After a year and a half being out, I hit a point where I couldn't take the feeling of being isolated by an entire society. I felt unwelcome in cis spaces for being trans. Unwelcome in trans spaces for being foreign. I couldn't even be out in public without hateful glares.
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The gender care system just kept finding new excuses and ways to drag out my care, and worse, when I admitted I was struggling they used it as an excuse to slap me with a bogus OCPD diagnosis. The PM basically shut down the mental health system so I couldn't get therapy.
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I had no friends in the city really, and I barely talked to the ones I had online. I barely ever left the house. I just ... had reached a point I couldn't take anymore. I was alone here, but there was nowhere else I could go. I even tried looking into just leaving the country.
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But back home hardly seemed like a place for a trans person in the present climate, and everywhere else was closing its doors, and meant starting over as an immigrant and with my transition. So the only options that seemed left to me were death ... or detransition.
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Going back to being miserable and dysphoric was a kind of hell, but so was being treated like a pariah everywhere I went. So was feeling like I'd never have a place in the world, never be welcome. So was being used and manipulated and patronized by people who saw me as an object.
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But I didn't. Ultimately, what saved me was, I made a friend. On one of my rare days actually showing up to the office, I met this wonderful, kind, caring, charming woman, who from the very day I met her never once treated me as anyone but who I was. As a person. As a woman.
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We became fast friends, and through her constant pestering and encouragement, I started coming to work again. Made more friends. Even got more active in my career and my hobbies. She saved my life. I don't know if I would even still be here without her.
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But when I have tried to tell this to her, to thank her for what she did for me, what her kindness did for me ... She doesn't get it. She genuinely does not understand what the big deal is. She says she just treated me like anyone should. And the thing is: she's kind of right.
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We ask so little. The simplest thing in the world, even. Just treat us as people. That's all it took for me. To have someone, anyone, in my life, treat me with kindness and respect, to treat me as I am. And yet the truth is, when it's us? Somehow that's still too much.
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That's what infuriates me. It's so easy. So easy to show a little human kindness. A little empathy goes a long way. Each of us, every one of us, choosing a smile instead of a stare, respect instead of suspicion, love instead of hate ... would save so many lives.
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That's the true story of detransition. Over and over again the evidence says the thing that makes us give up ourselves isn't that we're mistaken, or that we're pushed to something. It is because the weight of being a pariah is more than any social animal should have to bear.
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Human beings need love. They need compassion. They need kindness. They need to feel connected and part of something. And when you are trans, suddenly the world shrinks so hard. Instead you are isolated, hated, disrespected, invalidated, insulted, attacked, over and over again.
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It's not hard to predict what happens next. The same thing that happens to anyone in that place. Depression. Isolation. Death. Loneliness kills. And we're wired to give up almost anything to cure it. Even ourselves. I just wanted friends again. Love. A place to belong.
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So think about that, the next time another sensational story about detransition comes along, another shitty hot take. And think too about how incredibly rare it still is. How *certain* someone has to be, to be willing to bear through that isolation, to defend who they are.
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The story of detransition isn't the story of being mistaken about who you are. It is the story of being so isolated, so abused that you would give up who you are, consign yourself to suffering, all just to escape the greater suffering our society inflicts on the visibly trans.
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