galat-ladki
20 something ▫️ detrans woman ▫️ India | trying to figure myself out | I'm made up of salvaged parts
51 posts
Latest Posts by galat-ladki
now since tumblr apparently loves to support non-american authors, but is surprisingly mum about this, imma tell you.
you see, everybody's favorite evil corp, Amazon, bought Indian publishing house Westland some six years ago. Now Westland is a very famous and reputed publishing house in India, and has put forth some of the best titles the country has seen. It didn't shy away from controversial and uncomfortable topics, and some of its books quite vocally criticise the current government, which has been responsible for the current state of india as a pseudo-democratic, pseudo-secular, economically ruined country, the most notable one being The Price of the Modi years by Aakar Patel. It also produced Amish Tripathi's pathbreaking Shiva Trilogy.
Now here's the thing that got me nuts.
AMAZON. SHUT. IT. DOWN. A WEEK AGO.
JUST OUT OF THE BLUE, IT IS CLOSING DOWN WESTLAND FOREVER. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS TO COME OF THE HUNDREDS OF TITLES PUBLISHED BY IT, OR OF THE AUTHORS ITS CONTRACTED, OR THE PEOPLE EMPLOYED BY IT.
It has triggered a buying surge in India, as people go on shopping spress to get their hands on the titles they want from this house. Short on supply and high on demand, bookstores across India are showing solidarity and moving surplus books around.
here you go with a few links that i think sum up the problem quite nicely, and please guys. just. please support westland.
here they talk about how this is becoming a trend with global corps.
here they talk about the future of indian publishing houses.
this one talks about a bleak future for literature and how it feels like we're living in a dystopian novel
spread this around. jeff bezos continues to be evil, and will be. he is quite literally, irredeemable.
I hear, “you don’t have to have dysphoria to be trans” a lot but I never hear the equally true, “you can have dysphoria without being trans.”
“Gender is a social construct” does not mean that gender is meaningless and can be used any way you’d like. Money is a social construct, too. That doesn’t mean that you can decide an American five dollar bill should actually be worth ten American dollars, or it’s the same thing as 500 Indian rupees, or you only have a $20 bill but it just feels more like a $50 bill from the texture of the paper. Tell that to a merchant when you’re trying to purchase a good and they’ll laugh you out of the store. Social constructs still have meanings and rules and specific functions which are culturally determined – it is not up to any one individual to decide how a social construct is or should be used. That’s not how it works. Gender is a social construct, but you must actually seek to understand the rules and functions of gender before you can deconstruct it – and deconstruction of a social construct can therefore only be a collaborative social project and not an individual pursuit.
that reblog saying ‘If you don’t want to be a girl you probably aren’t one’ like.. if you don’t enjoy feeling like a sex object aged 10 you’re probably not a woman like WHAT. I think you guys need to like.. talk to more women :(
When Adrienne Rich said “our minds and bodies are inseparable in this life, and when we allow our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger”
I had a whole thing typed up but not in the mood. The original post was a butch women talking about her discomfort with people placing expectations of femininity on her. She never passed judgement on anything. And every post I see of this sort has other users butt in with "it’s okay to be feminine” which gets a bit galling since popular culture already says that all the damn time. It feels a lot like this. I’m sure you mean well but there is a time and place for these things.
being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic. you go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualised when like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade yugioh cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it. and then you spend years hating being a girl and hating everything puberty did to you and wishing you could be a boy or be completely genderless again and it takes you Many years to come to terms with yourself Or you simply try to Lean In to everything and do makeup tutorials on YouTube and claim it’s for fun. like how can this be treated as normal
ive been thinking abt that “being a lesbian is just constantly the cant relate meme” and its actually so true it makes me sad lmao. like my friends can rant for five minutes about how badly they want to suck some dudes dick but i feel uncomfortable even mentioning that im slightly attracted to some girl. so much of “girlhood” or “womanhood” thats portrayed in mainstream pseudo feminist media, or even coming of age literature is about the heterosexual experience; about a women coming into her (straight) sexuality and thats just so frustrating. little women was hailed as one of the first books to write about girlhood and growing up and a lot of it involves all the girls falling in love with men. also honestly the whole “sex positive revolution” thing is annoying and exclusive too lmao. i read an article that cited sex and the city, 30 rock, magic mike (??), and amy schumer, as “sex positive media” thats contributing to a “more open discussion” on “female sexuality”.. while literally none of these are in any way relatable to the lesbian experience. im forever grateful to alison bechdel, and anyone else who is making space to talk about the lesbian coming of age experience because we literally have nothing at the moment and it fucking sucks.
It perturbs me when I see people write that detransitioners “were just confused cis women”. At best, it’s a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of our experiences. But often than not, it’s an attempt to neutralize and silence women who are getting too loud or causing trouble.
At no point during my transition or detransition was I “confused”. I was many things, but confusion wasn’t part of the equation. If I had to only one word, it would probably be something like, “deliberate”, “driven”, or “ambitious”.
The insistence that detransitioners are helpless or confused is a two-pronged attack, both a shutdown and a theft. If a detransitioned woman is painted as confused, it implies that she is unable to make a sound choice, and/or can be easily manipulated by an outside force as a result of her confusion. It removes her agency from her story, and casts her in a secondary, inactive role in her own experiences. It renders her story open to reinterpretation by ideologically motivated parties of all kinds (be it conservatives, ROGD moms, doctors/surgeons/psychiatrists, trans activists, people across all parts of the political and moral compass). It’s an old trick; it has been used against women for ages.
Every step of the way, I was doing my best to make careful decisions that were in my best interest. I had a boatload of problems, and when presented with my options, I used what I knew at the time to address those problems as best I could.
I made lifechanging decisions at a young age, with limited information, incomplete knowledge, like all people do. Many of those decisions are not ones that I’d repeat or recommend to anyone else. Many of those decisions led to outcomes that I am not satisfied with, even if other people are satisfied with similar results. I’m especially dissatisfied by the parts of these experiences where I enlisted the aid of outside experts, who ended up causing me more harm than help – real harm, real physical and mental and financial harm. I’m especially dissatisfied by the broader social context I made these decisions in – I’m dissatisfied by things that were outside of my control, and sometimes beyond of my awareness. None of this means that I was “confused” or unable to think critically.
Both then and now, I’ve wanted the very best for myself and those on similar paths. I yelled back then, and I yell now, because we deserve better!
We aren’t confused. We have demands. We want freedom, agency, safety, respect. We want quality medical care. We want improved, honest information made available to people. We want people to listen and actually incorporate our experiences into their workflows, learn from the things that have harmed us, so that they don’t keep happening. We want apologies from those who have caused us harm. We want peer support, actual allies, not just people looking to indoctrinate and use us. We want to be taken seriously. We want these things and more. We want so many things. We wanted these things then, and we still want them now. We haven’t stoped wanting, and therein lies the problem. Nobody likes an unsatisfied woman.
Enduring a trip to hell and back doesn’t make a woman confused, it makes her resilient and pissed off.
I often see more gatekeeping presented as a way to prevent detransition. And while this wouldn’t necessarily be useless, it’s a bandaid solution. Working harder to root out the “right” people to transition from the “wrong” people to transition isn’t going to eliminate transition regret. To get at why we have to ask, who are the “right” people? Are they the ones are suffering the most or who have been suffering the longest? Are they the most gender non-conforming ones? Are they the ones persistent enough to pass through checkpoint after checkpoint? None of these things insure that transitioning is going to work for someone: that it’s going to improve their quality of life.
When I walked into gender therapy I was suicidal and had been off and on since I was old enough to understand what death was. I was already being regularly mistaken for a boy. I was adamant that I needed this. My therapist called me a “classic case” and still we talked for almost a year before I socially transitioned. I then spent another year living “full time” before starting testosterone and spent my first six months of testosterone on a low dose prescribed by a fairly paranoid pediatric endocrinologist. I met every requirement. I passed every checkpoint. I didn’t take any shortcuts. And still, here I am: a woman, a butch dyke, further from normality than ever, bitter about what happened to me. Because none of those measures addressed my underlying problem.
What we really need if we want potential regretters to not be certain that they need this is a shift in culture. We need environments without misogyny that are affirming of lesbianism and gender non-conformity. We need girls to grow up free from abuse, supported in their mental health and knowing that they can be anything they want to be and anything they are. We need to encourage them to love and live in their bodies and provide immediate solutions if they find that they can’t. Because by the time that many girls step into a gender therapist’s office they’ve already made up their minds, for good reason, that they can’t live this way.
Ive spent the past few months reading some radfem and detrans related stuff, just curious and trying to educate myself. Then quite recently Ive basically started to feel like "oh shit maybe i actually should detransition" and its freaking me out. Im not sure if im just going crazy being in quarantine and making rash decisions, or if all the time as home gave me time for introspection to come to this conclusion. i feel so lost lol
tbh, this is how i found myself on a path to full detransition, not just stopping hormones. i just wanted some perspective—what i found was a full paradigm shift.
you didn’t ask for advice, so take or leave this: you don’t have to figure it all out right now. give yourself permission, space, and—importantly—time to see how you’re feeling, to understand what you believe about gender and sex and all of this messy shit. and if you get a handle on how you feel about that, then see what you want to do. you don’t even have to DO it yet, just see what you want. and if you continue wanting it, take small steps toward that thing, then pause and ask yourself how it feels. do you feel more authentic? do you feel less confused? are you afraid, and if so, what of? are these fears realistic? are they worth confronting anyway?
the time in quarantine has absolutely given you time for introspection, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reach a conclusion just yet. there are actually no rules to how your life must go. that’s entirely up to you. all i can suggest is, spend the time asking the questions that come up for you, and try to answer them. try to figure out what YOU believe and why you believe it; am i living a life that satisfies me? am i living in a way that excites me? don’t worry about anyone else, what they might think of you, how they might react to your questioning or any conclusions you draw—the only person for whom those questions and answers matter is you. ultimately, you’re the person who is guaranteed to be with you your whole life—so that’s the person whose opinion matters most.
being compassionate to yourself involves making it a discipline to do the things that you love, no matter how many times you attempt to convince yourself that it’s no use. being compassionate with yourself involves sitting down and writing, even when you feel insecure about the work you’re producing. being compassionate with yourself involves taking a walk outside because you haven’t had any fresh air the whole day. being compassionate with yourself involves committing yourself to learning something new even if it hasn’t gone well many times before. being compassionate with yourself is about committing to the discipline of self-betterment and healing.
Either I genuinely have good ideas in the shower or the lack of ventilation deprives my brain of oxygen to the point where anything seems profound, but I feel like I’ve finally figured out the root of my dysphoria.
The gap between the way I want to look, act, talk, and be perceived and the way society expects those things of me is huge. Large enough for me to never feel comfortable in my “assigned role”. But at the same time, uncomfortably small. Too small for the expectations to ever be fully out of reach. My deviation from the norm is often seen as unacceptable, but never unfixable. I am still female, I am still a woman, and even if I need to learn absolutely everything about how to woman right, people refuse to give up on trying to teach me. And until two years ago when I came out as a trans man, I largely refused to give up on trying to teach myself.
I was always confident that my dysphoria was the real, innate, unfixable-without-transition kind, because I genuinely wanted to be male. The idea of getting to be masculine as a woman offered me absolutely no relief from the unbearable discomfort I felt existing inside my own skin. The idea of getting to be male did. Men don’t suffer from this pressure, masculine women do. And while I won’t claim the pressure ever fully disappeared while identifying as a trans man (feeling it very strongly over the past few months is the only reason I’ve managed to come to this realisation), at the very least I was chasing the promise of relief. And the distress when I didn’t fully get it - when I still had to face my body and realise that it looked like something that could fill the role I was and am so deeply uncomfortable with.
I feel almost stupid for coming to this realisation after being told over and over and over again that trans men are just trying to escape gender roles. But the difference for me is that the way it was talked about from either side never made the dysphoria that could come from this seem real. I’ve attempted suicide over my dysphoria, over the distress at the idea of never being able to become male. I’ve taken a knife to my chest before. I’ve never seen myself smile as wide as I did the first time I saw myself in a binder. I cried from happiness when I got my first packer because my body finally felt right. Everyone around me has told me how big of a change they’ve seen in me since I came out, how much happier I seem. With how dismissive people sound when they bring up transitioning as the result of gender roles, I never could’ve imagined it to be the root of my dysphoria. Mine was real, and severe, and had been with me for as long as I could remember. Any suggestion that seemed to invalidate that was not only offensive, but painful.
This realisation doesn’t fix my dysphoria and there is very little I as an individual can do to fix the underlying causes, neither for myself nor anyone else. But I wanted to share and maybe get some people to reconsider how they view dysphoria, whether their own or other people’s. I honestly think the way it’s currently talked about is harmful to a lot of people.
the dialogue around detrans people online right now is so fucking awful lmao…. seen threads full of people talking about how they literally do not give a fuck about the struggles of detrans people whatsoever bc we’re “too small of a group” or are “cis so it doesn’t matter”. it’s just like….. so fucked because we literally have all the exact same struggles as trans people? 100% of the same shit? the only line between the groups is one largely of labelling and choices we make w our bodies (which isn’t entirely true, not every trans person medically transitions or stays on hormones and not every detrans person medically detransitions or goes off hormones)
almost every detrans person i know and have talked to struggles with transphobia from strangers on a daily basis. a lot of us are coming out from having been stealth which i have to say has felt exactly the same as coming out the first time. we need the same kind of healthcare that any trans person might need and struggle to receive it for the same reasons. we need the same kind of legal assistance that any trans person might need and often have to go through the same lengthy headache process of getting all our identification changed. we’re at the same risk of violence and harassment for the ways that we look and move through the world. what is the legitimate empathetic reasoning for not giving a fuck about us? and no, “you did this to yourself so you deserve it” is not a legitimate empathetic reason. imo everyone who struggles with gender and presentation socially and/or medically and/or legally is in the exact same boat and we should all be supporting eachother. its kind of hard dealing with knowing that there are tons of people out there actively declaring that they don’t give a shit about me or anyone like me. it makes it difficult feeling comfortable or safe or cared about anywhere
The absolute worst part of being detransitioned is having absolutely no idea what to say to anyone to save them from what I went through.
Being a teenager and not caring about long-term detriments, thinking others' experiences don't apply to me, being nebulously lost and angry, seems to be universal.
I have thought on it for years now and I cannot imagine what anyone could have said or done to stop me. I don't know that it's like this for everyone, but I think I had to live this experience to know that it doesn't work. To know WHY it doesn't work. I just wish I could translate my journey into some profound scrap of advice for even one person.
If you aren’t detransitioned yourself, you don’t get to tell people the “reasons” for detransition with any kind of authority on the matter. You don’t get to tell detransitioned people how they must have experienced dysphoria or say that it wasn’t “severe” enough if they were able to find other means of coping than continuing to transition their bodies.
I’m tired of watching non-detransitioned people try and speak over us, try and erase the variance in stories because some of them don’t fit a narrative they like, and consistently belittling our experiences.
People who transition are only helped by having information on the varying outcomes that may come from it, no matter how small of a chance it may be. My doctor didn’t have me ignore the fact that my nipples could fall off after having surgery just because it was a less than 1% chance, they certainly shouldn’t have been telling me not to research about detransition for the same fucking reason.
i really do think that we, as a whole, are becoming more and more disconnected from our bodies.
we’re being encouraged to view our true self as separate from our body—the body is a collection of disparate parts, to be discarded at will or exchanged for new ones, separate from our mind or soul. instead of viewing our bodies as something that developed alongside our minds, they’re an object of scrutiny and judgment; if you don’t like your nose, your fat, your breasts, your labia, your forehead, your lips…don’t worry, because you can (and should) change those things.
go under the knife and reveal your new self, molded into the vision in your mind’s eye for only thousands of dollars and an ultimately unimportant risk to health and life.
adopt a strict new diet. obsess over an idealized form of yourself. shift the goalposts of what “perfect” looks like so the chase is never complete. hate every natural function of your body. devote all your time, money, and energy to an idea.
stare at your breasts and hate them. hate them so completely that you decide that you need new ones, or to get them removed so you never have to look at them again. never try to come to terms with how they look—that’s settling, that’s giving up, that will never lead to happiness. stare at your genitalia. hate it. daydream about something that would look better, feel better, be less objectified, be more acceptable, be more featureless, look more male, look more female, look different.
your body is not you; it’s just a vessel. and it’s your right to customize your vessel with anything that you want—whether it’s drugs, surgery, injections, or extreme diet restriction, it’s not you. you’re not doing it to yourself. you’re doing it to the flesh that formed around the real you. so how can that be wrong?
how can your idea of what your body should be, in complete contrast to what it is, be wrong? how could it ever be influenced by a complex combination of factors when it’s not even you, when it’s barely even connected to you?
how could dysmorphia, dysphoria, body image issues, or a desire for extensive cosmetic surgeries be misguided when you can neatly separate the mind from the body?
Hello, just came across your blog. I've been on testosterone for over a year and a half, and I'm considering stopping eventually to preserve my health, even though it's helped my with my dysphoria, and I feel a lot more comfortable with my body as it is now compared to pre-transition. Any advice, since you've gone through something similar according to your bio? From your experience, what changes revert back? Thanks for your time!
Hey! This is going to be long, bear with me.
Great to hear your dysphoria is better and you’re doing well. Honestly, this course has been very good for me personally. For brief background, I always expected to stop HRT after getting permanent changes from it, because the health risks like cancer and heart disease sounded like a bad tradeoff for essentially nothing in the long run, but it did surprise me that I had to stop early due to the health problems HRT was giving me, both mental and physical.
So in total, I’ve been on HRT for four years: I took two years off it in the middle because of the effect on my mental health, and then went back on when I was more stable, switched from gel to injections and stuck to it for another two years before I started losing hair, at which point I made the decision to quit permanently. I’ve now been off for some three years total.
For changes, I was pretty far into masculinization at that point. I had increased hair growth everywhere, although by genetics I was never set to become very hairy. Also by genetics I was doomed to have shitty facial hair growth, so I only ever managed to grow a couple dozen beard hairs under my chin. My voice dropped very low quite fast, and my friends say it’s lower than most men they know, although I’m personally deaf to how it sounds as it’s always just been “my voice” to me. My body fat had completely redistributed, I was thick in the middle and my face was angular, and within my own demographic I was usually read as male. And as said, I was losing hair, particularly from the top of my head, which was most unwelcome to me personally, lol. So I made the decision to stop there.
In terms of mental wellbeing, testosterone always had a shitty effect on my anxiety and paranoia; it masculinized my depression and made it more active instead of passive, leading to anger and anxiety rather than sadness. Other than that I felt very good about myself and overall had a positive experience with T, even though it (combined with binding) caused me various unexplained health issues like trouble swallowing, muscle tension and such, which, like mentioned above, were high on the list of reasons I quit and have to be mentioned as “effects” of the treatment.
Backstory over, so, I quit T.
What happened first was my hair literally just fell off all at once. Yay? This is apparently normal, based on my extensive research on male-pattern baldness prevention online; when you start taking DHT blockers (or cease injecting testosterone into your muscles), the damaged hair on your head just dies off and gets replaced by new, healthy hair. I shed like shit, I’m not going to lie, I had short hair but when I went to take a shower my palms would be covered in hair when I ran them through my head. So I shaved it all off, problem solved(?). Like promised by the Internet, my hair did grow back more healthy, and I was no longer losing any afterwards. At three years in I have a normal head of hair.
Second, my periods came back. Based on my previous experience on stopping T, periods coming back is shit, not because nobody likes them but because your body’s fucked up from the treatment. First time around I had horrible cramps for a couple months - pretty much non-stop through the entire period, debilitating and just awful, way worse than I had in my teens. Second time around no cramping but I literally just bled buckets. I had a large-sized mooncup, but I had to empty it hourly instead of every 8 hours like recommended, and I would still bleed through it. Like there was just so much fucking blood everywhere. I had to leave work for it, it was that bad. So be prepared for your periods to be fucked up afterwards. I was warned repeatedly by gynos that they’ll probably not come back after stopping T, but they always did, and after a couple months they went back to being regular and normal again. Three years after T I have a normal cycle, pretty much the same it was pre-T, with less cramping due to my age compared to when they stopped the first time when I was still pretty young.
Third, my body hair calmed down. I lost the hair on my chest entirely, my neckbeard had slowed down to the point where I don’t bother shaving it more than once in three months or so, my unibrow vanished, and my whiskers grew lighter. My arm hair has gone back to being relatively invisible. My leg hair and thigh hair is still thick, which I like. Brows still thick, which I like.
Fourth, body fat redistribution. You have to lose and gain weight for this to happen, so it may be faster or slower depending on your lifestyle, but essentially your new body fat distributes in a female pattern whereas your old fat burns from the male pattern. My waist is back and my hips are wide. Breasts are way fuller, even though nobody needed that. Face is round. I still retain some angularity to my jaw but essentially back to babyface for me at three years in.
Fifth, voice. My voice is still low range masculine,
but reaching higher pitches is much easier, and my voice overall has softened and regained range in general. Nobody else has picked up on it, but I’ve noticed, especially within the past year, my voice becoming much more versatile and in general higher and more feminine. Obviously, as imaged, this doesn’t affect the average range of my voice, but it is noticeable.
I’ve done plenty of voice training for my safety (sometimes I get questioned in female bathrooms, for example) so this is not just the effects of T alone, but here’s an example of the ease in which I can reach a passable female voice three years off T:
Sixth, TMI and sad, but I no longer have a dick. It’s gone. I’m back to square one in that field. Luckily I don’t suffer penis envy, I just really liked the growth both aesthetically and in terms of it being on my body. I really, really liked it. Safe to say I never had much to begin with, but it was quite significant in comparison to what I have now. Bye, dick. You are dearly missed.
Health-wise, I’m doing much better! I no longer experience issues with swallowing, my muscles are feeling much better especially with regular exercise, and I don’t have unexplainable physical symptoms that leave my doctors shrugging in confusion. My mental health is also excellent, but it’s worth noting this has a lot to do with external factors as well, such as escaping abuse for a major contributing factor. However, it’s also due to active practice in merging together my fractured self in terms of embracing my female reality instead of trying to live as a male in whole. Finding that balance has been a big help in alleviating the dysphoria I dealt with upon quitting T. I feel really good in my skin now, with the permanent changes T has provided me together with my healthier body, so I can safely say this has been a good choice for me overall.
Tl;dr: Post-T Edition
Things that changed for me: body hair lessened, balding stopped and hair grew back, voice became more versatile, physical and mental health improved, beard growth slowed down to fuck all, regained a round face and hourglass figure, boobs filled up, bottom growth went back to 0
Things that didn’t change: normal speaking voice is still deep as shit, leg hair growing strong, brow game bushy, still have whiskers, people keep questioning my presence in female bathrooms and nobody tries to sell me makeup, dysphoria doing good.
Overall: I’m in a good place, yo.
TERF Tips #270
For dysphoria:
Keep telling yourself that you can’t escape your biology! That definitely won’t lead to any suicide!
Forget about your dysphoria!
Keep telling yourself that technically all womynly womyn have dysphoria! And that they all overcome it somehow! Yeah, like my mom knew what the hell was wrong with me when puberty hit me 10× harder than other kids!
Punch a hole through the wall, and pull out that sword that you’ve kept hidden for centuries, and pretend to slice it in half, so that it’s now dead.
can ppl like……… stop having a concept of me in their head ……… no object permanence here…..i only exist when im right in front of you….. no memories allowed. thx for understanding.
if it’s okay for me to ask, can you explain a little further how you “reconceptualized” your dysphoria? how did you go from that to realizing your dysphoria is rooted in internalized misogyny? @tejuina
–Shiro
as much some folks wanna think it so, my complicated relationship with my gender doesn’t make me trans.
As a butch who struggles w dysphoria, the temptation to wear compression tanks, get a double mastectomy, take just a lil bit of T to try to get some kind of results that just might last afterwards, even though I know it’s detrimental to my health- it’s crushing sometimes.
And I do have to put myself first and distance myself from butches who encourage doing these things. Because seeing that makes that little voice go, “oh yeah, look how easy that is, you could definitely pull that off no problem.” And no.
I want to fight that unhealthy part of me. I want to accept my body as it is. Breasts and hips and all.
Enough is enough. Sometimes we have to protect ourselves and other women struggling with dysphoria by standing firm in what we believe and keeping our boundaries up.
I know there’s a lot of overlap in the butch and transmasc communities. But I have no interest in interacting with dysphoric women who promote needless hormones and surgeries or harmful practices like binding. It isn’t a reflection on those women’s worth or value- it’s a protective reaction and sometimes fierce anger that more and more women like me are transitioning.
I’m not gonna do it.
I’m going to learn how to live with myself the way I am. I’m not going to lie to myself and say that taking testosterone and getting unnecessary surgeries is okay or something to even be desired.
And it’s an uphill battle every day, but I know I’m not alone, and that I’ll get to the point where I can stop wishing my body and voice were something they aren’t.
“I’m happier being detransitioned, but saying that people detransition because they’re “not happy” with transition is disingenuous. The truth is that a lot of women don’t feel like they have options. There isn’t a whole lot of place in society for women who look like this, women who don’t fit, who don’t comply. When you go to a therapist and tell them you have those kinds of feelings, they don’t tell you that it’s okay to be butch, to be gender nonconforming, to not like men, to not like the way men treat you. They don’t tell you there are other women who feel like they don’t belong, that they don’t feel like they know how to be women. They don’t tell you any of that. They tell you about testosterone.”
— Cari Stella, @guideonragingstars, Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation