thinking about detransition?

i'm glad you saw this blog, that's what it's here for :) i encourage everyone who wants to post/discuss detransition seriously to use the #detransition tag and schedule/queue a few posts if you have the heart, even if it's just reposting the same post repeatedly. additionally, please submit posts you've seen to me so i can queue them.

a conversation between lunargaze and bisexual-slime

LG: I always warn people that casually wearing a binder led directly to a crazy increase in dysphoria & the feeling that I needed surgery immediately. A huge amount of the reason I ended up getting a mastectomy was to stop having to feel the panic-attack inducing compression of a binder. B-S: 6 years of consistent binding left me with increased muscle and joint pain and shortness of breath. I stopped for good November 2020 and I don't regret it. It also increased by chest dysphoria and now that I've stopped binding, I've found easier and healthier ways of coping. If you really must conceal your chest out of dysphoria, I'd suggest a comfortable sports bra (do NOT get one smaller than your size. get the correct size) and looser layers and fabrics. This has helped me massively, as has foregoing bras completely, sports bras included. I'd encourage you to at least give this method a shot because it's genuinely been so beneficial and helpful for me.

LG: Absolutely. If I had the thought to just like, stop wearing bras at that point in my life I can’t imagine how different things would be for me right now.

And let me tell you, nothing made my chest dysphoria worse than a mastectomy :/ it breaks my heart seeing more and more people like me expecting the affirming whole-feeling result and just ending up with more issues.

BS: I've always had chest dysphoria but it's only been in the past couple of years I've drifted away from the surgical route in favour of physical exercise to get the result I want. I recognised my goals were not realistic and my chest would always cause me problems post surgery, plus I was scared I would regret such a major operation so I just decided against it and decided I would prefer to implement a work out routine because I've seen that kind of thing done with smaller chests (I'm an A) so it seemed like an easier option. My heart always breaks for women who have been fed an idealistic image of themselves that can only be attained through surgery and end up with more mental and physical problems than they started out with.

from laundryandtaxes, when asked for a recommendation for a safe binder

I think people make decisions that are harmful to their bodies but psychologically helpful in at least the short term all the time, but I outright don't agree with the concept that such a thing as a safe binder exists- I think the practice of binding is categorically a harmful one and that the most appropriate framing here is one of harm reduction. To that end, I would say that especially unsafe binding practicers are those that seem especially unsafe, like the use of tape, double binding, wearing binders while swimming, etc. But I honestly would feel very irresponsible and culpable putting a link here to a company that sells items meant to compress breast tissue with extremely predictable results- rib pain, lung capacity problems, permanent flattening which creates new support problems, etc- so I will not be linking any such companies here. There's no such thing as "effective" binding that doesn't hurt your body. Frankly, I don't even think binding ends up being psychologically helpful for most people, since the core issue (discomfort with having breast tissue, not just with that tissue being seen by others) goes unaddressed and often binding increases someone's distress at seeing their unbound chest categorically. So while I understand that you're experiencing distress and I understand and have also experienced that distress myself, I cannot in good conscience point you toward a company that produces binders while also claiming I'm helping you not harm your body.

from tejuina

"rapid onset gender dysphoria" could've been used literally to describe a phenomenon that I do think occurs, but instead it's become this pseudoscientific theory that oversimplifies the issue and touches on everything but the root problem. parents are blaming tumblr and their kid's friend group and the lgbt-friendly teacher at school and of course end up thinking the solution is to isolate their kid and control their life. they blame gender therapists and simultaneously think the panacea is ~good~ therapists, who can occasionally help but are not a substitute for oh, say, the eradication of sexism and homophobia on a systemic level.

rogd implies there's non-rogd trans people aka "real" trans people who can't be harmed by transition if they stick to guidelines set forth by "good" doctors. and on top of that, I think it minimizes the very real problems that rogd teens face that make them vulnerable to "social contagion" in the first place. it's easier to say, "my child was such a normal little girl, nothing was wrong until the internet made her trans!" than to say, "my child grew up in a a patriarchal and homophobic environment" (especially when you contributed to that misogyny and homophobia whoops).

I also hate this assumption that this is just gen z’s ~emo phase~ and that in 10 years everyone will look back and cringe at the phenomenon. things are not going to just magically get better, and they will in fact get worse if we don’t do something about it.

from tejuina

I’ve long been horrified at the turn the detrans tags took in the past couple of years. in what seems like the blink of an eye, they went from being full of women talking about their experiences to being full of people fetishizing detransition. I despair for anyone just now realizing they want to detransition and not knowing where to turn—twitter is an absolute mess infested with conservatives and voyeurs, and finding detrans content on tumblr now entails going through post after post of people eroticizing forced detransition.

but I think too of the people writing these posts, the people who might only allow themselves to fantasize about detransitioning in the context of kink. people who might be too afraid to see themselves as women again, people who feel like they can’t make the decision to detransition themselves and need someone to force them into it. people who may have thought acknowledging their full humanity meant they weren’t women and who therefore think returning to womanhood means they need to be dehumanized.

I hope they realize they don’t need anyone’s permission. I hope they realize, no matter whether they choose to detransition or not, that you can exist as a woman without eroticizing your own suffering and humiliation, that you can be a woman without being subservient to a man.

read the full article

i recognized that i missed my connection to women a couple years before detransitioning, but i thought i was “too far to go back” so i just kept going forward. i wish i had stopped when i realized i missed being a woman.

i want to let anyone out there who has considered detransition or reidentifying know it’s just not too late. it’s never too late to decide you’re going to fight for yourself and your ability to live happily in this body.

the feelings are UNCOMFORTABLE the experience can be daunting and you’re going to go through a lot of emotional shit, but it becomes worth it. heck, it starts off worth it and that worth grows as you begin to enjoy yourself and your possibilities.

that’s what detransition has been for me: opening new possibilities i thought were just closed to me. the possibility of living a happy lesbian life. the possibility of women seeing me and accepting me as their own. the possibility of close female friendships again.

don’t just keep going forward because going back feels hard–going forward will be hard, too. only you can decide which direction will ultimately be right for YOU but it is not too late to live as a woman if that’s what you want.

conversations about detransition are meaningless if they don’t address the reasons people do/don’t transition and the reasons they do/don’t detransition. is transition the best course of action for some dysphoric people under the current climate? sure. but saying that their transition is only a response to an innate gender identity and has nothing to do with misogyny and homophobia does a disservice to dysphoric people everywhere.

using the small number of detransitioned people as proof that transition is the right solution for most means nothing if we’re not actively fighting against homophobia and sexism and trying to ensure gnc people can live freely. if people such as myself transition because we’ve internalized those messages, what incentive would we have to detransition if society is not moving towards female and gay liberation?

my decision to detransition was, among other things, a way for me to reposition myself within feminism and had little to do with me having a female gender identity. what this tells me is that there are many people out there with whom I have a lot in common who would maybe detransition if the world were different.

tldr; if people transition because of reason X, they by and large won’t detransition unless X isn’t there anymore. so until homophobia and sexism don’t exist, we cannot say they’re not keeping some people from detransitioning.

“This evening I assembled a piece of really cheap, shitty furniture with nothing but my equally cheap and shitty leatherman. I took this time to take my shirt off and complete a task while I was fully in my body and focused. As I crouched over to fasten screws into the piece, I was very conscious of how my stomach had rolls when I bent over, and how my hips bulged out a bit from my pants when I leaned. I usually feel pretty grossed out by how my body looks and behaves in these situations, how characteristically feminine and soft is appears, but I made myself sit with it this time. I wanted to reach for my shirt to cover my body up but I didn’t. For three hours, I bent over, drove screws into metal, and watched as my (soft, lumpy) body completed the task. I grew more and more content with the body performing the work as the project came together. When I was finished I felt so confident and pleased with the new addition to my apartment that I hung out with my shirt off for the rest of the night. This is an example of an approach to a dysphoric moment that, rather than hiding or disguising my body, highlights my body’s existing capabilities and its inherent good. This method does nothing to create the illusion that my body is somehow different than what it really is. Essentially, this strategy is the opposite of that utilized through binders/packers/etc., devices that attempt to alter the appearance of the body, and thus the experience of being in that body, to relieve dysphoria. I distracted myself from my discomfort with a task that required a lot of concentration (those instructions were also shit, lol), and I became more familiar with how my body looked and felt over the course of a few hours. 

The familiarity somewhat desensitized me from the feelings of revulsion I typically feel toward my body.”

this is your lucky day.

it's okay to be considering detransition.

you can work towards a life free of self-hatred and sexual harm.

you have options. it's not too late.

Did you know when you see pictures of male weightlifters, and they’re ripped and you can see every crevice and nook and vein, that definition only happens during a period of starvation? They are strong, they’ve been knocking it out at the gym for months to put on the muscle, but before that particular image got put on film  they’ve put in a couple of months of only boiled chicken and broccoli and hardly any calories to get all the fat off. So our idea of what “ripped” looks like is first of all, about male bodies, and second of all, about male bodies being starved.

Since I’m committed to not beating up on my body for both being female and looking female, and since my expectation is I’m only going to look like I’m in starvation mode if I’m starving myself, and that doesn’t work for the whole not killing myself thing. I realized, oh wait if I keep this up I could get strong as fuck and really not look like it.

But hey, that’s the deal with female bodies- we’re getting lied to about what strong looks like. Sometimes muscles are visible, lots of times they’re not. If you can lift the weight, that’s how strong you are.

So the question is do other people need to see the strength for it to be real?

Well, I don’t know if you’ve caught on that I have a lot of disdain for other people’s ability to perceive me. I’ve been around so many blocks with other people’s perceptions of me that my assumption is those perceptions are 99.9% their own bullshit.

But how do you ever learn about yourself if your default is complete dismissiveness of other people’s takes about you?

It’s real easy. There’s numbers on the weights. There’s what you’ve lived through. There’s what hasn’t killed you.

Strength is fun to have, even if people can’t see it. Strength is fun to know about. Strength is fun to be able to use.

Is detransition the definition of who I am? I just think of it as a weight I lifted. I was doing hard things before transition/detransition and I’ve done hard things since. I’m a woman who just throws herself at the world, and so I’ve gotten the shit kicked out of me a lot, but also I’ve gotten really strong. It’s fun being strong. It’s not a sad-sack kind of deal, although it can look sad to people who aren’t prone to throwing themselves against the world like it’s a concrete floor.

Here’s the thing about smashing your face on a concrete floor- the first time it’s a tragedy, the 12th time it’s a little bit fun. The kind of fun you could do without, but some part of you gets proud. That’s where you see who you are.

I like my strength a lot. I like my obsessiveness a lot. I like my strangeness a lot. It’s all bigger than detransition. I think it’s even bigger than anything like conforming or not conforming. I enjoy getting to be me. And I enjoy what other people can’t see.

I often see more gatekeeping presented as a way to prevent detransition. And while this wouldn’t necessarily be useless, it’s a band aid solution. Working harder to root out the “right” people to transition from the “wrong” people to transition isn’t going to eliminate transition regret. To get at why we have to ask, who are the “right” people? Are they the ones are suffering the most or who have been suffering the longest? Are they the most gender non-conforming ones? Are they the ones persistent enough to pass through checkpoint after checkpoint? None of these things insure that transitioning is going to work for someone: that it’s going to improve their quality of life.

When I walked into gender therapy I was suicidal and had been off and on since I was old enough to understand what death was. I was already being regularly mistaken for a boy. I was adamant that I needed this. My therapist called me a “classic case” and still we talked for almost a year before I socially transitioned. I then spent another year living “full time” before starting testosterone and spent my first six months of testosterone on a low dose prescribed by a fairly paranoid pediatric endocrinologist. I met every requirement. I passed every checkpoint. I didn’t take any shortcuts. And still, here I am: a woman, a butch dyke, further from normality than ever, bitter about what happened to me. Because none of those measures addressed my underlying problem.

What we really need if we want potential regretters to not be certain that they need this is a shift in culture. We need environments without misogyny that are affirming of lesbianism and gender non-conformity. We need girls to grow up free from abuse, supported in their mental health and knowing that they can be anything they want to be and anything they are. We need to encourage them to love and live in their bodies and provide immediate solutions if they find that they can’t. Because by the time that many girls step into a gender therapist’s office they’ve already made up their minds, for good reason, that they can’t live this way.

it’s hard to consider the possibility that some of your dysphoria might have been “created” as a result of like, pre existing aspects of your psychology/trauma and engaging with what are probably (somewhat to very) misguided groups of people/ideology, but honestly, it doesn’t mean you’re stupid or fake. humans are social animals, we are very responsive to our communities. their words, actions, and ideas create realities in our lives.

it took me a long time to consider the possibility that my dysphoria wasn't innate, and even longer to acknowledge it publicly. but now i know it isn’t something to be embarrassed of. it’s very very understandable. misogyny sucks, dysphoria sucks, figuring out how to cope with dysphoria in a misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic world sucks.

generalizing my experience to others whose dysphoria escalated a lot as they engaged with trans ideology and community, i believe there’s a lot of potential for significantly improving that dysphoria through engaging with healthier communities and ideology

you have to use a lot of critical thinking, and you have to be selective about who you choose to engage with, open up to, and surround yourself with. this can be really, really hard to do, especially if you have a history of interpersonal trauma. working on developing self empathy and identifying the patterns of damaging relationships that you've had in the past is essential to being able to avoid being retraumatized as much as possible.

if there is a space you're wishing for, chances are others are also longing for that. try to create it on the scale that’s available to you. even if that’s just person to person and friend to friend. you can build something better.

happy halloween!

scared? feeling worthless and unloved, and like you want to be hurt or destroyed? not sure how things will ever be okay again?

this is a chance for you. you don't deserve that and you are not alone.