Ky Schevers

In detrans communities, you have people giving testimonials about "alternative treatments" for dysphoria but a lot of these detrans people are very ideological. Some online groups for detrans people don't allow people to recommend or support anything "trans affirming".

In some of the forums for detrans women I used to belong to, you had to use female pronouns for anyone, you couldn't say anything supportive of identifying as trans or transitioning and "reconciling with being female" was the only accepted way to deal with dysphoria.

These spaces framed being trans and transitioning as forms of self-destruction and something like an addiction. Supporting someone's trans identity would be seen as encouraging self-harm.

When I started having doubts about my detransition, I didn't feel safe discussing them with other detrans women because of such community norms. I didn't feel like people ever considered that these "alternative treatments" could not work or even be harmful.

I don't think all "alternative treatments for gender dysphoria" are necessarily bullshit or harmful. Some seem to work for some people but there's no research into how effective they are, how they compare to medical transition, what the long term effects are, possible risks, etc.

I find the conflation that goes on between social and medical transition a pretty weird thing in all of this. E.g. the references you made to pronouns - trans people were using alternate gender pronouns and appearance and living cross gender lives in the middle ages.

Medicine didn't invent that, people with gender dysphoria choose to take the course of their life in a direction that suited their own needs. But it becomes pathologised by the idea of it being "treatment" and being colonised by the psychiatric estate.

People in my old scene would argue that trans people in the past were only doing that to survive living in a homophobic sexist society. Like people can never just be trans, it always has to result from some kind of outside influence.