Thread by @reclaimingtrans

Anti-trans conversion practices include not only attempts to change or erase gender identity or modify gender expression but also trying to prevent/discourage medical transition and/or encourage detransition. A core part is about promoting "alternatives to transition".

Anti-trans conversion therapy/practices is based on the idea that both trans identity and medical transition are unhealthy and harmful. They include attempts to change trans people's identities but also lots of promotion of "alternative treatments for gender dysphoria".

People promoting anti-trans conversion practices try to get trans people to internalize negative beliefs about transition regardless of how transitioning has actually impacted them. They try to convince trans people that transition has hurt them to get them to detransition.

People promoting anti-trans conversion practices try to get transitioned trans people to link suffering or trauma in their lives to their transition, to see their transitioned bodies as less than, to see their lives as being fucked up because they transitioned.

Transphobic people don't care about whether trans people have been helped by transitioning. They want to convince happily transitioned trans people that they've actually ruined themselves forever. They want to destroy any happiness a trans person feels because of transitioning.

Transphobic feminist ideology convinced me that I'd fucked my life up by transitioning. I became so miserable because I thought I'd messed my life up by taking t. But it was all internalized transphobia, my life wasn't actually ruined. I suffered needlessly for years.

When I started figuring out that transition hadn't actually been a disaster, that I'd been wrong about that, I started feeling so much better. But when I told other detrans women, they became threatened and acted like I was "in denial" about what transition had done to me.

What kind of "therapy" or other method of "healing" encourages a person to think of themselves as damaged forever, doomed to suffer? What other treatment encourages people to think they can't ever get over their past choices? Encourages them to stay stuck in trauma?

That's not "therapy", that's not "healing", that's psychological abuse and indoctrination. Transphobes use anti-trans ideology to manipulate transitioned people into seeing their transitions as "damage" based on the belief that transition is inherently harmful and unhealthy.

Transphobic society can believe that people can be brainwashed into "mutilating" themselves by transitioning but can't see how trans people can be brainwashed into believing their transition was "mutilation". There is social pressure to view one's transition as self-destructive.

I wouldn't recommend questioning a detrans person's personal narrative of suffering because it's best to err on the side of respecting someone's pain. But one can certainly point out social biases and larger cultural narratives about transition as inherently harmful.

And how the media highlights stories that reinforce the idea that transition is "mutilation". Even a lot of transphobic detrans people reject such narratives but their voices are rarely heard. A very select range of detrans experiences are represented in the larger culture.

I spent the entire time I was detrans yelling at transphobes not to call me "mutilated". Even when I saw my transition as "damaging", why I saw it as harmful was different from how most transphobic people understood it. But they cared more about their disgust than my well-being.

They saw my transition as bad because it made me more "freakish". I saw it as bad because I thought I'd used transition to become more passable and have an easier time blending in. I thought I'd changed myself to survive in a hostile society and given into self-hatred.

Transphobic people regularly took the parts of my story that reinforced their "transition as mutilation" narrative against my wishs and protests. They claimed to be on my side while objectifying me, exploiting my suffering and trauma, and talking down to me. Some "allies".

Transphobic people try to brainwash trans people into seeing our transitions as "self-destructive" but even when we do, often our views still don't match up with their bullshit enough, so they have to cut and paste and distort them even more to fit their narrative. It's that bad.

Anti-trans conversion practices aren't just about trying to "cure" people from being trans, they're also about convincing trans people that transition is harmful. Transphobes would rather destroy a trans person's happiness from transition than admit that transition can help.