Detransitioners Perspective: How Detransitioning Helped Me Heal and Come Home to Myself

I first came to believe I was trans 17 years ago, at the age of 14. Soon after coming out a year later, I received what I now view as inadequate and misguided healthcare by a doctor who immediately affirmed my trans identity and created a plan for me to get onto hormones and transition.

The therapists I worked with also affirmed my identity and failed to implement a developmentally informed psychological and exploratory approach that took into account environmental factors and trauma history. For twelve years, including all of my twenties, I lived my life as a stealth transwoman, believing that I had been born into the wrong body and had done what needed to be done to be who I truly was. It should be noted that I never experienced transphobia, I had a very supportive community, and a successful professional life. I transitioned and moved on. All the while, though, my physical and mental health was deteriorating.

For years I struggled to find a solution, seeking counsel from various allopathic doctors, psychiatrists, and naturopathic physicians. I’d spent hundreds of dollars on specialized blood tests to try and find the root cause of my suffering, as well as herbal treatments, massage, yoga, breathwork in an attempt to manage it. A year ago, in desperation, I began to supplement a small dose of testosterone. Doing so was the one thing I tried that finally restored my declining health, inspiring research into what happens to a male body that is deprived of its natal hormone…long story short: its not good. When it became clear that my “gender affirming” treatments had been making me sick, I embarked on a deep personal inquiry.

How’d I get here?

I guided myself through an investigation of my youth that therapists ought to have supported me in as a young person. I brought curiosity to why I had become so convinced at 14 that I had been born into the wrong body. I began to understand it all as a trauma-induced delusion that doctors and therapists colluded with, that then got encased in a lot of social pressure following transitioning. Growing up in a homophobic environment, a younger version of me did everything he could to shield himself and, as a result, I fell asleep to a huge part of who I was. All of this was unconscious, of course, and it’s incredible to see how creative the human mind will become in its self protection. Despite how hellish of an experience it had been, a part of me is glad to have struggled with my health because if I hadn’t gotten so ill I wouldn’t have come to these discoveries.

Unlike that younger version of me, I no longer need to shield myself. I’m strong enough now to love the parts of myself that my younger self couldn’t. Sure, I’ve woken up in the body of a castrated man. My endocrine system is ruined, and I will forever mourn my twenties as a decade-long opportunity for me to grow into myself as a gay man that was stolen from me. But I get to accept, love, and grow into myself now. And for me, accepting and loving myself meant accepting and loving my biological sex.

Detransitioning has been the best gift I’ve ever given myself, and while it’s sad to look back on what’s happened, all I can do now is work to heal, and share my story so it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

All detransitioners deserve to heal and have incredible lives, which I’m confident is possible despite the extensive medical trauma and grief we’ve incurred and experienced.

For more from this author, check out @detranshealing on Twitter.