"if that was my true self, then why did it take so much work?"

A teenager hesitating on the precipice of transition asks r/detrans for advice:

I'm 18, identify as a guy and have been out of the closet to most of the people I know for about 2 years. I'm pre-everything. I wasn't sa'd as a child nor am I autistic. The waitlists for any type of treatment for trans people are extremely long here, so I really didn't have a choice in waiting.

Before coming out, I didn't want to be trans, because I figured being trans would be hard and painful. But being in denial about my identity issues was just as painful, so I took a long time to think and made sure I was actually trans, and came out a year later.

The way I look with short hair and masculine clothes makes me feel good. I enjoy being called he. It makes me feel like myself. Whenever I look in the mirror now, I recognise myself. Being recognised as a girl or woman, being called she, etc. makes me feel like I've been punched in the stomach, as well as not really responding to it; I don't feel addressed when someone speaks about me using she and her pronouns.

I know transitioning won't be a quick fix, and it won't solve all my problems. I don't expect it to. I do feel like going on testosterone could help me feel more comfortable in my own body. I've felt that way for most of the time, but I always feared that I might regret it some day.

If being completely certain about transitioning isn't a guarantee that you won't regret it later, then I might not stand a chance. Detransitioners didn't start hrt thinking they'll detransition later, right?

I won't have the chance to start anything transition-related because of the waitlists. But I still would love to hear your opinions.

The responses are well worth reading:

In order for transition to be helpful for you, you basically have to accept some ideological positions. When I decided to transition it was because I thought that there was something “wrong” with me being female, I thought that transitioning would make me male in SOME way, and I thought my body was just some vessel that held my “true self” and that is was possible to for my body to “not match” my inner self. As I grew older, I stopped believing in these things but I continued transitioning because it felt good to transition and the ideology I had been indoctrinated into as a child discouraged me from thinking critically about the way I treated my body.

I think if I had known that I would always be a woman no matter what until the day that I died, I wouldn’t have decided to transition. I think in some ways I did know that but I pushed it down and I pretended that fact didn’t matter to me and shouldn’t matter to anyone. I think it truly doesn’t matter to a lot of dysphorics and I have met a handful of people who are happy with acknowledging that they remain men/women after transition but have decided that the risks associated with transitioning are worth the aesthetic results. But it seems that most people are only happy with transition if they believe that it’s changing their sex. I know I was.

So I guess you have to figure out if you can maintain that belief for the rest of your life. It took a lot of work and mental gymnastics for me and I feel like I will never get those years of my life back. I wish that I allowed myself to know what a woman was during my most formative years. However some people really are satisfied with “a man/woman is someone who identifies as a man/woman” or “a man/woman is someone who gets called sir/ma’am in public” or whatever alternative facts they need to come up with.

So what I’m going to do here is try to question some assumptions you may have regarding transition. I’m going to do this because I remember when I was questioning my identity, everywhere I turned online was a singular message — being trans is a fundamental part of a person and if you feel like you are trans, you are. Full stop.

I didn’t realize how vulnerable I was to other people‘s perception of me. Every affirmation, every relatable meme became a nudge that I wasn’t the right gender, but I could be. It shouldn’t be hard to remember we are social creatures… our sense of self isn’t always as internally generated as we might believe. Especially when that external validation feels good.

I need to mention this next piece because it is incorrect, inconsistent with biology, and damaging. We are not clown fish. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species with over 150 million years of primate ancestry being same. If we were like clown fish, then increased levels of testosterone would cause ovary tissues to descend and turn into testicles, as they are differentiated from the same tissue. But it doesn’t. On the whole, cross-sex hormones just make you sterile.

You came here for dissenting opinions prior to making a huge decision, so it would be doing you a disservice to regurgitate the politically correct notion that trans people are “trapped in the wrong body” and “just are” that way. Its far more nuanced than that.

One of the most interesting things about third wave feminism that includes transition, Is that second wave feminist groups are horrified that one of the of the things “busting the binary” does is stops defining women as a homogenous group that can ask for change. The female experience becomes the vagina-haver experience. This is nuts because we cannot change lived experience, and we can’t change the fact that biologically a male with a male puberty is on the whole much more strong and tall and dangerous than a uterus-haver. Gosh I find that nomenclature demeaning and I don’t even have one.

Anyway, to not get this post completely off the rails, Go in with your eyes open. Best of luck.

It's not anyone's but your place to decide what to do with your life etc., but you came here to us detransitioners to say this and all I want to do is shake you and say that this does NOT make you a man. it is completely sane to hate being a woman in a woman hating world, it's NORMAL to feel good being recognised as a man when you are a woman inclined to masculinity.

you cannot be "completely sure" that you are trans, because there is no inner truth to anyone that makes them trans. doing trans is being trans, so if you chose to play out your trans identity, you become trans. that does not make it "your true self".

obviously your post ticked me because I see how similar we are, but hey doodly doo, if you want to do as me and put testosterone in your body for years to emulate a man (what's so great about men?), let some money loving man cut you open and redefine your body, all to the distress of people and society around you, go ahead.

I was 100 percent sure I was trans. Then six years into transitioning I woke up from a dream like state and realized the weight of reality and what I had done. My Brain finished developing at 25 and I have a shift

You may not have been assaulted outright, but being female comes with its own set of traumas. No female person escapes that. Given that you feel more comfortable hiding your femaleness you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm not going to tell you that you should or shouldn't transition. Some people find that transitioning helps them function. Others feel as though it didn't help at all, and in many ways made things worse. What I will say is that there's no way to know if you'll regret any decision. All you can do is do your research, ask the right questions, and hope the people answering are telling the truth.

Honestly you sound very similar to how I did. Sorry if that's not helpful, but yes, pretty much the exact same feelings about it all. And I was transitioned for 4 years before realizing my dysphoria just... went away. So I went off testosterone and have just been vibing as a very masculine woman. I do everything pretty much the same as when I was transitioned, I just don't pretend to be male now. I specify all that because a lot of people seem to think the options are either transition or conform, and that's definitely not it. If short hair and masculine clothes make you feel good, then wear em. God knows I do lol.

If you're worried about regretting testosterone, then I'd say definitely do not rush onto it. It will always be there as an option. In the meantime, maybe look at trying to develop coping methods for the feelings you experience when people recognize your sex — A lot of people say stuff like avoiding your body and denying your sex helps dysphoria, and I think it does short term, but I think it doesn't longterm, and even if you decide to go on hrt or stay socially transitioned and whatnot, it's extremely helpful to develop resiliency. For myself I did a lot to sort of neutralize my perception of my body, recognize that it is neither a good nor bad thing even if my brian freaks out about it, and remind myself of that as much as possible. Social stuff is hard, but learning to accept that you can't control how people view you helps — and applies to much more than gender. Best of luck

… Rereading this — saying my dysphoria just went away is too simple and it's something I did for a long time because I still kind of believed and fed into the idea that you can't mitigate it and work with it like any other mental illness. I don't believe that anymore, obviously. For me, it was a lot like how I eventually overcame my depression and anxiety. I had it, pretty damn intensely. I tried for a long time to develop coping mechanisms that were positive for me in the long run. Over time, especially as I developed a sureness in myself, I began to cope better. The truly bad days started to get fewer and farther in between, and I was able to rationalize the irrational thoughts better. Approaching my dysphoria like my other issues, especially my ocd tendencies, was 100% a good strategy and could be for you, maybe — as long as you've grown out of the tumblr mindset of every mental illness being 100% permanent, if your mental illness is really bad it means its permanent, permanency as a measure of pain, etc. That shit is harmful as fuuuuuck.

Over time, it just steadily became... not as much of a problem anymore. To the point where it felt like I didn't believe in it anymore. Sure I still get the feeling that I should be male, I should have a dick, people should see me as male and it's weird that my bdoy doesn't align — but I don't agree anymore. It's kinda dumb, honestly. I'm a biologist. You can't "should have been born as" anything. You're just born the way you are. There's nothing inherently wrong with me or my body. Sure it feels like it some times, but I also get random intrusive thoughts about incest, and those are stupid as hell too.

And like I said, this is something thats helpful whether you transition or not. I think a lot of dysphoric people whos tay transitioned actually get to this point, somewhat. At least, the happy ones. They develop the coping mechanisms — it's harder, when you're feeding those thoughts by transitioning, but it's possible. Transition is sort of like a crutch.

For me, I detransitioned because I didn't want to be on testosterone anymore for health reasons, and socially because it felt silly to keep pretending to be something I'm not. People still often assume I'm male because I'm a very masculine dressing androgynous woman. Oh well. Who cares?

That apathy is what I wish, for you. It's the most freeing thing in the world.

Never treat a software problem at the hardware level.

No, I didn't go into it expecting to regret it. But there were also a lot of things that I was never told, and never thought of for myself, when I was 17-18 planning to transition. Things that I wish I had been told to consider prior to transition include:

-Even with testosterone, if you have wide hips, curvy legs, thin shoulders, big eyes, little feet, and/or other little giveaways like that, then not everyone is going to see you as, or react to you as, a man. In my personal experience, I found that even with HRT it still took a lot of effort when it came to personal styling, vocal training, body language practice, ect. One of the results of this for me, was that after a few years, it really wore me down and started to feel like a costume or a job uniform that I was maintaining. I felt like if that was my true self, then why did it take so much work?

-There's a non-negligible chance that your dating pool will be decimated. This depends on the type of people that you surround yourself with, but unless you plan on surrounding yourself with trans and/or bisexual people, it can be very hard to start a relationship with just anyone. Lots of people may find it easy to accept you as a friend, but in my experience, sex and dating is a much harder sell. In particular, being attracted to men, I found that gay guys want to date men with penises, and straight guys want to date women who, generally speaking, look like women. This isn't a universal experience, but it's one that I've had more than once.

-Social and hormonal transition can really cut you off from being able to bond with people of the same birth-sex. This may feel fine to you, but in my experience, it ended up contributing to loneliness. Once I began to really pass, I found I couldn't weigh in properly on a lot of conversations with men either because I either didn't have any experience or, my experiences were very different-- less like men's experiences, and much more like the experience of lesbians or masculine women or both. I'm not a lesbian, but I find now, about 10 years after beginning my transition, that those are the people with the closest life experiences to mine. This isn't so bad if you don't mind telling people that you're trans for the sake of the conversation, but my main point is, that for me, it ultimately began to feel like an act.

»The way I look with short hair and masculine clothes makes me feel good. I enjoy being called he.«

You can do all of those things without medically transitioning. This is something that Ithink I genuinely failed to realize prior to my own transition. On a semi-related, note, one thing that genuinely changed my outlook on my own transition was about a year ago, the first time that I dressed in very modest women's clothing-- floor length skirt, long-sleeve button up blouse and a vest. I was feminine but fully covered, with no accentuated curves; basically I felt like I looked like a woman, without feeling like an inherently sexualized being. The impact that had on me is something that I'm still wrapping my head around. I still wonder, if I had figured out prior to transition that I could in fact be a woman without having to wear tight clothes and be ogled by men, would I have made different choices re: my body and my gender presentation…

Like the other commenter said, nobody can tell you for sure if you'll regret it or not. But the above are some experiences I've had and things that I wish I had considered when I was your age. Ultimately, it's your choice, and all I can really do is encourage you to consider it from as many angles as you possibly can. Good luck to you, friend.