Femme Sourde

Because this was published for me on the Women’s Declaration International blog and Reality’s Last Stand, I wanted to share the full, unabridged version of my story of transition and detransition.

My story is not meant to be a comment on your own — if you are trans, and you are wholly comfortable with yourself and the processes that surrounded your transition, then I cannot speak to that and will never claim to. However, there is social contagion happening. There can be no ignoring the rampant misogyny, nor can we continue to gloss over the negative side effects of long-term cross sex hormone use. I dream of a world where gender non-conformity does not exclude a person from his or her same-sex peers, and where girls and women are no longer harmed or oppressed based on their sex.

My story is not an uncommon one, and so I will share it, because it is important for all sides of a social discussion to be heard.

PART I: EARLY CHILDHOOD

Wondering what it would be like to be the opposite gender isn’t an experience unique to tomboys or feminine boys; I think everyone thinks about this kind of thing at least once, and sometimes thinks about all the positives they could experience as the opposite sex — avoiding the expectations placed on their own sex. Men don’t want to always be expected to be tough leaders, and women don’t want to always be expected to be sensitive followers. Sometimes it can be hard to come to the conclusion that not conforming to stereotypes just means you’re human.

I also think one would be hard-pressed to find a child who isn’t afraid to grow up, to have an adult body — especially when the intermediary stages are so awkward. Having budding breasts that are too small, or too large, having “weird nipples,” being too hairy, being too hairless… being perceived at all by others, period, is one of our greatest torments about being human. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, when we perceive ourselves being perceived, we objectify ourselves in the same way others objectify us.

This all being said, I am going to explain what happened to me – I am sure others will be able to relate.

Last year, I made one of the biggest changes in my life thus far by deciding to stop trying to live as the opposite sex. A few days after my 28th birthday would have been my ten year anniversary of cross-sex hormones. This was to be a milestone I always thought I would feel at peace with, so deep into my “authentic life.” A month after that was 6 years after my mastectomy, something I stopped genuinely thinking about pretty much as soon as I recovered from the surgery.

I had what may be called a more severe case of gender dysphoria as a child, though none of it had anything to do with my body until I began learning about the ways others changed theirs. In the beginning, I simply thought so much would be better if I were a boy – my “tomboyish” hobbies would be accepted by boys, I wouldn’t get stared at in the video game aisles… nevermind all the negatives that would come with being a boy, like being judged for my carebear collection or affinity for barbies! In truth, I was less of a “classic tomboy” and more of a healthy young girl who did not let gender stereotypes dictate her life.

And yet each night I prayed, and every year made birthday wishes, and every day hoped with all my might to one day wake up as a boy, with not a soul having any recollection to the contrary. And yet, I did not really mind being a girl. In fact, our neighbor loved to tease my sister and I by yelling to us, “Hey, boys!” which was met without fail each time: “WE’RE GIRLS, MARK!”

My main issue with sex was primarily that everyone around me seemed obsessed with separating boys and girls, telling us what hobbies or friends we were allowed to have, something I did not understand. Of course, this wasn’t true in all cases, but we are always quick to categorize girls as “tomboys” or “girly girls,” and some of those girls keep track of what they are.

A hefty desktop computer found its way into my home as a child, complete with dial-up and MS Paint. When I first got online, I was about 10 years old (this was in 2006-07). At first I mostly played dress up games, arcade games, and things of that sort. Eventually I learned that I could search questions that I had and find answers, which led me to… Yahoo! Answers. 

Yeah, if you were posting questions on Y!A in the aughts, chances are a barely-fifth grade girl was answering. I was often mistaken for a guy, because my birth name (sorry, it’s not Céline) is traditionally masculine and was cut off to an even more masculine name due to the character limitation for screen names. 

I wound up on the LGBT section of Y!A and asked if I could be “a boy inside” even if I loved my long hair, liked my girl clothes, liked my “girly hobbies,” and didn’t really mind being called a girl.

The answer was, bizarrely, a resounding “yes.” Several of the responses even gave me resources: forums I had absolutely no business being on, full of adults trying to change their sex. Webcomics that glamorized medicalization and the lives of these adults, and sometimes even teenagers. 

At age 12 I found my way onto DeviantART while looking for fanart of cartoons I liked. What began as a search for cute drawings and stories about these cartoon characters quickly exposed me to LGBT content, much of it very sexual. The budding transgender and nonbinary community was extremely appealing with its colorful flags and promise of openness and inclusivity. I was especially interested in boy/boy relationships and “femboy”/anime boy content. There was this soft, feminine type of boy being portrayed to me, who was equal to his boyfriend in their relationship (usually), and who could express femininity within the confines of being male. 

At this stage in my life, I had become frustrated with the way that every book I read seemed to focus so heavily on childhood crushes and romance, something I was not interested in – the online shift to adult homosexuality was something I had never really been exposed to and had no idea how to reconcile. The stories that I wrote began to shift focus to these themes. My best friend complained that all of our jointly-made characters had become homosexual in my stories, and expressed to me, “Not this many people in real life are gay or transgender!” 

I was told by people on the internet that he was simply being a hateful bigot, and that I should push him away in favor of those who praised my “diversity.”

I wondered a lot about myself and started going by a boy’s name and asked to be called “he/they pronouns.” I was assured frequently that my previous lack of sex dysphoria before going online did not make me “less transgender.” 

In fact, by the time I was a teenager, I wanted my chest to be either larger or totally gone. Binding my chest created dysphoria where it did not previously exist — I misinterpreted this as dysphoria about being female, but in hindsight it was dysphoria about the fact that becoming male was not not truly attainable. 

When I turned 14, my friends from DeviantART all began to migrate to Tumblr, where I followed them in search of more artwork and community. I then secluded myself into an ideology that defied everything I knew from life in south Alabama. Most importantly, I “learned” that people who uphold Woke positions support the underdog and justice, while those who are ignorant of them or deny them are no better than Nazis. 

I learned to hide things from my family, and to judge them negatively for not being able to understand or accept the complexity of “gender identity.” How could they deny that I was a boy inside? How could they deny “gender” might exist in shades of gray? Males who told me they did not “feel like guys” were only saying so because they “never had to think about gender” the way I did. This is what adults online were telling me, what my fellow teenagers online were reciting. 

Since “cisgender” people were incapable of understanding, I retreated into being trans. This also got me Internet Points, because I could be one of the uplifted underdog voices, especially when I was a “nonbinary boy.” 

My mother, at her wit’s end with how much I had gone totally silent towards her, did the only thing she could think to do: She read my diary. The first page of this new journal was dedicated to the logistics of stuffing my underwear with rolled up socks to create a phallic bulge while still needing to use the girls’ locker room at school… my mother confronted me angrily, asking me how long I had been doing all these things to look like a boy. I completely shut her out, and my trust in her had been shattered. 

Our relationship was extremely tense for a few years. She would threaten to send me to all girls schools, she would argue with me, she would take away my boy clothes and refuse to let me cut my hair. Several times she would follow me to the store to ensure I was not buying duct tape, which she learned I was using to flatten my chest, or shaving razors because she knew I was no longer shaving, but instead self-harming.

All of these things pushed me away further. My story finally looked more like the desperate stories of other teenagers in my boat, with families who fought every step of the way against gender ideology.

One day, in reaction to seeing that while she sometimes used male pronouns in front of me – but used female pronouns when talking to anyone else, I came to the horrifying conclusion that I would never be accepted by my family as the opposite sex. I threatened to take my own life, because what was the point ever going to be? Everyone online told me that suicide rates for transgender teens were sky high, that without transition, death would be my only relief.

This made the tides turn in my favor.

Accepting my transition eventually did not help me though, because eventually, when I wanted to back out, I remembered how hard it was to convince her in the first place. How hard it was to convince my friends and my teachers.

Several other things were going on in my offline life. I was becoming curious about presenting in a more feminine way, such as by experimenting with makeup and “funky” girls’ clothing. Much of this I did secretly — my mother had given up on trying to make me stop binding my tiny chest, and she had stopped hiding my masculine clothing. My boyfriend at 13 bought a chest binder for me online, and some mornings over video calls before school, I would cry to him about my dysphoria and having to see my female body. 

The truth was though, I had not had problems with my body that were any different than other girls’ problems with theirs. It was only when I got online and was told it was possible for me to become a boy that I began to hate that I wasn’t.

And online, I could be a feminine boy. I ignored that in real life, the boys I saw at school were rarely feminine. Even when I got older and met feminine boys, the truth was very different: many of them got mistaken for girls and enjoyed this. Of course I, with a female body, would need to work harder to look traditionally masculine in order to actually be seen as a man. Did I really want that? Or did I just want respect?

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PART II: SOCIAL TRANSITION AND DETAILS

In 8th grade I had gotten a shoulder length haircut, and in 9th grade I was pretty androgynous — I was openly a trans boy at this point and asked my teachers to all call me a boy’s name and male pronouns. I was made fun of, but never physically attacked, although my principal was terrified that I might be assaulted due to my insistence on using the boy’s restroom – and even more terrified that if that came to pass, I would most certainly be blamed. 

I remember one day sitting in his office with a boy my grandfather had called the school about, because I had complained about being made fun of each day.

“Why are you picking on her?” our principal asked.

“Because she’s a tranny.”

Regardless of my constant insistence that I was a boy, I still loved the “femboy aesthetic” I saw online and often tried on women’s clothes at Goodwill, never buying them. I felt a strange arousal sometimes in women’s clothing, which I thought of as autogynephilia rather than a slow acceptance of my own sexuality as a female.

I tried on makeup and a friend even bought me a long wig, since I had begun getting buzzcuts every month… I hated the “tomboy in a dress, everyone reacts with shock and awe” trope I always saw on television, so I tried to hide all of this from my family. I was being consistently called a male name and pronouns (at least to my face) by the age of 16, so I didn’t want to risk “fucking all that up.” I did once try to show my makeup and dresses to my mother’s ex husband, who asked me why I wanted his sons confused by calling myself a boy without dressing like one. I was angry, but began working harder to hide my femininity.

My grandfather took a different approach than my mother. She had often hidden my “masculine” clothes, including women’s button-downs and polos. I hid myself in a baggy jacket in response. My grandfather, however, let me wear whatever I wanted and even offered old football jerseys. He took me to get my first barber shop haircut, which I paid for with my winnings from an essay contest.

That essay contest was focused on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I remember in one paragraph I had written something about modern day transphobia as it related to Scout’s experiences being forced to wear a dress to school. My essay won for my school district and was submitted to the University of Alabama for the statewide judging around 2010-2011.

Still, my grandfather never gave into things like calling me a boy’s name and male pronouns. He felt pushing too much would make me dig down deeper, though of course he never said as much to me. At most he tried to counsel me that I could not be a “gay man,” because gay men are homosexuals – not interested in females. I stopped speaking to him when my mother revealed to me he “did not really accept this trans thing.” He saw it as something I would grow out of, because the majority of children with gender dysphoria who aren’t medicalized do grow out of it. Only in extremely severe cases does gender dysphoria extend into adulthood.

One of the mistakes I made was seeing “trans” as an identity to retreat into. In my opinion today, no one is “inherently trans.” Some people have a mental illness known as gender dysphoria, and they may or may not attempt to change their sex in response, or at the very least begin to lie about their sex. Because changing one’s sex is impossible, this does not completely alleviate gender dysphoria even in those individuals. But worse, if someone does not actually have gender dysphoria, then medicalization or attempting to live as the opposite sex can cause that to develop. Today a lot of kids are essentially “roleplaying” mental illnesses such as this, and they don’t understand they are playing with fire. Many of them have no dysphoria, and they still jump straight into transition. They feel lonely, they feel weird, they feel like they don’t fit in, and so they find solace in an online community and identity that isn’t really helpful with resolving those feelings. 

I remember that at 14 my mother had asked my doctor for help, and he referred me to a private therapist to help me with a “damaged sexual identity.” When I saw her, she told me that it “wasn’t her job to change me,” and she referred to me exclusively as male when talking with my granddad after sessions. He would calmly respond, talking about me as a girl, and the two would go back and forth like this while I stood there holding a teddy bear I always brought. 

I only saw this therapist a few times before my mom said we couldn’t afford it ($10 a session, out of town) and I was eventually switched to the county mental health clinic, where I bounced around from therapist to therapist. A few wanted to focus on my gender identity, which I resisted conversation about as I saw it as a solid fact that needed no discussion. I refused to consider if sexual abuse had made me feel bad about my body, or if I was simply a tomboy who wanted to stop being made to feel weird about my boyish interests. I refused to explain how “feeling like a boy” was different from “feeling like a girl” because I was unable to accept that those ideas are meaningless. 

My friends at school referred to me as male and interacted with me more or less as a boy. This made actually living my life as a teenager difficult: I was interested in boys, but insisted on my “male” identity. No gay boys were interested in me, and if straight boys were, then I was offended at being correctly sexed by them. I was kind of interested in girls, but no girls were interested in me. My whole personality was no longer about my hobbies, dreams, and passions, but instead my ideology, my politics, my dedication to being part of the trans community.

A lot of my life at that point was about the aesthetic of being “transmasculine” or being a “transboy” more than it was about actually trying to live my life as a man. Ultimately, this was always about running away from shame I had about my own body and sexuality. I felt like my body was gross. I worried that seeing women as attractive was wrong and objectifying, but I also struggled with wanting to be attractive and not wanting to be used, hurt, or reduced to my body. All of these, of course, are bad reasons to retreat into the fantasy of becoming male. They are all reasons to deal with internalized misogyny.

The biggest mistake I made was believing that gender is real and separate from sex, and that people can “feel like girls” or “feel like boys.” Being a female who “feels like a man” doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make us men, it makes us human beings who just want the same respect we see men get. None transboys whom I knew as a teen ever really wanted to stop looking like young, pretty boys… and all of us started to see the same things when we medicalized our bodies: hairy stomachs, weight gain, and receding hairlines… things we never actually wanted. 

I was two months shy of turning 15 when I had first found a gender therapist in Montgomery and emailed her. I explained that I was uncertain that anyone would let me medicalize my body because I was “a little nonbinary.” She told me I would be surprised at how open-minded she was. I began saving up money to go and see her: every single penny was pinched with the goal of one day using it all to transition. I did not do anything fun with my friends or create savings goals for adulthood.

When I had the money, I emailed again at 16. At 17, I finally had an appointment with her – she made sure to schedule it for a day there would be a group meeting, where I met another 17-year-old transboy (who was already on testosterone) and transwoman (who did most of the talking while we both sat there shyly, silently). 

Our appointment consisted of 20-30 minutes of my explaining my story (leaving out details that tumblr had suggested I omit, which were mostly related to my nebulous identity), highlighting that I had “lived as male” for a few years at that point. She asked why, then, had I come to see her, since I “sounded so sure” of myself. I told her I needed to see a therapist in order to be prescribed cross-sex hormones, and she turned around to enter my name into a pre-filled form for this purpose. She printed a copy and handed it to me, saying she would also submit my referral to an endocrinologist who worked in the same building.

I was FLOORED…  it was really going to be this easy?! 

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PART III MEDICALIZATION

When I saw the endocrinologist, he was alarmed that I listed lithium (a mood stabilizer) as a medication I took. I explained that I had mood swings (I would later be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder) but that I had full consent from everyone to begin hormones. He was uncomfortable and wanted letters from my parents and psychiatrist, but ignored these when submitted. When I asked him about hormone blockers, he told me at my age, this would be pointless as I had already undergone female puberty.

I spent the next year continuing to save all my spare change and every dollar I received. Some time during this period, I dragged my mother to the probate judge to change my legal name. She sat there, looking desolate and defeated as I assured the judge that she fully consented. He told me he could not in good faith assist a minor attempting to change her sex. 

A few days after turning 18, I returned to the endocrinologist, having never seen the gender therapist past that first appointment. On the basis of informed consent, he “could not” and did not turn me down. Did I understand the medical risks of what I was doing? Sort of. All of the side effects meant nothing to me because I had been told online that the alternative was a life of misery and eventual inevitable suicide. What did it matter to me if I died young, if I could die young as a man rather than suffer for years “stuck in a woman’s body”? 

I left with a prescription that I filled that day, and over a few months the changes began. The taunting at school even stopped as the bullies who mocked me suddenly heard my voice crack and drop and saw facial hair sprouting. I was still binding my chest, sometimes with very frilly/cutesy custom-made binders (a cupcake print one comes to mind). My A cups were damaged from long-term binding at a young age, and so they were sagging badly. 

While I had swore to everyone up and down that when I moved out of state for college, I was going to begin presenting myself as a masculine man, this never really happened. I entered college being very open about the fact that I was a transman, and I frequently wore makeup and sometimes women’s clothes, because I was able to “freely express femininity as a man” in a way that felt confining as a woman. I was on every transgender student panel and did my best to educate everyone on the intricacies of people like me.

I gained a lot of weight on a very tiny campus with buffet dining. I liked this because I had a new underdog identity (fat) and because with my saggy A cups, I just looked like a hefty man. I was able to get away with being shirtless at pools and outside at will, though I got some double takes at times… In hindsight, we cannot change our skeletons, so it was probably obvious to some people that I was a very bold woman.

Slowly I started to leave behind my former nonbinary identity as I found it to be ridiculous, telling myself that I could still have a “man’s brain” even if part of me “did not feel like a man”… I got a large tattoo on my chest to mask my breasts, thinking I’d never be able to afford a mastectomy anyway. 

I remember at the first appointment the tattoo artist asked me, her deaf client, “How do you sign, MY BODY IS AMAZING?” I showed her, and she turned it into a dance. It was the dance of another woman who has struggled her whole life to love her body. I had begun to love mine, but was still obsessed with ambiguity and not looking completely like either sex. This made romantic endeavors difficult, because I insisted on trying to be with gay men despite not being male and no longer making an attempt to look male. 

I had been seeing a therapist on campus, who helped me tremendously with issues such as my eating disorder, but never questioned my desire to try to change my sex. I frequently showed up to her office wearing women’s clothing and makeup, but she never strayed from her acceptance of my male identity. At one point, when I had stopped wearing women’s clothing and had begun to dress in exclusively men’s clothing, I explained my decision by telling her that I realized I could enjoy the way some clothes looked without wearing them myself.

I found out that my student insurance covered gender transition related surgeries, so I made a consultation for a “simple release,” feeling this would make me feel satisfied in a more androgynous, ambiguous body. My therapist was ready and willing to write a letter of support that stated I had legitimate gender dysphoria that would be alleviated through surgery. 

At the appointment, I had no sign language interpreter and did my best to understand the doctors and communicate what I wanted. The surgeon asked me if I wouldn’t prefer a more linear path, involving a mastectomy first. The nurse “shook” her own breasts at me while looking at my chest, eagerly smiling to indicate that he was right. I took off my shirt, slightly uncomfortable. The surgeon assured me that my tattoo would remain totally intact, and that because I was so small-chested, the mastectomy could be done with the keyhole method, leaving me without scarring. I was torn, but this path would also mean in my mind that I could pursue weight loss without my breasts giving me away. I no longer bound my chest since I had gained so much weight, but that would “need to change” if I lost it.

I made the appointment for surgery.

The day of surgery, I kept wondering if something would go wrong. If my insurance would suddenly fall through. If my ride home would cancel, thus necessitating we reschedule the whole thing. Everything went very smoothly, and everyone assured me that when I woke up, I would be happy.

Before surgery, I had to take out all my facial piercings. At that point I had stopped dyeing my hair crazy colors as part of a new year’s resolution to keep my natural hair color for a year. So, there I was on the operating table, looking very typical.

When I woke up, bandaged, it was all so surreal. I got back to my dorm and a few days later saw myself unbandaged. To me, it was like my chest had never looked different… always flat. I could hardly remember having breasts. I thought this meant it was the right thing to do… in hindsight, it was trauma. I had just lost body parts that would never regrow.

I feel stupid it for it these days, because I was an adult at the time of surgery, but I genuinely had no idea that my breasts would not grow back if I stopped testosterone – this was the popular myth online at the time. I had seen so many references to “chestfeeding” that I had no idea that my mastectomy was not different from one given to a woman who has breast cancer. I can never breastfeed now if I decide to have a baby, which is not something I received counseling on, yet a desire I expressed to my therapist at least once prior to the operation. 

I became more masculine-presenting after my surgery, often wearing blazers to class and keeping my personal uniform “business casual.” I lied about my sex to the extent almost no one remembered who I had been. I mostly lived under the radar. With my mastectomy done, I was able to get a vaguely worded letter from the surgeon expressing that my sex had been changed, and that I was now physically male. My birth certificate and driver’s license were amended to reflect this.

I was not unhappy, per se, but little did I know, health problems were exacerbating. Taking a cross-sex hormone is a bit like trying to install a Windows operating system onto an Apple computer. You can certainly do it, but the machine is not equipped to deal with that… some things are not going to work.

I had already been through female puberty. My bone structure was never going to look male, and although I desperately hoped for it, I was never going to be able to gain muscle like a man. There were so many impossibilities at play.

The female brain is not designed to handle male levels of testosterone, for example. Mood disorders can get worse, ADHD can get worse, and we are likely to struggle with dementia much earlier. I began struggling with my eating disorder much more severely following my mastectomy, because I saw my stomach sticking out so much farther than my now-flat chest. 

Vaginal atrophy is an inevitable part of taking cross-sex hormones, and while I always thought that I would get a total hysterectomy and genital-mutilating surgeries at the “appropriate time” in my transition to “avoid complications,” I was never able to follow through. I had seen women pretending to be men who had their own biological children, and lied to myself that that was a sustainable way to live, a real goal to strive for. Waiting so long caused vaginal atrophy and cervical problems, which I am only just now beginning to have treated because I avoided gynecologists for so long when I was pretending to be a man. 

I got married to a man in 2019. My husband was always uncertain about how it was possible for me to “feel like a man,” but never said anything despite my very clear female-socialized tendencies. However, he did admit that he was terrified about the medical experimentation being done on my body, and felt that intimacy would likely be ruined between us if I were to go through with “bottom surgery,” the results of which are less than ideal.

He expressed what my family was afraid to: how long would I live, being a medical experiment? 

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PART IV: Detransition

After I got married and moved to the Midwest, I went totally stealth. I was no longer “feminine,” ever. I was mostly perceived as a straight male, and met with surprise when I brought up having a husband. I never said a word to my in-laws. I lived in total secrecy, something I thought I would like… and it made me feel empty for four years. As much as I could try to look like a man, my mannerisms, speech patterns, and way of thinking all reflected someone who had been raised a girl. Yet I was never able to be wholly truthful about my childhood. At some point, my period returned, despite taking testosterone – and this was difficult to hide. It did point to the fact I was still able to have children, but this led to the question: how would I hide being female if I decided to get pregnant?

When I looked in the mirror, I saw a man, and I saw myself beneath him. Was he me? Was I him? Was everything just a mask?

I was told often by trans people that I could have been open about my sex. I could have been the type to wear pride pins and wave flags. That was just never the life I imagined, constantly calling attention to the discongruence between my actual sex and what I wanted to be.

In 2023, everything fell apart for me. A few key events finally led me to the decision to detransition.

One of the first things that began to peel away the lie was learning about people in history that those in the modern transgender community enjoy applying their label to: I saw a video about Margaret Anne Buckley, who lived her life pretending to be a man named James Barry in order that she could be a surgeon. My husband pointed out that it was incredibly insensitive to apply the label “trans” to people who never did or never could apply that label to themselves – it simply was not their reality, and we would be wise not to apply the politics of today on the dead of yesterday. 

This made me question how I would have lived and identified in another era. Would I have tried to lie about my sex if I were born in 1775, or hell, even 1975? While I had always thought that the answer was yes, that I would have tried to change my sex in any time period, I was no longer on social media and therefore more able to think for myself and readily say: probably not. I would have just been a woman who knows she doesn’t have to pretend to be a man to be who she is. Getting mistaken for a man is interesting and fun sometimes, but believing in that mistake is a tragedy.

One of the second things that began to make me open my eyes was this: in a group chat between myself and two of my former roommates (both transmen), one confessed to us that lately he had been having “intrusive thoughts” about wearing women’s clothing. He was very content in his life as a transman, living with his girlfriend and being a father to their children. All through his childhood, he had never really felt comfortable in female clothing due to excess body hair and tall stature. 

I did not admit it, but realized that I had been walking past women’s clothing constantly in my workplace and wishing that I could wear it. I wondered about what this meant, because public crossdressing was ironically something I did not wholly approve of at the time, as I did not want to call so much attention to myself. I thought a lot about my childhood: I loved my Sunday church dresses even if I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a dress any other day of the week. Expressing my femininity on a liberal college campus had also been enjoyable, where I could pretend to be a man crossdressing as a woman. Clothing does not make us women, of course, but I dressed to hide my female body and to make myself look as much like a man as possible.

This was all starting to make me wonder what I could even realistically do with the knowledge that I was, in fact, living artificially. 

In February 2023, Jamie Reed blew the whistle on the St. Louis Children’s Hospital. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I had been leaving work and stopped to look at the newspaper stand, where the article caught my eye, and so I took it to read.

All of it shook me to my core. I related to each and every line of the article and was horrified by what I read happening to children and teenagers. I myself had recited, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” to my mother, a line I had heard online, a line apparently recited by medical professionals to distraught parents. I had fought so hard to be accepted as the opposite sex that I pushed away thoughts of desisting, to the extent I was able to convince myself that the phrase “boys can be feminine and still be boys!” referred not just to biological males, but to transboys.

Having feared medical complications (I had read of plenty of side effects at this point), I had already stopped taking testosterone several months prior. Despite my facial hair, I was being correctly sexed by confused men in public restrooms as my body fat began to redistribute. What could my next step even be? My niece had only ever known me as her uncle, and my husband and I lived outwardly as a happy “gay” couple. I continue pretending to be a man, with my beard and mastectomy, and continue hiding my figure underneath baggy clothing… but did I want to?

I looked up what “detransition” was. I had been taught to see detransitioners as self-hating, transphobic, or even rare cases of other issues being mistaken for “genuine gender dysphoria.” The future was uncertain to me: I was nearly 30 and had lived half my life as a transman. There was no adult woman I could return to being, in my mind. 

What I found was so different than I had been told: hundreds of people who had been prescribed cross-sex hormones after a single appointment with a medical professional, many never seeing a therapist. Hundreds of women whose breasts had been removed without ever being asked why they wanted that. Hundreds of people whose healthy genitals had been mutilated to approximate the opposite sex, poorly. Hundreds of people who really did, at some point – or even still – struggled with the desire to be the opposite sex, an impossible endeavor. 

Hundreds of people told me that even if I had been living my whole life pretending to be male, that “detransition” did not mean “going back” to anything: it meant moving forward. It meant stopping the medicalization, letting go of gender identity labels, and simply coming to learn how to cope with trauma and body dysmorphia differently.

I have met the funniest, kindest, most intelligent women in detransition support groups. We don’t always agree with one another, of course, but the discussions and jokes all give me a deep sense of healing.

And so, I took the leap.

I initially planned to wait until a year had passed to publicly detransition: a way of serving penance (a “spiritual” coping strategy my husband suggested to me), and a way of avoiding being perceived as a transwoman. I wore women’s clothing at home, along with breast forms (which took an insane amount of courage to begin doing, because I felt like I was crossdressing as a woman despite being female). One day, I snapped. I could not handle the misery I felt going back to work every day living a lie, and I absolutely could not continue to handle the frustration of dealing with a period in the men’s restrooms – I told my HR director about my situation, expecting shock. I expected a slow few weeks of telling managers, then coworkers, then changing my name tag and restroom habits. 

My director was completely unsurprised. Expressing that she would support whatever timeline I wanted, she made sure to reassure me that absolutely no one would be uncomfortable with me in the women’s restroom. 

And so, I decided to change my name tag that very day, and told all of my coworkers through a handwritten note that I passed to them with shaking hands – and not a single soul was fazed. Most reacted with great positivity and support. A few asked me privately about my decision to transition in the first place, and I told them very honestly: I was groomed by adults online, felt trapped in my decisions, and the last decade of my life had been the epitome of sunk-cost fallacy.

Of course, the cat came out of the bag to my in-laws. One day they came to visit while I was wearing breast prosthetics and women’s clothing, and my husband and I expected loud bewilderment… which never came. My teenage sister-in-law brought her sketchbook over to me to show me her drawings: large-breasted anime characters that she insistently called male pronouns. I privately texted her about my detransition, to which she responded with her desire to be a boy, her involvement in the same internet circles I had fallen for, and her intentions to attempt to look more masculine. I saw myself in her: she is very feminine, but ashamed of her body, and the internet has already told her that this means she is a boy inside. After a few hours of aimless conversation, I finally told my in-laws that if they weren’t going to ask why I suddenly looked like a woman, then I would just have to tell them. I was met with love and support, and wondered if I should say anything about the hole I saw their daughter falling down. 

Gender ideology ruined a large swath of my childhood. I wonder today what would have happened had I never been exposed to the rhetoric online, or had therapists pressed more to ask where I was getting these ideas – especially when femininity began to appeal to me, but not being female. 

Today I know that being a woman is just about being female. It has nothing to do with the way one dresses, the way one sits, the way one walks, talks, or lives her life. Today, I have taken a more feminist stance about being female. This includes embracing some aspects of my “gender nonconformity,” and knowing they make me no less of a woman than any other.

 It is my hope that sharing my story will encourage self-reflection for those who want to change their sex, empower parents and medical professionals to question youth more deeply, and for all of us to work towards a return to sanity.