Thread by @reclaimingtrans

The damage of anti-trans conversion practices can be long-lasting. Years later, I'm still dealing with psychological wounds from engaging in conversion practices to suppress my sense of self and dysphoria. It doesn't just stop once you decide it doesn't work and stop doing it.

It's like I spent years cutting a part of myself away. I had to numb myself to what I was doing. Now I can feel the wounds in my psyche and work through my past denial. A lot of healing starts with facing what happened & learning to trust my own perceptions that my pain is real.

Part of engaging in conversion practices is normalizing and rationalizing suffering because seeing a part of yourself as "false", "wrong" or "unhealthy" is suffering. Trying to suppress or destroy part of yourself is suffering. It hurts but you learn to justify it to yourself.

And other people justify it too and encourage you to stick with it. If you're engaging in conversion practices in a "peer support group" then you're all encouraging each other to keep going. You're giving each other "emotional support" to endure & rationalize psychological pain.

So I came out of my detransition in a lot of pain but having trouble believing that pain was real. And having trouble believing that how other people treated me was abuse. Because I'd been trained to see what I did and what others did to me as "healing" and "helpful".

And whenever I'd tried to talk to other detrans women in my old scene, most of them acted like I was "crazy" for feeling hurt. When I tried to talk about how detransition didn't seem to be working for me and was causing me distress, they dismissed my perceptions and feelings.

So after I left, it took a while just to get to the point where I could accept that my suffering was real, that I wasn't making things up or exaggerating the damage. Just seeing some of what I went through as harmful felt like I was "betraying" my old community.

I'm still just taking in what happened to me, still figuring out what it is I lived through, still coming to accept that my suffering is real. I needed a good amount time and distance from my old community just to get more perspective and start to see what the problem is.

Being in the detrans rad fem community fucked up my ability to make sense of my own life and mind. They really got inside my head and made me feel like I couldn't trust my own thoughts and feelings, because they were "contaminated by patriarchy" or whatever. It's a real mindfuck.

And how am I supposed to even begin healing if I can't see or understand the damage of what happened? Conversion practices don't just create lasting damage, they get in the way of you even being able to recognize what you're doing/went through was harmful. That's how they "work".

And then there's the feelings that come up as you get your mind back, because it's only then that you realize how much you lost. To come into awareness of the damage is to come into grief because you finally see just how much of you was destroyed. It makes recovery very painful.

I had no idea how much of myself I'd cast off or tried to kill until I started remembering & recovering those parts of myself. I really did try to destroy myself and become a different person and it's very disturbing to realize that. It's upsetting how much encouragement I got.

It's not just what I did to myself that so disturbing, it's how much "help" I had doing it and how much praise I received. And then there's how I encouraged other people to hurt themselves too. Now I see what kind of damage I was encouraging other people to engage in.

I really thought I was trying to help other people like me but now I know I was encouraging them to destroy themselves & "helping" them rationalize and accept their own pain as a sign of "healing". All the ways I was hurt or hurt myself, I did to other people too. It fucks w/ me.

I've spent so many days full of pain, of anger, of feelings of being deeply violated, of horror and guilt that I urged others to hurt themselves too, and so many days of grief and regret. I have six years worth of trauma to work through, understand and heal from. It's heavy shit.

It can be hard to talk about how I've beem hurt because skepticism about trans people's inner lives and sense of self is so normalized. I feel like I have to explain to some cis people that a trans person can be very hurt by trying not to be trans cuz it's not obvious to them.

And that's also surreal. Like imagine having a gaping wound in your chest and having to explain to another person that being ripped open amd bleeding is bad actually. That's kind of what I feel like when I try to explain to some cis people about how my detransition hurt me.

But how am I supposed to resist anti-trans conversion practices or help create more resources for survivors if I don't raise awareness? I don't like that I have to explain how my detransition was a damaging conversion practice but I also don't feel like I have a choice.

Not if I want anti-trans conversion therapy/practices to end. And I feel a responsibility to help raise awareness about them & end them because I spent so many years promoting them, promoting what I now know is dangerous and devastating. How else am I supposed to live w/ myself?

I talk about my experiences in the hopes that will mean others won't have to. Either because they'll avoid anti-trans conversion practices entirely or if they're survivors, they'll be able to access the resources they need to focus on healing and getting on with their lives.

I want to live in a society that respects trans people and values our well-being. That takes our suffering seriously instead of seeing our existence as a threat, as something that needs "careful assessment" by cis medical professionals to prove that our self-knowledge is real.

It's not just TERFs who are responsible for hurting me, it's also the transphobic medical system. That system has always been about limiting our autonomy and reducing our numbers as much as possible. There's plenty of conversion practices worked in much of trans healthcare.

Cis fears about "transition regret" have always been taken more seriously than the risks to trans people of being subjected to conversion therapy/practices. We need trans healthcare that truly understands the dangers of suppressing our inner lives, of trying to kill our psyches.

And we all need more resources to help us resist and heal from living in a society that doesn't want us to exist and questions our reality constantly. Conversion practices are just a concentrated version of the psychological warfare all trans people are subjected to.

I just don't want anyone else to suffer like I did. I want a world where trans people grow up knowing only love, autonomy, respect and wholeness. Where our lives are valued and celebrated. And where people respect the brilliance of our minds instead of trying to wipe them out.