Woman Interrupted
Tags: LGBTQ, Transgender, Detransition, Gender, Feminism

Growing up, life was plagued with pain and hardship. My step-dad was abusive to my whole family, but especially to my mom and me, his only non-biological child. He’d frequently call my mom and I “cows,” separate me from my brothers and sexually abuse me when my mom was away, and tell my brothers that my mom and I were worthless. On my birthdays, he’d buy them gifts and berate my mom if she did anything for me. When I began excelling in elementary school and was moved to a gifted and talented program and skipped a grade, he demanded I move schools. Despite me being in sports and the fittest I’d ever be, he’d call me a pig in a school uniform. As a child, I believed I was somehow worthy of this treatment. Perhaps subconsciously the decade of sexual abuse and misogyny I endured from him made me truly hate being a girl, but neither I nor my therapists ever consciously made the connection at the time.

Nevertheless, I still have nightmares that wake me up and keep me unable to sleep, heart racing in the middle of the night and about to cry, of those years. It’s difficult to say the trauma from that time hasn’t affected me at all, though I did once try to pretend so.

Home life being difficult, school life was only marginally better. Despite excelling academically, I was unknowingly on the autism spectrum and from elementary onward my peers, being school-aged children with keen awareness of any nonconformity, were quick to realize I wasn’t like the other girls. I had difficulty engaging in conversation with them, as I hated makeup, dresses, boys, and the like. I fit in better with boys, who were quick to welcome me into the fold. I liked my hair cut short. Out of my school uniform, I wore only “boy” clothes. It didn’t take long for rumors and accusations to fly that I was a dyke, and while at the tender age of 10 I didn’t understand what a dyke was, I learned quickly.

That being what it was, it’s unsurprising that around puberty things only escalated. I hated my body and swam in XXL jerseys and sweatshirts, refusing to wear a bra. I cried when I got my first period, and shamefully hid my pads in my backpack until a guy friend of mine had found them by accident while borrowing a pencil from my bag and paraded it around the library table with our study mates, mortifying me. I didn’t feel I was meant to be a girl, and around this time I happened to read “transgender” in a book of child psychology while doing research for a paper, and talk of the “gender binary” began to pop up on Tumblr.

Honestly, at the time it felt like I’d found a secret key. Everything fit — the discomfort with my body, my loathing of being a “girl,” my comfort with being masculine, my desire to be masculine.

Up until this point, I had secretly followed lesbian blogs on Tumblr and quietly reading LGBT books for youth (Keeping You a Secret still has a special place in my heart). I knew deep down that I was attracted to girls; I always liked the Disney princesses more than the prince and I couldn’t really name a single boy I’d had a crush on up until that point. I hadn’t yet come out to myself, though, framing this as just being “supportive” of the LGBT community. The idea of being a lesbian was terrifying. Maybe ironically, being a transgender guy seemed so much less scary even though there wasn’t much trans support at the time. I began following ftm youtubers, looking into transition and researching HRT and surgeries. At the time, the biggest ftm communities were on sites like Tumblr and Livejournal; I fondly remember using guides like these as my bible. Community-made resources on binding, packing, surgeries (including who to avoid), dating, coming out, legal changes, and the like proliferated by word of mouth. Sites like Laura’s Playground and Susans.org because staples of my internet reading. I consumed trans content voraciously; for the first time I felt “accepted.” I was allowed to be and even validated in my feelings, my inability to connect to stereotypical femininity. My hatred of my body was normalized. I was experiencing gender dysphoria, and so did other peole. Art, fics, memes, community — it all helped me feel like I had found a place. I came out as trans that year. I was 14.

Perhaps unrelated, perhaps related, around that time I began getting into yaoi through female friends online. Admittedly I didn’t particularly see myself as a “gay man,” but I connected more with yaoi than yuri and felt that sort of cemented the matter, as of course gay men would see themselves in yaoi (never mind that yaoi is aimed at women!). I blame it on 14-year-old logic and being unable to articulate what bothered me about het and yuri media; yaoi uniquely allowed an escape from being female while offering a relationship on “equal” terms. By 15-ish, I was identifying as a gay trans guy.

Over the next 6 years, I’d live as closely as I could to that identity while stealth. I dated exactly one guy over that time period, a 25 year old cis guy to my 17 years who I dated out of pity, and had a “crush” on my best friend. Oddly, I never questioned if I was really “gay” or attracted to men — I was attracted to other trans guys after all, even if I didn’t pursue those relationships. Sure, I didn’t want to date my “crush,” and I couldn’t imagine being more than friends, but that was normal, right? And so I went on. I graduated high school and entered college, middling through art classes and late night trains and working part-time to cover expenses. Normal college stuff.

And then, in my last year of college at 21, I moved out from my family’s home and finally began T.