Transitioning didn't make me a woman — but rejecting trans ideology taught me what it means to be a man

I am a 31-year-old man. I am engaged to the love of my life, a woman with whom I look forward to building a family. I have a rewarding job. On top of all this, Donald Trump takes office in just under seven weeks. I am optimistic about the future for the first time in 10 years.

I also used to be trans.

There are no rights that normal citizens have that trans people don’t. What they want are bonus rights. They want to compel all of society to validate their desired identities.

Specifically, I am an MtFtM detransitioner — i.e., I was born male, experienced severe gender dysphoria, decided that I needed to live as a female, transitioned, realized that this wasn’t the “solution” I thought it would be, destransitioned, and have gone back to living as a man.

The hard truth about transitioning

Based on this experience — which included hormone therapy, facial feminization surgery, and breast augmentation — as well as extensive research, here are some things I think gender-dysphoric males should consider before transitioning.

• Just because someone referred to you using she/her doesn’t mean you passed to them.
• A very small percentage of males have the capacity to ever pass, and even for most of these, it will require surgery.
• There are real long-term health consequences to hormone replacement, including but not limited to infertility and a vastly elevated risk of testicular cancer.
• It is not the case that if you don’t transition you will inevitably end your life. It is not clear from the best evidence reviews that transition even improves one’s chances.
• The source of your dysphoria is almost certainly a paraphilia called autogynephilia. This is not a value judgement. It’s why I transitioned, and it doesn’t always feel like the sordid caricatures many critics of trans highlight ...
• ... but it is a paraphilia. It is not an innate female psychology, it is not a sense in which you “are a woman” mentally. It is a desire born out of your love for/attraction to women. It’s worth knowing this.
• You will become much more invested in how other people see you, which is deeply unhealthy. You’ll be paranoid about whether someone clocked you, whether someone judged you.
• This is because your new identity is based entirely on perception and social approval, whereas your sex is a physical fact and so is independent of perception.
• If you are one of the vast majority of trans-identified men motivated by autogynephilia, having genital surgery may remove your desire to live as a woman. Then you must choose between continuing to pretend or admitting you made an almost unimaginably huge mistake.

These facts should be part of any legitimate informed consent process to access transition treatments. But they’re not, so it falls to me to share them.

Autogynephilia: Trans ideology's third rail

The most accurate description we have of the causes of male gender dysphoria and desire to transition comes from the work of Ray Blanchard. He identifies two distinct etiologies of MtF desire to transition.

The first type are homosexual transsexuals. These will show female-typical behaviors and preferences from an early age, tend to transition younger, and show shifts toward the female average in many physical and psychological traits. This is likely due to prenatal under-masculinization.

They will be shorter, have a more naturally feminine build, have female-typical digit ratios, have brain fMRI results shifted toward the female cluster, have female-typical rates of violent crime, and have female-typical hobbies and interests. HSTS transition primarily in order to attract more masculine male partners than they could as gay men. Many are very invested in the idea of having straight boyfriends.

The second type are autogynephiles. These are heterosexual men with a cognitive trait that causes them to internalize their sexuality. They are attracted to women, but this is aimed at themselves, so they feel ugly in male bodies and excited/satisfied by the thought of having a female body, wearing women’s clothes, occupying traditionally feminine roles, etc.

Even though they are orientationally heterosexual (not turned on by pictures of naked men, when measured in laboratory conditions), they sometimes have sex with men to fulfill their desire to occupy a female sexual role. They sometimes even marry them. But they exhibit none of the natural feminization that HSTS do.

They have male-typical brain scans, male-typical height and digit ratios, male-typical (or worse) levels of criminality, and male-typical interests. They have very high rates of autism and personality disorders and high average IQs.

'Trans women are women' and other lies

The activists leading the trans movement tend to be males with AGP. So what do they mean when they use the phrase “trans women are women”? They know they aren’t literally female. Women in what sense? I am a detransitioner, and I still have no clue how this statement is supposed to be true.

They are not physically female, and they are not psychologically feminine-shifted. People will confidently say things like “gender is a social construct” as if this has been proven in a lab somewhere. In reality, it’s just something that some feminist writers said. It has as much scientific weight as a poem.

If you attempt to pin down what this means, you will find a bunch of sex-role stereotypes that these same activists will disavow in other contexts. Gender is stereotypes, but also trans women don’t owe you femininity! There is no coherent intellectual core.

They deploy their arguments cynically and feel no need to make them consistent or to provide evidence for them.

And what is this movement fighting for? There are no rights that normal citizens have that trans people don’t. What they want are bonus rights. They want to compel all of society to validate their desired identities.

How I cured my dysphoria

Are the vastly increased rates of transition in recent years a sign that society is more enlightened and aware?

Or do they rather highlight the fact that for thousands of years, people managed to cope with gender dysphoria just fine — at least without demanding that we upend science, law, and truth to accommodate them?

I suspect the latter, as I used to have severe dysphoria and figured out how to stop having it.

I felt intensely ugly to myself, hated my maleness, avoided mirrors, didn’t like sex or male roles or thinking of myself as a man. I finally fixed it by:

• Accepting the Blanchard model and understanding that the root of my dysphoria was autogynephilia: My attraction toward women had become internalized. I felt like I couldn’t love myself as a man.
• Dealing with my childhood sexual trauma that had caused me to hate men and, by extension, myself.
• Learning to simply not think about it so much.

We must form men, not deform them

I think when we look back on the madness of progressivism, it will be clear that the trans issue, more than any other, destroyed the left. When all the respectable institutions lie to us so blatantly, we start to wonder what else they’ve been lying about.

According to several studies, all groups of transsexuals have mean IQs well above average. Encouraging a high-IQ population to sterilize themselves via physical and chemical mutilation seems like a bad idea. Dysphoria should be seen as a challenge to overcome rather than an identity to center one’s life around.

We must find better ways to help people who suffer from dysphoria. The world needs more competent, confident men. Most of the traits categorized as “toxic masculinity” are actually underdeveloped masculinity. Being bitter, entitled, cruel, crass, and vindictive are not traits of men. They are traits of people who never truly became men.

Gender ideology tells men who may be struggling to achieve mature and healthy masculinity that their struggles are a sign that they need to abandon manhood and medically modify themselves. When this fails to improve their lives, it tells them that this is because of the intolerance of society. It teaches them to externalize their locus of control.

If it were intentionally designed to exacerbate mental illness, it could hardly do so more effectively than it does now.

Even the most extensive and convincing interventions will fail to make a trans woman female; all they can do is alienate him from his male virtues. An ideology that encourages such deformation does a grave disservice to both the people it purports to help and to the society from which it demands increasingly unhealthy “acceptance.”