My Journey of Transition and Detransition
At 16 I started testosterone; two days later I was in hospital for self-harm. Every ‘gender-affirming’ step only deepened my depression. Detransition saved me—let’s stop pushing kids down the same broken path.
Επισκόπηση
Zedd, an 18-year-old Kiwi software developer, recounts how a school visit from a trans-male physics star at 13 triggered four years of identifying as a boy, complete with chest-binding, testosterone at 16, deepening depression, self-harm and an eating disorder. After realising transition amplified rather than eased her distress, she stopped hormones, embraced her female body and now speaks out against the automatic medical affirmation of gender-distressed girls.
Πλήρης Περίληψη Βίντεο
Zedd, an 18-year-old software developer from New Zealand, begins her 40-minute testimonial by admitting she is still startled to say, “I’m a woman.” For four and a half years she insisted she was a trans man, a conviction that began at 13 when a successful trans-male physics student visited her high-school class. Seeing a masculine, accomplished peer who had “escaped femininity” felt like a revelation to the tomboyish girl who had spent childhood being rejected by boys for being female and by girls for being insufficiently feminine. Within months she moved from she/her to he/him pronouns, joined a queer-student club, and adopted an anti-feminist, hyper-masculine persona that she believed would finally grant her social acceptance. The next three years were marked by escalating psychological distress. A manipulative long-distance friendship became her only human contact, triggering severe depression: months without showering, daily panic attacks, and self-harm that landed her in the hospital two days after she started testosterone at 16. Each medical or social step hailed as “euphoric” by online trans communities—short hair, chest-binding, testosterone—briefly numbed her, yet the underlying loathing of her female body intensified. She developed an eating disorder, reasoning that eliminating body fat would also erase visible curves and, symbolically, femaleness itself. Meanwhile, her school—described as having “the highest rates of trans-identified students in New Zealand”—provided unquestioning affirmation: teachers celebrated name changes, the nurse offered hormone referrals, and no adult explored why a depressed, lonely girl might want to flee womanhood. The turning point came when she befriended a classmate who was neither anti-feminist nor transgender. Conversations with him chipped away at the YouTube-fed narrative that feminists hated men and that “TERFs” were evil. Once she began identifying as a radical leftist, she noticed the contradiction between her collectivist politics and her liberal-individualist gender theory. Reading radical-feminist blogs and discovering detransitioned women on Tumblr forced her to confront two painful insights: first, that her dysphoria felt identical to her eating-disordered body-hatred, and second, that every transition step had correlated with worse mental-health crashes. Stopping testosterone in early 2022, she describes “peaking”—a moment of clarity that she had never actually been male and that medical transition had functioned as an expensive, injurious coping mechanism for the trauma of growing up female in a sexist culture. Detransition, Zedd emphasizes, is not a return to pink dresses or makeup; it is an acceptance of the adult female body she tried to starve and drug away. A year off testosterone has softened her voice slightly and allowed her to forgo chest-binding, yet she still battles dysphoric spirals and occasional fantasies that re-transitioning would make life as a software developer easier. What keeps her anchored is the conviction that visibility matters: as a child she never saw a proud, gender-non-conforming woman, and she is determined to become that mirror for the next generation of tomboys. She closes by promising future videos on practical techniques she has used to reduce dysphoria without medical intervention and by urging professionals to stop reflexively affirming minors who say they were “born in the wrong body.”