When I first came out as a trans man, I went by Icarus. Then, after I started taking T and passing more consistently, I would go by Ethan. Now I'm going by Ellie, and I'm back to using she/her pronouns. So ... What happened?
My detransition started with going off T.
Not because I wanted to ... It's more complicated than that. I felt satisfied living as a man, passing 95% of the time and getting to choose in which contexts I would be "stealth" or out as trans. Generally, I felt safer going and doing things on my own, more confident in my social interactions, and I had lost much of the chronic discomfort I experienced surrounding my breasts after getting a double mastectomy. My voice had deepened, and the higher pitch that would give me a headache was finally gone. I benefited from a physical transition in many ways, but not in every way. I needed to feel like I could truly be free from the prison that was my female body.
I still had wide hips. And, geez, they were a bigger problem than the breasts. While my fat did redistribute as I was taking testosterone, this wasn't the case for the fat around my hips, and it's not like I could do anything about the bones. So much of my bodily discomfort came from those two problem areas - hips and breasts - and seeing as I could only take care of the breasts and T wasn't doing the job for the hips, it didn't make much sense for me to keep taking T. The permanent changes were permanent already - my voice, my top surgery, my facial hair.
With T came a rise in my bad cholesterol levels and stress surrounding my weekly injections. I also increasingly felt ill at ease with my vaginal and uterine health. I had always wanted to have children, and I knew the chances of this happening could be hurt the longer I took testosterone (for reference, I took T for around three and a half years) due to atrophy. In general, over time, I began to feel less physically well, and while I'm sure more exercise would have helped me, I didn't have much time, and my fluctuating mental health made it harder for me to motivate myself to work out.
In many ways, T helped me avoid the sensory hell of a high-pitched voice, and top surgery significantly reduced the discomfort surrounding my breasts. But at the end of the day, HRT stopped being right for me. I have also come to attribute much of the physical discordance I felt in relation to my mind and body to be a result of undiagnosed social and sensory issues.
Please note, my going off T is not me arguing against giving trans people access to a medical transition. Personally, I still benefited from having access to these treatments even though I no longer am living as a trans man, and I do feel like they can be life-saving treatments, whether you are a trans person or have sensory issues related to your body that can be alleviated through these treatments, even without a specific diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Anyway, after I went off T to help my physical health (and it did - after a few months, I got bloodwork done and my cholesterol levels were back to a healthy level, and this is without a change to my diet or exercise routine). As annoying and distressing as menstruation can be, I also felt healthier when those organs were back in working order and no longer in a state of stasis.
The downside to going off T was that when my fat redistributed to pre-T distributions, I stopped passing as a man.
Ouch.
Back to the distress of pre-T me, socially trying to present as one thing when my body simply didn't pass well enough as male for people to get it right. I've always had trouble self-advocating and feeling like I deserved to speak up for myself, and while one could argue I needed to work on standing up for myself and telling me, "These are my pronouns," I also think that's a massive oversimplification of a more complex issue.
When it comes to not passing, it's ... painful. Painful in that I'm back to square one: people see me as a woman, and if I tell them I'm not, I assume they start using the right pronouns out of respect or pity and not because they're convinced I am what I say I am. And to have to tell people I meet again and again, "I'm a man," winds up being exhausting to me, plus I feel the burn of disappointment. The burn of incongruence. My head is here; my body is elsewhere.
So, I gave up.
If people are going to assume I'm a woman, I thought, I might as well live as one again.
I might as well stop trying to project an image that most people simply don't buy, and it hurts too much to need to correct them all the time. If I'm going to be boxed back into the womansphere, I might as well attempt to embrace this old familiar mask and have as much fun with it as I can.
Only, it really isn't fun. Aside from occasionally buying jewelry or a cute outfit or two, I still don't feel convinced that I fit as a woman, either. This unusual state of living hasn't eased what remains of my dysphoria. Rather, I'm trying to cope with that discomfort by reminding myself of why I stopped taking T and how T was my path to pass. The unfortunate futility of my transition, along with the way a need to "pass," also boxes you into the gender you're trying to pass as, makes it so I can more easily accept the painful reality that my mind and body don't align.
So, what does this mean? I still feel dysphoric. I identify as GNC and tend to consider myself as "nonbinary," although I've also always prescribed that males and females can have all sorts of variations in experience and expression that don't require them to be any more or less male or female.
Neutral pronouns feel the most right with me (they/them/theirs). But in a similar vein to how trying to pass as male before and after T made hearing "him" in reference to myself much rarer and correcting people exhausts me, I have simply opted for what I know people think when they see me: she/her/hers. While this generally doesn't feel great to hear, I prefer re-adopting a female persona instead of trying to confuse people into using they/them for me instinctively and feeling disappointed when this inevitably fails most of the time.
So, that's why my pronouns are changed on Amazon and this website! I'm living as a "cis" woman without actually identifying with my gender assigned at birth. Weird, but I'm used to masking, and I just consider this to be another form of it.
Best,
I.O. Scheffer
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