Overview

Existentialism is a family of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies that start from the concrete, first-person experience of existing: being free and responsible, being finite, and having to make a life out of circumstances one did not choose. Its vocabulary now shapes everyday talk about gender: authenticity (owning one's existence rather than conforming), bad faith (self-deception about one's freedom or one's limits) and existence precedes essence (see key ideas below). "Living authentically" and "being your authentic self" have become standard phrases in coming-out stories. Detransitioners use the same words to describe the opposite move.

This page explains what five central existentialist thinkers actually argued, drawing on their primary texts and on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), a peer-reviewed reference work. It then sets out how their ideas have been used for transition and against it, and how detransitioners describe authenticity and acceptance in their own words. It belongs to the section on philosophical frameworks: lenses people use to make sense of gender distress and of the moment they came to see it differently.

Key ideas

A few terms recur across all the thinkers below:

• Facticity: the given facts of a person's situation that they did not choose: their body, their sex, their birth, their past, their historical moment. The SEP lists "our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in" (SEP: Existentialism).
• Transcendence: the human capacity to interpret those facts, give them meaning and act on them. We are not determined by facticity, but we are never free of it.
• Authenticity: owning one's existence rather than drifting along with what "one" does. For existentialists this usually means facing freedom and limits honestly, not discovering a hidden inner essence.
• Bad faith (Sartre's mauvaise foi): a form of self-deception in which a person denies one side of their existence, either their freedom or their facticity.
• The lived body: the body as experienced from the inside, as the medium of a life, rather than as an object examined from outside. The SEP quotes Sartre: "The body … is lived and not known."

Kierkegaard: becoming a self

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is usually counted as the first existentialist, though he wrote as a Christian thinker and never used the word. His central claim is that a self is not something one simply has; it is a task. In The Sickness Unto Death (1849), written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, the self is a tension between opposites: the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, necessity and possibility.

The SEP sums up the point plainly: "Much about the self is fixed and cannot be chosen. Humans are born with particular biological characteristics, in a particular place and time, into a world that is not of their own making" (SEP: Kierkegaard). Yet people also hold possibilities to be acted on. Despair, for Kierkegaard, is not just a mood but the condition of failing to hold these together, "the state in which the self fails to become a self in truth."

He describes two opposite forms. In the despair of possibility, a person loses contact with necessity and "lives in a world of imagination that is disconnected from actuality", endlessly generating possible selves instead of choosing and acting. In the despair of necessity, a person sees no possibilities at all and becomes a kind of fatalist. The SEP gives his image for the balance: possibility is like oxygen; one cannot breathe pure oxygen, but neither can one breathe without it.

Kierkegaard also distinguished despair "not to will to be oneself" from despair "to will to be oneself" in defiance, trying to make oneself from nothing on one's own terms. Both, for him, are failures, and the task of balancing the elements of selfhood is never finished before death. One commenter on r/detrans used another of his books, Either/Or, to warn a questioning poster that no choice of this size comes without cost:

This isn't moving house or changing jobs; this is the you that you'll be living every day as. Do this or that, you'll regret it either way, wrote one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms. Some regrets cost more than others, so please do continue being terrified at the possibility you're considering. —Nazianzun, r/detrans commenter

Heidegger: thrownness and ownness

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) set out the most influential account of authenticity in Being and Time (1927). (His later membership of the Nazi party remains a serious and separate controversy about his work.) He calls the human being Dasein, "being-there", and describes it as thrown (geworfen): we find ourselves already in a body, a family, a language and a history we did not choose. As the SEP puts it, one is "never in control of one's own being from the ground up" (SEP: Heidegger).

Most of the time, Heidegger argues, we live as "the They" (das Man): we do what "one" does, think what "one" thinks, and feel secure because everyone else is doing the same. He calls this drift falling. The German word translated as "authenticity", Eigentlichkeit, comes from eigen, "own"; it means something like ownness. An authentic life is one where a person takes over their thrown situation as their own, often after a moment of anxiety in which the routines of the They stop making sense.

Two features of Heidegger's account matter here. First, authenticity is not creation from nothing. The meanings we choose have already been shaped by our history; we take them up and make them "mine." Second, it is not rigid. The SEP notes that resoluteness "does not mean 'becoming rigid' and holding fast to a chosen identity"; an authentic person must be willing to "hold [themselves] free for the possibility of taking it back" (SEP: Existentialism). In Heidegger's terms, revising a commitment in the light of experience can itself be authentic.

Sartre: existence precedes essence

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) gave existentialism its slogan in his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism: existence precedes essence. A paper-knife is designed for a purpose before it exists; a human being, Sartre argued, exists first and defines themselves afterwards through what they do (Aeon 2026). There is no pre-given human nature that tells us who to be.

This is often misread as "you can be anything you want." Sartre did not mean that. The SEP is explicit that his point is "not, of course, to say we are free to do or achieve anything"; we are "always in a factical situation" (SEP: Sartre). Freedom is the freedom to give meaning to and act on that situation, not to escape it.

Bad faith, in both directions

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes bad faith as lying to oneself about this double nature. The SEP's summary is worth quoting at length, because it cuts both ways:

I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation. — (SEP: Existentialism)

Sartre's most famous example is a café waiter whose movements are just slightly too quick and too precise: he is playing at being a waiter, treating a role as if it were his fixed nature. Another example in the same chapter concerns a man who refuses to admit his homosexual conduct. Sartre calls this denial bad faith. But he adds a twist: the champion of sincerity who demands that the man confess to being homosexual, as if this were a fixed thing in the way a table is a table, is in bad faith too. Both treat a human being as an object with a settled essence.

The look of the Other

Sartre also describes what he calls the look (le regard). Imagine peering through a keyhole, absorbed in what you see, and then hearing footsteps behind you. In that instant of shame you discover yourself as an object for another person: "part of what I am is constituted outside me, in and through the look of another freedom" (SEP: Sartre). We cannot fully control what we are for others, and much human anxiety comes from trying.

Finally, Sartre's account of authenticity is not about finding a true identity. In Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) he writes that "authenticity consists in a lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it" (SEP: Existentialism). Elsewhere: "the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being)."

Beauvoir: the body as a situation

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is often treated as Sartre's follower, but recent scholarship reads her as an original philosopher whose idea of situated freedom corrects his early optimism: our agency is "constrained, though never determined, by our situation" (SEP: Beauvoir).

Ambiguity

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she argues that human existence is permanently ambiguous: we are both subject and object, free and bound, individual and tied to others. Ambiguity is not the same as meaninglessness: "To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed" (quoted in SEP: Existentialism). She sketches figures who flee this ambiguity, including the "serious man" who hides behind fixed values and authorities.

"One becomes a woman"

The Second Sex (1949) asks what a woman is, and answers that patriarchal society makes woman the Other: man is treated as the human norm and woman as the deviation. Its most famous line, "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient", was rendered in 1953 as "One is not born but becomes a woman" and in the 2010 translation as "One is not born but becomes woman" (SEP: Beauvoir). The 1953 translator, the zoologist H. M. Parshley, has been criticised for distorting her philosophical vocabulary; the new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier tried to restore it (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). Claims sometimes made online that she "really" wrote "feminine" rather than "woman" are not supported by the French; as one French-speaking detransitioner pointed out:

My first language is french, so I know about the original version of Le Deuxième Sexe by Simone de Beauvoir. The original quote is "On ne nait pas femme, on le devient." … femme is the french word for woman and that's the one she uses —pantooute, detrans female

The book is a founding text of second-wave feminism. For Beauvoir, the sexed body matters a great deal, but its meaning is not fixed by biology alone: "the body is not a thing; it is a situation… subject to taboos [and] laws… It is a reference to certain values from which [she] evaluates [herself]" (quoted in SEP: Existentialism). The SEP sums up: "what it means to become a woman is to live or experience one's body in a particular way," and this "does not commit her to a biological account of 'woman'" (SEP: Beauvoir). Her chapters on girlhood describe in detail how many girls experience puberty as an alienation from their own bodies, under a world that sees them as objects.

Competing readings

Beauvoir is now claimed by both sides of the gender debate:

• The sex/gender reading. Many feminists, and later Judith Butler (see queer theory), took "one becomes a woman" as the origin of the idea that gender is a social construction separable from sex.
• The lived-body reading. The literary scholar Toril Moi argued in What Is a Woman? (1999) that the sex/gender split misreads Beauvoir: on her view, being a woman means "finding oneself in a particular, namely female, body and living one's life in reference to this situation without being determined by it" (summarised in Neuhann 2023). Some radical and gender-critical feminists draw on this side: for them, Beauvoir's subject is the situation of female human beings.
• The trans-affirming reading. The philosopher Megan Burke's Becoming a Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence (Polity, 2024) argues that Beauvoir's ethics supports trans affirmation, and is presented by its publisher as a case against gender-critical readings (Wiley). Esther Neuhann, writing in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, finds that Moi's lived-body account can describe some trans people's wish to change their bodies, but struggles to recognise a trans identity where no bodily change is wanted (Neuhann 2023).

Camus: the absurd and acceptance

Albert Camus (1913–1960) rejected the existentialist label, but he posed one of its best-known questions. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens: "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide" (SEP: Camus). The absurd, for Camus, is the "divorce" between the human "wild longing for clarity" and the "unreasonable silence of the world."

He rejects two escapes. One is physical suicide. The other is hope in some higher meaning that will redeem the present, an appeal to the transcendent that he accused other existentialists of making. His alternative is to live "without escape and with integrity," in lucid revolt: fully aware of one's limits and mortality, without consolation, and still committed to life. His image is Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever. Camus ends: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Camus's acceptance is not resignation. It means refusing to pretend that the limits are not there, while still choosing to live within them. Several detransitioners reach for his image when describing the grief of finding that years of effort went the wrong way:

Your anger makes sense. You went through all of this effort in an attempt to improve your life, and now you feel like Sisyphus at the bottom of the mountain. Who wouldn’t be angry? I struggled with this a lot, and to an extent still do. It’s part of the grieving process. —pteridium-aquilinum, detrans female

If thoughts of suicide are part of what you are going through, please reach out to someone now; the support directory lists detrans-aware help.

Existentialist arguments for transition

Existentialist ideas are often used to defend transition, and the strongest versions deserve a fair hearing.

• No essence fixes who I must be. If existence precedes essence, then being born with a male or female body does not dictate one's life. On this view, transition is an act of self-making, choosing one's own path against what society has made of one.
• Authenticity as refusing the They. Living as the sex society expects can feel like Heidegger's falling or Sartre's waiter: playing a part. Coming out and transitioning are then described as breaking with conformity and taking ownership of one's life.
• The lived body over the object body. Phenomenologists distinguish the body as lived from the body as seen by others. The trans studies scholar Gayle Salamon builds on this in Assuming a Body (Columbia University Press, 2010) and argues that the body is "defined and constituted by what I feel and not simply what others see" (Salamon 2014).
• Clinical use. Christina Richards, a psychologist then working at London's Charing Cross gender identity clinic, explored transsexuality through existential themes of "choice, freedom, authenticity, the existential 'givens', facticity and the making of a 'leap to faith'" (Richards 2011).

Trans commenters often speak in exactly these terms. Some describe life before transition as a performance of the kind Sartre analyses:

I was a shell, a facade, a facsimile of what society expected me to be, and I lacked authenticity with pretty much every social interaction I'd ever had. —im-ba, MTF

To me, coming out means choosing not to live your life as a compromise in order not to inconvenience others. —11cholos, MTF

Others express the radical-freedom version almost word for word:

You are not "supposed" to BE anything. Modern human society and its array of norms and customs are nothing more than agreements between large groups of intelligent creatures over thousands of years. You can be anything you want, do anything you want. That's free will. —taylor_clint, MTF

These experiences of feeling fake, and of relief at no longer performing, are real and should be taken seriously. The question is whether existentialism supports the conclusion that changing the body is the authentic answer to them.

Existentialist arguments against transition

The same thinkers supply equally strong arguments in the other direction, and several of them go to the heart of the concepts above.

• Sex is part of facticity. On the existentialist picture, the sexed body is a given, like one's birth, past and mortality. Transcendence means how one relates to a given, not the power to abolish it. Hormones and surgery can change appearance, but they cannot change the history of a body or its sex. Claiming that they do risks the second form of bad faith in the SEP's description: over-identifying with freedom and denying "the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation."
• Existentialism dissolves the "true self." Popular trans narratives often describe discovering an inner gender that was always there: "who I really am." That is an essence preceding existence, the very picture Sartre rejected. Critics of authenticity talk make this point in general terms: the SEP notes arguments that "authenticity demands positing the existence of a 'true self'" and so smuggles in an essentialism it cannot defend (SEP: Authenticity). Sartre's champion of sincerity, who demands that a person declare a fixed essence, is in bad faith whatever that essence is.
• Fleeing a situation is not transcending it. For Beauvoir, the misery many girls feel at puberty is a response to a situation, a body lived under sexism, objectification and danger. If the problem lies in the situation, the authentic response is to understand and contest it, not to try to leave the category. This links existentialism to the analysis on reframing dysphoria and gender stereotypes.
• Living under the look. Sartre's analysis of being-for-others fits much of what detransitioners say about passing (being perceived as the target sex). A self whose security depends on being read correctly by strangers is held hostage by the look of the Other.
• Freedom without changing the body. If there is no human essence, there is also no "male" or "female" personality one must have. A gender non-conforming life, a masculine woman or a feminine man, is already full existentialist freedom, without medical intervention.
• Owning one's history. Heidegger's authenticity means taking over one's thrownness, and Sartre's means "a lucid consciousness of the situation." For someone who has transitioned and then detransitioned, that includes owning the transition itself as part of their past, rather than denying either the person before or the person during it. Heidegger's openness to "taking it back" makes detransition an authentic act rather than a failure.

Two caveats keep this fair. The classical existentialists did not write about transition, and applying them either way is interpretation. And these arguments are claims about meaning, not medical guidance; they cannot tell any individual what to do with their body.

How detransitioners talk about authenticity

The phrase "authentic self" is a running point of contention on r/detrans. Many commenters say it was used to steer them towards transition, and later came to seem upside down to them. The themes below recur across many accounts; they come from a self-selected online sample and are not presented as typical of all detransitioners.

"The complete opposite of authentic"

There is nothing authentic about denying reality. I’m so tired of hearing the term “authentic-self”. Authenticity comes from self acceptance, denying biology is not self acceptance. —Throwawaythingzyay, detrans male

I guess I cannot speak for everyone but for me becoming trans was the complete opposite of authentic, I was running away from myself because I hated myself lol. —DEVlLlSH, detrans female

In existentialist terms this is a claim of bad faith: what looked like self-creation was flight. Kierkegaard would recognise the pattern he describes in The Sickness Unto Death: a person who seems to despair over something is, underneath, despairing over themselves and wanting to be rid of themselves.

Performing for the look

Several commenters noticed that their most "authentic" period was also the one in which they were most anxious about how others saw them:

If I'm finally living as my Most Authentic Self (This Is Who I Really Am Deep Down) then why did I care so much what other people thought of me? —OkHurry8168, detrans male

There was so much emphasis on finally getting to be your true authentic self... by studying how others act and emulating their behaviour. —cagedbunny83, detrans male

I see loads of posts on Reddit asking for suggestions or reassurance on how to pass better. How is any of that authentic? It’s putting on a constant act. —ShiplessOcean, desisted

This is the waiter again, now playing at being a man or a woman. In the AI-extracted detrans.ai stats, "fantasy–reality disillusionment", which includes exhaustion with performing a role, was coded as the primary detransition reason in roughly 264 of 3,094 r/detrans stories. The cohort is self-selected and the coding automated, so this describes the sample, not a rate.

Accepting the given body

The most common existentialist note in these accounts is acceptance of facticity: the body as given, not as a project:

A large part of my detransition journey is accepting my body as it is. —wildflowerden, detrans female

My solution to things like this has been to accept that a body is a body, not a project where I can change every part into a most optimal one. … For me detransition has been in part about just accepting how things are. —anonymous1111199992, detrans

If anything, it helped the most to realize that I didn't have to like my sex. My body just is what it is, and it doesn't matter if it isn't ideal or perfect. It's all I get. —autochoris, detrans

The last quote is close to Camus: acceptance without needing to love one's situation. In the detrans.ai stats, "accepted sexed body" was coded as the primary detransition reason in roughly 375 of 3,094 stories (about 297 of 2,344 women and 78 of 750 men), with the same caveats as above. In a survey of 100 detransitioners, 60% gave "became more comfortable identifying as my natal sex" as a reason (Littman 2021); that sample was also recruited online and self-selected.

Freedom without changing the body

Some describe realising that existentialist freedom was available to them all along:

True freedom is when we admit there are females and males and there's nothing wrong with being, let's say, a tall, strong and masculine girl, or vise versa when it comes to boys. —jjheygayftm, detrans female

Others go further, in a direction Sartre would recognise, and reject fixed identity altogether:

I think the biggest thing I have learned in my transition is that identity itself is a trap. it’s an abstraction— a way of separating yourself from reality by trying to impose a category onto it. Who you are is not determined by what you identify as. —writteno, detrans female

Existential distress mistaken for gender

Some commenters re-read their dysphoria as the ordinary human distress existentialists describe: anxiety, dread, dissatisfaction with existing at all:

I have learned that my "dysphoria" was really more of dissatisfaction with life in general, depression, existential crisis type stuff. I still feel existential dread but I don't feel it is related to gender anymore and I misinterpreted it when I was younger. —throwouthdhsjsjsj, detrans female

Heidegger would say this anxiety is not a malfunction but a basic mood of human existence. Treating it as proof of being the wrong sex gives it a specific, fixable cause it may not have.

Owning the past

Finally, several accounts describe something like Heidegger's taking-over of thrownness: accepting that the transition happened and is part of one's story:

For deeply unhappy people, transitioning is sold as a new chance, a new life. Just as you’ve said, it really isn't either of those things. The person who they always were still exists at their core. —Top-Spinach-5577, desisted female

One woman who detransitioned soon after surgery listed what helped her through, and put philosophy first:

Things that helped me were: 1. learning about existential philosophy and existentialism and the importance of finding meaning in our own experience and suffering, 2. principles and teachings of Buddhism, 3. committing to my own truth of my experience, … —deleted, detrans female

A qualitative study of six UK women who detransitioned found a similar emphasis on "the limits of medical transition" and on detransition as "an ongoing process" (Lomax & Butler 2025). For more on practical recovery, see healing and recovery.

Assessment

Existentialism is often treated as obviously on the side of transition: if there is no essence, anyone can become anything. A closer reading of the texts suggests something more demanding.

First, every major existentialist insists on facticity. Kierkegaard's necessity, Heidegger's thrownness, Sartre's situation and Beauvoir's body-as-situation all name the parts of life that cannot be chosen away. The freedom they defend is the freedom to give meaning to those facts, not to replace them. On this reading, a life that depends on denying one's sex, or one's past, is closer to what Sartre called bad faith than to authenticity.

Second, existentialism is hostile to the idea of a hidden true self waiting to be discovered, whether that self is "really a woman" or "really a man." This cuts against biological determinism about personality, but it cuts equally against the innate gender identity that underlies much modern gender identity belief. Existentialists would ask what someone does with their sexed existence, not which inner essence they have.

Third, the trans-affirming readings make a real point. The lived body matters, and feeling like a fake under social expectations is a genuine existential problem. But the existentialist answer to role-playing is not to switch roles; it is to stop treating any role as one's essence. That is also the path many detransitioners describe: living as a gender non-conforming man or woman, with the sexed body accepted rather than overcome.

Finally, existentialism offers something to people living with the results of a choice they now regret. Heidegger's willingness to "take it back", Beauvoir's ambiguity and Camus's Sisyphus all describe how to keep making meaning when the past cannot be undone. That makes it a natural companion to the questions of irreversible decisions explored under transformative choice and to the phenomenology of the body discussed under embodiment.

Related pages

• Philosophical frameworks, embodiment and transformative choice
• Second-wave feminism, gender identity beliefs and healing and recovery

References

• Aho, K. (2023). Existentialism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Lippitt, J. & Evans, C. S. (2023). Søren Kierkegaard. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Wrathall, M. (2025). Martin Heidegger. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Reynolds, J. & Renaudie, P.-J. (2026). Jean-Paul Sartre. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Bergoffen, D. & Burke, M. (2023). Simone de Beauvoir. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Aronson, R. (2021). Albert Camus. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Varga, S. & Guignon, C. (2020). Authenticity. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Kierkegaard, S. (1849). The Sickness Unto Death (as Anti-Climacus).
• Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time.
• Sartre, J.-P. (1943). Being and Nothingness; (1945). Existentialism Is a Humanism; (1946). Anti-Semite and Jew.
• Beauvoir, S. de (1947). The Ethics of Ambiguity; (1949). The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier (2009/2010). Review: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
• Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus.
• Aeon (2026). The anguish of choice: re-reading Sartre's lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism. source.
• Moi, T. (1999). What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford University Press.
• Neuhann, E. L. (2023). Toril Moi's Phenomenological Account of "Woman" and Questions of Trans Inclusivity. Hypatia 38(2), 251–274. source.
• Burke, M. (2024). Becoming a Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence. Polity. publisher page.
• Salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia University Press. Salamon, G. (2014). Phenomenology. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1(1–2). source.
• Richards, C. (2011). Transsexualism and existentialism. Existential Analysis 22(2). source.
• Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, PubMed.
• Lomax, J. & Butler, C. (2025). Narratives of Adults Registered Female at Birth Who Started a Medical Transition and Later Detransitioned. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, source.
• detrans.ai (2026). Primary detransition reason, r/detrans cohort (n=3,094; self-selected, AI-extracted). stats.