Transgender identity offered me an explanation for why I was wrong. I’ve felt different my whole life. I never felt like I was really a girl because I never seemed to be able to act like the other girls acted.
When I was 6 years old, I cried and screamed because I didn’t want to wear a dress. When I was 9, I begged my mother for a football. She said, “No, football is for boys”. At school kids made fun of me for acting like a boy. I was told the way I was wrong, that I needed to behave like a girl. Yet I could not seem to do this thing that came so naturally to all the women and girls I saw around me.
My early life experiences had a lasting impact on my sense of self and self-esteem, and I grew to resent my female body. I hated being a woman. Unlike many detrans women, I lived many years as a butch lesbian woman before transitioning at the age of 34. I had a series of life changing events happen after the age of 30 that drove me into a deep dark depression. It seemed like I was drowning, and my dysphoria became unbearable. The only way out I could see was transition.
I’m not going to sit here and say transitioning didn’t help my dysphoria, because it did. But the reasons it helped became obvious after taking T for 4 years and having a double mastectomy. It helped because I didn’t have to live in a world that thought I was wrong.
I started taking antidepressants for my depression and they enabled me to begin to ask the hard questions necessary to address my dysphoria without continuing to live as trans. It's been the hardest and most humbling thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, but I’m glad everyday that I detransitioned. I feel for the first time in my life I am truly living authentically. I’m a mother, a wife, a lesbian and I’m sure people still think I don’t act like a woman. But I know now that I’m not wrong, they are.
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