“Really not enjoying the female experience”

The Reddit community r/questioning describes itself as “a helpful community for those questioning their sexuality and/or gender.” In practice, online communities like this serve as one of the first stops along a process of indoctrination, a place where people newly confused about gender find their disorientation and dissociation reinforced.

Take this 15-year-old, who started questioning her gender two years ago, who identifies herself as “possibly FtM” [female-to-male]:

My thoughts are more often “I want to be a guy” rather than “I am a guy”

But sometimes, I sort of stand where I stand and from my own perspective am standing there as a guy. Until someone passes by and goes “good afternoon young lady”.

Basically, sometimes I feel like I exist in the world as a guy – but living as a guy feels unreal. I’m born female, I guess that’s what I’ll live as. There’s not point even changing it, the first 15+ years will always have been lived by a female version of me.

It feels really weird and alienating and kind of painful to call myself a girl (even typing this just…). And being called by my name or she/her feels like being stabbed and it’s so triggering, but that only started recently after like 2 years of questioning. Although any other pronouns or names that I use online sometimes feel alienating as heck. He/him is weird and feels a bit funny (idk how I feel about it), they/them is basically as triggering as she/her.

My sister often tries to insult me by telling me that I look like a guy. I really hate it when she does it. Not really because she calls me a guy – it’s just, I need to defend myself and say “nah, I’m a girl” or something like that and the sentence just doesn’t come out right. And sometimes my mum will ‘help me’ defend myself by saying “No, she really looks like a girl”. or something and I just get triggered.

I don’t even know if I have dysphoria. People say it’s like hating your body, but I don’t feel that way. I don’t mind my body as a whole or something like I feel neutral about it but also a bit disconnected. I don’t really see my body as something connected to myself or something – it’s just there when I look in the mirror. But the way shirts and pants fit me because of my chest and thighs does make me want to rip off my head. I can still look at those parts standalone though, but I hate them for destroying how I look in clothing and making me hate swimming.

Lower dysphoria-wise, in a lot of situations I want male parts, but I don’t hate whatever I have right now. I still don’t want to describe it, refer to it, talk about it, interact with it or have people interact with it in the future or whatever (I might also be asexual though).

Unfortunately I can’t really experiment with gender expression until I’m a legal adult. I don’t know about men’s clothes, but women’s clothes don’t really work for me.

I have sort of talked about questioning with a friend of mine, who is trans himself. Sort of explaining these kind of thoughts (although more focused on body things and I never specified disliking my name or she/her or whatever). And he seems to agree that I am a cis girl. He does say that what I feel might be dysphoria though. But in a cis woman way or something?

Edit: probably forgot to mention a lot of things, I will likely add whatever I want to later, but one thought I had was that I can say “I want to be a guy but I don’t want to be trans”, because it’s true. But I can’t say “I am a guy but I’m not trans” and that hurts a bit. It’s not possible.
And another addition: I feel like if I were (am?) trans, it’s already too late. I might have fucked up 15 years and even if I came out right now and got on a waiting list or something, I would be 17 or 18 by the time anything would happen. And at that point my body would already be hopelessly poisoned by estrogen puberty.

I started questioning myself at age 13, but still haven’t figured out if I’m trans or not – I’m 15 now. If I were (am?) trans, wouldn’t I have been sure in those 2 full years? Surely I would have. But still just living my everyday life it just doesn’t sit right and it takes so much energy.

TLDR; there’s plenty of reasons that I ‘am not trans’, but I keep coming back to questioning everything.

She describes everything feeling weird—he/him, they/them, she/her. She writes about feeling triggered by her own name, but then notes that she only started feeling that way recently—“after like 2 years of questioning.”

She feels disconnected from her body and cannot avoid objectifying herself. She doesn’t talk about her body as something she inhabits—the “radiation” of her “subjectivity,” as Beauvoir put it—but as something she sees in the mirror, something that “destroys” how she looks in clothes.

Like many teenagers, she is uncomfortable with her body and its potentialities. She doesn’t want to “describe it, refer to it, talk about it, interact with it or have people interact with it in the future or whatever.” She thinks she might be asexual, but she might also just not be ready for the sexuality she sees everywhere on display.

She’s being bullied by her own sister and struggling to defend herself. She has trans friends, who only confuse her further. (What does it mean to feel dysphoria, “[b]ut in a cis woman way or something?”)

She wants to be a guy, maybe, but not trans. She recognizes the impossibility of this desire. If she carries on in online trans communities, she may forget these limits later. She may pursue something she once knew she could never become, something she knew would never be enough.

Like so many young people further down the road to transition than she is, she has that clock already ticking in her head. Maybe 15 is already too late. She imagines herself coming out and spending the next two or three years on a waiting list: “at that point my body would already be hopelessly poisoned by estrogen puberty.” The pressure is on.

After two years of questioning, she feels like she should know the answer. But she cannot let it go. Because she cannot reject the idea, because she cannot pin anything down—least of all whatever it might mean to be a ‘guy’ or a ‘girl’—she cannot move on.

But it isn’t just teenagers, going through a normal—if hijacked—stage of identity development who are vulnerable to a compelling but confounding set of new ideas about what it might mean to be ‘who you really are.’ Here’s a great example of just how slippery the questioning-your-gender slope can be, even for middle-aged adults:

Asexual AFAB and really not enjoying the female experience. Am I trans?

I can’t think of too much that’s actually fun about being female. I don’t want kids, periods suck, medical care is hugely biased and lacking, and our anatomy is poorly designed and prone to infections if we don’t wash after every sweaty activity and wear dresses for best airflow.

All of our clothing is about sex appeal, not comfort, practicality, or hygiene. I prefer loose guy clothes.

Trying to create any sort of career is a constant uphill struggle against misogyny.

Everything is more expensive for females.

I’m tired of justifying, explaining, repeating, and validating myself. I just want to BE. I feel like I could have enjoyed being female if there weren’t so many setbacks and obstacles to overcome. But I’m just tired now at 41.

I don’t want to grow more body hair or have surgery. So I don’t know what I am. Maybe just leaning towards androgyny.

I do apologise if anything is offensive. I’m exploring and curious and trying to gain knowledge and understanding of myself and this community.

This post is utterly typical on subreddits like r/asktransgender or r/questioning. The only exceptional thing about the poster is her age (41) but the post reads as though it could have been written by a woman of any age who has recently run into a certain toxic belief system that seems to explain a lifetime of frustrations. Her list of grievances mixes casual misogyny (“our anatomy is poorly designed”) with real pain and exhaustion (“I just want to BE”), and though her grievances are fairly concrete, her idea of what it means to be female or male is becoming murkier by the day. She’s already dabbling in cult language (“AFAB”).

But she’s not yet sure where she fits in. That’s why she’s on r/asktransgender.

Some commenters tell her she doesn’t sound trans. Trans is something else, something indefinable that can coexist with disliking the way women are often seen and treated but somehow, ultimately, has nothing to do with it:

Look, I’m a trans guy. I experienced all that shit. It’s not what made me transition, though. Transitioning to escape the female experience is a TERF concept that does not reflect reality. It doesn’t mean you’re not trans, but disliking misogyny does not make one trans.

Or maybe disliking the way women are treated isn’t what makes you trans—but it might be an indication that you should dig deeper (read: sink more costs) into investigating your gender:

Disliking misogyny and gender stereotypes doesn’t make you trans BUT a lot of trans people will feel incredibly uncomfortable with those things and it can be a sign that you’re uncomfortable with your assigned gender beyond the subjugation you face as a result of your assigned gender. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is in your case, but if you feel you might be trans then you don’t need to discount it solely on the reason that nobody likes experiencing misogyny.

If you can somehow untangle your discontent from your desires, you might be trans:

But do you want to be a different sex though not as an escape from it all but as who you want/need to be. That’s what’s important here.

The original poster responds:

No. I don’t want to be any gender. If I could be as smooth as a barbie doll down there I’d be happy.

Unfortunately, there are surgeons out there who specialize in making patients “smooth as a barbie doll down there,” as commenters are quick to point out:

Nullification is the term for that surgery

Why not read up on Dianetics? Why not immerse yourself in the Gender Dysphoria Bible, which will show you how every bad feeling you’ve ever had is really a sign you’re trans?

You might want to explore whether that’s gender dysphoria then. I recommend starting with reading this: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/

Meanwhile, the community draws more tightly around her. Yes, we, too, can relate to wanting an androgynous—even pre-pubescent—body. You fit in here, whatever you call yourself:

Trans agender guy here. I feel you on wanting an androgynous body. In an ideal world I would retain my prepubescent body and never experience any puberty related changes. I feel closer to manhood than womanhood but still, ideally I wouldn’t be either. That’s not an option. The human body doesn’t like not having any hormones. So I’m going for the next best option which is to go through both puberties and become unrecognizable. I can’t tell you who you are, but your description of how you feel about your body sounds a lot like how I feel about mine and I’m 100% sure I’m trans.

The reason most people here are saying you’re probably not is because your post places so much focus on the social struggles of women. But if I isolate how you say you feel about your body, that does sound like dissociative dysphoria to me.

Not that it matters:

good news is you can just do whatever you want without having to be trans. like if you want a binder and a more masculine fashion style then do it. nobody can stop you. you don’t have to claim a label, you can just do things that you think would make you happier and that’s it.

if you decide that you’re actually trans later then good for you but it feels like you don’t really need that complexity rn [right now], you just need peace in a world thats hostile to women

Others suggest she might be nonbinary and that it “certainly doesn’t hurt to play around!” Why not experiment with extreme body modification, like nullification surgery (“and just enough hormones”) or phalloplasty?

I mean, there are options for partial transition. Ive seen abour a half dozen cis women on trans forums in the past few weeks asking about phalloplasty.

Tbh, you seem more agender than anything else. Like maybe nullification surgery and just enough hormones to get an androgynous look would’ve been a better route. Only you truly know though. It’s your gender identity and your body.

Over the next few months, the poster moves more decisively toward a trans (‘agender’) identity that involves hormones and a restrictive diet designed to minimize “upper body encumbrances.”

What strikes me here is the way trans communities function like zero-gravity chambers. Nothing means anything, so whatever a word means to you is what it means. Your body doesn’t mean anything either, so why not experiment with it? As though your flesh and blood were pixels on a screen, capable of limitless transformations.

Youth and adults alike make decisions with huge consequences—for their mental and physical health, for the shape of their lives, for their loved ones, for everyone who interacts with them—in spaces where no idea can be pinned down and examined because every concept is hopelessly fluid, infinitely malleable, and in the end always slips out of reach.