Requested By Ziraangel

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?

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. 

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.

anyone else remember being a child and seeing the very neat handwriting of other little girls and somehow knowing that you were a different genre of person than they were

My Cat, Keiko Hiratsuka Moore.

This seal relaxing halfway under water 

(via)

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.

no offense but it’s so much better (and healthier) to try to love the body you were born with and to examine the roots of your dysmorphia instead of internalizing obscure gender identities and making those your whole personality

Gender Troubles: The Butches