Why Did I Detransition? (Part Two)
What was the actual catalyst to changing my mind about transition?
This is sort of a part two to last week’s entry. Last week was about why I didn’t detransition sooner; this week is about what did actually push me to commit to detransitioning in 2020.
(Note: My friend has given me permission to share his story, but like me, he prefers to stay anonymous.)
Five years ago, I permanently stopped taking testosterone — for a few reasons, but mainly because I was incapable of taking my shots on time and because I stopped caring about looking any more masculine than I already did.
But I didn’t consider myself to have detransitioned at that time. I guess I was still under the impression that there was only one possible reason that someone could identify as transgender: an innate sense of identity, which I believed to be firmly backed by science.
Around this time, I was a big-time stoner, from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep. Shortly before I made the decision to stop taking testosterone, I experienced a high where I was convinced that I was actually a woman and had a vivid imagining of what would happen if I started detransitioning.
I have a journal entry from that day. Here’s a few bits of it.
“I got caught on the detransition thoughts again. They're kind of just making their way in and then the concept of actually doing it kind of blows my mind. If I told my family that I wanted to use she pronouns again I feel like they might disown me.”
“I know I'm going to be genderweird in some way for the rest of my life. If detransition was ever a thing that I chose, unless I were to disappear and restart myself elsewhere where no one knew me when I identified as male, the person that I am is always going to be coloured by my past history of how I presented my gender. My identity as male is part of the rest of my life no matter what my identity is in the future. When I say that, though, I also think about my identity as female before I identified as male, and I think my experiences living as that gender are also important to who I am at this moment. Those are both part of me.”
“A lot of these thoughts about it are feeling very wrong, like they're coming from someone without any fundamental understanding of being transgender, but somehow I'm believing every word of it and feeling shame.”
That very last paragraph is a good example of the type of cognitive dissonance I was going through. The recognition of my actual sex was akin to having “bad” thoughts, and going along with those thoughts was something to be ashamed about.
I decided to identify as non-binary and moved on. About six months after stopping, my face started to look a bit more feminine, and people did refer to me as “she” every now and then. For the most part, though, I continued to pass as male.
About a year after that, I met my current best friend. At the time that I met him, he was going for sort of a femme-boy aesthetic. He had been transitioning from male-to-female for five years at that point and was still taking estrogen but was not trying to pass as a woman.
We started living together about seven months after that and continued to live together until the beginning of this year (about three years total).
Throughout the time we lived together, I watched him change his mind every once in a while about how he felt about his transition. He stopped taking estrogen and went back on once or twice. He changed the pronouns he felt comfortable with and started trying to pass as a woman again. He had an orchiectomy scheduled, but later cancelled it… then rescheduled it again after that.
He was also seriously mentally unwell for most of this time. (I was, too, but I think his behaviour would be considered more extreme than mine.) He met the criteria for borderline personality disorder. He struggled with depersonalization and derealization. He would tell me that he felt like he was inside of a movie. What he saw didn’t feel “real.” It felt flat.
I accompanied him to the hospital for emergency psychiatric care several times.
In the first half of 2020, he decided that he was detransitioning for good and started the process of changing his name and sex designation back to what they were before he’d transitioned.
It’s weird to think about it now, but at the time, I remember being convinced that he would transition again and end up changing it back in the future.
After he detransitioned, my friend’s mental health did a complete 180. It was hard to believe this was the same person I had sat with for hours waiting for him to be admitted to the psych ward.
He started posting on the /r/detrans subreddit and exchanging ideas with other detransitioned people, particularly other men. He talked to me about what he thought were some of the reasons he might have transitioned in the first place: taking his parents’ divorce hard, not being able to see his dad throughout his formative years, being a child involved with a religious cult, potentially some AGP involved, etc.
Again, I wasn’t totally convinced, and when he started talking about how he felt that his therapist had pushed him in the direction of transitioning, I assumed that he was being radicalized by “TERFs.” He encouraged me to read some of the posts on /r/detrans, but I flat-out refused.
I can recognize now that I was the one who was radicalized. When you can’t open your mind to ideas that challenge your own, you are being controlled by the ideology you subscribe to.
My friend’s political background had been different than mine since the day we met. I think if we had values that were more similar, he might have been able to craft an argument that I would have agreed with sooner. But I’m certainly not blaming him for anything — just reflecting on what might have been different. He was being logical, but he just didn’t know how to reach me in a way that I’d be open to.
Watching my friend go from very unwell to completely stable was certainly the catalyst, but my thinking flipped while I was engaging with the work of individual leftists who were criticizing cancel culture.
The same year that I met my friend, I had been diagnosed with autism and ADHD. One of my interests after that point was the relationship between traumatic experiences and the nervous system.
While I was looking at this, I encountered ideas about transformative justice that appealed to me. Transformative justice was presented as a trauma-informed method of justice, particularly as an alternative to the traumatic vigilantism of cancel culture.
These folks stressed that thoughts and ideas on their own were not “harmful” or “violent.” Our believing that ideas can harm was based on the fight-or-flight reaction from our nervous system perceiving a threat that wasn’t actually there.
In a cancellation, subjective realities are prioritized over material realities. Our feelings and emotions about people’s thoughts and ideas take precedence. The punishment we then inflict on people affects their material realities (e.g., their job, their income, and their access to support).
When one of the people I admired said she preferred to prioritize material reality over subjective reality, I immediately made a connection with the subjective reality of gender identity. But I didn’t know how to integrate this new idea of prioritizing material reality (which made perfect sense to me) with my old ideas that “felt right.”
I was caught up in cognitive dissonance again.
I don’t remember how our conversation began, but I do remember that the evening I accepted that detransition might be an option for me involved a complete meltdown. I broke down sobbing, asking my friend, “Would women even accept me into their spaces if I detransitioned?”
I didn’t realize how badly a part of me wanted to be counted among women once again.
It’s still something that lurks in the back of my mind. I worry that my voice is too low and my chest is too flat; that I won’t be taken for female when I am. And that is my reality. I continue to be mistaken for a man quite often.
However, another part of me knows that I am a woman no matter how anyone else perceives me. So those mistakes don’t trigger me the way they did when I identified as trans.
Back then, being “misgendered” was fuelled by fear. I demanded to be seen as a man when I knew there was nothing but my own feelings to back it up. But a stranger mistaking my sex means nothing now.
I know I am a woman, and it is a knowledge which is backed by a material reality that anyone could observe. I don’t need to be validated. I just am.