Womanhood: From Flight to Acceptance

I was sexually assaulted as a kid. Sexual violence has been in my life from a very young age. Over the years I tried different strategies to escape it, from practising martial arts to drinking, from being very discreet to being loud and outgoing. 

I often wanted to be a man because, in my mind, being a man meant freedom, strength, and most importantly, it meant not being harassed or sexually assaulted. Men in movies, books and games were strong and free to shape their future however they wanted. I had a lot of dreams, and I often heard the sentence “A woman can’t do that.” At first, I tried to prove them wrong. I tried to prove that I was strong and could be free and not need anyone. But I broke under the trauma I had endured.

I always wanted to be equal to my brother and be treated like a boy when I was young. I then formulated the desire to pretend to be a man when I was around 11. I was known to be a lesbian at my school and lost all the female friends I had because of it. I was a freak and I ended up hanging out with a group of young men who assaulted me regularly. We were all trying to be tough, and I had to be tougher because I was a girl, so I put up with it. 

Even though I admitted to being a lesbian, I didn’t think that any woman would ever love me, and I just believed that my whole life would be like that: be tough, hang out with guys, be a freak. 

Being feminine was a death sentence in my mind because it was equal to being raped. So I had to be as far away from that as I could. I didn’t think much about relationships and how I could be attractive to women. I was just in survival mode all the time, trying to get stronger with one goal: never get assaulted again. Sometimes, in a corner of my mind, I had thoughts about having a relationship with a woman, but that never seemed possible. Maybe as a guy, or maybe never. I always felt inadequate as a woman, especially with other women.

Like the guys I hung out with, I had a messy family life. I ended up on the streets, or sleeping at random people’s houses. I moved around a lot and didn’t have any plans or stability. I tried to socially transition a few times, but I always ended up talking myself out of it and trying to feel at peace with my body.

How I Decided to Transition

There were two guys, let’s call them Tom and Jack, who tipped the balance that led to me transitioning. Tom was a trans-identified male, and Jack was just one of the random guys I hung out with. 

I met Tom while hitchhiking. Long story short, he told me about consent, ‘woke’ feminism, and how to find empowerment in what he called sex work. I was fresh out of a cult where I had been raped by the leader multiple times. Tom told me that whatever I did, I would get assaulted again, and I might as well get paid for it, especially because I “had the perfect body for it”. He also told me all about the mysteries of gender and healing trauma by doing BDSM. I found a new hope for a magic solution. I started thinking more seriously about transitioning. This time, I had someone else, someone who was actually taking hormones and who explained a lot to me, and it felt actually possible and even good. I could stop feeling helpless about all of the assault, and take charge. I could shape my future, shape my body, and never be the weird chick that every man wants to assault and every woman judges. 

Jack was just one of the many people who joked that maybe I should have been a man. I was really trying to be comfortable with being a woman and that random guy told me I’d be better off as a man because I was more manly, competitive, wanted to be stronger and very obviously hated being seen as a woman. That little thing tipped the balance at that moment. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else later, who knows?

I ended up following Tom’s advice. I just turned 18, made a video with him, left his city and tried to prostitute myself. I don’t remember most of it, I just know I couldn’t do it much. At the same time, I started transitioning, still talking to him for advice. Everything is blurry and hard to talk about. 

I went to a clinic, my country’s version of Planned Parenthood got testosterone very easily, and lived as a fake guy from that moment. I got a job as soon as I passed and saved money for my surgery. I was working when I could and living with friends. It was better than my years on the streets. One of my friends was abusive to me, and they ended up giving up the apartment, so I found myself living in a squat. I was still working a pretty decent job. I quit as soon as I had enough money and got a mastectomy at 19.

Getting a Mastectomy Was Easy

I saw the surgeon, got a psychiatrist to write a letter in one appointment, had a scan of my breasts, gave the money, and that was it. 

I remember the appointment with the psychiatrist very clearly. Online he was known to give the paperwork very quickly without asking many questions. When I entered, it felt like we both knew why I was there and what was going on. He asked if I was happy as a guy, I said I was and that I had a job and a girlfriend, then he nodded and wrote the letter. Of course, I didn’t actually have a girlfriend and was very obviously homeless, but people online gave me advice on what to say, and that psychiatrist already knew why I was there. I left about five minutes later and I was glad that I had passed the one thing that should’ve stopped me.

The surgeon knew that I was homeless too and let me sleep at the hospital for two more nights after my surgery. Then I was back on the streets, in January.

I’m not exactly sure what I wish all of these people had done at that time, but I do think that the surgeon should not have performed the mastectomy, seeing that I would not be able to heal well. I gave him literally all my money. The psychiatrist lied on paper, saying that he was my doctor for a while and knew me. 

What it Was Like to Live ‘As a Man’

I attempted suicide pretty much twice a year. I would move places every two months, and would sometimes struggle with alcoholism. It would still feel better than before because I could have jobs and was trying to move forward. Life was hard, but no one assaulted me for a while; people would listen when I talked, I would find jobs easily. I could go about my day and walk outside and interact with society without being reduced to a sexual object, and that felt really good. 

I would have moments where I would feel like I finally had the strength to get better, and then I would drown again and struggle and want to die. I was just trying and didn’t know how to figure things out.

I often had doubts about transition, but people online said it was part of it and it didn’t mean anything. At the clinic, they knew I wasn’t sure either, but they still gave me testosterone. I wish they hadn’t, and I wish they had helped me with my trauma. They just gave me hormones and told me I was fine. 

The same thing happened with my health issues. The area around my uterus would hurt so much that I could not stand and would almost pass out. The doctor told me that it was fine. I was advised to take a painkiller or get my uterus surgically removed. I wished they had taken my pain seriously. I wish they had told me from the start that it would happen and not treated another surgery like it was a small thing, because it’s not. Surgery and hormones have an impact on health that cannot be overlooked, and it was ignored by every professional I met during my transition.

At some point, I really wanted to go back. My health was deteriorating, I felt like I was lying and living a double life, except that I pretended that the first life had ended a long time ago. I felt tired of running away from myself. I felt tired of trying. Honestly, sometimes I don’t even remember all the reasons that made me detransition. The biggest thing was my health and the constant lie I felt I was living. I didn’t want to feel like I was living a lie anymore. I was born a woman and that would never change. I missed the friendships I had with other lesbians, even if it had been just for a few weeks in the summer. Why did I not believe I could fit in with them? Why was I encouraged to transition so much?

I thought that before my mastectomy too. I wish I had listened to my gut and cancelled it. But at that time, I thought that I had taken testosterone too long to go back and that the mastectomy would finally help me fit in and feel like a real man. 

The thing is I would’ve never felt like a real man. Because I never was. 

The Road to Detransition and Beyond

I never really looked into detransition, it was on my mind sometimes but I didn’t know there were so many other people. I talked online to some, read and listened to podcasts. It felt good to not be alone and find people who went a bit outside of the woke ideology that surrounded me. 

At some point, after a suicide attempt that had me being stitched up in a hospital, I went to live with friends. They offered me a room. It was the first time in almost 10 years that I had a space of my own. I was always sleeping in squats, dormitories, couches, hallways… Having a bedroom where I could lock the door to sleep and knowing no one would get to me, a room where I could cry, laugh, and sleep all I needed, really changed everything. We had enough to eat, which was another thing that changed everything. I spent a few months just sleeping, eating, and processing the past years, from the squats to my childhood. 

That was a very important period. I didn’t know what to do about transition, I was still on the fence about it. It felt like a year or more that was suspended in time. At some point, I went to see a “friend”, a trans-identified man. I got sexually assaulted on the bus, then got raped by my “friend”, who confessed to liking young adolescents and finding me attractive because I was anorexic at the time, and I looked, according to him, like a young boy. 

After that, I went back to my room and couldn’t go out or speak. A few months later, I found a therapist who helped me. 

With her guidance, I worked on talking and eating again, I made peace with the way I saw my body and my past. Very quickly, continuing transition seemed absolutely not viable. I didn’t feel the need to hide under another identity anymore. I started caring less about gender and focusing more on what I could do with my life. To me, that was the key: focusing on what my body could do instead of how it looked. 

I decided that transition was not worth it, I was a woman and would always be, and that had nothing to do with feelings, but just a basic life fact. Pretending to be someone else would not work in my favour. Even if I really wanted to be that someone and I felt like it would fix me. I stopped thinking about it so much and started trying to move forward. 

Now, at 26, I am a lot more mentally stable. I feel like I’m just starting to live. I have an apartment, I met an amazing woman and I’m trying to go to school. Sometimes I still wish I would appear differently when men harass me and I fear for my safety. But I have no regrets and I find other ways to deal with it. I’m way healthier than before and I’m happy most of the time.