detransqna.github.io

Why are you answering these questions?

I’ve had an experience with being trans that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else. In particular, the reasons for my transition and for my eventual detransition are unique in what I’ve heard and read. I don’t know whether anyone will consider these questions and answers interesting or important. At the very least, answering these questions will have helped me understand myself a little better.

I hope someone gets something out of what I have to give. I didn’t write these questions for anyone in particular (except where otherwise indicated), so whether you’re a transitioner, desister, fellow detransitioner, parent, medical professional, activist, or curious outsider, you’re welcome here.

Why did you create this website?

I didn’t see any other platform that would give me the freedom to tell my story as I saw fit. With a personal website, I can answer whichever questions I want, take as much time as I want on them, and update my answers over time as I understand things better (making note of what I’ve changed, of course). And, as a bonus, I can do all of that without asking anyone’s permission. I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not I have someone’s approval to post (except those people close to me who help me edit) and I definitely don’t want to worry about whether minds, policies, or viewpoints will change after the fact and impact my ability to post.

What are your rules for answering questions?

First of all, I’ve decided to remain anonymous. Everything I write is true; I don’t fabricate events to throw people off the scent or anything. However, no place names, no city names, no people names.

Second, I don’t trust myself to successfully navigate and interpret the medical literature it’s necessary to understand to answer questions like “is there a biological marker for whether someone is trans” and “are there any side-effects of hormones” (not least because we don’t know the answers to either of those questions). So, no medical/psychology/sociology questions.

Third, whenever possible, I stay away from opinion because I don’t believe that being a detransitioner gives my opinion more weight than others’. So, questions like “do you think autogynephiles should be denied hormones” and “is anyone really trans” are out, too. Of course there’s some subjectivity involved even in reporting my own experience, but I stick to the facts when possible. That being said, I make an exception in my message to transitioners and give some advice (which is necessarily an opinion) because, as imperfect as I am, I think that if I had read that message when I was younger it would have helped me out.

If you have a question, send me an email.

Why did you transition and why did you stop?

When I was a young kid I was interested, as a lot of young kids are, in what it was like to be other things and in details about the other sex. All pretty normal stuff. But when I found porn at eight years old and used it frequently, these interests took on an explicit bent. I became obsessed with knowing what female pleasure was like. I’d look up reports of female orgasms on the internet and having female biology was a significant portion of my fantasies.

I hung out with the alternative crowd as a teenager and soon discovered that being trans was an option. I was interested in being a woman sexually and socially, both because my interests from when I was a kid and because, as a teenager, I was exploring my identity. Was I trans? It seemed like a cool idea. I liked the attention it got me from girls my age, a species I was terrified of and hopelessly drawn towards. I also attracted identity labels to myself like mosquitoes (like some other young angsty teens who watched BBC’s Sherlock, I diagnosed myself as a high-functioning sociopath) and now trans, and therefore gay, was another medal I could wear. But playing with the idea of being a girl around my friends wasn’t a big part of my life.

When I started hanging out at my high school girlfriend’s house, that changed. I wasn’t comfortable enough around my family to explore who I was and my girlfriend’s family gave me a space and a lot of time where I could. I expand on this more in other answers, like “was my family transphobic?” (no) and “what changed when you started hanging out at your high school girlfriend’s house?” Being able to explore my identity was a good thing, but the fact that I changed my body to do so, as well as the fact that I believed that doing so was necessary treatment for an immutable fact about myself, was not.

Here’s a fundamental theorem: “being trans” was an activity that I engaged in, and the more I engaged in this activity, the larger a part it was of my identity. As long as being trans was an activity that I could engage in and feel good doing so — and as long as I felt like I needed this source of good feeling to live my life — I would continue.

From my Sophomore year of high school to my Sophomore year of college, not a week went by where I was not either dating someone or pursuing someone. I needed women. I broke up with my high school girlfriend a short way into college and began pursuing my college girlfriend not long after. I was looking for sex and comfort. Sex had two purposes for me: getting pleasure for myself and making my sexual partner feel good so they’d stick around. During this sex, I would often adopt a feminine persona, continuing with my college girlfriend my auto-erotic fantasies. Aside from keeping “being trans” alive through sex, I still wore the labels “gay” and “trans” to assert my uniqueness around my friends. I would still spend time checking myself out in the mirror, admiring the curves estrogen had given me, pushing my hair in front of my face, striking vulnerable postures. At some point in college, “being trans” stopped being about experimenting with who I was and started being about those other things and as a potential solution to my depression and anxiety. This was the worst period of my transition and soon things would change.

My girlfriend broke up with me because my using her to meet my needs was by no means limited to sex and had damaged our relationship. She did it over the phone and I sealed the deal by screaming at her for ten minutes and then begging her not to hang up. When she told our mutual friends what I’d done, it was the last straw — I had neglected all of them in favor of her and encouraged however I could that she do the same, monopolizing her time and energy.

How was I to continue the behaviors that characterized my trans identity if I had no friends to flaunt my identity around and no girlfriend to use for fantasy? I still pursued her, leveraging the feelings she still had for me to preserve as much of our unhealthy dynamic as I could. Desperate for more, I reached out to my high school girlfriend after a year of silence, but the phone conversations that she only occasionally had the emotional energy to sustain weren’t enough.

Not long later, a psychedelic experience gave me some much-needed perspective from outside myself: I had been emotionally abusive to my college girlfriend and I was to blame for her and our friends distancing themselves from me. I stopped pursuing her, apologized and took responsibility for my abuse (though I didn’t yet understand why it happened), and never heard from her again. I learned that I could live without her, even without my friends. I was thrown headfirst out of the darkness of my selfish misery and I found that I was stronger than I thought.

A month later, I was ready to give up my ossified transgender identity. In the midst of another enlightening psychedelic experience, I called my mom in tears and found a supportive voice who loved me, was relieved that I wasn’t getting genital surgery anymore, and had never thought that medical transition was a good idea. I agreed. Soon, I stopped wearing estrogen patches and taking T-blockers. I had lost my friends, my girlfriend, and my identity — I went on to have the happiest summer of my life.

Why do you keep saying “being trans” in quotes like that?

Because I don’t see a better way to describe the set of behaviors I participated in that characterized my experimentation with my identity. However, I don’t want to call myself trans because that feels disrespectful to people who consider themselves trans and have more of a claim to that word than I do. So I put it in quotes.

What changed when you started spending weekends at your high school girlfriend’s house?

I didn’t feel comfortable experimenting with who I was at home. Trans was an identity that I wanted to experiment with, so when I had the opportunity, I did.

Please don’t use this answer to suit an ideology. I turned out to not be trans; that doesn’t mean that my girlfriend and her family were conspiratorial gender-vixens and that my parents were thoughtful people who knew what was best for me. At the opposite extreme, it’s also not true that my parents were transphobic bigots and that my girlfriend and her family were a safe, healthy refuge with my best interests in mind. The truth is gray. My parents were stressed but mostly stable people that I didn’t have a good relationship with. My girlfriend and her family were more relaxed but were struggling financially and emotionally and were not great influences. I had a need to experiment with who I was that wasn’t being met and the circumstances of my past meant that I wanted to experiment with being a woman.

Are there any situations in which you would have forgotten and moved on from the idea of medical transition?

I never would have transitioned had I not spent weekends at my high school girlfriend’s house, where I had an opportunity to experiment with new names and pronouns in an environment that supported that. Had this not happened, and had I not been encouraged to seek medical treatment, “being trans” would have remained a fantasy for me which I experimented with socially and sexually but not medically.

I went on T-blockers at seventeen and estrogen at eighteen. My high school girlfriend and her family were the only people I kept my identity alive with, so I believe if we had broken up in high school, that part of me would have faded away. It is possible I would have continued; I had a contentious relationship with my mom at the time, who thought my transition was wrong-headed, and I would not have wanted to admit to her that she was right.

I don’t think restrictions postponing the date at which I could have received hormones would have stopped me from transitioning — I had to wait over a year to get T-blockers as it was and it took another year to get estrogen. Regardless of my body, I was “being trans” at my girlfriend’s house and that was enough to keep me going without hormones. When I went far away to college and broke up with that girlfriend, I was in a very left-leaning community in which my chosen identity would be celebrated. Even if the age at which I could get hormones was raised to twenty-one, I think I still would have waited.

What did “being trans” look like for you?

I’ve written elsewhere that “being trans” was a set of behaviors I engaged in that I got something positive out of. I’ve also written elsewhere what those behaviors are. Here’s a quick list:

There are some normal trans things that I didn’t do: I never asked my family to call me by different pronouns. I didn’t feel comfortable experimenting with who I was around them, so I relegated my identity experimentation to my friends (and high school girlfriend’s family). In particular, I only experimented like this around my female friends; I wasn’t comfortable experimenting around male friends.

I also never made any attempt to dress female or change my voice because my drive to experiment was not powerful enough to overcome my self-consciousness. My high school girlfriend would sometimes dress me up as female, but that would never leave the bedroom (except during Pride) and I never altered my voice for anyone.

How did autogynephilia play a role in your story?

Disclaimer: I am not saying that my experience with autogynephilia is the same as others’. I see my own autogynephilia in a negative light, but that doesn’t mean that I believe autogynephilia itself is a bad thing.

My best guess as to how I became autogynephilic is that my early porn use (starting at eight) created a warped sexuality which obsessed over female pleasure and grew accustomed to voyeuristic control over sexual situations. The idea that I could modify my body to become female was therefore appealing to me as I could then possess and control a female body.

The fundamental theorem of my experience with identifying as trans is that “being trans” was a set of activities that I got something out of. One of these behaviors was sexual fantasy in which I imagined myself as a woman. I got more out of this if there was someone there to participate in it with me, to acknowledge me as a woman. When I had sex with my girlfriends during my transition, my focus was on my own body; they were simply participants in my masturbation fantasy, like co-stars in a porn shoot. I used sex to escape a reality in which I was unhappy and these autogynephilic fantasies were a way of enhancing that escape.

Autogynephilia, and particularly engaging in that fantasy with a female partner, was a large component of my transition. It’s no surprise, then, that I started pushing for hormonal transition just a few months after my high school relationship began and ended it just two months after my college relationship ended.

P.S. – Kudos to Helen Joyce for her discussion of autogynephilia in Trans; in particular, I appreciated the quotes she included from autogynephiliacs describing their personal experiences; they helped me understand my own.

What would you like to tell the medical providers who helped you transition? How about all medical providers; what do they need to know? Many of them don’t believe that detransitioners really exist.

I’ll start with the medical providers I know. The two medical providers that I had the most contact with were therapists: a regular therapist and one who gave me an assessment before I received my diagnosis of gender dysphoria. I also saw an endocrinologist and an assistant to a surgeon, but they can be lumped in with the “all medical providers” as I didn’t have significant relationships with them.

So, to my therapists: Our therapeutic relationship was an obstacle I had to overcome in order to get something I wanted. I never felt as though I could tell you the whole truth because doing so would risk me not getting hormones. (I never felt as though I could be honest with myself for the same reason.) The only incentive I would have to tell you the truth was if I didn’t know what I wanted and I was dead set on what I wanted before I met you. I was experienced with this dynamic, as it’s the one I had with my parents. I knew a good lie is as close to the truth as possible, so my lies were rarely bald-faced. Instead, I would overstate or twist the significance of real events from my distant or recent past (some of which came from my history with autogynephilia) to fit the narrative that I was trans. I didn’t have to try very hard; I remember that a lot of my conversations with my regular therapist were about TV shows, which I was fine with because these unproductive conversations presented no danger to my path towards hormones.

I don’t know how much of my BS you believed, but the end result was the same: I got hormones, and I wasn’t trans; I was autogynephilic, a word that I don’t remember coming up in my therapy sessions. (Which isn’t to say that it didn’t. It’s possible that I heard it and brushed it off, but I remember first hearing about it only a year or so ago.) Here’s the main thing I want to tell you: the fact that I took hormones was bad. Taking hormones was not “something I needed to do to explore my identity” or a healthy step in my development as a person. The permanent changes to my body don’t bother me much; having prominent breasts and hips is a little strange, but the changes are minor and it’s not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Instead, here are the problems: first of all, no one knows what happens to the brain when you interrupt the natural course of male (or female) development like that. Second, and more importantly, I used physical transition as a coping mechanism for serious problems and by constantly attributing my problems to an imperfect physical form, I was able to escape any responsibility for dealing with them and push down any awareness of their true causes!

Honestly, I’m not sure there’s anything you could have done to prevent me from getting hormones. If you had told me that you didn’t believe hormones were psychologically necessary, I would have just said “screw this” and found a place with lower standards of patient care, of which there were and are a lot. I also don’t think that the tactic of really grilling me as to my reasons for being trans would have worked, either; I loved to come up with stories, and once you’ve moved from places and events into the realm of thoughts and opinions, there’s no longer any counterbalance against the most egregious lies. There is one thing I can think of, though — it’s possible that hearing about autogynephilia could have helped me understand myself. It should not be a dirty word.

To each member of the transgender medical community:

One of the BIG issues right now is a push by trans activists (including many youth providers) to treat gender diverse adolescents the same as adults - which means not requiring mental health involvement, assessment, etc. Was there any way in which those helped you?

The process that I went through to get hormones was pretty lengthy compared to some. I waited over a year until I was able to go on T-blockers and then I waited another year after that to go on estrogen. Over that time, in spite of the fact that I was attending at least bi-weekly therapy, my course did not change one iota. The mental health involvement and assessment process were hoops that I had to jump through. It didn’t even occur to me that I should tell the undoctored truth because I wasn’t aware, except maybe on the dimmest, sub-verbal level, that I wasn’t doing so. The only way that I can truly say that the lengthy medical involvement helped me was that it delayed my hormonal transition.

I am not saying that mental health involvement and assessments are useless and that we might as well get rid of them. There are people as old as I was who were struggling with some of the same things, who see therapists who are legally mandated to tell them that they are trans if they believe they are. That is a horrendous error in judgment. Those kids will experience years of confusion in which their demons become louder and louder, and they keep changing their body but those demons don’t quiet down, so they just change it more, seeking that moment of peace when they look in the mirror and everything looks just right, and their problems fly up into the air like fireworks, burst, and fade away. But that will never happen.

For me, mental health involvement and assessments were ineffective at helping me understand the true causes of my wanting to transition, which were roughly: a desire to experiment with my identity, autogynephilia, social anxiety, and a promised solution to my problems. There are ways that mental health involvement could be improved, certainly, first and foremost being exploring other possibilities to transition in therapy sessions, even against the insistence of the patient. I’d like to see people do some research into these diagnostic alternatives, of which autogynephilia is one but not the only one (rapid-onset gender dysphoria is another — I don’t know why alternatives to a trans diagnosis are so viciously torn down), and I’d like patients to be required to at the very least be aware of all of these alternatives.

In order to know whether having this process is better than not having it, we’d need data and definitions we don’t have — how do you tell if someone is trans? How many trans people were blocked by assessment who wouldn’t have been otherwise? How many who weren’t trans were permitted to transition who wouldn’t have been with an assessment? As far as I’m concerned, whether someone is trans, or what “trans” means, is irrelevant. A patient should transition if transitioning is the correct, medical a good decision for them — and that should be up to the doctor(s) to decide, not the patient, particularly for adolescents and kids even younger than that.

Was the fact that you transitioned when you weren’t supposed to really all that bad?

Because I transitioned, I spent years of my life unaware of my problems. I thought that many of my bad feelings were dysphoria and addressed them with medical transition. This led to a pretty miserable late adolescence for me and for two women I am no longer on speaking terms with and it means that I have to work hard to catch up to the emotional maturity of my more stable friends.

Now for some maybes and whatevers, to mention the potential consequences of others’ misguided transitions:

A question came to mind as I was writing this: “It sounds like the main problem you claim was caused by you deciding you were trans — using a scapegoat to not address your problems — could have come up even if you didn’t transition. Did transitioning really make your life worse or are you incorrectly identifying transitioning as the cause of your present problems in the same way that you did with gender dysphoria?”

I could be. It’s possible that, without transitioning as an option, I would have adopted some other persona slash coping mechanism — an all-consuming focus on political ideology, maybe, or perhaps a gaming addiction. However, given my history, there was a reason I ended up transitioning instead of doing these other things. Without transition to fixate on, a possible path with a peculiar pull on my particular psychology, adolescence might have been less troubled. I believe my transition stunted my development and I worry that it does the same for others.

So yes, it was a bad thing. Things turned out alright in the end, but they didn’t have to, and for other people in my shoes, they won’t. I urge parents, the medical community, and transitioners to be careful, because a mistaken transition is no joke.

Was your family transphobic?

I will speak mostly about my mom, as I (almost) never talked with my dad and siblings about being transgender. This was my choice, not theirs, and if I could have helped it I wouldn’t have talked with my mom about it either; the only reason it came up was because she was scheduling my appointments and she was concerned (more on that below). I had no interest in presenting as a woman around my family because I didn’t feel relaxed around them. This lack of relaxation was not specific to my “being trans” — it wasn’t transphobia that I was afraid of; if I had decided to go all-in and present as female around my family my dad would have had precisely no reaction to it and my siblings would have been fully accepting.

My mom questioned my stated gender identity. She didn’t want me to alter my genitals. She thought it would be more difficult for me to be trans and thought that if I felt feminine I could explore it without changing my body. Is she transphobic? Only if each transitioner is absolutely right about every decision they make for themselves and should not be questioned about them. That isn’t true for anyone and it’s even less true for teenagers. My mom wasn’t considering my choices morally or ideologically; she was concerned about the effects my choices might have on my life, which sounds like the bread and butter of responsible parenthood.

When I decided to transition, she made her opinion known but did not interfere. When I made the decision to detransition, she was relieved, but there was no judgment, no “I told you so”, just unconditional support. She was never concerned with the idea of being transgender; she was concerned with me, and that’s why she’s not transphobic.

What is your history with psychedelics?

I started taking mushrooms late at night when I was 15 and quickly began using them as a means of escaping misery. I saw in them a potential for reaching out beyond myself, which I wanted, as I was perpetually stuck inside my own head. I had a few bad trips, which were probably due to my expecting too much out of the experience and not being open to what my unconscious now had the power to show me, but I kept taking them because of the potential I saw in them.

This would be a common cautionary tale against drug misuse, except the thing is that sometimes it worked. My first memory of real empathy was when I took mushrooms with my high school girlfriend at sixteen. We got into a fight, the source of which was that I was angry at her because she wasn’t as interesting as I wanted her to be. Then I had a thought, which was mine, but not mine: “What if what you have to say isn’t the most important thing that can be said right now?“ For the first time ever, I let someone else control a conversation. During another experience, when I was eighteen (I had switched to LSD by this point), I realized I had been a really crappy son to my mom — I lied, stole, yelled, and mischaracterized her to my friends (often as transphobic) — and I apologized the next morning. In one night, I lost an adversary and gained a source of unconditional love and support.

But LSD didn’t work the same whenever there was something that I refused to accept. A common part of psychedelic experiences is altered visual perception; on these occasions I didn’t even get that. All of my conscious and unconscious energy would get swept up in the vortex of an internal war between my conscience and my needs. Something that came up a lot in my psychedelic experiences was whether I was really trans. I questioned the legitimacy of my transition from its start and obsessed over whether I could prove it logically. I’d look on Reddit for questions like “how do you know for sure you’re trans?” to find better tools for convincing myself of something I didn’t feel. But before talking about this internal war, I will talk about a couple others.

The first internal war I had was fought over my high school girlfriend. I knew that she wasn’t good for me from the start. I often was unhappy being around her and would take convoluted routes to her house to avoid seeing her. But I needed her. So I told myself, in a bit of mental judo, “plenty of people are confused about their feelings like this; there’s no reason to worry her. Just say you love her; everything will just be a whole lot less stressful.” This war ended in defeat for my conscience, and I managed to push the question deep, deep down. (I never did feel anything — I don’t believe I was capable of unselfish feelings at that point in my life.)

The greatest internal war I ever had was fought over my college girlfriend. My conscience had become stronger (how, I don’t know) but so had my needs. Our relationship was progressing without any noticeable problems (at least from my perspective), until I took LSD and my conscience got a thought in edgewise that I really would have preferred had gone unthought: “you don’t have feelings for her.” And it was true. I looked within myself and found nothing. But I needed her. I couldn’t not date her. I told her that I didn’t have feelings for her twice over the next few months in an attempt to resolve the tension in me. But both times when she seemed about to leave, that was too much, and I would get her to come back to me in whatever way I could.

Here’s the thing about LSD — it weakens your ego. (Ever heard of “ego death”?) I wanted that because I hoped that I would learn something to help me escape the constant pressure of my conscience and my needs. I had to take LSD because it was a way out. But I had to transition, because sexual fantasy and a social persona were also ways out. And I had to date my girlfriends, because female attention, for as long as it lasted, was a way out too. I was caught between a rock and hard place. My conscience refused to let me forget, and for that I am forever grateful. But my needs refused to give up what they had, and I was not yet strong enough to break free of them myself.

This is why my girlfriend and all of our mutual friends dumping me was such a godsend. I had lost everything — not just her; I had lost a lot of “being trans” as well, because many of my trans behaviors were things I did around her and our friends. All I had left was a flimsy persona with no one to sustain it. My conscience won the college girlfriend war because my needs no longer had anything to fight for. One psychedelic afternoon in early March, I understood not only that I didn’t love my girlfriend, but also that I was horrible to her. I learned to do without her and my friends by reaching out to my mom for support. It was just a transference between two coping mechanisms, but this one was a lot healthier. My conscience won the trans war too, firstly because my needs had less to fight for, but secondly because I was stronger, having withstood the pain of being a social outcast with some dignity. One psychedelic afternoon in early April, a voice that was mine, but not mine, spoke to me while I was looking down at my body in the shower, and it said: “you are not trans. You never were.” And I listened.

Disclaimer: don’t go reading this and thinking you should take psychedelics to fix your problems. I’m not saying doing so is good or bad — I’m withholding my opinion. Here are two facts instead: My relationship with psychedelics was unhealthy, but I am a better person because I did them. I took them so often because I was trying to find a way out of the vice grip of the opposing demands of my conscience and my needs without having to actually put in any effort. If you have the same problems I do, see a therapist and waste no effort finding one that works for you. You might also look into the work of Carl Jung; his practice of active imagination has the same therapeutic benefits of psychedelics that I sought — a connection with the unconscious — without the need to use powerful drugs for self-medication.

Do you have anything you want to say to transitioners (or anyone considering doing so)?

I have a definition of trans that I prefer to all others: someone is trans if they are made better by transitioning. I wasn’t trans. Over three years of hormonal transition, I didn’t get better.

I thought I was trans because pretending to be a woman made me feel happy, safe, and excited. I hated who I was, so I pretended I was someone else, and that made me feel safe. Plenty of teenagers experiment with personas; that mine happened to be a woman makes sense given my personal history. At eight years old, in the midst of a subpar home life, I became addicted to porn and nursed fantasies of being the women in the videos. Given that my formative sexual years were centered around using voyeuristic masturbation to escape an unsatisfactory reality, it’s no wonder that the idea of altering my body grabbed my attention.

There’s much more to this story, and I’ve written about it elsewhere. But for this answer, here’s one of my biggest reasons for transition: the narrative of using transition to escape depression and anxiety caused by gender dysphoria. When I was anxious and depressed, the reason was gender dysphoria and the path out was medical transition. During my teenage years, I acquired hormones through a local clinic. After that, the natural next step was sexual reassignment surgery, which I went as far as passing (!) an initial screening for and scheduling an appointment for some months out. This would have been irreversible, and I am very, very glad I didn’t do it.

My point in this message isn’t to pass negative moral judgment on my feelings or anyone else’s. It definitely isn’t to say that everyone who transitions, or wants to, feels like I did. My point is that there were reasons why transitioning felt right to me, but they had nothing to do with my depression and anxiety. Because I believed that I was depressed and anxious because I was trans, the real reasons why went unaddressed and grew unchecked until my life fell apart.

I’m writing this message to you to tell you that transitioning is not the solution to all of your problems. I don’t mean you’re not trans. I mean that even if you’re trans, transitioning is only one part of getting better. If you’re pinning your hopes on your transition, what I just said is a real hell of a thing to hear. And I get that, so I’m not gonna tell you to just deal, because that doesn’t help anyone. Instead I’m going to tell you how I made my life worth living after I stopped transitioning, because you might hear something that can help you.

So here’s what I want you to do — and I’m serious, when you stop listening, I want you to do this. Go get a pen and a piece of paper and write down some lofty goals you have. Examples include: “Get into a good college.” “Stop doing heroin.” “Feel like life is worth living.” Then, get another piece of paper and write down all the things you could do to make your life even just a little bit better. “Make my bed every Saturday.” “Find a psychologist.” “Call a friend once a week.” There are so many more than that. Get creative! Start small. If the task is too hard, you need to be more humble. If you can’t write about your feelings for an hour a week, how about fifteen minutes? How about five? If you won’t take all the dishes out of your room, how about instead of beating yourself up for being stupid and useless, you take one out every time you use the restroom? Just one! That’s way better than none! Start small. You can do it. If you feel like giving up, do less, but never do nothing. Now tape or pin these two pieces of paper up somewhere you can see.

Okay, so now you’ve got some goals for the future and some things you can do now. The plan is to get these two lists to meet in the middle. For example: “I’m working on this homework assignment for five minutes today so I can become the kind of person who can work for longer so I can get a good grade in this class so that I can get into a good college.” Or perhaps, “I’m taking this dish out of my room because I feel better when my room is cleaner and that makes me feel like life is more worth living.” That’s what it means to follow your dreams: to have the things you’re doing right now connect you to a positive future that you imagined.

I want you to do one more thing: really consider what your life would be like if you weren’t trans and you stopped transitioning. Again, I’m not saying you’re not trans — I’m saying you must consider it. If you’re anything like I was, not being trans sounds like a bleak existence. So set some goals and do small things to make your world right now a little less bleak than it could be. Then after you’ve put yourself together a little, ask yourself, “Do I still need this? Do I still need to be trans?” It’s possible that you do, and if you do, that’s okay. I mean it. But you might not. Don’t be afraid of that possibility. No one — not me, not your psychologist, not the government, not your family, not your friends, and definitely not social media, should tell you what to think about this. This is the only body you are ever going to get, and it’s yours.

Transitioning is not the only way to improve your life. Go get a pen and two pieces of paper and make things better.