When I talk about how I treated my gender dysphoria without transitioning, people say I wasn’t really trans. They say I mustn’t have had actual dysphoria and I’m either stupid or a grifter. One person even said I must be incapable of making my own decisions and should have had a conservatorship to make them for me.
For someone who they say was never trans, I did all the things you see transmascs on TikTok doing: cutting my hair into a mullet, talking about whether I wanted to use “they” or “him” pronouns, getting my new name on a Starbucks cup, dancing to music in my binder, crying about how I broke up with my boyfriend, and soaking in all the likes, follows, and comments saying I was “so handsome.”
I found a gender-affirming care doctor through a trans nonprofit organization. During my first appointment, he tried to persuade me multiple times to show him my genitals. While smiling enthusiastically, he claimed he could determine if I was intersex by examining them. I insisted that I knew what my genitals looked like and left feeling uneasy.
In an effort to avoid returning to the doctor, I scoured the internet for someone who no longer experienced gender dysphoria. I found Reddit threads claiming that dysphoria always returns and that the only treatment is medical transition. Meanwhile, trans people on X posted, “Just try hormones—you won’t regret it.” When I responded that it was irresponsible to encourage people to try something irreversible, they smeared me as transphobic.
Eventually, I didn’t know what else to do, so I returned to the gender-affirming care doctor, where I spent multiple appointments being asked questions like what kinds of activities I did as a child and how I felt about my body in the shower. I told the doctor I was bisexual, had been diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and OCD, and had experienced a traumatic childhood, was sexually assaulted and had previously worked as an escort. After each appointment, I was so exhausted that I slept for the rest of the day. I was worried about giving the wrong answers and being denied what I had been told was life-saving medication—but the doctor said I was at high risk and, “no matter what,” he would prescribe me testosterone.
My last appointment was a health exam, where I was instructed to remove my shoes and socks and lie down. The doctor checked my pulse in my feet, then my heartbeat in my chest, then palpated my stomach, and then began to pull my shorts and underwear down. When I flinched, he said he needed to examine my “hair pattern.” He insisted it was necessary, and because I felt I needed testosterone to continue living—because society had told me it was the only way to treat my dysphoria—I said, “Okay.”
That time in my life feels like a fever dream. I’m 35 now, and looking back, I was completely consumed by a social contagion fueled by the TikTok algorithm. I didn’t “explore my gender expression”—I was brainwashed, and it ruined my life. For a while, I felt embarrassed and wanted to pretend it never happened as I worked to rebuild my life. But I have deep concern for young people who will inevitably discover one day that they’ve made a horrible mistake, only to be told by the trans community, “That’s on you.”