have my public identity synchronized with these experiences.

However, if I am to be completely honest about it, my tendency is to sometimes fixate on restoring myself physically (as well as possible) to my original pre-transition condition when no amount of new medical interventions are ever going to undo what has happened; let alone fully heal everything I’ve been through. The healing has to come from inside.

Furthermore, my partner of 19 years (who I dearly love), is decidedly gay and although he tolerates my new androgynous look, he’s expressed a feeling of not being attracted to my more ‘feminine’ side. After building a life together, adopting and raising two young children together, and running two businesses together, I have a very hard time with the possibility of risking all that when maybe I could be content with a genderqueer or gender neutral identity.

20 years old, from the US.

I’m a Hispanic Jew, and that’s really where it all starts. My genetics came together as a mismatch - very pale and very stocky and with thick dark hair. I remember begging my mother to let me shave as a ten year old because even my prepubescent body hair was mannish in my eyes. I thought I was a hideous girl, and bad at being one on top of that. I always felt very separate from the girls in my classes, like an entirely different kind of species watching them from the outside. I’m still not sure if it’s because my Hispanic upbringing didn’t match their white middle class experiences or my awful social skills or just an early awareness that I was a lesbian. My body stayed chubby and flat chested all through puberty, and between that and the faint mustache I can now appreciate I looked like a big ol’ dyke.

Everyone, even the ones who didn’t know I was gay, knew I was far from feminine and my “mannish” physique made them treat me mannish. I came out in early high school and was promptly flocked by the scared girls only beginning to question their sexuality. I think I made them feel like they were taking baby steps, virtually still dating a man. I had two girlfriends over the course of high school, and both pressured me into the dominant - the “masculine” - role in our relationship. I made the decisions about dates, I gave them gifts and paid for them, I controlled the sexual encounters. I didn’t know what I was doing any better than them but I faked it and they loved it, and I told myself I liked letting these shy sexually curious girls pigeonhole me into the role. I hated being feminine, after all. Femininity made me look like a gorilla in a dress and made me clean up after the men in my life. What’s not to dislike?

When I was 15 I became aware of gender identities, and at the same time I grew closer to a now former friend. I was shy and she engaged with me (when it suited her), so young me who was so tired of making all the decisions for the girls in my life soon ended up manipulated by her. She told me our mutual friends beginning to question their genders were faking it, they weren’t really genderfluid like her. She asked me if I was nonbinary too. I thought about how my mother held me to much higher standards than my much older brothers, how I’d always felt othered around the girls in my classes, how freakish and self conscious I felt at any behavior that didn’t suit my unattractive and “masculinely” proud person, and I said yes. She said she understood, and that those fakers weren’t like me and her.

I cut her from my life when I left high school, but I had yet to shake the gender feelings that plagued me. I felt like I hideous mistake of a woman and longed for a flat chest and a slender, genderless body. I wanted to be left alone to do as I pleased. The sentiment followed me to college, where I introduced myself with they/them pronouns and a shiny new agender label. The name was harder, I’d always hated my name but I was afraid to take the leap to an entirely new name so I struggled with nickname after nickname and felt like a burden for asking my friends to use the new one every time. I began to wear some men’s clothing mixed in with my existing wardrobe, being unable to afford an entirely new one. I felt like a hideous mistake of a nonbinary person, my body too feminine to be androgynous even with a shorter haircut and shapeless clothing. I always felt like a faker within the trans and nonbinary crowd, not being on hrt or in the process of getting it and not looking anything like all my tumblr-stereotypical queer friends.

The next step was a binder, and that was the beginning of the end of my social transition. It turns out I have weak lungs, and every sized binder I tried made me stupidly dizzy after an hour tops. Once I was forced to accept a flat chest was not in my reach without top surgery which I had no possibility to afford I was hit with crippling dysphoria, and in my stubborn and decisive style I knew my only option was to accept my body and I was damn well going to make it work. Every morning I did my bathroom routine entirely naked, at first unable to look at myself in the mirror but soon adjusting to it. I examined my large curvy body and discovered one day to my astonishment that I was not fat at all, just a thick, bottom-heavy Hispanic person. When I liked what was underneath my clothes I began to like the way I looked with them on.

This contributor wanted me to include her username, but she deactivated since sending in this submission. Her old URL was @ supladiez. If you’re still on tumblr and you want me to include your new username, please get in touch.

Midwest USA, 18 years of age

If you met me a year ago and asked me where I thought I’d be today, I would have expected to be seven months on T with a date set for top surgery and a legal name change. It’s strange to write that out now. I’m smarter today, and I feel more grounded, but thinking about transition still gives me a little ache of desire. Maybe it always will. I’m getting closer to making peace with that.

I’ve felt that twinge of desire to be a boy on and off throughout my life. When I was a child, those moments were few and far between. I was shy and got along better with books and bugs than people, but I was happy and reasonably well adjusted. The only times I wanted to be a boy were in short, hot bursts- so I could play rough, piss standing up, take my shirt off, be the main character instead of his girlfriend.

When I got older and hit puberty, everything got a little worse. My body was changing but I refused to wear bras, what was cute shyness in a child was now frustrating social anxiety and I started feeling increasingly isolated from my peers as they became more and more entrenched in their respective gender roles. Boys were getting bigger and stronger and girls were getting fatter, weaker and expected by everyone to celebrate our growing fuckability. I refused to wear shirts that so much as showed my collarbone and shied away from being touched. It was around this time that I started feeling like a creep around girls, a feeling that grew subtly over the years. Guess my subconscious was punishing me for something it took my conscious five more years to process- I was bi. Despite being attracted to boys and girls, I was much more fascinated with boys. Social conditioning and my fixation with literature had done its work- I watched and silently envied boys for the inner depth, the effortless vitality, the fully realized humanity that everyone implied they had. They could be Hemingway, I could be one of his nameless wives. I wanted to be them, had elaborate fantasies about being them, but I didn’t kid myself- I was a girl and there was no changing it.

It only got worse when high school started. My friends were all still intelligent and caring, but our personal paths diverged as they started to glow up and I stayed weird. I still sat with them at lunch and walked the halls with them, but I emotionally isolated myself despite the physical proximity and felt like an outsider witnessing the seemingly effortless way they all got girlhood right.

Whether or not I felt like a typical girl, I was treated like one. Boys that were friendly with me made fucking motions behind my back when they thought I couldn’t see; I was yelled at for taking a walk after dark and shot strange looks when I forgot to pitch my voice high enough. Only a few months into freshman year, I got depressed. The cause was more complex than just misogyny, but it was a factor. Unfortunately, I made an account on tumblr pretty soon after getting depressed. The collective tumblr obsession with males didn’t do me any favors, what I now recognized as dysphoria had been building over the years, between my depression and social isolation I was drifting unmoored through life, and I was mired in compulsive introspection thanks to a fresh new case of classic teenage egotism and search for identity. This is when I was exposed to the idea of being trans.

In early 2014, being trans was the hot new topic, and it only took a few weeks of research for me to “accept myself,” as nonbinary for a hot minute and then as a bi trans guy for three years. I checked all the boxes, and despite knowing how hard transition would be, being trans was a relief. I wasn’t a weird girl who didn’t have any of the right instincts or wants, I was actually male inside. It explained why I hated the sound of my meaningless female voice and wanted desperately for my female sex characteristics to be replaced with strong, steady male ones. It explained why I wanted to crawl into a cave when I had to wear impractical dresses that exposed my vulnerable body, why I felt awkward around other people. It explained why I had a complicated inner life, why I had a fierce independent streak and didn’t get crushes- I just couldn’t fathom romance when people treated me like the girl I wasn’t. My constant daydreams of an alternate life where I was male weren’t a maladaptive behavior at all- they meant I was a boy on the inside! Popular trans advice blogs even touched on internalized misogyny just enough to be able to write it off. Have you reblogged two or more performative and ultimately meaningless posts about how “all women are beautiful”? Congrats, internalized misogyny does not impact your worldview or any of your decisions! I came out to one friend, one teacher and then my parents. They screamed, cried, took away my computer and we never talked about it again.

Despite the fast and intense rejection from my parents, I stayed true to being trans. I just kept it inside. Before I came out to them, I’d harbored a few vague hopes about early transition, school transfers and a new life. Now, I kept researching HRT and surgeries in depth on my phone and planned to take a year off after graduation to transition away from my family before college. In the meantime, I resigned myself to three years of getting by. That was a mistake. Focusing on becoming a completely new person in the future allowed me to completely disconnect from reality. Each day I would daydream through school, whip my way through homework and then lay on the floor in my room for hours, scrolling through the web or staring at the wall. The shit I was seeing on the web didn’t exactly make me feel better either. I slowly realized that a lot of popular content about being trans was based on barely obscured gender roles. It took me a long time to see through the bullshit and realize that gender wasn’t a feeling and it wasn’t how you dressed, but there are only so many times you can see someone you follow reblog a “gender is a construct” edit and follow it up with something about how being genderfluid is a valid and materially meaningful identity before the cognitive dissonance is too much to handle. One notable moment for me was in my high school GSA, where a girl said that she considered herself “cis-ish” because she didn’t care about clothes or shoes. Instead of having common sense, our forty year old male adviser said that “cis-ish” was a great term and he would start using it because he had a dollhouse as a child, liked the idea of raising a baby, and didn’t mind when people called him a “mama bear.” Steaming inside, I bit my tongue. At the time, I was angry because I thought they were reducing being trans to gender roles, but I now recognize that my feeling like I was male inside because of abstract character traits and a gender non conforming personality was sort of an extended version of the same idea.

Even after I started to recognize these things, I hung onto being trans because I was dysphoric, the one true proof of my identity. Then I saw a post by a butch lesbian about her dysphoria. Until then, I had never even heard of a dysphoric person who wasn’t automatically trans. My knee jerk reaction was anger and rejection- who did this woman think she was, to be claiming the term “dysphoric” as a cis person? The idea wormed its way under my skin and made me so annoyed and uncomfortable that I was confused by the intensity of my reaction. I took a step back and tried to think about why the post made me feel the way it did, but I couldn’t figure it out. In that moment, I made one of my better decisions online. Instead of staying complacent in my worldview, I forced myself to confront and interrogate my feelings. I followed her. Anonymously, I asked her how she distinguished between her dysphoria and trans dysphoria and she told me that it was all the same dysphoria, the difference was that she chose to keep thinking of herself as a woman despite it. I had never heard anything like that before.

It took me about six months after seeing that post to finally reidentify as female. The post in itself didn’t change me immediately, but it led me down an intellectual and psychological path that made me examine my life and emerge with a greater consciousness of the toll socialization had taken on me as well as the failures of gender as a system. I came to realize that the idea that I, a gender nonconforming female, had to “identify” as a gender rather than just be a sex was setting me up to fail. Reluctantly, I backed away from transition.

I’m still depressed. I still feel disconnected from my life. I’m still dysphoric, I still feel isolated, and sometimes I still get caught up in wishing that I had been born a boy. None of that precludes me from being a woman. I’m not transitioning, but I took that year off after graduation and I’m using it to try to get a grip on depression and reconnect with my life before I go to college. Trying to accept yourself and grow as a person kind of sucks, and most of the time I feel like I haven’t made any progress, but I hope I will someday. Reidentifying as female has given me a stubbornness and motivation to prove myself that identifying as male never did.

Anonymous, 17, from the UK

Growing up, I was a very gnc kid. I hated anything to do with being girly and femininity. I was never out of my football kit and I loved playing with cars. I also loved the fact that I wasn’t like most girls. As a child, my male friends valued having a girl that liked the same stuff as them.

As I got older, this became more of a problem. My family was uneasy with the fact that I didn’t grow out of being a tomboy. By 13, I realized that I was a lesbian. I was extremely bullied about being a lesbian, even before I officially “came out” as one - because I was so masculine. At 14, I discovered the “sjw” side of the internet - and so did my friends. People in my friendship group started to come out - but not in the traditional sense. People were coming out as “genderfluid” and “a gender”, as they had discovered the terms on the internet. I did some digging myself, and found, at the time, I resonated with being transgender - female to male. In my naive brain, I thought this label would give me a new sense of self - I would be seen as this ultra cool guy who everyone liked, instead of the weak, picked on lesbian that I was. I thought it would give me a whole new better life. A new appearance on hormones was attractive to me, because I had such low confidence after being bullied. But this label did the whole opposite of what I dreamed of in my imagination.

I started identifying as male with my friends, who had no issues at all with a name change and pronouns. Online, I became a trendy trans boy. I complained about my “dysphoria” - which I now realise was just low self-esteem and low body confidence, and perhaps even body dysmorphia - to the tumblr trans community. I thought I had found myself.

Then my parents found out what I had been telling my friends. They were furious. All types of social media were taken from me, I wasn’t even allowed a phone. I was sent to therapy. I was suffering from serious self harming issues, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I thought this trans identity would take that all away - it was something to blame my thoughts on, i.e. I was depressed because I needed to transition. The therapist told me that I would be referred to the Tavistock gender clinic once I was stable enough. Once my parents realized that my therapist wasn’t discouraging my eagerness to transition, they stopped me from going.

I’m a biracial 20-something from the US.

To summarize my situation: I was severely dysphoric and transitioning to male seemed right for me– in fact it seemed like the only option for me other than death. However, when I moved out of my sexually abusive father’s house– having lived as an FTM for several years with zero doubts, having gotten a double mastectomy, changed my legal name and gender, and having taken hormones for 2 years– my desire to be male instantly vanished and was replaced by equally intense dysphoria because my body no longer looked female. In hindsight, I probably should have addressed my sexual trauma before permanently changing my body!

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Youth

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My earliest memories are of being sexually abused by my father. The sexual abuse only stopped when I altered my body to pass as male in my late teens. Other than that, I had a typical FTM childhood: extreme alienation from the girly version of femininity that was expected of me, most of my friends were boys and I liked stereotypical boy things. I had crushes on both boys and girls. I went by a boy nickname beginning in elementary school, cut my own hair off when my parents wouldn’t let me get it cut as short as I liked, and absolutely refused to be dressed in girly clothes. I was bullied all the way through school for being “weird” and being gender non-conforming was a large part of that. More than once I was the only kid in the whole class who was not invited to birthday parties. Girls in particular went out of their way to exclude me, though as I got older they simply pretended I didn’t exist and boys began to take a more active role in bullying me– usually in the form of sexual harassment.

Going into the sixth grade I made a conscious effort to be more like a girl, though I was never able to embrace femininity beyond buying on pink skirt that wore only once and then threw away. I started identifying with goth culture in middle school because it offered me a version of femininity that seemed less vulnerable and less “vapid” than I believed “preppy” females were (I now see the error of my ways). Being an outcast was the norm for goth, scene, and emo kids. Of course, I didn’t really fit in there either, since I am biracial and could never fit the Eurocentric ideal of those particular subcultures.

I owned three dresses in my middle school years: one that was black and studded, one that was black and lacy (that another goth friend had chosen for us both to wear to 8th grade graduation), and one that was a rockabilly style red-and-black checked dress. I added a fourth dress to my repertoire in high school that I wore on a few memorable occasions. I still only wore dresses about two dozen times in my life until I began detransitioning.

The only time I was exposed to butches at all was when they were the butt of jokes on television. People used the term butch to describe me when they were insulting me. Butch was what happened when girls didn’t grow out of being tomboys like they were supposed to. I couldn’t be butch and I wasn’t girly, so naturally I was thrilled to learn that there were people who had experienced femaleness like I had that were as uncomfortable with both butchness and femininity as I was; I think the first time I was really aware of trans people was when I saw an attractive white guy on a clip of either Ellen or Oprah that had been posted on youtube. Before then I’d only been exposed to the concept of transmen once when a female friend of mine had shown me a gallery of images of attractive (white) transmen and told me that she felt weird for finding them attractive. It must have been around 2009.

Seeing that Ellen or Oprah clip for the first time roughly coincided with my entry into fandom culture and when I first made a tumblr blog. I was exposed to more and more trans male narratives and they all sounded so similar to my own (minus the sexual abuse that I had convinced myself hadn’t affected me at all). Soon, transition seemed like the panacea for all of my sufferings. Starting when I was about 16 I would obsessively browse the transman tag on tumblr, watch transman progress videos on youtube, and read tips on passing for hours at a time.

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Transition

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By 2012, I was going by a male name and male pronouns, completely convinced that I was transgender. Where my discomfort with my body had previously manifested as anorexia and diagnosed body dysmorphic disorder, I now obsessed over my unwanted breasts and high pitched voice. I cut my already short hair and came out to my family. By then I was regularly attending a queer youth group where I met many other trans identified youth. For the first time, I felt like I had found a community where I fit in. There were no butches to show me that my fear of being seen as a butch were unfounded– just other outcasts who were as immersed in online trans culture as I was.

I was a little bit worried about starting testosterone because I was afraid I’d wind up never passing and just making myself completely unlovable with the damage I did to my body (mission accomplished!). Throughout my transition, most of my friends on and off line identified as trans. The experiences of trans youtubers reinforced my belief that testosterone was the key to happiness.

I went to an informed consent clinic in 2014 and was immediately given a prescription for very high doses of testosterone, administered via injection. Even if I had visited a gatekeeper therapist, I would likely have been given the okay to start testosterone since I had been a tomboy as a child and experienced what I believed was extreme gender dysphoria.

Within four months of starting testosterone, I had undergone a double mastectomy and legally changed my name and gender.

Transitioning felt right for me, even after testosterone caused me to gain 30 lbs. I never had any serious doubts about my identity– just my passability.

I idealized the male form, the male experience, and gay male relationships. I felt that heterosexual relationships were always a bit exploitative because I felt that males in our culture always wielded more power than females. Heterosexual sex made me feel sick (yet I didn’t even consider that this might be related to my trauma). Suddenly, all of my heroes were gay men– gay because heterosexual males frightened and repulsed me and male because the association between femaleness and victimhood was so deeply ingrained in my psyche. Tumblr was a big part of that: I was constantly bombarded by messages that romanticized and idealized gay relationships between white men. It got to the point where anything other than gay relationships between two white men seemed strange to me, owing to the predominance of fandom “ships” that consisted of two white males.

While I’d always hated sex, I thought that if I had a penis I would enjoy it since I hated penetration and hated that heterosexual sex seemed to have little to do with the pleasure of the female partner. The idea of being even slightly submissive in bed turned my stomach because I had been made to take on a submissive role when I was being abused by my father and all the semi-predatory older boyfriends I had in high school. The idea of dominating and penetrating a man appealed to me because it was almost the exact opposite of the trauma I’d experienced. I thought that if I was male, I could have sex without feeling like the little girl I was when my father used to rape me– though I rarely connected my desire for dominance with the abuse, since I wanted to believe that it hadn’t had any impact on me.

I envied every young (white) man I saw in public and was constantly fantasizing about how different my life might have been if I’d been born a white cis male. I was also deeply envious of all the white trans boys I saw on tumblr who got to transition earlier than me and ended up looking something like the white masculine ideal– thanks to my internalized racism brought on by living in a racist society but also because my white father made me feel that non-whiteness was inferior. It’s funny, because I paid lip service to the idea that white cis males were the root of all evil and yet I wanted nothing more than to be one.

I didn’t identify as a femme-boi or genderqueer or anything like that– I identified as 100% masculine male. Yet, at the same time I felt more comfortable admitting to liking feminine things once I was passing; somehow being a man who liked musical theatre felt more noble and valid than being a cis woman who liked the same thing (in fact, as a little girl I rejected the color pink, musical theatre, and anything that could be remotely construed as female). Still, I hated every feminine aspect of my body and I secretly looked down on transmen who did things like wear dresses, glitter, and makeup. I felt like they were “fake trans” (oh the irony) and were only transitioning for attention. I was personally offended by people I thought were “trans trenders”– those people who called themselves trans without experiencing dysphoria. After all, dysphoria had defined my experience of transness. My dysphoria was so crippling that I was hospitalized once for suicidal ideation and once for a suicide attempt. My resentment for comfortably feminine transmen probably had something to do with the fact that I felt they were somehow co-opting an experience that had been so painful to me and that was so integral to my identity. I also felt that glitter wearing “demiboys” made me look bad by association (of course, I briefly became one of them when I was on the fence about whether or not to detransition).

On testosterone I was more confident (though paranoid about being misgendered or ‘clocked’ as trans) though never completely satisfied with my passability even when I was able to go completely stealth after about a year on hormones plus top surgery and some masculinizing facial plastic surgery. I loved the way people treated me when I passed as male– how I was able to speak up in class without people rolling their eyes and how people suddenly thought my bad jokes were 200% funnier.

I loved being able to walk my dog at night without worrying that I’d be raped and murdered by a stranger. I loved my new relationship with my father; once he accepted me as his son he treated me much more like a human being than a sex object. Being seen as male made me feel like I was worth more as a person. Any doubts I had about whether transitioning was right for me went away as my voice began to deepen. I was thrilled by every change in my body. I loved the muscle gains. I loved the convenience of not shaving or getting my eyebrows done. I loved not having a period. I was flattered when gay men hit on me in contrast to when I had been hit on by straight men pre-transition and had always felt more terrified than flattered when one of them expressed an interest in me.

I was able to go “stealth” after just a few months on high doses of testosterone. I started school at a big college and enjoyed the fact that everyone there only knew me as a man. Because I never bothered to lose my feminine inflections when I spoke, people assumed I was a gay male. Suddenly, the sort of popular girls who had scorned me in high school for looking butch wanted to be my friend. I used my time in the new school to reinvent myself as a flamboyant queer male and occasional eccentric dresser. I could dress like a complete slob and no one thought any less of me. I began to enjoy exploring different ways of expressing “masculinity”. I didn’t feel quite so compelled to be attractive in a way that was palatable to other people– especially right towards the end.

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Re-Identification

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I moved out of my sexually abusive father’s house when I was in my early twenties. Suddenly, it hit me that I wasn’t a man. After three surgeries and about two years on testosterone, my desire to pass as a male vanished like someone had flipped a switch. It was replaced, ironically, by intense dysphoria because of my masculine appearance, which was suddenly incongruous with my identity.

I realized that my gender dysphoria was the result of the sexual abuse I had experienced as well as the trauma of being taken advantage of and stalked as a teenager.

Looking back now, I find it shocking that I never once considered that my history of sexual abuse might be affecting my feelings about femaleness. Just the time I finally took the plunge and started taking testosterone, I was being stalked by a much older man who was convinced he was in love with me. The desire to make my stalker lose interest in me was one of the reasons I was in such a rush to start passing as a male and yet, even though I was aware that this was part of my motivation to rush my transition, I never seriously questioned whether I was transitioning for the right reasons. I also never questioned the fact that my desire to be male while also hating males closely paralleled my desire to be white while also hating whiteness. Both of these, to a large extent, originated in the trauma I experienced at the hands of my father. I wanted to belong to the privileged class of people that made up 99% of the protagonists in the movies I saw and the stories I read.

After I detransitioned, several other FTMs I knew from the queer youth group I had been a part of also detransitioned. Two of them told me that seeing me publicly detransition made them realize that it was okay for them to do the same. I was very close to one of the detransitioners in our cohort and she told me that her transition had also been related to a history of sexual abuse that she’d never spoken to her therapist about. I think another told me something similar, but for some reason I can’t remember who it was. I discovered online that there were many other women who had transitioned to male because of unaddressed sexual trauma that later re-identified as female.

I doubt I would have ever had surgery or taken hormones if I had addressed my sexual trauma in therapy or if I’d had the support system I needed to feel safe from my stalker. I think that every female who is considering transitioning to male should stop and talk to a therapist first if they’ve been through any sort of sexual abuse/trauma. While the number one cause of my unnecessary transition was sexual abuse, spending all of my time on tumblr and youtube looking at people who were already transitioned certainly contributed to my decision to rush my physical transition. I wanted to be one of the happy, handsome trans success stories I was constantly seeing on my dashboard. I wanted girls my age to tell me how attractive testosterone had made me.

Unlike many of the detransitioning FTMs I know (and love), I don’t currently identify as a radical feminist (or a radical anything). In fact, I’ve decided to take a step back from internet politics since I began detransitioning. I don’t think that I will be ready to examine any political ideology with clear eyes until I’ve had time to heal from both my sexual trauma and the traumatic experience of mistakenly altering my body to such a degree.

While my fat has redistributed to a more female-typical pattern since I stopped taking testosterone back in late 2016, I am now have to live with the following issues:

My period is now irregular and I don’t know if I will be able to conceive in the future

If I am able to conceive, I’ll never be able to breastfeed my children because of my double mastectomy and the breast reconstruction surgery I had in an attempt to return to something closer to my pre-transition self

I have a large collection of surgical scars from my FTM surgeries and now my ex-FTM reparative surgeries

My body is covered in dense black hair in spite of a year and a half of laser treatments and I have a beard that will only go away with painful electrolysis– I know that some MTFs and detransitioned FTMs have reported that their hair thinned out after having female and not male hormones in their system for a while, but this has not been the case for me at all. I am now paranoid about someone noticing my facial stubble. Shaving any part of my body is intensely uncomfortable because the hair grows back so quickly and causes me to itch like mad no matter what razor and shaving cream I use.

While my body hair continues to be abundant and fast growing, the hair on my head is now significantly thinner than it was pre-testosterone. It is shocking that in as little as two years I was able to develop such a noticeable bald spot. Some people claim that this improves with the cessation of testosterone, but for me this has not been the case. My hair continues to fall out at an alarming rate and grows much more slowly than it did before testosterone even though I take all my hair vitamins.

I have the voice of a teenaged boy and I can no longer sing. I can’t even raise my voice and my throat is always sore. If I want to have a voice that passes as female on the phone and sounds female when I laugh, cry, or scream, I’ll have to get some sort of surgery on my vocal chords. I am now extremely insecure about my voice (even more than I was during my initial transition when I thought it didn’t sound masculine enough).

Testosterone prematurely aged my skin and while I didn’t have any acne from female puberty, testosterone has left me with noticeable acne scars and giant pores. I used to get mistaken for someone much younger than my age and now I get mistaken for someone much older than my age. This is very depressing and makes me feel unattractive and bitter about my past stupidity.

My back and arms are discolored from acne scars.

I wasted all the money I was supposed to spend on college on transitioning and then surgically detransitioning and I still need to spend much more money to reach a point in my physical detransition where I feel I am close enough to more former self that I can feel anything close to attractive– the unwanted hair and my voice in particular are things that I must fix to feel comfortable in my body. In a way it does seem like I’ve traded one superficial obsession for another, but at least becoming a completely passable female is something that is attainable. I don’t need to look perfect– I just want to have a normal amount of female body hair and a voice that falls within the normal female range.

While I wish I could turn back time and prevent myself from ever touching testosterone or wasting thousands of dollars on surgery– thousands that could have funded my education, I do acknowledge that my transition might have enabled me to live more safely because eventually my stalker to lost interest in me (though it probably had more to do with the restraining order). It certainly made me feel safer. Men are raped all the time, so my former belief that maleness was the key to being safe was probably inaccurate. Experiencing male privilege opened my eyes to the fact that sexism is alive and well in the twenty first century. Even after I realized that I was not a man, I seriously considered continuing to identify as one simply so I could continue to benefit from male privilege (as horrible as that sounds). Being female feels unsafe, but I am a woman through and through.

I’d like to note that leaving my abuser not only enabled me to begin re-evaluating my thoughts on gender, but also allowed me enough distance from that toxic, racist environment to let me start coming to terms with my internalized racism and start exploring the non-white side of my heritage. I no longer feel the conflicting hatred of white males and desire to be a white male. I’m not really attracted to white males (or anyone at all– though this may change) and I acknowledge the fact that they have privilege, but going through life looking for more reasons to hate and envy white males no longer strikes me as productive in my situation. I’ve stopped looking for reasons to be outraged, which was a nasty habit I’d picked up on tumblr. I’m trying to see things from a more moderate standpoint because I know my personality makes me susceptible to adopting extreme views. Trying to take a more nuanced perspective on things (in general) is more difficult and less emotionally satisfying than picking a side in a debate, but once I am in the right headspace to start following politics again, that’s what I plan to do.

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Conclusion

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Overall I’d give transitioning a 0/10, would not do it again if given the chance to relive my difficult entry into young adulthood. Whatever “perspective” changing my body might have given me, it wasn’t worth being turned away from women’s shelters when I finally left my abuser nor was it worth saddling myself with a body that is objectively less attractive than the one I had before I began my unfortunate transition.

I’m done running from who I am and what happened to me when I was too young to defend myself.

I hope that any dysphoric woman or girl who has been through sexual trauma pauses and seriously considers the possibility that their gender dysphoria might actually be complex PTSD before jumping into an irreversible medical transition. It would have saved me a lot of money and heartache if I had!

Sincerely,

So apparently there’s no good option for linking to tumblr pages in the mobile app, so i’ll make a separate post as well. 

Thank you for showing interest in detrans-identified! Here are some guidelines for those of you who wish to contribute. You can choose to follow them or not.

It’s up to you what you would like to share! It would be really cool to have some kind of summary that includes how you started identifying as trans and how you ended up detransitioning/reidentifying. Your experience with dysphoria and identity. Your association with the queer community, whether you were in a community or not (irl or online). Are you still friends with people from your community? Have you told them? Did you leave? How did you do all of these things? Etc. As well as where you’re at now and what coping method was most efficient for you.

If you don’t mind I would also like to include what country you are from and what age you are. Please also include a username or e-mail that I can attach to your submission if you’d like people to be able to get in touch with you.

You can submit your story here or send it [email protected], just give me a heads up if you send it to my mail!

I’ll pm you when your story is published!

I had to take a long hiatus from this project as I’ve had a lot to deal with irl the past couple of months, as well as just needing a break in general, but I’m officially making an effort to revive this project! I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on this blog and I see the need for these stories to be out there for people to find.

I’m gonna try to publish 2-3 stories each week depending on how many submissions I get. You’re welcome to contribute regardless of what stage in the process you’re at, regardless of sex, age etc.

For simple guidelines on how and where to submit >please click here<  

Submission by: anonymous UK/17

I spent most of my childhood being gender non confirming, getting asked if I was a boy or a girl, acting like/spending most of my time with/hoping to be seen as a boy till I finally got sick of being treated as a bodyguard by the girls (as the only one who would fight the boys to protect them) and not being treated as a boy by any adults but patronized as a girl (told to reform my behavior because it was “unladylike” and that I couldn’t help with physical tasks, having to fight to be able to play rugby and ending up with a girls “tag rugby” team etc.) so I decided to “just be a girl” and conform for an easier life. I also repressed any attraction to females and forgot my first romantic/sexual relationships were with girls till mid adolescence. When I got my first girlfriend we were both very into liberal feminism, trans activism, gender theory, sex/kink positivity and a shallow understanding of the left. I started getting body and social dysmorphia and got her to refer to me as her boyfriend instead/ started presenting as male and felt amazing so I thought I was gender fluid because I didn’t want to think I was trans. Fast forward a few years I found radical feminism and agreed with most of it, at the same time however, I started having intense body dysmorphia that required unhealthy binding (several layers of binding materials with a proper binder on top) and talked to trans/liberal feminist friends who were convinced I was trans from my past experiences and what I was feeling. I found a way to fit transitioning and coming out to close friends with my politics by telling myself, “yes I’m female, I just would rather be seen as a man, dress in a typically male fashion, and have the body of one” and because I knew gender couldn’t be innate I used the fact I had physical dysmorphia to “prove” I was trans (and lessen the confliction of my politics and what I wanted.) But I was lying to myself. There WAS a distinct feeling and identification with maleness and what it represented, and even after talking to detransitioned rad fems who advised non-permanent solutions to the dysmorphia I sought out medical attention and saw a nurse about a referral to a gender Identity clinic. In the UK, hormones are free and most people report being given them at just the second appointment at the GIC. I didn’t go through with it because after a few months I woke up without body dysphoria. I thought it was just a day off but it didn’t come back/only came back in mild or social ways (which I never trusted as much because daily treatment of women isn’t something pleasant for most people anyway.) After another week I released I wasn’t trans and apologized to my friends and my doctor. My hardcore genderist friend was clearly disappointed and refused to hear my views on gender or what had happened as soon as I realized I wasn’t trans but stayed friends with me.

So this blog has gained quite a lot of followers despite being pretty inactive as of late, so it’s more than obvious that there’s is both need and interest for a blog that collects stories from detransitioned and re-identified people.

I’m more than happy to keep this blog going, but for that to happen I’ll also need more submissions. You’re more than welcome to submit your story if you feel like the requirements fits. Anyone is welcome to submit regardless of sex, orientation or political alignment. There are guidelines (you’re not required to follow) that you can find a link to in the top bar of the blog (you can access it through tumblr desktop).

Please share this blog to anyone you might think will find it useful, and please reblog this post so it be able to reach out to more people and potential new detrans-identifiers.

Submission by: @psilocyborg 24/California

I’m a bisexual woman, but that took me years to accept. I grew up in a very homophobic/misogynistic home and so growing up I quickly learned to not like feminine things in an effort to be less mistreated. This lasted all up throughout high school until college where I finally admitted to myself that yes, I like women, and yes, I’m going to date them. During this time I was very active on tumblr and started to get into the sjw community. I started identifying as nonbinary genderfluid because I thought I experienced genital dysmorphia and I felt like I needed words to describe how confused I was about my sexual and gender idea.  Well, I was never confused about being a female…I had just learned to hate them. I was just ashamed of the parts of me that were feminine. I used this new trans umbrella to help me justify my discomfort with feminine traits instead of dismantling my own internalized misogyny.

That said, I don’t think I would have gotten over it if I hadn’t gone through that phase. It was so funny, as soon as I started going be ‘them’ and claiming that I wasn’t a girl, I allowed myself to start enjoying feminine things again. As if, without the title of 'woman,’ I could enjoy anything I wanted without ridicule.