Overview

Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in Athens around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium. It survives mainly through three Roman authors: Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), a statesman and adviser to the emperor Nero; Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE), a teacher who was born into slavery and later freed; and Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), the emperor whose private notebooks we call the Meditations. Its central claims are that some things are up to us and most things are not; that much of our distress comes from our judgements about events rather than the events themselves; and that the only true good is good character, or virtue.

Stoicism comes up again and again in detransition accounts. Sometimes people name it directly, recommending Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. More often they describe it without the name: "accept what you can't change", "thoughts and feelings will lie", "you can't undo the past, only move forward". This page explains what the Stoics actually taught, how their ideas passed into modern talking therapies, how detransitioners and desisters use them, and where the framework reaches its limits.

The sources

A philosophy as a way of life

The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot argued that ancient philosophy was less a set of theories than a set of daily spiritual exercises: practices meant to change how a person sees and lives (Hadot 1995). That is a useful key to the Stoic texts, which are mostly practical. Most of what people read today comes from three Roman texts.

The three Roman texts

• Epictetus' Enchiridion ("handbook"): a short summary of Epictetus' teaching, compiled by his student Arrian from the longer Discourses. It opens with the distinction between what is and is not up to us.
• Seneca's Moral Letters to Lucilius: 124 letters of advice to a friend, covering fear, grief, friendship, illness and death.
• Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: notes the emperor wrote to himself, never meant for publication, in which he repeatedly reminds himself of Stoic principles.

Core ideas

What is "up to us"

The Enchiridion begins with what modern writers call the dichotomy of control:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command… — Epictetus, Enchiridion 1 (Carter translation)

The body is on the second list. For Epictetus the body is not "ours" in the deepest sense; what is ours is the faculty of judgement and choice (in Greek, prohairesis) that responds to it. The practical lesson follows directly: if we stake our happiness on things outside our control, we will always be at their mercy. A later chapter makes the same point about physical limits: "Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to your ability to choose" (Enchiridion 9).

Impressions and judgements

The Stoics divided experience into impressions (phantasiai), the way things first strike us, and assent, the judgement we then make about them. An impression can arrive uninvited; whether we accept it as true is, for the Stoics, up to us. Epictetus told students to answer each "harsh appearance" by saying "You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be" (Enchiridion 1). His best-known line states the principle in general form:

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. — Epictetus, Enchiridion 5 (Carter translation)

Marcus Aurelius says much the same in the Meditations: "If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it" (8.47, Long translation). Seneca applies it to anxiety: "we suffer more often in imagination than in reality" (Letters 13.4, Gummere translation).

Virtue as the only good

Stoic ethics rests on a strict claim: only virtue (wisdom, justice, courage and self-control) is truly good, and only vice is truly bad. Everything else, including health, wealth, reputation and appearance, is an indifferent. The Stoics did not mean these things do not matter. They called health and comfort preferred indifferents: reasonable to pursue, but not things a good life depends on.

This has a direct bearing on sex and gender. If a person's worth lies in their character, it cannot depend on how masculine or feminine they look. The first-century Stoic Musonius Rufus, Epictetus' teacher, argued that women have the same reason and the same natural inclination toward virtue as men, and should therefore study philosophy too (Musonius Rufus, Lecture 3, trans. Lutz 2020).

Accepting fate, and amor fati

The Stoics believed the universe is governed by a rational order, which they called fate or providence, and that wisdom means bringing one's will into line with it. "Don't demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well" (Enchiridion 8).

The phrase amor fati ("love of fate") is often attached to Stoicism, but it is not Stoic. It was coined by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in The Gay Science (1882, §276) that he wanted "to see as beautiful what is necessary in things" ("Nietzsche on Amor Fati" 2025). Nietzsche's idea goes further than the Stoics: not just accepting what happens, but wanting nothing to have been different. Many detransitioners would reasonably refuse to "love" a mastectomy or years on hormones they now regret. Stoic acceptance asks for less than that.

From Stoicism to modern therapy

Ellis and Beck

The link between Stoicism and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), the talking therapy that works on the thoughts behind distressing emotions, is well documented. Albert Ellis, who founded rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) in the 1950s, wrote in 1962 that his central principle "was originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers", and he taught the Enchiridion 5 quotation to clients. Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, followed: his 1979 manual for depression states that "the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers" (both quoted in Robertson and Codd 2019, the Behavior Therapist).

Acceptance-based therapies

Later "third-wave" therapies put less weight on disputing thoughts and more on accepting them. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes, trains people to make room for painful thoughts and feelings without fighting them, while acting on their values (Hayes et al. 2012). Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), developed by Marsha Linehan, teaches radical acceptance: fully acknowledging a reality that cannot be changed, which is explicitly not the same as approving of it. Robertson and Codd argue that these themes of mindfulness, acceptance and valued living were "already practices native to ancient Stoicism", even though the therapists who built the third wave turned mostly to Buddhism for inspiration (see Buddhism).

Stoicism in detransition accounts

Sorting the changeable from the given

The most common Stoic theme in detransition accounts is the distinction between what can and cannot be changed, applied to the sexed body. One commenter who struggles with gender dysphoria without transitioning described it in almost exactly Epictetus' terms:

None of us can control the circumstances of our birth, nor most other aspects of the world around. Learning to make peace with that and learning to move on as best you can is hard, but worth it. —hugonaut13, gender-dysphoric, not trans or detrans

A detrans male who still has feelings of wanting to be a woman reached the same conclusion through experience:

If you don't like them to bad, you have to find peace with the fact it's attached to you. It sounds harsh but this is actually the easiest path to inner peace. Trying to change what cannot be changed will likely make you more miserable in the end, i tried and found this out the hard way. —throwawayyyy174927, detrans

In Stoic terms, sex belongs to the body, which is "not up to us". What is up to us is how we judge it and what we do with our lives. Several detrans women describe acceptance as the step that let them stop treating their sex as a verdict:

I had to remind myself that being female was not a bad thing that forever trapped me into some kind of box. It is simply a result of my conception. To reject that part of me is to reject myself, and so self acceptance was the only thing that ever made my dysphoria heal. —PocketGoblix, detrans female

Acceptance in these accounts is not acceptance of a stereotype. Many say that once they stopped fighting their sex, they felt freer to dress, act and live however they liked. That fits the Stoic view, in which character, not appearance, is what counts. The reframing dysphoria page looks at how people come to see their distress differently.

"Thoughts and feelings will lie"

The second theme is the Stoic gap between an impression and the judgement we make about it. A desisted male, answering someone shaken by the idea of being "born in the wrong body", put it this way:

Thoughts and feelings will lie, for the rest of our lives, but reality is always right there in front of us. Something that really helped me was reading Marcus Aurelius Meditations. —Euphoric_Capsicum69, desisted male

A detrans woman who came across Stoicism only after deciding to detransition recognised her own change of approach in it, and stressed that it is not about suppressing feelings:

Of course, it's not about repressing or dulling your feelings- it's figuring out where the feeling is actually coming from and working through that feeling in a way that isn't self-destructive. I don't see it as something to perfect, but more like an art form- something you consciously practice throughout your life and get better at over time. —trialeterror, detrans female

That matches Hadot's picture of Stoicism as daily practice. Other accounts describe the same thing through modern therapy rather than ancient texts. One detrans woman found ACT "extremely helpful in relieving dysphoric thoughts and feelings" during treatment for depression and trauma (scoutydouty, detrans female). Another, who had years of CBT and DBT for complex trauma and depression, listed what transferred to her dysphoria:

observing and accepting distress and the physical and emotional manifestations of that distress. … recognizing that they are feelings, and feelings do not dictate reality. —[deleted], detransitioner

In a survey of 237 detransitioners, many respondents said they wanted other ways to deal with gender dysphoria but found it impossible to talk about them in LGBT+ spaces or in healthcare (Vandenbussche 2022). Stoicism, with CBT and ACT, is one of the alternatives people find for themselves.

Past medical steps and lost time

Stoicism has more to say about what cannot be undone than about what still can. The past is the clearest case of something "not up to us". One detrans woman explained it in Seneca's spirit:

Also when i get like this i have to remind myself that I don't have a time machine. I can't go back and fix things. So dwelling on it is, in the long run, completely pointless. Instead, i need to work on the here and now. How can i live in the moment now and treat myself and those around me with grace? —[deleted], detransitioner

Lost time is a large part of this. In the detrans.ai stats cohort (3,094 self-selected r/detrans accounts, coded by AI, not a representative sample), 463 accounts mention regret over lost time and 818 mention regret over hormone-related body changes. The same coding rates regret as "clearly improving" in 1,042 accounts and "largely resolved" in 529, although the model's confidence in that rating is low (median about 0.5). These figures describe what people wrote, not rates in any wider population. See transition regret for more on regret.

Grief, the Stoic way

People often picture the Stoic as someone who feels nothing. Seneca did not teach that. Writing to a friend who had lost a companion, he said:

Let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend, nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail. — Seneca, Letters 63.1 (Gummere translation)

For many detransitioners this "weep but do not wail" balance is closer to their experience than either "get over it" or endless mourning. A verified professional on /r/detrans described realising that one cannot become the opposite sex as a real loss: "You are in mourning", allow yourself to grieve, and then "focus on accepting and being your best current self" (Froidinslip, verified professional). A detrans woman three years out described the same mix:

There are still moments where grief will overwhelm me out of nowhere. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to steel again because of intense regret and grief over my mastectomy

But mostly? I'm at peace. I live comfortably in my womanhood. I am at peace with my body. I am at peace with the past. —mountain-flowers, detrans female

Epictetus could be much harsher. The Enchiridion tells readers never to say "I have lost it" but "I have returned it", even of a dead child (Enchiridion 11). Applied to an irreversible surgery, that teaching can sound cruel, and most people who use Stoicism in detransition take Seneca's gentler line. The healing and recovery page covers grief in more depth.

The sexed body in Epictetus

Epictetus has one passage that speaks closely to modern debates. In Discourses 3.1 a young student of rhetoric comes to him with styled hair and plucked body hair. Epictetus tells him that what makes a human being beautiful is human excellence, meaning justice, moderation and self-control, and then asks him directly: "Are you man or woman?"

You possess the rational faculty as a peculiar thing: adorn and beautify this; but leave your hair to him who made it as he chose. — Epictetus, Discourses 3.1 (Long translation)

He even anticipates the logic of full transition, mockingly telling the student to remove "that which is the cause of the hairs" and "make yourself a woman in all respects". A reader today needs to separate two things here. The philosophical core is that our worth lies in character, not in reshaping the body to match an ideal, which echoes the detrans accounts above. But Epictetus wraps it in contempt. He calls hairless men and hairy women "monsters" and uses sexual insults, enforcing the grooming norms of Roman men. That is policing of appearance, not a Stoic principle, and it goes against the Stoic claim that external appearance is indifferent. A consistent Stoic reading accepts the sexed body as given while leaving people free to look and behave as they like. Gender non-conformity needs no new label and no medical change.

Critiques and limits

Acceptance used to dismiss injustice

The strongest objection to Stoicism is political. The historian Henry Gruber argues in an essay for Psyche that Roman Stoicism became a philosophy of elites who could no longer govern the republic, and that "the stoic individual may feel less pain" only because they "have become dulled to, and accept, the injustices of the world" (Gruber 2022). He points out that Epictetus, though formerly enslaved, never argued against slavery. Defenders reply that justice is one of the four Stoic virtues and that Stoics took part in public life. Even so, the risk of quietism, meaning withdrawal from public wrongs into private calm, is real.

For detransitioners the risk is concrete. "Accept what you cannot change" can slide into "accept what was done to you", which can protect the clinicians and institutions involved. Many commenters on /r/detrans reject that:

I blamed myself for years. It kept me from holding the doctors accountable. —thisonesathrowawway, detrans female

The only reason people don't want you to be angry is because they don't want to be held accountable for stuff that should get them sued. —Shiro_L, detrans male

The clearest answer in these accounts separates accepting a fact from approving of it, which is also Linehan's distinction. One commenter, replying to someone who did not want to "accept what happened", wrote:

please remember that accepting something is not the same as being okay with it. … But hear me out: that doesn't mean you can't still be angry, and that doesn't mean you have to forgive anyone. It just means rebuilding - that is all. —worthwhilewrongdoing, questioning own gender identity

Read this way, Stoicism supports accountability rather than ruling it out. Whether to pursue a complaint or a lawsuit is "up to us", and pursuing one is an act of justice. What Stoicism advises against is letting rage at the past decide the rest of one's life. A detrans woman who had a mastectomy after coming out at 15 said both things together. She quoted Seneca ("No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity", Consolation to Helvia 5.4) while insisting: "I know what happened was wrong, despite what anyone says" (Opening-Ratio-5601, detrans female). She also warned that being told "it gets better" can feel "like minimization". Stoic consolation offered too quickly can feel like that too.

The limits of "it's only your judgement"

The second objection is psychological. Telling a person in severe distress that their pain comes from their "opinions" can sound like telling them it is imaginary. Some trans people say exactly this about acceptance-based advice. One trans woman wrote that people with dysphoria "cannot will themselves to feel the effects less through pep talks and body positivity" (witch-of-woe, MtF). Another replied to advice against ruminating on unchangeable features: "That's... what gender dysphoria is" (Amekyras, MtF).

These objections deserve a fair hearing. Stoicism does not claim that pain is unreal. Seneca allowed tears, and the Stoics accepted that first reactions, such as a flinch or a jolt of fear, happen before judgement and are not a moral failure. CBT and ACT do not say feelings are fake either. They say feelings are not always accurate guides to what is true or what to do. Detransition accounts suggest that a judgement such as "my body is wrong and must be changed" is often what gets reconsidered, sometimes after transition failed to remove the distress (see distress persisted). But no philosophy can promise that reframing will work for everyone, and Stoicism is no substitute for treating depression, trauma or other conditions that often sit underneath dysphoria.

The framework does not decide the question by itself. One trans woman described using "Stoicism + ACT" to cope with political fear, "not in a “everything’s fine” way" (Responsible-Long3612, MtF). What Stoicism adds to the detrans reading is its classification of the body as something given, together with the claim that a good life does not depend on changing it.

One more caution. In the same passage of the Meditations quoted above (8.47), Marcus Aurelius goes on to accept leaving life if a good life becomes impossible. The ancient Stoics allowed suicide in some circumstances. Anyone reading them during a crisis should know that this is part of the texts and should reach out for help instead; the support directory lists options.

Pop Stoicism and misquotation

Modern Stoicism is also a self-help industry. One commenter who recommends going "straight to the original sources" warned about the commercialisation of popular Stoic writing (hugonaut13). Misquotations spread easily: the line "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just…", shared under Marcus Aurelius' name, including on trans forums, does not appear in the Meditations (Stoic Network 2026). The classicist Donna Zuckerberg has documented how online "Red Pill" communities use the Stoics to support misogyny (Zuckerberg 2018).

Tough-love advice to "read the Stoics" can also confuse Stoic self-command with a stereotype of manhood. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who takes the Stoic theory of emotion seriously, questioned the price of the Stoic project of cutting back grief and love, since deep attachments make us vulnerable to loss (Nussbaum 1994; Kirby 1995 review). Detransition involves grief that should be worked through, not cut away.

Related frameworks

Stoicism overlaps with Buddhism, which also locates suffering in our response to experience and teaches non-attachment, and contrasts with existentialism, which denies any given human nature and stresses freedom to make oneself. A detrans woman who detransitioned soon after surgery listed existentialism and Buddhism among the things that helped her live with what had been lost ([deleted], detrans female). For many people these lenses work together. Stoicism's particular contribution is the plain line it draws between what is given and what is still ours to do.

References

• Epictetus. Enchiridion. Trans. Elizabeth Carter. MIT Internet Classics Archive.
• Epictetus. Discourses 3.1, "Of finery in dress". Trans. George Long. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University.
• Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. George Long. MIT Internet Classics Archive.
• Seneca. Moral Letters to Lucilius (Letters 13, 63). Trans. Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 75, Harvard University Press, 1917. Loeb Classical Library.
• Seneca. Consolation to Helvia 5.4, in Dialogues and Essays. Trans. John Davie. Oxford World's Classics. PhilPapers record.
• Musonius Rufus (2020). That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic. Trans. Cora E. Lutz. Yale University Press. Lecture 3.
• Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science §276; discussed in "Nietzsche on Amor Fati", Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (2025). De Gruyter.
• Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Wiley-Blackwell. publisher.
• Robertson, D. & Codd, R. T. (2019). Stoic philosophy as a cognitive-behavioral therapy. the Behavior Therapist 42(2). ABCT. (Quotes Ellis 1962, Beck 1976 and Beck, Rush, Shaw & Emery 1979.)
• Hayes, S. C., Pistorello, J. & Levin, M. E. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy as a unified model of behavior change. The Counseling Psychologist 40(7). SAGE.
• Vandenbussche, E. (2022). Detransition-related needs and support: a cross-sectional online survey. Journal of Homosexuality. study page, source.
• Gruber, H. (2022). Don't be stoic: Roman Stoicism's origins show its perniciousness. Psyche (essay). Psyche.
• Zuckerberg, D. (2018). Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. Harvard University Press. publisher.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (1994). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton University Press. publisher; reviewed by J. Kirby, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1995.03.15.
• The Stoic Network (2026). Marcus Aurelius quotes from Meditations: authentic passages (on misattributed quotes). source.
• detrans.ai statistics: regret and outcome features, cohort of 3,094 self-selected r/detrans accounts, AI-extracted. stats page.