u/sleepingokapi

I started testosterone when I was 15 years old via "informed consent." I never had a therapist. I got top surgery the next year when I was 16, just before my senior year of high school. I stayed on testosterone until I was almost 22, and I'm 24 now. My voice dropped to a bass-baritone. I got laser hair removal for my facial hair this year, but it's not enough. Even though my appearance passes, as soon as I speak it's ruined. People always dance around pronouns when they talk to me, or just flat out call me a guy.

I'm glad my appearance has changed, but I guess I thought it would do more for me. I'm haunted by the memories of a 40-something year old male doctor groping my chest when I was a minor to assess it for surgery. I only had breasts for a couple of years. They were small anyway -- I rushed into surgery because I was tired of my ribs hurting from binding, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to figure it out myself in college. Now I feel like I'm missing a part of my body that practically every other woman has. My results don't even look good. The scars are long and stretched out, the nipples are more like discolored scars than healthy tissue, and one side of my chest is practically concave. To me, it's a visible, physical symbol of my own self-hatred, and a reminder of what could have been. On top of that, I've tried voice training, but it just feels like a lost cause. Even if I could speak passably, I'll never be able to sing the way I could again. My voice used to be so free, but now I sound like I'm being strangled (and it physically hurts) if I go higher than A3... It also hurts whenever I have to speak loudly, which is something I need to do constantly for my job. There's no way for me to shout and sound remotely female at the same time.

I don't know how to cope with any of this. I don't know a single person who is going through anything even close to this. I just want to be a normal young woman. I never gave myself the chance to be one. When I refer to myself as a woman out loud with my deep voice, it makes me feel like an imposter. I've permanently made myself an outsider. I feel like I ruined my life before it even started. Two years of detransition have hardly helped. I don't know what to do. It's hard for me to imagine living out the rest of my life like this.

My personal thoughts on the function of gender and misogyny align pretty well with gender abolitionism. I don't think that gender can be logically deconstructed without revealing that there's nothing to it other than culturally specific stereotypes. In other words, there is no difference between gender roles and gender itself apart from sex. We're all human beings who are born with a certain sex, and any non-biological qualities that are ascribed to that sex are gender roles that vary across societies and throughout time. We all have our own individual personalities that don't necessarily align with those ideals, and we all suffer from the pressure to restrict ourselves based on them. I have a hard time seeing how gender isn't inherently oppressive to all parties, but especially women, as misogyny is basically ubiquitous in daily life.

I don't think that masculinity and femininity in and of themselves are problems. I think it's a problem when we associate femininity strictly with women, and masculinity strictly with men. I believe that everyone should be free to explore any range of expression that they want to, and doing so shouldn't carry any particular weight.

It's hard for me to not fall into being kind of gender critical when I think about all of this (with regard to the popular theories on gender and transition given by the online trans community, at least). It seems like a lot of people interpret their own resistance to gender roles and sexism as evidence that they're not "truly" the gender they grew up in. But I don't think anyone is truly any gender -- I think we're all just male, female, intersex, etc. and anything on top of that only exists in a purely social context. And it feels like the insistence that you aren't a woman because you don't identify with "womanhood" (which always ends up being defined as either femininity or an enthusiastic acceptance of women's gender roles) carries the quiet implication that people who DO identify as women are completely okay with those things. I only call myself a woman because I'm female, and because I recognize that I'm part of a long history of female people who struggled with misogynistic and homophobic societies. I don't like how women are seen in society (NOT to the fault of women), I don't feel some inherent sisterhood with other women, and I don't really fit into any of the common ideas of what a woman is. I accept being called a woman and using she/her just because those things are the default for someone who is female. I could very easily identify as nonbinary, but I would feel like it was kind of counterproductive considering my thoughts about gender.

I believe in bodily autonomy, and I recognize that trans and nonbinary people are just trying to enjoy their lives in a way that makes sense to them. Gender abolition isn't something that could happen in any of our lifetimes, and if you really wish you could occupy a different set of gender roles in a way that doesn't seem possible without transitioning or taking on a different label, then it makes sense to do so. We only live for so long, and we might as well not spend our lives agonizing about being something we don't want to be. My only gripe is with a lot of the theories on gender that much of the community insists on, and how a lot of the time they actually reinforce gender roles rather than opposing them. At the same time, I don't want to seem like an asshole. My struggle with understanding all this could just be projection from my own experience as an autistic detrans person. I medically transitioned as a young teenager because I was convinced that my body dysphoria was inherent to me instead of something that resulted from comparing myself to people who were born male (even though that's exactly how it began, and how it ended once I stopped doing that). I'm a very progressive person, and I know some trans and nonbinary people, so my opinions on these things have left me feeling kind of isolated. I just never express them in person.

Anyway, I would like to hear people's thoughts on this! Do you agree with gender abolitionism? I really want to hear strongly pro-trans thoughts that meet me where I'm at, because I genuinely want to find a way to reconcile my (maybe very idealistic) opinions on gender with people's real-world experiences and needs. Other opinions welcome as well. I just don't want to get stuck in one way of thinking, because I feel like it's easy to develop huge blind spots.

FTMTF lesbian here. I was always a "tomboy" as a child. I took pride in feats of strength, I wanted to be chivalrous, and I hated when I was forced to dress femininely and shave my body. This masculinity was a huge reason why I thought I was a trans man. I came out as FTM when I was 12-13, went on T at 15, had top surgery at 16, and started to go off hormones at 21. I've been off T for a little over two years now, and I've been out as a woman for a little over a year.

After I "came out" as a woman, I started to dress in a feminine way. I felt like I had repressed that side of myself for so long - that when I started to pass more often in androgynous clothing, I allowed myself to experiment with long skirts, dresses, etc. I like trying to recreate certain looks from past decades -- particularly alternative looks from the 1980s. In that way, the way I dressed was still pretty far from modern, acceptable femininity, but it certainly couldn't be described as masculine. It also helped a lot with me passing as a woman. I still often get misgendered, but it happens less if I'm in skirts/dresses.

The thing is, I always felt like I was playing dress up. It wasn't a bad thing, and I'm not opposed to continuing to experiment with clothing in that way, but I'm increasingly starting to feel like it doesn't represent me. I really connect with the butch lesbian identity on a deeper level, but I feel like I can't claim it because I don't hate playing with femininity every now and again. I know I probably wouldn't have ever done so if I never transitioned, because I wouldn't have a reason to try and make myself "look like a woman" just to pass as my own gender. I would love to be able to fully embrace the masc style and energy, but I know it'll make me look like a cis man, so I can't. Then again, I didn't hate playing dress up, and I might end up going that direction again.

Can anyone relate? If you are a masc or butch lesbian now, did you go through a more feminine phase when you first started to detransition?