Internalized Misogyny Led to My Transition
I thought testosterone would turn me into the man I idolised. Instead it left me scarred, infertile, and still a woman—one who’d let misogyny carve her body instead of heal her mind.
Επισκόπηση
Detransitioner Waffling Willow explains how childhood resentment toward her mother and repeated bullying by girls taught her to hate femaleness, leading her to seek escape through transition. She now sees medical transition as a socially sanctioned way to flee womanhood rather than a true identity.
Πλήρης Περίληψη Βίντεο
Waffling Willow, a female detransitioner who chronicled her experience in a multipart “Irreversible Damage” series, returns to her channel after a short hiatus to explain how internalized misogyny—not innate gender identity—set her on the path to identifying as transgender. She begins by admitting that, until recently, she rolled her eyes at the phrase “internalized misogyny,” associating it with fringe feminist rhetoric. Yet conversations with viewers and long, frank talks with her mother gradually forced her to confront the degree to which she had absorbed contempt for femaleness and turned it on herself. Willow now sees that contempt as the emotional engine that drove her to try to escape womanhood altogether. The roots, she believes, were laid in childhood. Her father had never wanted children and, according to family stories, defaulted to a “fun grandparent” role while dumping real parenting duties onto her mother. Willow and her siblings naturally gravitated toward the permissive parent, leaving her mother to play the disciplinarian. The louder message was unconscious but unmistakable: men are easy and lovable; women are demanding and therefore despised. A series of small but searing memories—her father refusing to turn down his music when Mom asked, storming out when homework help got “too hard,” mocking her for being unable to pronounce the word “lips” because it felt “private”—cemented the association of masculinity with comfort and femininity with shame. When Dad later allowed a new girlfriend (now wife) to cut contact with his children, Willow’s resentment landed squarely on women: the new wife was “the homewrecker,” while her father’s complicity went largely excused. School dynamics reinforced the pattern. A on-again-off-again friend named Rhi mocked her publicly—first by scribbling a crude “vagina” joke on Willow’s drawing, later by “stealing” a new girl away and freezing Willow out. Other girls delivered random cruelty (“swallow your spit” when she said she was thirsty, or mocking her crush). Because nearly every bully wore a female face, Willow concluded that meanness was a female trait. She tried to be “one of the boys,” failed, and then discovered transgender narratives on the internet. Transition, she realized in hindsight, offered a socially sanctioned escape hatch: “That’s my ticket into being friends with guys, getting away from all these past problems, and living life smoothly.” Willow closes with two take-aways. First, she credits “radical forgiveness”—especially toward her mother—for dissolving enough resentment that she could finally look at her own internalized sexism without reflexive self-hatred. Second, she applauds the recent wave of girls and women who compliment rather than compete, arguing that this new kindness is the antidote to the poisonous belief that femaleness itself is a defect.