33
votes
Detransition is gender liberation, too - Here's to never being satisfied and forever changing
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- Title
- Detransition is Gender Liberation, Too
- Authors
- Devon
- Word count
- 2887 words
Time for a cliche: Finding your identity is a journey. Detransitioning is absolutely gender liberation if it brings peace to someone. The relief that comes with understanding oneself is indescribable, and no one should be robbed of that. This is going to sound super ignorant, but I remember learning about the existence of trans people in my early 20's and it blew my mind. I mean literally, I was floored. I had always struggled with my place as a man. I never felt like one. Whenever I spent time with girls, I just felt so much more comfortable. I just felt like generally, my wavelength matched theirs. I cross-dressed constantly until I was 15 and decided I "had to stop this silly fantasy". I had to accept I'd never be a woman, I'd never be accepted as a woman. So for a decade, I shoved those feelings away. Literally actively repressed my thoughts and feelings, shutting down my brain the second it wandered to those feelings. So a decade later, when I found reddit and saw transgender users discussing their experiences, I was just so stunned. I legitimately thought my feelings were so rare, and that I was just being weird. The realization that I can be the person I want to be was so goddamn liberating. A switch had been flipped in my brain, and all those old feelings came flooding back. I was still hesitant though, I mean do a few stray thoughts really mean I'm a transwoman? But the more I analyzed my past, the more I realized how much I had really repressed. I mean I had literally made myself forget for YEARS all the things I had in common with other women. I was too busy playing a straight boy. It actually makes me laugh now about the level of denial I was in. It's just so clear to me now. I'm so glad other trans people shared their experiences on the internet. Without them, I would have denied myself for my whole life.
Transitioning is liberation, destransitioning as an act of finding oneself is liberation. Find your peace however you can. Be you the best you can.
I hate this because I do it to myself. I still struggle with self-hate. I haven't made a lot of progress as far as my personal goals go, and sometimes I tell myself it's because I'm weak and afraid. It just isn't true. Everyone moves at their own pace. Some people have different goals. Some people want to "pass" and some people just want to be happy with what they see in the mirror. Some want gender affirming surgeries and some don't. They're all equally trans. Gatekeeping is shit. Anyone who has called themselves trans should know just how hard it all can be. I don't know how common this sentiment is, but shaming people for trying to find themselves awful.
as someone with their own gender goals, i find that it helps a lot to seek out environments where you can be playful with your presentation. intentionally queer spaces pretty much dont respond to people exploring gender presentation however they want, besides saying "where u get that" or "u look cool/cute". this can include online communities!!! experiencing what it feels like when that is the norm is really helpful in finding the confidence to do it in "regular" settings. im so glad you have been able to reconnect with this part of yourself <3
Trans guy who once almost detransitioned here. I relate a lot to Devon's experience when it comes to the societal pressures placed on trans people and on those who choose to detransition.
There's a stubborn stereotype among trans people that testosterone is magic for trans guys and everyone who takes it passes as male in record time. I'd never known a guy who didn't pass completely after a year on T... then I decided to transition myself, after realising (thanks to my psychologist helping me through it) that yes, I was indeed trans. Though my parents brought me up in a fairly gender-neutral manner and never denied me anything on the basis of "you're a girl, you can't have/do/look like X" or whatever, society unfortunately did not treat me the same way, and I felt out of place from the day my body started looking obviously like a girl's body because I felt like it was doing these things out of my control. I don't remember this, probably because I blocked it out, but my mom recalls me having a literal nervous breakdown when I had my first period. She said I cursed out basically the entire world and kept trying to understand what was wrong with me that made me deserve to suffer like this. I was nine years old, and in my tiny French Canadian hometown in the mid-2000s, no one had any idea what trans people were, much less the right words to describe them.
When I transitioned, I discovered the hard way that T was going to take its sweet time with me. I knew from the start I'd probably look a bit like a twink and would never end up hypermasculine-looking simply because of genetics, but this was ridiculous. I was over two years in, even having had top surgery by that point, and I was still being addressed as a woman with zero hesitation by literally everyone I met. That took its toll on me mentally, and I became a bit of a recluse because I was so anxious at the idea of leaving the house and immediately getting misgendered. Every time it happened, I was forced to face my body's failure, and I hated being reminded of it. It took me over four years to be able to pass consistently, which is basically unheard of even in the trans community. (I never figured out why it took so long, as I never managed to convince my former doctor from the trans health clinic to actually run the tests I needed to look at my T levels and absorption rate since he believed, like many others, that I "wasn't making enough of an effort to pass", and that it was all in my head/all my fault. After I left that doctor behind, I never got an endo to actually look at what was going on - the one I got referred to quietly closed down his clinic a few months later without telling anyone (I found out six months later when I tried to book a follow-up) and judged I wasn't one of his patients worthy of being transferred to another endo. Eventually the problem resolved itself, but only because enough time passed for my body to actually do what it was supposed to do.)
When I thought I would get support and understanding for what I was going through, I instead got the opposite; the trans community shunned me for "making them look bad" and told me I couldn't talk about my experience because it would scare people into thinking T doesn't work, and I often heard the words "if you want to be a man, why aren't you making an effort to look like one?" I did my best considering the hand I'd been dealt - there's only so much you can do to look like a man when you're 160 cm/5'3" and have a DD chest that even binders can't fully hide. I left my local trans community when a similarly non-passing friend was banned from the support group we were both a part of because their "lack of effort at presenting as a woman" (which was really just a similar situation to mine of hormones taking forever to do their thing) made others uncomfortable. I knew they'd come for me too eventually, and that just cemented the fact that I was never going to be accepted for who I was.
I thought of detransition a lot, and even posted on a detrans sub on Reddit for a while. It wasn't that I didn't want to be a man - I did! - but if transition had failed me and I wasn't being accepted for who I was because my body wasn't good enough at looking the part, then what other options were left? I spent a while weighing out which option would be the lesser of two evils long-term: to keep trying and hope eventually I'd look like a man enough for the rest of the world to take me seriously, or to admit that I failed what everyone else was able to do seemingly effortlessly (from my perspective) and go back to being a woman for the rest of my life. I ended up going for the former, because the thought of having to live as a woman again felt like an even worse version of hell.
Seeing what detransitioners went through also made me worry - so many of them were told they were making trans people look bad and that they were better off just continuing to perform as something they weren't. I knew from the beginning it wasn't about making trans people look bad (not for most, anyway, though some do decide to go that route, unfortunately), it was just about figuring out what worked for you specifically, but a lot of people from outside the detrans community don't see it that way. I also had a friend at the time who detransitioned and that opened my eyes to their situations a lot. There were a lot of people who realised it wasn't right for them, or that the transition was just a way for them to avoid facing something else, or who - like me at the time - felt like it wasn't working, or felt a lot of societal pressures, and were debating if they were "better off" stopping.
In the end one of my friends ended up having a similar experience to mine, and I did find support on one Reddit sub where a few other guys had also had slow transitions (shoutout to r/FTMMen) which helped me realise I wasn't as alone as I thought I was. My foray in detrans spaces and experiences with detrans people makes me wish they were heard more, and makes me wish that society didn't demonize gender exploration and the realisation that sometimes things don't work for you as well as you thought they would. No one should be attacked for saying that or sharing their experiences.
Thank you so much for sharing this experience. I really wish stories like yours weren't so hard for so many others to hear, because they are important stories, especially for people who might be going through similar doubts or issues.
Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate it!
Because of the reaction I got online and within the trans community when I talked about my experience, it took me a while to feel comfortable with the idea of sharing it more openly. I realised, though, that it was important to share, both to be able to give other guys more realistic expectations of things and so they wouldn't feel like something was wrong with them like I did back then if they were dealing with the same thing. After I started posting on the Reddit sub I mentioned, a couple other guys chimed in with similar experiences to mine, and over time I've seen a few others who've gone through the same thing and said our posts helped them feel less alone. Though I rarely look at Reddit anymore, I left my account up to preserve those posts, and still check in on that sub from time to time.
Something I realise I didn't bring up in my original post is my experience with my current friends circle, most of which met me partway into my transition. They were actually a lot more helpful than I expected them to be throughout all that, and not for the reason I expected either. Sure, when I still looked very androgynous they did question if I was a guy or a girl, but when I told them I was trans and T was just taking a while to do its thing, their reaction was more along the lines of "well, puberty took a while for me, it's normal that it takes a while for you too" and they left it at that. They were so nonchalant about it that it made me realise just how ridiculous it is to expect to pass as male so soon, and how it's even more ridiculous that that entire concept became the expectation/norm in the trans community.
It took me a long time to identify as non-binary but more so as demi-gender. I just didn't care enough about my gender to figure it out.
But transitioning/detransitioning are both about individual experience and so embedded in our cultural experience of gender, in the ability to be socially accepted when transitioning, in the desire to exist in a more masc or femme space (either physically or mentally) it's always a personal journey.
And that includes the people who detransition and are unhappy with ever having transitioned too. I'd rather they not weaponize their experiences against trans folks, but their life is valid. And so are their feelings. As much as the person that detransitions due to social stigma or finances. As much as the person that never medically transitions or the person who pokes their gender with a stick and waits for it to do something.
Being misgendered and nonbinary tho, feel that. Not a they in sight for those she/they pronouns most days.
Yeah this is when it becomes a problem and as always, various political/interest groups see it as ammo in their fight against trans rights.
It worries me that detransitioning, in addition to all of the stigma and hate and stuff surrounding trans rights in general, will itself be uniquely stigmatized more than it is already. Or maybe, it's already at that point, given how the article describes peoples' reactions to the detransition
If someone feels to be true to themselves they need to detransition and can't (due to fear, legislation, stigma, etc), that is just as much of a concern as transitioning not being available/accessible and liberation must include it.
There will always be people who choose to use their personal pain against others or who are easily swayed to do so by the "other side". And there have been trans folks that insist on medical transition for the trans identity of others to be valid in the past for example.
But there is something rather particularly in-fighty about the queer community.
I work for an academic medical center that's fairly well known both locally and in the world. However, we haven't been known for stellar queer health. In fact, I'd say we've been lacking, quite a bit. Recently the school put on a talk about the medical needs of people who have detransitioned and even featured a speaker who had themselves detransitioned. It was an absolutely fascinating talk, which highlighted some of the trends they have been seeing, talked about the many reasons that people tend to detransition (mostly social pressures, as described by Devon in the piece) and talked rather frankly about the kind of online harassment these individuals had experienced for detransitioning. It was really sad to hear about the harassment, although unfortunately not something that surprised me.
Having been in plenty of online trans spaces, it's been clear to me that there are a lot of people out there struggling and many of them can lash out at others for plenty of extremely valid reasons. Being trans means you're constantly under attack - people invalidate your experience which prompts defense, but perhaps more importantly one often has to fight tooth and nail and expend significant resources in order to get access to medical care which in many cases can be life saving. People often convince themselves that access is more prevalent if they fall into certain boxes. Trans medicalism is one such example, a viewpoint in which advocates distill transgenderism into a very medical definition. It's entirely an issue of nature, with no nurture component, and it has well defined symptoms and resolutions. Trans medicalism is almost always purely binary and assumes there is an "ideal" endpoint of transitioning. What this often means, is that trans medicalists will attack people who don't agree with their viewpoint and make the argument that promoting any other viewpoint or life experiences will result in jeopardizing their access to already limited medical care.
Trans medicalists causing infighting in the transgender field is just one such example from these trans spaces where infighting (and outsiders attacking) happens and there's some level of harassment. Luckily there's a lot of folks who will back you up if you are attacked by these folks who are often deeply scared and hurting, but there's a lot less support for folks who talk about detransitioning. Detransitioning highlights the fact that there are folks who will undergo some level of transitioning and regret it and reverse course. This makes the idea of transitioning scary to cis folks, and it also gives them a reason to gatekeep it, at least until adulthood, an idea which can be catastrophic given the high suicide rates of trans folks, especially those who are young and watching their body change in ways which cause serious distress. However, the literature reveals that the vast majority of folks who do detransition do so because of social pressures (averaging around 80% of the primary reason and >90% of folks citing it as at least one of the reasons) which reinforces the narrative that social acceptance of trans folks is the most important factor to their success. Regardless, the perceived invalidation of transness (that some people could choose to reverse course) means that folks who try and talk about their experience of detransitioning often get attacked online.
It would be difficult to talk about the harassment that detransitioning folks get online without also addressing that there's a weirdly large number of people making up personas online as a way to push their political agenda. Having moderated transgender spaces online, I have personally witnessed individuals who come back, time and time again, and spread a false story about detransitioning. I say that it's a false story because some of these individuals have been discovered to post elsewhere on the internet about the this behavior and celebrating the fact that they are sowing discord. In fact, this happens so often, that in many trans spaces I've been in online, they either explicitly ban or more discreetly clean up this kind of noise, likely catching some folks who truly did transition and were not indulging a false persona online.
This was the first time I had even spotted an academic talk on detransitioning and it really signaled to me the beginning of acceptance and the emergence of a group from the shadows where they have been shoved, and to stumble across an article like this from a well known semi-public trans figure was really amazing for me to see. A lot of the narratives that Devon brought forth in this post highlight a lot of the struggles that trans folks deal with and puts words to some of the tough ideas we'll need to struggle with as a society and as an in-group (a call to action for trans folks to more vocally/actively support detransitioning). It also highlights some more non-traditional paths and viewpoints on gender. As someone who is both non-binary and agender, I personally resonated with a lot that Devon brings to the table here. I don't often talk very vocally about my own experience because I've both experienced and worry about the push back that narratives like mine and Devon's can garner. For example, being agender, I don't experience gender based feelings - gender dysphoria and euphoria are both things I do not experience. Many people might question why I decided to transition in the first place, and my answer might also be wholly unconvincing to many.
I suspect this subset of individuals is going to be thrust into the limelight (they already have, at times, by journalism and political forces) more presently, especially as we begin to better address their health needs. Mental health, especially given the amount of harassment they receive or the need to conceal their detransitioning, seems to be especially prescient. I'm glad that we have some figures such as Devon speaking out about their experience, and helping to draw attention to all the nuances that go into one's decision to transition and how the experience itself can be a lot messier than the media makes it out to be.
~~ hello fellow agender enby friend. it's so interesting how different experiences can be even within a certain subsection of gender: i definitely experience feelings of dysphoria and euphoria (honestly i would say "contentment" instead of euphoria tbh) as a person who has prominent gender associated body traits. while i dont really have a sense of gender, i like to lean into femme presentation (as well as masc or androgyny) but for a while felt like being femme as an afab agender person was kind of a self-betrayal. but it's not my fault that people look at me and assume things based on external perceptions. and it's not my responsibility to constantly present in an obviously queer way just so people believe i exist. im also bi/pan so im kind of used to "not existing" lmaoo
i think that our perspectives are important, and freeing to others. thank you for sharing.
Hello friend 😄💜
It took me a long time to adopt the labels that I have, and a lot had to do with the lack of representation I saw. Agender is a pretty rare label, and I ran into a vanishingly small number of people who used the label so it was really hard for me to know what it was meant to represent! I agree that sharing our perspectives are freeing and important to others, which this article made me think a bit about. Regardless of how difficult it may be for others to understand or accept my lived experience, it might also help others like myself, years ago, who are looking to understand themselves or find representation out there that matches, at least on some level, their own experience.