Thread by @reclaimingtrans

Taking t signficantly reduced my dysphoria and made me feel more comfortable with my body. I couldn’t say this when I was detransitioned. I couldn’t be honest because I was supposed to be discouraging people from transitioning and promoting “alternative treatments” instead.

When people asked me how I overcame my dysphoria, I couldn’t tell them that taking t for four years and then stopping once I’d gotten the changes I wanted had helped me feel more at peace with myself and less disconnected from my body.

I always said I felt more at peace with my body because I had worked through trauma or internalized misogyny and maybe that helped too but I didn't say that until after I became a radical feminist. Before that I acknowledged that taking testosterone had helped a lot.

After I stopped t but before I became a detrans women and got into radical feminism, when I still thought of myself as genderqueer, I wrote about how I'd never felt happier with my body.

Detransitioning and coming to see my transition as a result of trauma and internalized sexism actually made me feel worse about my body because I came to see it as a symbol of how I'd been hurt by other people and society, how I'd fucked myself up by internalizing oppression.

One thing I didn't like about the changes t gave me was how they made it harder to be seen as a dyke or genderweirdo. I liked the physical changes but not the social ones that came with it. Detransing and getting into radical feminism took that dissatisfaction and amplified it.

I became so miserable because of what my body came to represent to me. I never stopped liking my body but I felt like I should've been able to find a way to live in it without changing it. I saw myself as defective compared to lesbians who'd never transitioned.

Coming to see my transition as a form of self-destruction motivated by trauma and living in a patriarchy made me so fucking depressed and fed into my self-hatred. It made me feel so ashamed of myself.

The detrans community and radical feminists encouraged me to see transitioning itself as traumatic. I was encouraged to make peace with my body but also feel grief at how transitioning had changed it. The ideal body was an unmodified body and I could never have that now.

I was encouraged to describe my transition in the most negative of ways, call it a kind of living suicide for example. I was never encouraged to consider how framing it that way could be a distortion of reality or lead to suffering.

When I started questioning how I viewed my transition and decided it hadn't actually hurt me, I encountered a good deal of resistance from other detrans women. They acted like I was deluding myself and were worried that I could be a bad influence on other people.

Moving from seeing my transition as a disastrous act of self-destruction to making peace with it improved my mental health so much. But that didn't seem to matter to some of the detrans women I knew. Instead of being happy for me they were threatened.

They saw transitioning as self-destructive and thought that if I talked about how transitioning hadn't hurt me I'd be encouraging people to self-harm and deny their trauma. I wasn't saying that transitioning actually helped me at this point, I didn't dare.

I could decide that transitioning wrecked my life and caused me lots of grief but I wasn't supposed to decide I had been mistaken to see it as a problem and that viewing it that way had hurt me. I sure as hell couldn't say it actually helped.

But it did help. I used to have a hard time connecting with my body. Transitioning helped me feel at ease with myself and there's nothing wrong with saying so. I shouldn't have to lie about how I came to be at peace with myself or what actually helped my dysphoria.