Content warning: Sexual abuse, Suicide

As hard as it is for me, I will talk about the reasons behind my transition. I think the main reason why I wanted to change myself was the sexual abuse I experienced as a child, back in first grade. Although, I have to add that I started to reject some feminine norms in my kindergarten: I refused to wear dresses and play with dolls, I preferred playing with toy cars. But my trauma accelerated all of that, and perhaps without it, I could have accepted being a girl.

After the trauma, my brain opted for rejection tactics and literally began to hate itself, or more specifically, my body, “disgraced” and reminiscent of trauma. I couldn’t look in the mirror, I literally didn’t care what condition my body was in. I wanted to erase everything, including the person and the body that had anything to do with those events, to literally start over. “That happened to M, and now I’m a different person”.

When I was 14, I learned about transgender people, and at first, I thought that’s who I am: “So that’s how you call it, here’s what’s happening to me” I thought. I started getting ready for transitioning, learning literally everything about it, talking about myself in a masculine way, and calling myself a male name. At the time, all I could think about was transition, and the thought of being a girl was disgusting, I even wanted to kill myself because I was not a guy.

My gender dysphoria is almost nonexistent now. I found a way to fight it with therapy. I understand that a transition would not solve the problems with gender dysphoria but would probably only make things worse.

On one hand, feminism helped to weaken my gender dysphoria, because it made it clear to me why a woman may not want to wear makeup, shave her hair, love children, and wish to have them, but is still called a woman. So, feminism helped me realize the fact that being a woman is primarily about chromosomes and biology, but not about social rules and stereotypes. On the other hand, it’s made me feel a little worse by the fact that you are very often confronted with different types of violence against women, which brings back painful experiences and memories, making me feel sick.



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