"Quitting isn't an option"
One of the things I’m planning to do over the next several months is to delve more deeply into the virtual worlds of boys and men who identify as trans. MTF spaces are every bit as stereotypically masculine as FTM spaces are stereotypically feminine. For one thing, there’s more jostling—jostling that can shade into browbeating and bullying. In some cases, trans identity for boys seems to be less about how they want the world to see them (an obsession for many trans-identified girls, who endlessly exchange advice on how to sit, spit, and shoot the shit like a man) and more about withdrawing from the world altogether.
Take this 17-year-old boy, who started identifying as trans around age 15 and has spent the last five months begging trans Reddit to help him not be trans anymore. He describes his desire to transition as “actually driving me insane” and reports that “every aspect of myself makes me want to kill myself.” The idea of transitioning has “genuinely taken over my life” and he says he’s “sick of lying to [him]self” about his prospects of becoming the “cute pretty girl” he fantasizes about:
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