u/wdcrfv

Every morning since I realised my mistake, the first thought I have upon waking up is “Oh. I don’t have breasts”. My brain can’t process it.

I’ve become an insane person that obsessively stares at every single female passing body I see as I walk down the street thinking about how they have (natural) breasts and I don’t. I’m aggressively gendering people in my head as I see them in a way that I haven’t done since I was super young (and also insane back then I guess!).

The worst part is, the reason I was able to question my transition in the first place is because I started really recognising my attraction to women, which I ignored and misinterpreted for so many years as envy and toxic comparison. And as soon as I’ve realised it, it’s become intermingled with envy and self hatred again.

The cruel joke of it all is that I’m “a boob guy” when it comes to my attraction to women. Of course. Getting rid of my own breasts was probably to do with the fact I was so distressed at my own attraction to them.

I can’t get over the fact that I’ve chosen to have a surgery to… do what? Become a female with no breasts? Literally insane behaviour. Convincing myself that I was a man feels like a primal hallucination, even if I did genuinely want to live as one, if only to escape seeing myself as female.

Interacting with people in the world now and having them he/him me sends me into an almost out of body experience. I’m 2 months off T and don’t look masculine at all. What on earth are they seeing me as? How on earth are they going to react?

I can’t stop thinking about how people in my life will react. People talk and the thought of old school acquaintances I’m not in touch with finding out and laughing at me makes me feel sick. I know I shouldn’t care about them but it just brings me back to being that weird autistic, emotionally neglected kid that no one wanted to talk to. I could ignore their judgement when I believed I was really trans but I’m not. Like I really am just r*tarded.

Me transitioning drove such a wedge between me and my parents. We never had a good relationship but this destroyed it. They are going to be all like “we told you so”, without any regard for how their treatment of me really fucked me up.

Like, if you grow up being told your role as a woman is to submit to a man and to listen to him and that sex is when “you give your body to a man”, of course you’re gonna feel insane about your gender and bodily autonomy?

I feel bad I caused them so much pain because they do love me but we are so different and their views are so hurtful I legit I don’t even wanna talk to them again. They’re first gen immigrants and we barely even speak the same language so it’s not like they’d listen.

Tl;dr I feel terrible. I know from some of the stories in this sub, that I don’t have it that bad and I can recover, but it just feels like the universe has played an unspeakably cruel joke on me. Like what the fuck is this existence. My only hope is that it gets better. I’m only 5 months into this shit so perhaps time will heal some wounds. Or at the very least, I can move away from this pathetic victim mindset.

For the longest time, I would have described myself as feeling “like a man trapped in a woman’s body”. The disconnect was alienating and terrifying and made me feel like my brain and body were at war with each other.

What I didn’t realise when I was younger is that the feeling of being trapped felt so pessimistic because I wasn’t able to see anything beautiful about the female experience, both in terms of birth sex or gender, due to the very strict gender expectations I was raised with, that heavily counted on misogyny. Also not realising I was attracted to women and experiencing the way of viewing my own body as something that was terrifying.

Before, I thought that feeling “like a man trapped in a woman’s body” meant that I had to change my body to allow myself to connect to and express my masculinity. And who knows, perhaps living as a man for about 10 years is what I needed – I still think being able to move through the world is a man for 10 years provided me with a valuable perspective and to realise really what the difference is living as either gender.

But nowadays, I think I feel more like I’m just a masculine-aligned soul who has been blessed with getting to inhabit a female body. I still have some gender dysphoria, but I now feel like almost it’s part of who I am instead of a problem that needs to be fixed. I feel a a lot of regret that I got top surgery. It feels like I let down the woman that I was meant to protect. All I can do is move forward and start taking care of my body the best I can.

I’ve been wondering whether pride in transness/being trans correlates or has influence on future detransition.

Personally, when I first realised I had gender dysphoria and wanted to transition, I thought of it as my only way out, and also something that I didn’t feel super excited about but more of something that I “had to do”. Eg - I never did those videos like “this is my voice x days on testosterone”, etc. I didn’t want to acknowledge the ways I was changing, I just wanted to pass as a guy and forget I’d ever has a female presentation or experienced gender dysphoria.

In hindsight, this may have been a sign that transition for me was running away from a past self and “hiding away” rather than a acceptance of a new facet of myself. It definitely was the actions of someone with a lot of internalised shame rather than someone who was proud to be trans or proud of the process of transitioning - even if I seemed like I was finally accepting myself.

Was wondering if anyone else had similar experiences?

Has anyone got breast reconstruction with just fat grafting/lipo and would be willing to share results?

I’ve been browsing this Reddit and general BC ones and seen a lot of results for breast implants but not as many for just fat grafting. Would be great to see a few more examples.

Just wanted to post this in case any ftmtx is feeling down about suffering from internalised misogyny and having that as a cause for their transition.

When I first realised that the extent to which misogyny affected my view of the world and caused me to completely disassociate from my gender and medically transition, it broke me and I felt so deeply ashamed. Like, how could this happen to me?

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot more over the last few weeks and… most of the world is misogynistic. Society at large still hates women. And I personally grew up in a pretty conservative, sex negative environment that exacerbated it. In fact, it would be an outlier if you had put the effort to unlearn misogyny, which, if you are on the sub and questioning, you have.

It is deeply sad that we took out the pain of feeling alienated from being a woman out on our own bodies, but it is not at all an illogical response to the conditioning that the world gave us. Just wanted to share in case anyone was feeling low about their original cause for transition.

I (29, FTMTF) am only 2 months off T after 8 years, but generally feminine looking + my voice is already androgynous with voice training. At this point, I think the only factor that causes people to read me as male is my lack of chest.

Top surgery is also the biggest thing that I feel regret about (I don’t regret hormones or my social transition). I’m unsure if I want to have reconstruction.

Other FTMTFs that have had top surgery, how do you go about navigating:

1. Disclosure
2. Self confidence
3. Meeting people

I think something that makes it a bit more complicated for me as well is that I am a little bit GNC in presentation, so I’m tempted to call myself non-binary as a way of explaining my current presentation… but I think that gives people the wrong idea of thinking I want to transition? Idk

If anyone has any success (or horror…) stories as well, I would really value hearing them! Idk, some of this might be nerves due to dating inexperience as well 🙃

I realised I had top surgery regret about 2 months ago (it’s been 5 years) and I’ve been processing a lot of gender & transition thoughts as a result. In retrospect, a large part of my chest dysphoria was related to passing to avoid sexualisation, rather than bodily discomfort.

This is where I’m at currently: I think, for the first time in my life, I feel connected with being AFAB, rather than hating it. As an extension of that, I feel connected to female sexuality, whatever that means. And as such, I’m mourning the loss of my chest and I’m going off T.

However: I really enjoy being a man socially. I feel good at it and I enjoy dressing masculine and having a lower voice. But I’m realising I enjoy it almost like as a performance which makes me feel safe. I’m not sure why, nothing insanely bad has ever happened to me - but I do have OCD tendencies and used to get super intrusive thoughts about rape and SA (also grew up in a religious environment). There is also am element of being masculine that feels inherent to me.

Something about people knowing I’m AFAB feels too vulnerable, or personal? At least, I think that’s how I subconsciously felt when I first transitioned. Now I’m older and more confident, I guess I’m okay with people knowing it… I’m just not sure what this means for what detransition or what my gender presentation should look like going forward.

Does anyone else relate to the rest of this…

To emphasize: I (FTMT?) am not detransitioning for them. I’ve had a series of experiences in the last year which has changed the way I view myself. I’m still figuring out if I’m a woman, or just more woman-aligned (see post history if you’re curious I guess!)

Kind of a vent, but any support re. tricky family dynamics is appreciated.

My parents never accepted my initial transition. My mother is a Jehovah’s witness, and my father is conservative. We’re also 1st gen east asian immigrants and there was a decent amount of pressure for me to “make it. Growing up, I didn’t feel like they “saw me” as a person, just more as a child that they were responsible for making successful - which meant emphasising gender and sexual conformity. I don’t think they understood how to be interested in me as an individual.

Looking back, I’m realising my initial transition was (partially) due to escaping a gender and sense of self that felt inhospitable. I had an eating disorder fuelled by really bad exam stress (which they never acknowledged). And it conveniently allowed me to stare at pictures of women all day without acknowledging I might be attracted to them. My mother made me friend break up from my best friend when I was 15 because she came out as a lesbian.

After a few attempts to try and speak to my mother about trans identity & getting shut down each time, I said fuck it and moved out and transitioned. I finally let them know two years later and it was as bad as I thought it would be. I’m forever regretful my two younger siblings (one of whom is closeted non binary) got caught in the crossfire.

What surprised me is that they didn’t disown me (I was prepared for that). But in some ways, it was worse. We were basically in minimal contact and we’d occasionally have dinner every few months to maintain some image of civility, but each time it would end in them telling me I was mentally ill and a disgrace and I need to change back.

I kept meeting them though because I know my experiences were not something they could have foreseen as part of their parenting journey, and their own upbringings were extremely difficult, and I don’t want to regret severing the connection. I figured the immense psychic damage every few months would be less worse than cutting them off and breaking their heart and affecting my siblings and then one day hearing they’d died or something…

I know they love me, even if they don’t like me or really know me at all. I’ve sent them birthday and xmas presents, call my mum every other week, even ask about which bible verses she’s enjoyed, and my dad helped me buy my own place last year. I don’t speak to him at all and he doesn’t really speak to me. It’s maybe complex for non asians to understand, but there is this concept of filial piety - basically, rejecting your parents is unthinkable. You can hate each other but you can’t just disown them.

There’s also a culture of maintaining social face. My parents have not told anyone that I’m trans. My childhood friend who is also Chinese told me he came out to his parents as gay, and had a similar reaction. It’s so ironic to me that both of our parents individually are going through this grieving process of their child’s identity being different, but no way in hell would they ever talk to each other about it or seek support because they’d both judge each other as social failures for having nonconforming children.

Today I went to see my brother at a professional event he was presenting at and my mother was there. She said hi to me but then ignored my presence for the rest of the time we were there as there were other people that knew her and were asking about her kids and she didn’t want to seem associated with me in case they clock I’m her kid. As soon as they left she came over to me and my sibling and asked if we wanted to get dinner :) Shit fucking blows.

I went home and just bawled my eyes out. I already feel so low about realising maybe medical transition isn’t what I want anymore, but being treated like a social outcast by my own parents really drove the nail home today on how cruel they could be.

I know if I “changed back”, they’d be so pleased. I almost don’t want to give them the satisfaction. I think they’d want me to be back in their life again, and worst off - pretend nothing had ever happened. Having seen how they treat me when I don’t comply with their expectations, I’m not sure I want to go along with this. I’m still someone who genuinely had gender nonconforming experiences, and I will never betray the trans community and decry medical transitioning, even if the (extent of) it I underwent was more than I needed.

I love my parents, or at least I try too, but I can never look past the way they see and treat others - a worldview which made my life during transition so much harder, if not indirectly feeding so much of my low worth, dysphoria, and body dysmorphia, which partially caused me to seek medical transition in the first place.

I’m sharing this as I just would like any thoughts on this experience.

I (29 FTMT?) transitioned about 8-9 years ago. I’ve pretty much exclusively been romantically/emotionally attracted to men since I was young, but in a way that felt not entirely straight. I occasionally found women pretty/sexy, but I never had that intense longing for them.

Anyway, this year I’d been undergoing a lot of physical and emotional stress. Part of that was being rejected by two of my crushes who were straight men, which got me ruminating about what life would have been like if I was cis. I still “felt like a man” internally though, whatever that meant.

Then, one day - I happened to catch eyes with a woman and felt this insane surge of attraction towards her that it genuinely felt like love at first sight.

The weird thing about this is that… It felt like that attraction made me really comprehend what it meant to be a woman? Like I think that sense of attraction unified the concept of what a woman looks like to me.

I had a pretty bad eating disorder when I was 16-20, that I think contributed to me seeing my body as an assemblage of parts rather than a thing in its entirety. I also wonder if obsessively staring at the pictures of skinny women on pro ED tumblr blogs was actually some form of repressed attraction to women but filtered through this hyper analytical misogynistic lens.

The best way I can describe it is that it suddenly turned my perception of my own body and other female bodies from a warped Cubist Picasso painting into a real singular thing. I wasn’t aware that I was perceiving women this way before.

Once I was able to feel this way I was also able to see my pre-transition body the same way. Still figuring out what my gender is, but I do think I regret some aspects of medical transition, mostly top surgery. I’m dealing with that.

Overall, it just astounds me that 1) it took me almost 30 years to see what women look like? And 2), it took this unlikely attraction to a woman for this to happen. Was this always inevitable or have I just changed? Certainly without the testosterone driven sex drive I don’t know whether it would’ve happened. Maybe it’s more of a case of reverse dysphoria.

Any thoughts would be welcome. I’m just tired of processing all this by myself.

Reading the posts and comments on this sub, I’ve noticed two common narratives when it comes to realising the desire to detransition.

One is that a bunch of life stuff happens and they realise overtime that transition has been more detrimental to their life than helpful.

The other is that some people have a sort of “waking up” moment, where it’s like a flip is switched and their attitudes towards their gender and transition changes overnight. I find this one more interesting, partially because it’s very internal and less easily explainable. Interestingly, it seems to be the one most commonly peddled by far right detrans grifters.

Most of the experiences I’ve read on this sub fall somewhere in between this continuum. I myself think I’m a combination of both - Several events recently have really highlighted how being transgender has made life so much harder for me. But I also had a series of epiphanies (related to un repressing trauma) which fundamentally changed how I saw many things, gender being one of them.

Just wondering how everyone else would place themselves in terms of which they relate to more?

Just an update on my detransition journey. I (29, FTMTF/FTMT?) came to the realisation that transitioning may have not been the right life choice and that I might want to de-transition, about a month and a half ago.

That month and a half was probably the toughest (so far) of my adult life. I’d started processing things in my life that I’d never processed, now I finally had the language and emotional scaffolding to actually feel all those feelings that I was completely numb to for so many years of my life. It honestly felt like how in movies when the protagonist who has amnesia finally experiences something that makes them get their memories back. Except since I still remembered them it was more like my (emotionally) black and white memories were finally in (emotional) colour.

I think I’m probably through the hardest patch. I say this because my brain is finally thinking about what moving forward might look like as opposed to ruminating about what could’ve been. I know my life is harder in many ways now, but I think I’m finally starting to experience some optimism and hope for being on a more suitable path for me. This Thursday would’ve been my due date for my T-shot (I won’t be taking it). I’m enjoying seeing my hair grow out, and I’m already getting better at practising speaking with a more feminine voice.

However, the more I think about my experiences now… I really did think of my plan as a detransition, but I don’t know if that’s completely accurate. I think I’m probably some flavour of non-binary (but I really struggle accepting it about myself). After all, I did spend pretty much a decade of my life as a man, and it was alright, maybe even good. I do feel a specific type of kinship and “brotherhoodness” towards men, that I think I maybe mistook as solely romantic love (though I do feel that towards them too). To put it poetically, I think part of my transition was always about feeling like I could be a horse and run with the horses (lol).

As I’ve slowly grown in the last few weeks of into experiencing myself within the context of womanhood, I started revisiting voguing (the dance), as a way to connect myself to female/feminine sexuality. It almost shocked me how much I felt so embodied doing it. I previously tried voguing, maybe five or six years ago, and I was pretty uncomfortable with any type of overt feminine sexual expression. It’s only really in the last year or so that it’s really changed for me, and that was really gradual.

I guess my connection to womanhood now is just completely different to what it was before I transitioned, and so much of it was informed by my experiences as a queer man. Like… maybe it took me being a man to be a woman? Honestly, this tracks as I am someone who has always been a bit “grass is greener on the other side”*, but also, reading accounts on this sub, seems a pretty common experience that HRT does seem to cure gender dysphoria, until a point where it starts giving gender dysphoria in reverse.

Anyway, I guess I’m wondering if any other detransitioners or re-transitioners have felt this massively increased love and appreciation of their birth sex when they realise they wanted to de/retransition, but also feel slightly like they’re not exactly going back to the same gender. Feels like experiencing the equivalent of starting “new game plus” for woman as gender. And also, if people have experienced this along with “reverse gender dysphoria”.

*Trying not to make this mistake this time though and do de/retransition very slowly and not idealise the outcomes, and trying to be okay with potentially being non binary. Again, I think I have glaringly huge signs that I might be non-binary. I think it’s just hard to believe about myself, even though I find it easy to believe for other people.