Why I Transitioned & Detransitioned
A 16-year-old girl was fast-tracked onto testosterone after trauma. Three years later she’s detransitioning, facing permanent voice drop and hair loss. Kids deserve therapy and time, not irreversible drugs.
Общ преглед
Elle Palmer, an FTM detransitioner, explains how online grooming at 15 and immersion in trans Reddit/Twitter led her to start testosterone at 16 with a therapist who rubber-stamped the decision. After three years she realised her dysphoria vanished the moment she began hormones, stopped T when hair loss threatened, and now urges minors to explore therapy, real-life friendships and time before medical transition.
Пълно обобщение на видеото
Elle Palmer, a female-to-male-to-female detransitioner, opens her video by explaining why she is finally speaking on-camera: after months of reflection and active participation in online detrans communities, she wants to “let out” the complicated feelings that have resurfaced now that she has been off testosterone for four-and-a-half months. She intends to recount both why she transitioned in the first place and how she is coping with detransitioning. Elle first came out as transgender at 14 or 15, shortly after a traumatic online sexual encounter with an older man. That experience convinced her that being perceived as female on the internet was dangerous, so she sought refuge in the idea of looking and being read as male. Isolated from school and real-life friends, she spent nearly all her time in trans-centered Reddit and Twitter spaces, absorbing trans media and narratives. A year later, at 16, she started testosterone. One therapist had tried to slow her down, prompting Elle to leave and find a new clinician at the local LGBT Center who, in her words, was “ready to get me on hormones from day one.” Over six months this therapist mostly talked about her own life, yet still wrote the letter that cleared Elle for hormones. Within weeks her voice dropped, facial hair appeared, and she was consistently passing as a teenage boy; by the end of the first year she had legally changed name and sex marker and felt she was “living completely socially as male.” During the second and third years on testosterone, Elle gained significant weight, felt physically unattractive, and began quietly questioning whether she was actually transgender. A breakup, weight loss of 50 pounds through diet and exercise, and exposure to AFAB non-binary people who were comfortable wearing bras and feminine clothing triggered deeper introspection. She noticed that her severe bottom dysphoria had vanished the moment she started testosterone, a fact she now views as a red flag that her distress had not been rooted in gender identity. Still, she told herself she had “passed the point of no return” and tried to suppress thoughts of detransition. The decisive shift came during her first week at university. While living on a gender-inclusive dorm floor, she was shedding clumps of hair in the shower and realized that continuing testosterone would accelerate permanent hair loss. A single post on the detrans subreddit describing another person’s story “clicked everything together.” For the first time Elle allowed herself to believe she could “be a cis woman again,” and she stopped hormones immediately. She emphasizes that throughout transition she had continued to see herself internally as a woman; the incongruence between her inner sense of self and the way others perceived her became unbearable. Looking back, she believes that if she had been forced to wait, attended school, had real-life friends, and worked with a competent therapist, she could have reconciled with her female identity without medical intervention. Elle closes by stressing that she is not angry at the trans community and is grateful for the years she lived as a man, yet she feels strongly that adolescents should be required to explore other avenues—therapy, social connection, life experience—before starting hormones. She intends to make a follow-up video detailing the physical changes she has observed since stopping testosterone, and she offers herself as a “voice of hope” for others who may feel trapped, underscoring that detransition is not “the end of the world” and that learning to live with past choices is simply part of life.