#desisted

The thing that broke that pride in me was boys laughing at my armpit hair and teachers saying I better cut it to stop the bullying and to be more hygienic. It was the gender roles my family tried to mold me into that apparently made you a boy or a girl. It was the influx of gender ideology in every day setting and the slogans that said "it's okay to hate your body! You'll just bend it to your will". It was my biology teacher saying that a person's brain gender is biological and equally real to first, second and third sex characteristic, feeding me the false idea of who I might be. It was trans content made for kids that encouraged me to "explore" gender, furthermore deepening taught hatred I started to feel forward my body. It was the cancellation of sapphic and wlw creators I followed, they were bad and transphobic and it only showed me that the love I felt for women as a woman was also flawed.

So I hated my body. I wanted to cut off my breasts, speak in the lower octave, take testosterone I didn't need, use different grammatical forms for myself. All of that so I could be a female without being oppressed for being one. Cut all of the things that made me one, so I can finally be happy again.

But that happiness was false and not lasting. I was depressed, anxious, and rarely happy. It wasn't who I was even if I thought this was me. I told myself "I'm just born in the wrong body, that's why I feel that way" ignoring the clear signs of my mind longing for the connection to my authentic self. That dissociation from my physical body let me into the most miserable time in my life so far.

i'm definitely what you'd call cis too! though cis/bio womanhood is not at all what most tras assume it's like. especially detrans cis/bio womanhood. and for me, the label detrans helped me find others like me. it kept me from hating my own guts. it helped me find a community of ppl who actually understand what i've been through and don't think i'm a freak.

living as trans for 13 years changed what mainstream tras would call my gender identity forever. it also is a way for me to find people who also went thru what i went thru. i get a lot of DMs from other detrans women and detrans men who lived as trans or even transitioned partially/fully like me (i was on testosterone for a bit and have an awkward bit of annoying af stubble T_T gotta get expensive laser for that... it can be isolating!). to me, i will never again be a fully cis woman. i will forever be affected with having struggled with intense dysphoria for 13+ years. i also feel like my cis womanhood in general has forever been changed with me having rejected it and then finding it again - it does NOT feel the same way as my girlhood did. in girlhood, i didn't give a shit what people thought girls or boys needed to do. doubly so because i was autistic. then puberty came, and the usual teenage girl and/or afab experience of needing to conform to cispatriarchal expectations came, and i freaked the fuck out about my boobs, about how boys were suddenly treating me and the things my shitty female relatives told me were "becoming a woman" (all very conservative notions of womanhood) and it grossed me out so badly, on top of grappling with being into other afab people, and i just totally distanced myself from girlhood at all. i gave up on making my own scrungly, gender nonconforming version of girlhood. girlhood felt like it had no room for people like me.

and so i kicked it out of my mind. i obsessed over becoming a boy. some trans boys, ofc, become happily trans men. for me, though, it personally was an escape. i was trans-identified for all the wrong reasons and it really fucked me up. it made my internalized lesbophobia so much worse, to the point where i even started identifying as pansexual/bisexual (PREPOSTEROUS thing for me since i had never ever in my entire life been attracted to a man or someone living as male in society... but i was into non-transitioned transmasc people, so i thought i couldn't possibly be lesbian!). for me, the trans identity was a bandaid, it was a crutch in the worst possible way. detrans people aren't trying to make trans people look bad. we're not trying to convert y'all, we don't give a shit. we're too busy grappling with our newfound connection to cis womanhood/cis manhood and dealing with transition-related issues.

we NEED to find fellow detrans folks or we'll go batshit crazy with shame at having made a mistake, guilt at being weaponized without our consent against the trans community, and just fucking hating how hrt/surgeries affected our bodies and trying to come to terms with that and learning to love our bodies as they are despite it all.

detrans cis womanhood will never be normie cis womanhood.

detrans cis manhood will never be normie detrans manhood.

living as trans for years affects you DEEPLY. trans people should know this first-hand. detrans folks, simply by starting to live as cis / bio men/women again, cannot suddenly erase all those years as if they never existed. we just can't. i'm sorry. i tried. dear goddess i really fucking tried harder than you'll ever know. and so did so many of my detrans friends and my darling detrans girlfriend.

but detrans people need other detrans people.

mainstream tras don't understand us.

cis/bio radfems who aren't detrans often misrepresent us.

we need eachother.

and our voices NEED to be heard too.

both radfems AND mainstream tras don't get it.

detrans & desisted folks NEED sisterhood & siblinghood.

only detrans women understand other detrans women.

only detrans men understand other detrans men.

i will always be seeking out lost detrans sisters. and i will always want to hear out my detrans brothers. i love my detrans/desisted community. we've been through really hard shit, we're more likely to be gay, more likely to be traumatized, more likely to be autistic. we're not what you think. and now you need to sit down and hear our stories. sorry. it has to happen. or feel free to block all detrans voices and plug your ears and go lalala! and now i'm not talking to you specifically anon, i don't want to put assumptions in your little mouth. but i'm talking to ALL mainstream trans activists, anti-radfems especially, who assume the very worst of us from the get-go. those who want detrans & desisted people to pretend we were always cis and normies who should pretend to not be deeply affected by our real lived detrans/desisted experiences. we will not shut up. we refuse to. both radblr and normie leftblr misrepresent us.