spectrum. I was always friends with boys who shared my interests in science, video games, and speculative fiction rather than the girls in my class, who generally did not have those interests.v

As much as I had a hard time understanding other people in general, I really couldn’t understand girls. They mystified me. I was afraid of them, honestly. When I played rec basketball and club softball as a kid, I was forced to be surrounded by them. I felt like an outsider on every single team I was on. I remember hearing whispers about me being weird and annoying as young as when we were all in kindergarten, and those whispers turned into rumors about me being a lesbian as early as basketball camp the summer before fourth grade, before I even knew what that word meant. I first heard it used negatively, and that set the tone for my relationship with my sexuality for years to come. I was ostracized by my peers even further in middle and high school for allegedly being a lesbian. It felt like everyone around me knew this awful, shameful secret no matter how hard I tried to conceal it, like I had no control over others’ perception of me. It killed me.

I think now that my transition was heavily informed by my fraught relationships with my gender and sexuality rather than an intrinsic male identity. Growing up, I had the sense that I was “bad at being a girl,” and the shame I felt for being attracted to other girls definitely compounded that. This coupled with my need to gain control over how I was being perceived by other people, I believe, ultimately led to my decision to transition.

As much as I resent that I have to do this, I’d like to clarify that I am not a TERF now. I have the utmost love and respect for the trans experience, as many of my friends are trans and I still have a complicated relationship with gender myself. I believe my trans friends when they say they are who they are, and I don’t let my own issues interfere with that. 

Unfortunately, though, “detransitioner” has become a dirty word in the trans/gender non-conforming community, and it isn’t hard to see why. Detransitioners are often made examples by parents who are against their children transitioning, reducing their complex experiences to cautionary tales. The detransitioner community has also been heavily associated with trans-exclusionary radical feminism, a movement that takes the good ideas of radical feminism and uses them to harm trans people, especially trans women. This can be easily seen in two of the most prominent sectors of the detransitioner community: the wider YouTube detransitioner community and r/detrans. “Gender critical” TERF ideology runs rampant in these spaces, taking the very real pain and hardship of being a detransitioner and channeling it into hatred for trans people. This, I believe, has resulted in an automatic association between detransitioners and TERFs in the mind of the wider trans community. 

Of course, the experiences and viewpoints of detransitioners are wide-ranging, and this wide range is underrepresented. Take r/actual_detrans, for example: a subreddit that markets itself as an “alternative to r/detrans that provides support to detransitioners, reidentifiers, retransitioners, and questioners in an environment free from gender critical ideology and rhetoric.” The difference from r/detrans in attitude is clear just from viewing a handful of posts. Many posters are questioning, asking users for input on their relationships with gender and transition. While commenters in r/detrans tend to insist that the poster is not transgender and should detransition, r/actual_detrans responses tend to relate their own experiences to the poster while maintaining that the poster should take their advice with a grain of salt and reminding them that they aren’t alone. Not all online detrans spaces maintain that transitioning isn’t right for most people or even for anyone; it all comes down to the individual. I tend to have that mindset, though I make a point of not participating in online detrans communities. Online detrans communities tend to be relentlessly miserable, seeming to almost revel in deep self-hatred and, often, projecting this onto trans people, especially the ones who are by all accounts happy with their transitions.

The dominant gender critical side of the detrans community often argues that medical professionals are being flippant in their providing of gender-affirming care and that many dysphoric people are being brainwashed by the online transgender community to transition, but these claims are not at all reflective of my own experience. My therapist, my psychiatrist, and my physician all challenged me to some extent (especially my therapist, who I’ve been seeing since seventh grade and has been nothing but wonderful since), and I actually never felt all that connected to the trans community, online or offline. I wasn’t surrounded by a group of mutually supportive transgender friends as a teenager, either. There was a combination of factors both internal and external, but I can confidently say I wasn’t brainwashed by gender ideology or whatever.

As I discussed earlier in this essay, I was deeply ashamed of being a lesbian growing up. I distanced myself as much from the label as possible, in any way I could. There was no way in hell I could ever pass as straight, so I called myself bisexual for a long time, long before I transitioned, and tried really, really hard to like dating men. I leaned heavily into male sexuality and eventually the gay male identity. As I’ve always been the kind of person who sees their entire world through the lens of the media they consume, I obsessed over gay YA novels and later the gay media canon: Giovanni’s Room, Brokeback Mountain, My Own Private Idaho, the works. I became deeply obsessed with Car Seat Headrest and the Smiths, as well as other music with gay themes. I just couldn’t find any lesbian media that seemed to resonate with me.

This is where Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Big Thief, and Sleater-Kinney come in.

For brevity’s sake, I won’t delve into all of my thoughts on Stone Butch Blues; that’s outside the scope of this particular essay. For the uninitiated, Feinberg’s seminal 1993 semi-autobiographical novel covers the fraught coming of age and adult life of Jess Goldberg, a “stone butch” lesbian who at one point takes testosterone in order to “pass” as a man in an episode of gender confusion, having always been gender-nonconforming. She is relieved to feel safer in public as a man, like I was, but