I'm not an actual detransitioner (maybe more like desister?) and I don't wish to make light of/compare myself to actual detransitioners, but I wasn't sure where to post this, so apologies in advance.
I struggled making friends at school as a 13 year old, and due to my interests I ended up on reddit. I would always lurk, but I saw these people as my "friends" in a collective sense, and also as many of them were adults I always saw them as smarter, more mature and more informed than myself. I had little by way of interaction with either sex as a teenager, but especially as I went further in to these online communities I started seeing how women and girls were treated and viewed there: the nasty DMs from pedophiles and sex-pests, the constant jokes at their expense that wasn't a thing for boys, etc. The general consensus on these things was that they were normal, and there were often comments from "women"
I realised later that many of these people were probably not actually women at all saying these things were fine, that accepting them is just part of being a woman, and that many of these gross compliments and interactions were flattering to them. As I had no opinions from other girls and women in real life to reference this with, and considering there were so many of these type of comments, and many of them seemed to be by adults, I believed this (but could not accept it for myself). I thought there must have been something wrong with me, that was until I saw upon people talking about transgenderism in this context (suggesting to the heavily downvoted comments that expressed discomfort with it that real women did not have an issue with it, and if they did they might be trans men). While I didn't really understand transgenderism
because it's bullshit that makes no fucking sense it did seem to line up with how I felt: discomfort with (what I now know is called misogyny), discomfort in my body and secondary sex characteristics (something which made my peers and parents consider me abnormal, despite it being a fairly common teenage experience), and interests more associated with boys. I trusted these adults to know better than me, but I nonetheless did my own research (in complete good faith) to try to understand how this phenomenon worked. I read through all the (peer reviewed!) medical documents they linked, went through wikipedia sources to find them, went through medical journals to find the
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