![]() We started to go to college parties together and I was surrounded by girls in crop tops and high-waisted skirts. He policed what I acted and looked like to the point where I feared that if I cut or dyed my hair, he would dump me. The boy I dated from the end of my senior year of high school through to the beginning of my second year of college was, in retrospect, a total jerk, but I thought I loved him. This was another big factor later on in my ability to be fooled into believing that I could actually really be a gay boy myself and always had been. In fact, it became a sort of running joke that I was only attracted to gay guys, because by the time I had graduated, three of the boys I had “dated” had ended things when they realized they were gay. The majority of my friends, theater kids as well, were either straight girls or gay boys, nearly all of whom I crushed on at one point or another. I was well-liked and lucky to not have a bad high school experience. I was a theater kid, and had been since I was a child, and thankfully the theater kids didn’t get picked on. I’d been “part of the LGBT community” (in other words, I identified as a bisexual girl and was active on Tumblr) throughout all of my high school years.Īs a teenager, I often joked with my friends and on my Twitter account that I “wish I had been born a boy” because I “just didn’t get being a girl”! (Later, these tweets would reinforce my false belief that I had always been a boy.) Every time I wore a dress to school, I felt the need to announce it to all of my friends, like I was putting on a crazy costume and just didn’t want them to be shocked. Let’s start from the beginning: I had been a tomboy when I was young, had a crisis over my sexual orientation in middle school, and went through high school as a “regular girl”- I wasn’t especially feminine, but I also wasn’t gender nonconforming. My behavior was fueled by an unconscious attempt to escape from being female, bisexual, and gender nonconforming in a world that pressures women to be “feminine.” I want to share how it led me to seek hormone replacement therapy, and the red flags that professionals missed or ignored in my quest. Behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control were all factors in the development and progression of my Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. I struggled with self-hate, was susceptible to grooming, and existed under the influence of the online trans community, which uses tactics that I believe parallel Steven Hassan’s BITE model for mind-control to stop critical thinking and encourage cognitive dissonance. I was able, with the encouragement of the transgender community and transgender ideology, to develop an unshakeable faith in an unrealistic identity. I want to talk about my experience with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (or being transgender), to add my voice to the growing chorus of detransitioners speaking out about what we’ve been through. I did not re-identify and decide to detransition until later. I started to read the study, but it had been shared by someone opposing it truthfully, as I read it and started to really resonate with it, I got panicky and just closed it and stopped reading, because I was scared to agree that I did fit the criteria. When I first developed what I believed at the time to be genuine gender dysphoria, Littman’s study was not on the radar, and it did not cross my path for the first time until late last year. ROGD is a phenomenon described by researcher and physician Lisa Littman as a type of adolescent-onset or late-onset gender dysphoria where the development of gender dysphoria is observed to begin suddenly during or after puberty in an adolescent or young adult who would not have met criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood. I lived with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria for three years, believing wholeheartedly that I was not a girl, because the trans community told me that I didn’t have to be. She also notes the lack of follow-up she received from the MD who prescribed T, despite her diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). She now believes her gender therapist was negligent in not fully exploring the underlying reasons for her disidentification from her female sex. ![]() GuessImAfab chronicles the development of her trans-identification, including being prescribed testosterone as a “nonbinary” teen. ![]() You may have seen an abridged version of this narrative on her Twitter account. ![]() GuessImAfab was on testosterone for a year and a half and spent a lot of time engaged in the online trans community on multiple social media platforms. GuessImAfab is a 22-year-old re-identified female who identified first as nonbinary, and then a transgender man, from the ages of 18-21. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |