Why I Transitioned and Detransitioned
I realised what I wanted was to be like a cis woman. I didn't want to live as a trans woman… just wanting to not have to live as a trans woman anymore—it's really hard honestly.
Επισκόπηση
Noah, a 23-year-old detransitioner, spent four-and-a-half years on estrogen after walking into an informed-consent clinic the day he turned 18. He now says lifelong depression, bipolar-I, internalised homophobia and social alienation were recast as gender dysphoria inside trans Reddit culture, leading him to pursue an impossible dream of becoming a cis woman. A psychotic manic episode last autumn shattered that fantasy; when the delusion collapsed he realised he was simply exhausted by life as a trans woman and that his distress had never been purely gender-based. Cutting his hair and returning to men’s clothes felt “not as bad as I thought,” confirming for him that much of what he had labelled dysphoria was “a bunch of other stuff that happened to manifest in a gendered way.”
Πλήρης Περίληψη Βίντεο
Noah, who posted under the handle “40daysofrain,” begins his story by stressing that it is only his own: a four-and-a-half-year medical transition begun at 18, ended six months before the recording. He lists the psychological and social ingredients that, looking back, made a female identity feel plausible: lifelong depression and bipolar-I, discomfort with his body, a nerdy, non-athletic boyhood that left him at the bottom of male peer hierarchies, distaste for what he calls the “toxically masculine” culture of high-school boys, and guilt over failed teenage relationships with girls. Added to this was internalized homophobia—he is attracted to men as well as women—and resentment at being forced to keep his hair short. By 17, during a low depressive spell and still never having seen a therapist, he typed “what if I’m trans?” into a search engine, discovered gender-dysphoria narratives on Reddit, and felt the first rush of gender euphoria when he tried on feminine clothes. The sub-culture he found online carried, he says, an implicit message: “If you’re asking whether you’re trans, you almost certainly are.” Over the next month he rehearsed the idea until it became “the most meaningful thing in my life,” and he began mentally re-labeling body-image distress and social alienation as evidence of dysphoria so that a medical transition would feel justified. Seven months later, the day after his 18th birthday, Noah walked into an informed-consent clinic, had a single COVID-era video appointment, and left with an estrogen prescription. He had been in therapy for seven months, yet the formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria was issued only after he began hormones, when he needed the paperwork to change his name. He insists he never lied to the psychiatrist; rather, once he inhabited a trans identity he began to feel the very dysphoria he thought he was supposed to feel, distress over masculine features that previously had not bothered him. For three years he worked hard at femininity—make-up, voice training, carefully chosen outfits—because, as he puts it, “you do not look feminine at all; you look like a dude.” Around year three the hormones had softened his face enough that strangers sometimes gendered him correctly, so he relaxed the performance, dressing androgynously and abandoning voice exercises. Depressed and manic cycles continued; a severe depressive episode caused him to drop out of college and move back home, isolating him from the trans and queer friends who had been his main social mirror. The decisive break came last autumn during his first full-blown manic episode with psychotic features. While hearing voices, he was told to “stop estrogen” and simultaneously became convinced that he was “going to be magically transformed into a cis woman.” When the mania receded and the delusion collapsed, the emotional crash left him facing the reality that what he had always wanted was not to live as a trans woman but to be a cis woman, an impossible goal. Interpreting the voices as his own subconscious, he concluded that part of him had been trying to end the experiment. Cutting his hair and returning to men’s clothing felt, to his surprise, “not as bad as I thought,” and he realized that much of what he had labeled gender dysphoria was “a bunch of other stuff that happened to manifest in a gendered way.” Noah estimates that 30–40 % of his reason for detransitioning was the sheer exhaustion of living as a trans woman in a hostile world; the rest was an identity shift produced by the recognition that medical transition could never deliver the cis female body and life he actually wanted.