Femme Sourde

I wasn’t expecting my detransition story to blow up the way it did! Nonetheless I’m incredibly grateful for the kindness that has been sent my way, and my heart goes out to every woman who has told me her struggle with her identity has nearly mirrored mine.

I’ve decided to sort of broaden the scope of this blog to include not just my language learning trials and tribulations, but also information I find out about my biggest passion (literacy development) in addition to some “lifestyle” type posts. I may try out Substack as well.

I wanted to add a correction to the way I often report my transition: I typically remember first emailing my gender therapist at the age of 16 or 17, but an old blog post of mine on DeviantART that I managed to dig up paints an even more alarming picture. A woman from Montgomery messaged me about my Substack and knew of the clinic I had gone to, and the name matched exactly with what I had blogged.

I first contacted the gender therapist in September of 2010, when I was 14 years old. While I would not have an appointment until I was 17, the affirmation that I received from her in an email and the encouragement from my online social circles mentally locked me in to the “inevitability” of my medical transition.

Social transition is not a neutral decision. It is not something one can do to “test the waters” or “explore possibilities.” Desisters are just as important as detransitioners to listen to and gain perspective from, namely because of how locked in many people feel with social transition. In my own experience, social transition even made my dysphoria worse in some ways: I could be affirmed online and by some friends, some family members, in my utter conviction that I was a boy “trapped” in my female body, but at the end of the day, I knew I would never wholly be freed from it. I clung to the hope that medical transition would let me live authentically, but the man I grew to see in the mirror was a mask of myself.

I apologize in advance for how absolutely cringe my 14-year-old self was. Also I have no idea why the formatting is so weird.

“…which I’ve no doubt it may come to,” because I expected multiple sessions, but still expected multiple sessions to end in a referral for hormones. I saw therapy as a sort of “game to win” or “task to go through” in order to prove a single, “necessary” outcome: medical transition.

I was unwilling and unable to simply live the life around me — I was waiting for my “real life,” the one that was affirmed to me constantly online and in limited friend circles.

I never got that job in January — I was actually never able to get more than odd jobs as a teenager, and very few at that.

This is a short part of a comment chain that resulted from the blog post, where a then-18 year old friend, who I only knew online, encouraged me to have hope that medical transition would come for me, that my mother would “come around” (and that it didn’t matter if she didn’t) and (unpictured because the surrounding conversation is just so incredibly childish and cringey) that it might be best to avoid telling my dad (who didn’t live with me) until just before beginning hormone therapy.

I have obscured our usernames/icons because I don’t know where this woman is now, and what she thinks of any of this.

I’m not even sure what I should think of this time capsule.