Ky Schevers

The way some detrans people talk about what being trans is like strikes me as very odd now. Like how one can never "become the opposite sex", never find fulfillment, etc. It's also different from how I conceptualized being trans when I was detrans.

I experienced a significant degree of satisfaction from transitioning, including feeling more present in my body. Taking t made me less dysphoric. I wasn't trying to be male, just myself. And other people told me I seemed a lot more comfortable with myself, less anxious, etc.

So when I detransitioned, I explained my past transition as false consciousness mixed up with dissociation. My satisfaction was bad because it was an individual solution instead of attacking the root social/political conditions that supposedly caused my dysphoria.

I saw myself as being the same as transmasculine people, dealing with the same dysphoria, but I was interpreting my condition differently, according to a radical feminist framework. I thought other trans people could do what I was doing by reinterpreting their experience.

I knew transitioning and living as a trans person could be satisfying, I'd known too many trans peole not to know this. But that was a problem because it supposedly made them complacent instead of engaging in sex class war.

There was also this sense in detrans and some lesbian spaces that transitioning was taking the easy way out while living as female took effort but was a show of resistance. Transitioning was giving into patriarchy but living as a butch woman was challenging it.

Rejecting being trans and living only as a butch woman took a lot of work for me. I could only really do it when I was motivated by rad fem ideology and once my faith in that started faltering my transmasculinity came back strong.