My Detransition: Half a year later
Detransition gave me a job, a car, and my family back. The trans years left me broke, isolated, and fantasising about a womanhood that never existed. Transition isn’t always the answer—sometimes it’s the escape that costs you everything.
Overview
Six months after detransition, Martin Rei compares the bleak, aimless journals of his trans woman period with a life now filled with employment, travel, and restored family bonds. Though lingering dysphoria and idealised fantasies of womanhood still surface, he finds more peace living as himself—male body, no labels—than chasing either gender stereotype.
Full Video Summary
Martin Rei begins his six-month detransition update by leafing through the journals he kept while living as a trans woman, describing the pages as a “downward spiral” that charted an optimistic start that gradually collapsed into isolation, aimlessness and a sense of being trapped in his own mind. He contrasts that bleak period—when he could not picture any future and lacked both money and emotional support—with the life he now leads: employed, housed, and able to travel. His first interview presenting as male again, suit on and CV bearing his male name, ended with a job offer and, he says, the liberating feeling of being judged “for what I can” rather than “for what I am.” Six months later he owns a car, has visited “countless places,” and walks the streets of Rotterdam with a stability he once thought impossible. Socially, Martin reports a dramatic shift. While he occasionally misses the gentler treatment he received when perceived as a woman, he values the “deep bonds” he has rebuilt with friends and family who no longer struggle over pronouns or how to relate to him. The tedious, circular conversations about gender have vanished, replaced by what he calls “trivial” but deeply appreciated normality. Yet this comfort is not uncomplicated. Revisiting the detransition topic for this video forced Martin to confront feelings he had “chosen to repress.” He recounts renewed bouts of dysphoria: jealousy of women’s bodies, escape into video games where he still plays female avatars, and the persistent, “outlandish belief” that he was meant to be born a girl. These emotions coexist with the pragmatic recognition that he possesses decades of male socialization and an “unquestionably male body” that together create a comfortable, familiar existence. Martin traces his conflict to an idealized childhood vision of girlhood—supportive friendships, emotional openness—juxtaposed with a restrictive, shame-based version of masculinity that forbade tears or vulnerability. He concludes that transition, for him, was less about becoming a woman than about fleeing a distorted male role and chasing an equally distorted fantasy of womanhood. Looking back, he says he would not undo the transition because the experience supplied insights and perspectives he could not have gained otherwise. Today he identifies “as myself,” no longer feeling bound by either gender’s stereotypes; he may wear conventionally masculine clothes now yet takes comfort in knowing he could grow his hair or don a skirt without internal conflict. The video closes with Martin reflecting on broader societal questions. He imagines a future in which presentation is divorced from gender categories, where “each of us was just a person,” free to choose colors, shapes, and behaviors without judgment. While acknowledging that physical dysphoria and rigid social roles still make transition necessary for many, he argues that the ultimate goal is personal authenticity. Citing the revival of his long-dormant video-making hobby as proof, Martin asserts that living honestly—whatever form that takes—is the metric by which any identity, transition, or detransition should be judged.