"When did you start to deprogram?"

Fascinating and insightful thread on r/detrans:

When did you start to deprogram ? For those of you who have, when did you realize gender ideology wasn’t real and that you were transitioning to change the physical based on theory?

For me it was gradual, but it all started when I realized that since identifying as trans, I had become more and more miserable as years went on. I had backed myself into a corner where everything made me feel dysphoric and unsafe. Everything I thought about was about gender. I couldn't even talk with my family or some of my friends anymore because I feared they'd accidentally use a wrong word around me. They were no longer interacting with ME, but this new persona I'd created and that had to be talked to in the gender nonsense language. I was depressed and alone.

So I made the conscious choice of just letting go of the identity label. It felt so freeing to realize that no matter how I identify as, I will always just be my body, and nothing will ever change that. So I let it go. While identifying as trans I had learned to associate every differing opinion as me - my physical body - being in danger (talk about poor boundaries and ptsd). But now that I no longer identified as trans - as in, now that every differing opinion was not about ME specifically - I started to read things outside my bubble. Someone would call this being radicalized to the other direction, but for me it went like... Remember when I used to value critical thinking skills? Remember when I valued reading every fact and differing opinion before making up my mind about something? Then how come I ended up in this place where if a random twitterist tells me to avoid reading x and y's thinkpieces, I will just believe them, and not read anything "bad" in the fear of getting tainted myself? Yeah. I had backed myself into a group that acted like it was a religious group. And all of my irl friends were like this too, so it was not only via the internet.

Then when I started to first read some gc opinions and thought, well, these actually make sense, I thought okay - now let me go back to "my" side and see how "my good and intelligent trans people" are debunking these arguments. And I was shocked to see they weren't. There were no arguments behind the phrases we had all learned. It was all just virtue signaling and emotional blackmailing, which I didn't recognize at the time because of my childhood ptsd. And there were no actual studies either to back up the claims of high suicide rates, or that puberty blockers are reversible and safe, or any of that. Quite the contrary actually.

That was the beginning for me realizing I'd had the mastectomy for ideological reasons, even if it didn't feel like that at the time.

… how consistently trauma or sexuality was discredited as possibly causing this. I was denied transitioning in the late 90s because I was told it was trauma and that I’d regret it. I was really relieved that viewpoint had changed because it meant I could transition now but when I think about it I’d not read any stories of people who’d regretted it. I only saw positive transition stories, which made my therapists seem wrong and backwards. When I was days away from starting T, I started to question because I mentioned my PTSD to a trans man I knew and he scoffed at me. He was so dismissive and condescending about the possibility of PTSD being a cause of GID. He made me feel stupid for even considering it. I’d never been made to feel stupid in my life. Yet my psychologists (and I saw a psychiatrist for a while too back then) had been adamant. Which person WAS the expert here??? A supposedly happy trans man or a psychologist? At that point it looked like the trans man because he seemed happier than me. I was constantly told to listen to myself and only I would know, which meant I should transition, right? Yet the psychologist had said I had a distorted perception and I wanted to transition because it was a coping mechanism. I decided that the psychologist had to be the more qualified person to listen to and I began listening even better. I invested better therapy options too. Understanding that we sometimes create identities to cover the truth because it’s too painful was something I needed to learn.

… someone wrote “if you’re alright with something if it’s renamed, you don’t have a problem with that thing, but the symbolism of the word because of trauma”. That really helped me a lot and then I couldn’t stop seeing that everywhere else too. The word lesbian was too associated with male fetishisation and so I preferred to subvert it and claim gay or even fag. Yet, I also wanted to be with other OFABs. Of course that’s gay but internalised lesbophobia is a b*tch - smh.

I knew I wasn’t actually a man, taking testosterone felt pointless. I put myself through hormonal hell for nothing. And then I was silly enough to do it again 9 months later… cus i was afraid of gaining weight in an estrogenic pattern. Then while the second time on T I began to get chronic yeast infections. As soon as one ended the next one began. It was horrible.. so I stopped. Haven’t had any vaginal issues since (thankfully). I had a lot of internalized misogyny. A lot of my “ftm” friends had it too I imagine. I only hated my body because I’m not feminine. I never had boobs really, still don’t, idk a lot of things led me to think life would be better “living as a man” but that’s the lie they sell. You won’t ever be a man you will always be a masculinized female. Your health will decline.

I was IDing as gender fluid. I was in a group where three males came out as transwomen within the span of 3 weeks. One of those individuals was the (now ex) partner of one of my roommates. Maybe the way the partner treated the roommate after coming out made me start questioning if their transition was just another way to avoid trauma (cuz they started treating my roommate horribly, using transition as an excuse for their behavior). Idk, did some digging… guess I’m 80% gender critical.

It never added up to me. I felt like I was asking myself the questions that nobody else was asking, and these were big questions that shook the foundation of gender philosophy. I think the tricky thing was that I just really wanted it. No matter what you know to be true, it can be hard to be honest with yourself when you're so deeply attached to an idea. There was definitely a lot of cognitive dissonance and push and pull between truth and happiness.

Im just glad I never got actually too deep into the whole ideology and keep reasoning and understanding as to why it has imperfections. And I feel bad for the young teens/kids that seem to think that the gender ideology is practically a new religion and you gotta believe it word for word without questioning why. It makes it 20 times harder to quit something when all your friends are doing it and would cuss you out if you deny their gender or ask about it. Pretty sure our younger generation is gonna have it much harder if they all keep believing things like neo pronouns and not having gender dysphoria to transition.

From the very beginning of my transition I knew there was a good possibility I was transitioning because of CSA [child sex abuse] trauma and expressed this to others who told me "it doesn't matter why you're trans, it just matters that you're trans". I always felt like a science experiment, and I felt exploited. But gender dysphoria isn't a choice and I continued to transition and live as male.

I devoted a lot of effort to healing my past trauma and surprise surprise a lot of my dysphoria went away when I stopped disassociating from my body and repressing memories. I had this mentality of "that didn't happen to ME, that happened to HER (pre-transition me)" and literally disassociated from the trauma completely. It's sad and messed up.