My Dalliance with Detransition
At the emotional low point of the pandemic, I tried becoming a woman again.
This piece was originally published to Medium on February 24, 2022. Why I’m moving my archive to Substack.
I. Summer
When I came out as trans in the summer of 2016, my then-boyfriend was irreproachably supportive. We had one heartfelt conversation about my identity, sitting on the couch in the night, then he shifted into using my new pronouns the very next day, after which he never mistepped. He complimented my short haircut and the button-up short sleeves I bought from Forever21’s men’s department.
At some point he took his friends and coworkers aside and quietly had the Conversations with them, if it seemed necessary. Anyone who seemed too tertiary he let just naturally figure it out, their eyes widening the first time they re-met me, with my new look and lower voice. A few times, people introduced themselves to me as if they’d never met me or heard of me before at all.
My boyfriend approached my new identity the way he tried to smooth out every conflicting desire in our relationship: by subtly, quietly pulling this corner and that one into place, and avoiding friction everywhere else he could find it. He tread carefully. But for all the work he did, and in spite of all the effort I put into trying to be thankful, there was no resolving things. He was a straight man, and that was not changing. When we met he had complimented my perfectly feminine body. I was appropriately terrified of how my shifting physical form and rapidly clarifying self-concept would drive him away from me.
We both tried to pretend the inevitable wasn’t happening. My wardrobe changed and my chest flattened and I started hanging out almost exclusively with trans people, but we did not talk about it much. I never even told him when I started T. I just started sneakily coating my body in the gel every morning while he slept, at first just testing out how it felt. Then, once I resolved to keep taking it, I started leaving the boxes out on a shelf where he could see them and stopped burying the torn packets in the trash. Then one day, after at least eighteen months of this pathetic game of don’t ask, don’t say I didn’t tell, I talked openly about the hormone’s effects to a trans friend on the phone while he tidied his closet a few feet away.
We never discussed what was happening or how it was affecting us, aside from me tearfully muttering a few desperate words about no longer feeling desired, on random nights when I could not take it anymore. Those moments of acknowledgement were rare, and scattered across the span of a few years, but for me they were punctuated barbs on a long line of razor wire, curling around and cutting into everything. The pain and longing were constant, and talking about it never helped — so I stopped talking.
The tension drove us apart, further and further, until he and I were living almost entirely separate lives. We had different friends, different passions, and did not make plans for evenings or weekends together. At work I journaled a lot about how miserable I was, and at night, alone in the apartment I’d watch YouTube videos of gay male couples going on vacations and read gay Hannibal fanfiction.
I imagined the lives of these figures was the life I shared with my partner. From far enough away, life with my boyfriend could look affirming. He had lots of queer friends, and gay men had always loved him. He had a few effeminate little gestures naturally in his arsenal, and he was sensitive — plus he was an actor! Once, when we walked home from a restaurant together, a man stumbled up to us and slurred, are you faggots? I was afraid of violence, of course, but I also felt seen. No, my partner said. We’re not. That was the problem. The fantasy of us that I held in my mind dissolved the second he and I were close.
I thought I could live in half-denial forever, living and thinking as a gay man when I was away from him, and allowing him to pretend nothing had changed when we were together — which was rare anyway. I believed that, I had to — until the summer of 2020. The pandemic shuttered his theater and closed my office. It slowed our social and creative worlds to a crawl. We were left with a lot of time together, feeling the gaps and the words not said, the touches withdrawn from, the sex not being had, the speculative talk we’d once shared about children and marriage and old age no longer occurring. The world was ending and we were one another’s only imperfect lifelines.
After four months with no social life and two months with no sex, my self-worth was at its absolute nadir. I could barely stand to be around him, because the way he withdrew from me physically was so quiet I could barely prove it was happening. Yet I could feel the cool rejection coming off him in constant waves. The way he reacted when I approached him made me feel like I was unwanted and predatory all at once. All his life, gay men had projected their own desires onto him and he’d had to rebuff them. Now I was just like all the rest, pining away for a straight guy who could never love me the way I loved him. But neither of us could even express that it was happening.
I spent hours outdoors reading, writing, and lifting weighs, every single day, even when people were still afraid that COVID could spread on the open air and the mayor had closed down all the parks. At night my boyfriend and I would watch movies, or I’d lay on the couch and read while he edited videos or did his own workout. We talked. Once, we cooked dinner together. We played with the chinchilla. It was amicable. Sometimes it was tender and fun, like a sleepover with your best friend.
But every night when I slunk off to bed, I tried to kiss him and got only the thinnest, saddest peck back. Any attempt to hold his face in my hands or touch his shoulder was met with a stony lack of reaction. I cried myself to sleep almost every evening, with the fan blaring so he couldn’t hear. I longed and longed for him to want me again, to forget all this stupid transition stuff and all the bullshit of identity and just appreciate me as the person who loved him, but he couldn’t, and that wasn’t his fault. It was my fault, I thought, for doing all this weird delusional crap and ruining my body. And what had it gotten me?
I had no friends I could see, no workplace to escape to, no queer spaces to visit where my identity could be properly seen. All my creative projects were at a standstill. The world had ended and no vaccine was in sight. There was nothing to look forward to, and the one person in the world who I had by my side couldn’t acknowledge my touch. But once upon a time we had adored one another, and had slept cramped up together in his narrow bed. Nearly a decade ago I had posted a selfie on Facebook and he’d commented, the most beautiful girl in the world. Maybe, I thought, being loved that deeply could justify being a girl.
I decided it was on me to salvage the one good, grounding thing I still had — or imagined I could have again, anyway. I stopped taking testosterone. I stopped binding my chest. I let my body become soft and feminine again. I grew my hair out a bit, let it get shaggy and pixie-like. I lounged around the house naked, my now-round-again breasts heaving with sad desperate gasps for attention. I moved my hips just so when I walked from room to room. All this, I thought, would awaken his love, and bring us back to me.
It was the beginning of a long lonely year.
II. Autumn
Before I decided to come out as trans in 2016, I read many blogs by detransitioned trans-exclusionary radical feminists (or TERFs). These women had hateful, twisted-up things to say about trans people, their own past experiences of dysphoria, and the many ways in which testosterone had ‘ruined’ their bodies. Though they were self-described feminists, the way they described the post-testerone body gave the game away: they were so hairy, their tits so sagging and loose; their bodies were wider now, their faces greyer and older. Their chins were scraggly with the beards they had grown. Surgeries had maimed them, so they could no longer breastfeed their children. And that, after all, was what their bodies were for. About transgender women, they had far worse things to say.
Irreversible Healing: What Testosterone Has Done For Me
TERFs say T causes ‘irreversible damage,’ but the hormone has dramatically repaired my mental health and relationship…
I never believed what these women had to say. I had been resisting people like them since college, when a vocal crop of radical feminists tried to bar trans women from attending a protest for sexual assault survivors.
The first time I encountered a blog where TERF described a trans woman’s post-operative vagina as nothing but an objectified fuckhole, I recoiled and slammed down the laptop screen. It didn’t make sense. They’d go on and on about how the bodies of trans women were perverse, sex-toy approximations of womanhood, all sexy allure with no reproductive power, then they’d turn around and decry trans women’s bodies as disgusting and stinking the next. Which was it? Their obsession with trans women’s bodies, and with having sex with trans women, was palpable.
And yet, when these detransitioned TERFs wrote about people like me, I couldn’t turn away. I was a straight woman who wanted to date men without the baggage of sexism, they theorized. That’s why I had convinced myself I was a queer man. I was an impressionable Autistic who had been brainwashed by the internet into dissociating from my body. And as I ruined my body with hormones and surgeries, they said, I would only make it harder for the men I desired to want me. I’d wind up sterile, flat, and denuded, incomprehensible to others — and most of all, miserably alone.
It was yet another of their obvious contradictions. TERFs claimed to stand against sexism and for an expansive, nonconformist vision of womanhood. Yet they were constantly cautioning women against making themselves unattractive to men, or incapable of motherhood. Absurd as it all was, I could not keep their words from sinking in. I kept pouring through their narratives of transition regret, thinking that if I could understand every contour of that story, I could refute it, and avoid it for myself.
When I stopped taking testosterone in 2020, I started revisiting these blogs again. All the same old characters from 2016 were still there, though some of their names had changed. Their vlogs had turned into Twitter accounts; the Wordpresses I’d inhaled had gone private. A few of these former TERFs had left the movement, retransitioned, and begun unpacking the damaging messages that had led them to detransition in the first place. But most of them were still on the same old grind, talking about how men and women were fundamentally different, and lesbians and tomboys everywhere were under attack.
Among these figures, there was also a fresh crop of recruits, a whole younger generation of former trans men who had decided to reconnect with their womanhood. They were getting laser hair removal and learning to pitch up their voices. They regretted having been so delusional as to think they were guys. They were dating boys, having babies, and wearing makeup to help themselves be appealing again. They were champions against sexism and binary standards. They wore dresses and grew their hair long.
All of this freaked me out, because I had also started getting laser hair removal. Not to emulate the TERFs, whom I still loathed, but because I could see my boyfriend’s eyes glancing over the halo of fluff that clung to my belly. I paid hundreds of dollars to walk in the rain to Lincoln Park at the height of the pandemic. I laid on my back, double-masked, while a woman in three masks and a plastic face shield blasted ultraviolet rays onto my mons pubis. After about six sessions my genital area was almost entirely bare. What hairs remained were blond and whisper-thin and grew slowly.
My body was exactly as it had been before I’d started testosterone— at least in that one crucial spot. I took a lot of selfies with my phone cocked at awkward angles beneath or behind me. I was proud of what I’d done, undoing the damage, but it didn’t pay off in any significant way. My boyfriend didn’t touch me any more than usual, and did not say anything about it. Then again, why would he — he had never said a word about the increase in hair in the first place.
I started wearing makeup. Before the pandemic I’d sometimes slicked on a black streak of lipstick; it gave my whole aesthetic an androgynous, New-Wave sheen. But with obligatory masking, lipstick was not an option. I needed to find a way to be pretty again. I started learning about how to apply eye make up, and bought a ton of glittery and metallic products. I drew bat-winged eyeliner in bright teal, and layered shadows that I blended poorly with brushes my sister gave me. It didn’t look good. I was depressed and pale as the fall settled upon us. Because I was not on testosterone anymore, and I hated myself and my body, I was eating less. With all that extra shit on my face, my eyes looked sunken and hollow.
Surprising Effects of Testosterone
T affected my allergies, eye size, perception of time, and more.
Off of T , my eyes themselves had gotten bigger. I looked more doe-like, cute and tragic. Strange men on the sidewalk started talking to me. Even with a mask on, I was getting missed and ma’amed again. An old guy in a plaid suit carrying a Bluetooth speaker came up to me and told me over and over that he was going to take me out dancing, and he was gonna buy me a dress. A middle-aged white dude in a jean jacket sat down across from me on the patio of a Starbucks, and handed me a gold Sacajawea coin. The women always want that one, he told me. A few other random men — baristas and coffee shop patrons — asked me what I was studying in school.
When I had been a boy, people knew I was a professor. As a girl, I was a young hapless student again. And people assumed I wanted to be talked to. I didn’t mind having a fresh kiss of youth on my face. I didn’t even mind the attention. The pandemic had been miserable. I was alone all the time, except for the unrequited evenings next to my boyfriend on the couch. I spent all my days on coffee shop patios all over the city. A few kind words from pervvy men was better than nothing. It affirmed I was headed in the right direction, if I wanted to make my partner love me again.
On the last warm day in October, I threw on a floral dress that hugged my waist and flared out at my hips. But then I covered those crucial curves with a boxy men’s vest from Hot Topic. My legs were bare, but unshaven. I thought I was striking the exact right balance, offering up femininity even as I tried to obscure it.
I thought my partner would say something about the choice, because it had been years since I’d worn a skirt or dress at that point. But again, he didn’t notice. Or he didn’t think he was allowed to. I wanted him to celebrate me returning to him, to shower me in kisses and tender touches and give me a hero’s welcome. Though of course any kind of large reaction would have confirmed my worst fears.
Every day I tried to be a boy who looked like a woman, and I went to bed hate-reading TERF blogs every night. They were alight with the usual fears about teen girls getting seduced away from womanhood, and pulled into a life of hormone-dependency, vaginal atrophy, and hairy, confused fucking with dubiously queer men who did not deserve them. They talked about how horny hormones had made them, and angry, and strong, and how many mistakes they’d made when under the alluring pull of the drug.
I was depressed. I was still jacking off three times a day, the same as usual, but I missed needing it the way I had on T. I wanted to be like these women had been, getting blotto drunk and railed in gay bar bathrooms. Their worst moments sounded like a hell of a lot of fun. I got a Grindr account. I scrolled through the faces and bodies; there was a user online in my building, just a few feet away. I didn’t upload any photos, not even the ones of my freshly-lasered cooch and ass. Those guys wouldn’t want this. I laid in bed thinking about being a man and being loved by men. My boyfriend played video games quietly a room away.
III. Winter
By the time winter arrived, my body had changed a lot. My breasts had ballooned back into triple-D-cups again, and I felt weighed down by them. My hips looked wider and more luscious. The thick muscle I’d build in my shoulders and back had begun ebbing away. I had stopped exercising, aside from long walks in the snow to the empty office where I wrote every day. My hair had grown down to my ears. My voice wasn’t high exactly, but it wasn’t as guttural or throaty. I had allergies again. I felt weak and pitiful, like a little fairy drowned on a leaf.
It was January of 2021 and I had justgotten my second book deal, after months of dully editing a proposal. Vaccines were a promise in the distance, but the COVID case numbers were at a new highpoint, and no one was socializing. I had found a cold brick room on Facebook Marketplace, rented out by a therapist who didn’t need it, in which I could write. I told myself I would spend the next few months studiously banging out the words, finish the manuscript just in time for my vaccine and then spend the rest of the warm, free year as anunrepentanthedonist. I just had to survive the remaining few months first.
My boyfriend and I had shared a somber Thanksgiving and Christmas. We did our best, taking walks to get food and having small fights about gift purchases in a Target. We saw my sister, and my mom, whom we fought with about masking indoors. In the night he did not reach for me and I had stopped even trying to reach for him.
I used to be the big spoon, and loved cradling him in my arms. But now he always nudged himself away. Looking at his back while he slept made me feel absolutely insane with grief, my soul howling inside for acknowledgement that was just never, never going to come. At times I was incredibly angry. Mostly I seemed just bitter and checked out. In his own writing, the character that was me was always disappointed by things he could not guess.
I wrote and wrote all day in my brick room a few miles from our house, and I took breaks to take nudes of myself, wishing there was somebody who wanted to see them. Genetics had given me a body I recognized was desirable. The pressure to live up to that fecund form had always tormented me. All my life, men and women alike would tell me what a perfect, feminine body I had. Gender transition had freed me of that burden. But now the body was back, with all its torturous baggage and none of the benefits.
In the first month of 2021, Torrey Peters’ incredible novel Detransition, Baby was released. I nabbed a digital copy and sucked it down it in a couple evenings. I was enamored with the book’s former trans woman subject, the deeply conflicted Ames.
Peters writes that before he transitioned and began living as a woman, Ames thought of his body as a loyal dog he could dispatch to do whatever he wanted. Ames’ male body wasn’t “him,” but it was an object he could direct to a variety of ends. I felt much the same way about my own feminine body before transition. It was attractive without even trying. It got me a lot of kindness and smiles. People would sometimes want to be friends with me purely because of how I looked. Sometimes my body even got me free stuff.
When I looked in the mirror all I could do was recoil and hear the word hate echoing repeatedly, but I knew theoretically that what I had was good, and could be put to use. I tried to make peace with it. I found a good man, one who was kind and gentle. His body looked the way I wished my body looked. He was an expressive guy with a career in the arts, which I envied. I told myself I could sublimate all my gendered yearnings into him. I could love him instead of loathing myself. It worked for a while. Then it almost killed me. And so then I transitioned. It saved my health and sanity. But it lost me the man.
When she transitions into womanhood, Ames finds that her body is no longer an attentive “dog” anymore. Instead it’s just her. Suddenly she feels pain and pleasure in her body acutely, and cannot detach from reality. During sex with her girlfriend Reese, she sobs and breaks open. The vulnerability sounds beautiful and it’s unlike anything she has ever experienced, but Ames finds it too much to bear. The pain that had always simmered beneath the surface of her skin now is with her always.
In the book, Peters describes Ames as dissociating back into masculinity, following an explosive, relationship-ending fight with Reese. He slips his suits back on, dons the masculine mannerisms and cold, flat affect that had protected him in the days before realizing he was a woman. Ames expects that as a man, his body will become an attentive dog again. But that does not happen. There is no sensation in him anymore. No loyal, detached obedience either. Ames’ body isn’t her anymore, but it’s not a dog either — it’s empty and dead.
That’s really what transition and detransition, was like for me: a powerful, at times unpleasantly raw connection with myself, followed by a desperate, deadened attempt at disconnection. When I was a man, I felt fully self-possessed and real. But this made my boyfriend’s rejection of my male form all the worse. At times, I felt that it was worse to be rejected for who I truly was than it had been to be loved for who I wasn’t. When I hid my testosterone away, I wanted to return to the state of unknowledge, to detransition not just my body, but my entire self concept.
I thought that if I could turn myself back into the soft, round, smiling woman I was when he and I met, we could be happy together again. Before I knew I was trans, I could puppet my body and face to please others. It was reflexive because I had never known the release of honesty. Once I transitioned, though, I found it hard to fix my posture or fake a smile — the dull agony of unidentified gender dysphoria was now sharp and something I could name. I could feel how false it all was. I looked at old photos of me smiling and they gave me an icy chill of uncanniness.
Off of T, and with the help of lasers, longer hair, and makeup, I could look like a woman again. But my boyfriend had seen the real me, covered in fur, with sculpted shoulder muscles, and a gritty, assertive voice. No matter how hard I tried to puppet my old feminine body, he had seen who was holding the strings. Plus both of us could see how much healthier I was as a man — how much energy I had, how much more I ate, how much better I was at creating things and taking care of myself. He still cared for me, but he couldn’t change who he was any more than I could change myself. He was a straight man and I was a gay one. There was no undoing the fact we knew that.
IV. Spring
Not long after finishing Detransition, Baby, I logged onto the Walgreens website for the first time in over a year and ordered a refill of my testosterone. My provider was grouchy, because I hadn’t gone in for any blood work in ages. There’s a pandemic going on, I complained back. He obligingly let me get a three months supply of Androgel packets. I started applying it in the morning again, in the closet of our bedroom. I returned to lifting weights. My chin grew dark hairs. The bare landscape of my mons pubis got hairy again. I got horny in a way that felt like an emergency. And I got furious about all the years I had wasted.
It slowly got warmer. I got my first shot, then finished my book. I expected the world to get better, and for my life to open up, but at first not much really happened. I spent a lot of that spring on coffee shop patios, typing furiously on my phone in the sun — the exact same way I’d spent the warm lonely days of 2020. I was desperate for attention and validation, and miserably bitter about all the time I’d spent altering my body and warring with my mind, hoping it would make someone love me. Posting all day was the only thing that distracted from it.
I was no longer able to recognize kind things my boyfriend did for me. I had zero patience. I could only get as far away from him as possible, as often as possible, and get enraged about silly political squabbles online. My follower count climbed and climbed. My inbox was stuffed with effusive messages. None of it was what I wanted. I wanted to be wanted. I didn’t want strangers to like my mind, I wanted someone I loved to need my body. I wanted to be nude with a firm hand around my throat. I wanted to be proud of all my body’s soft and hard parts. I wanted to drool and drip with arousal and not think for a second that anyone was silently disgusted by the size of my need.
For years, I had tried to see myself solely through a straight man’s eyes, all without ever letting him into my head. I kept comparing myself to the gentle, sad, eating disordered, inhibited, beautiful woman he had fallen in love with, and found myself inadequate compared to her. I was so loud and demanding, so bulky and determined. I wanted too much, felt too much, and had destroyed everything dainty about me. I was still trying to embody my true self, but every time I grew closer to getting there, I felt repelled by the man I saw. Eventually , I had to give up this impossible balancing, my sad attempt at both being myself and being someone he could love.
I didn’t break up with my boyfriend until months and months later, after the vaccinated semi-bacchanals of summer had been snuffed out by Delta. It took months to work up the courage. To love myself enough to do something cruel to somebody else.
It’s remarkable how entirely gone all my insecurities are now. I adore my body hair, my growing beard, the masculine angles of my hairline, and my thick, throbbing little dick. When I’m desperately horny, I feel alive — not ashamed. I have a partner who crosses the room to be near me, who runs their hands along my body hungrily and calls me sexy. Sometimes we have sex as much as five times a day — and when they call me insatiable it’s a compliment. I take photos of myself purely for my own delight. I moved my mirror into the living room so I can watch myself when I work out.
My body is not a puppet, a loyal dog, or a dead thing that exists outside of me, it is who I am — and even more miraculously, I like who he is. For years, I tried to balance what I needed against what a straight man I loved found appealing, but I could never be what both of us wanted at once. I never had any choice but to choose myself.