[CW: Transphobia, transmisogyny, ableism, references to sexual and domestic violence, homophobia]

During my time as a detrans woman, I said and did many things that I now see as harmful and transphobic. At the time, I thought I was acting in accordance with feminism and working in the best interest of transmasculine people. In my mind I was trying to help people, I would never have acted as I did if I thought I was doing harm. Nonetheless, my motivations do not cancel out the harm of my actions, nor do they excuse them.

Trans people often became upset and angry at me and other radical feminist detrans women. I would get defensive and angry in turn but now I understand why trans people saw and treated me as if I was a threat to them. I can see now that I was indeed a danger to them and they weren’t wrong to see me and treat me as such. Not all of their reactions may have been productive or strategic in terms of actually countering the threat I represented. Some trans people reacted in ways I still regard as hurtful but I understand where those responses were coming from. I can empathize now, understand why what I did hurt and offended other trans people so much. …

I’m disturbed by many of my past actions as a detrans radical feminist. I said and did things that I now find very harmful and unethical. I was deceptive and tried to manipulate people, tried to change how transmasculine people thought of themselves and what choices they made. At the time I was able to rationalize to myself that my behavior was actually helpful because I believed so strongly in what I was doing.

Dishonesty was normalized in the radical feminist detrans women’s community. While some of us were more upfront with our views than others, most of us hid what we really thought from many of our friends and acquaintances. We thought they were too steeped in patriarchal culture or taken in by “trans ideology” to understand our views. If people did show any sign of being receptive to our beliefs, we would share what we thought they would find acceptable but hold back anything they would find too extreme or offensive. …

When I detransitioned, I believed that I’d finally figured out what I was and was in the process of solving my gender issues once and for all. I didn’t think I’d be hit with intense doubts four-five years in. It was shocking but at the same time unsurprising. I’d struggled with having complicated gender feelings in the past and had long wished that my sense of gender was more stable and simple. So while I hadn’t expected these feelings to come back, I wasn’t totally surprised when they did because this fit with past patterns. I’d tried several times to make my gender less complex and ultimately failed each time. …

I feel like I’m between worlds, between different groups of people, between detrans and trans. I don’t feel like I fit into either group. It’s surreal thinking of myself as trans after seeing myself as detransitioned for years. That was a huge part of who I was. And now my time as a detransitioned woman feels like it was a distortion of who I am. A failed experiment with damaging consequences for both myself and others.

I was more or less disconnected from the trans community for around seven years. Coming back to being trans now is disorientating. I feel like I was living in an alternative universe. I basically was. I really believed that the trans community was a threat to women, to lesbians in particular. I thought all trans men, transmasculine people and female-assigned nonbinary people were suffering from internalized misogyny and probably unresolved trauma too. Now all that seems totally out of touch with reality. Reading the writing of other trans people now, learning about their lives and perspectives, my old views seem warped, ignorant and harmful. …

I originally wrote this for my old tumblr blog some time during the summer of 2020. I ended up deleting my tumblr and my other online media related to detransition a few months later.

Detransitioning didn’t work out for me. About five years after detransitioning, I started wondering if it had really been worth it. I felt disappointment and regret. I went through a lot of hardship to detransition and live as a woman and it just didn’t seem worth the trouble anymore. Along with that, my sense of self started shifting and I started feeling more like a trans person again. I resisted this at first and tried to work through these feelings and re-establish an exclusively female sense of self but doing that felt wrong. It felt like I was going against myself. …

For seven years I lived as a detransitioned woman. I believed that I had transitioned as a way to cope with trauma and internalized sexism, that I had been trying to escape the stigma of being a butch lesbian in a homophobic society. I thought I had to reclaim womanhood in order to heal and find wholeness. I was part of a larger community of detransitioned women and re-identified women, a community heavily influenced by radical feminist and lesbian separatist theory and culture. Together we worked to support each other in healing from “female disidentification” and reconnecting with being women. …

What do I mean by ideologically motivated detransition? I made up the term while trying to make sense of my experience. I’m not wholly satisfied with it but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if I find other ways to describe what I’ve gone through as I continue to process my detransition. Still, one has to start somewhere and I think it’s important to define this particular form of detransitioning and explain why it’s harmful for both trans and detrans people.

People use the word detransition to describe a variety of experiences. Some trans people use detransitioning to describe a time when they temporarily put their transition on hold due to external circumstances, such as losing a job and being unable to afford hormones or experiencing hostility from transphobic family members. Others use detransition to refer to permanently stopping one’s medical transition. This could be because the person’s sense of gender shifted or they decided that transitioning wasn’t helping them or for any number of other reasons. …