#actually detrans

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.

OUR GOALS

- to provide support for our community

- to give new detransitioners hope for a future after transition that includes joy and satisfaction

- to promote solidarity between the trans and detrans communities in order to share resources and so that detransitioning is no longer treated as “betraying” our trans siblings

RESOURCES NEEDED / HOW TO HELP

we currently need information on the following

- which insurances cover detrans healthcare (ex. top surgery for detrans men) and where they are

- which name (and legal gender) change resources also serve detrans people

- discounts for laser hair removal

- detrans friendly support groups around transitioning to another gender

- hotlines/helplines

a lot of detransitioners only took hormones for a few years or less, their transition was often a relatively short period of their life as a whole. and don't get me wrong, that's a good thing! i don't want other women to have to go through these experiences, i'm glad if anyone can get out early.

but i do feel like it's a vastly different experience in some ways for those of us who are in transition for extended periods of time. i've spent literally half my life denying my birth sex, and trying to become a different person. all of my adult years have been spent in a medically and surgically altered body.

i WISH that my transition had been a shorter phase in my life, if only because it is so much harder to undo the effects of transition (not just the physical changes- if anything the mental effects are harder to reconcile). i don't know how to return to my previous self, i feel like i've cut myself off from who i used to be permanently. and i don't know if other detransitioners accounts of physical feminization after quitting T will apply to me or not, because i was on T for so long, and i don't have ovaries anymore.

and so, post-detransition, i switched my name to a feminine version of what i was going by, and i love it!

my family still calls me by my given name and im okay with that, since it doesn't feel like im taking psychic damage anymore now that i dont feel dysphoria.

Back in second grade, a girl in my class asked me if I was straight or gay. I said I didn’t understand what those words meant. She tried to explain. Said she was straight, and tried to explain what that meant. I didn’t fully understand and I couldn’t give an answer. I always found the conversation odd. Because did she ask everybody else that? But it was honestly probably my clothes and mannerisms. That made her ask.

I know in some of the anti-very-young-transition studies they say that a lot of extremely GNC kids just grow up to be gay or bisexual rather than trans. And I suppose that happens to some people. Not me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a crush on a girl. I kind of forced myself to? In middle school? Based on weird assumptions about who “people like me” were into based on various media I’d seen. But I wasn’t actually attracted to her. It was more like, if I was hypothetically forced to date a girl (which I know would never happen), she would be my pick for person I would hate the least to be dating. Given that she was nice to me.

But when I actually transitioned into being a man, I don’t think I ever called myself gay. I can’t remember a time I used the word or any of the gay/MLM flags, or actually interacted with the mlm community. It’s probably one of many, many signs during my transition that I wasn’t actually comfortable being a man. Others sometimes saw me as a gay man? For better or for worse? But I don’t think I did. If you had called me straight to my face, I probably would have said that was transphobic. But I didn’t actually see myself as “not straight”. I was “a man who was attracted to other men”, yeah, but that didn’t feel gay in my mind.

The thing is that a lot of detrans straight women are… well… a lot of them are Christians, for one. I know one of the detransitioners in the news a lot is a born-again Christian. Which definitely makes me… doubt the motives of their detransition. It feels very “Christian ex-gay” vibes to me. Not a lot of them have more masculine presentations either. Which I do. I also actually like some of my masculine features from T too. If I do the math, there’s more about it I regret, and overall if I had the option to go back and not take it I would. But… like… I like what it did to my facial structure, for one. Even if I know that that’s not necessarily “attractive” to the average straight guy.

Honestly, so much “straight detrans” stuff is just detrans kink. Which, even if you manage to look past the “graphic depictions of raping someone to forcefully remind them of their female anatomy and make them stop being trans” parts of detrans kink (which I can’t), the vast majority of it doesn’t describe a consensual detransition. It is forcing yourself to deny your true identity and preferred presentation for a straight male partner. Part of the reason so many trans men attracted to men date each other is the sheer amount of horror stories about cis guys with this kink in real life. Who only date trans men in an attempt to manipulate them into femininity.