My name is Helena, and as of this writing I’m a 23-year-old woman who, as a teenager, believed I was transgender. In the years since detransitioning (stopping testosterone treatment and no longer seeing myself as transgender), I’ve become interested in exploring why, in the last decade, nearly every English-speaking country has seen a meteoric rise in adolescents believing they are transgender and pursuing cosmetic medical and surgical interventions. Here, I’d like to go over how and why I came to see myself as transgender, the process of transitioning, and the events leading up to and following my detransition.  

The short version of my detransition story for those who want the bare details is that when I was fifteen, I was introduced to gender ideology on Tumblr and began to call myself nonbinary. Over the next few years, I would continue to go deeper and deeper down the trans identity rabbit hole, and by the time I was eighteen, I saw myself as a “trans man”, otherwise known as “FtM”. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood to begin a testosterone regimen. At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19, sometime around February or March 2018. When the disillusionment fully set in, I stopped the testosterone treatment and began the process of getting my life back on track. It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr.

But what leads a girl with no history of discomfort with stereotypical “girl” toys and clothes, or even the slightest desire to be a boy in childhood, to want to be a “man” through hormonal injections as she approached adulthood? In a vacuum, such a profound confusion leading to such drastic measures sounds like it should be rare and a sign of some sort of severe mental disturbance. Was I a fluke? Was I some kind of idiot who mistakenly believed I was trans because I’m crazy or just downright irresponsible?

The truth is that there has been an extreme rise in adolescents, especially girls, believing they are transgender. UK NHS referral data shows a 4000% increase in pediatric gender service referrals (not a typo). So-called “gender dysphoria”, which was once a very rare diagnosis that described mostly prepubescent boys and adult men, is now most commonly diagnosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explosive numbers are a result of increased societal acceptance, and that at long last trans people are coming out of hiding and living as their authentic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see comparable rates of transgender identity across all age groups and between both sexes, but its disproportionately adolescent females feeling that warm and fuzzy inclusive acceptance. Considering “acceptance” now implies supraphysiological doses of cross sex hormones and having healthy body organs surgically rearranged, it’s worth a deeper look into what kinds of factors are driving this population clamoring to go under the knife.

How did it happen?

As a child, nobody would have pegged me as a future transitioner; I was never particularly masculine or even tomboyish. I hated sports, roughhousing, and getting dirty. I liked Barbies, playing dress up, and getting toy makeup sets for Christmas. Of course, nobody is a walking sex stereotype so there were certainly “boy” things I enjoyed, but my point is that neither female-typical activities nor being seen as a girl caused any distress for me before I was introduced to gender ideology. On the other hand, even at a young age I was beginning to experience some deep emotional difficulties unrelated to gender that would get more urgent over time. I suffered a serious loss when I was seven, and the rest of my family took the “don’t talk about it” approach, so my grief festered like an infected wound. My family was also very preoccupied with image, especially dieting and weight, and this began to have a pronounced effect on how I saw myself (and on my brother, too). By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder. In eighth grade, I lost touch with most of my school friends, and was too self-conscious and preoccupied with my eating disorder to put myself out there again. I started skipping school, spending lunch in the bathroom, and in general just keeping my head down, trying to get through the day unnoticed.

During this time, I developed an obsession with classic rock, and while searching the internet for photos of young Elvis Presley I found a website called Tumblr. I immediately noticed that on Tumblr, there were many accounts posting about 50s, 60s, and 70s artists and that best of all, they were other teenage girls. I made an account and began posting scans of some vintage pop magazines I had bought off eBay, and soon enough, these accounts were following me back. Between sharing photos, drawings, and fanfiction, these girls were posting about their lives and going into deep detail about their struggles. Many were social outcasts like me, also struggling with things like self-harm and eating disorders. Finding a community of such like minded people felt amazing, and I quickly began spending nearly every waking moment on Tumblr or messaging some friend I had met on there. If I had any remaining motivation to integrate myself into real life, I lost that here. At school, I would sit in the back of the class, scrolling Tumblr and talking to Tumblr friends without engaging in class. When I returned home, I would open Tumblr on my laptop or hop on Skype to voice call with girls halfway across the planet, ignoring homework and studying all the while. As you can imagine, my high school GPA was abysmal. Tumblr would stick with me as I moved through various interests, from classic rock to Harry Potter, to One Direction and Justin Bieber, each iteration subsumed in a community of countless other intense, obsessive girls like me. I was in love with my new world, and even now I look back on some of these times spent on Tumblr, and the girls I met, with incredible fondness.

Tumblr, though, wasn’t only a place to post art and make friends. Being such a secluded platform with a fairly homogenous user base not only demographically (mostly teenage girls, many of whom white and middle to upper middle class), but especially in terms of personality type, it developed its own culture, distinct from the youth culture of the general population. Because many of its users were like me, using Tumblr as an all-day alternate reality escape from the real world, this “culture” should be understood in the most literal sense of the word. One should think of Tumblr, especially from 2009-2016, as a secluded island nation whose people rarely interact with the outside world, and thus have language, customs, hierarchy, and history that is entirely unique and at first incomprehensible to people from other nations visiting the island. There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person, and I’ve heard so many times from normal people (for lack of a better word) that they “tried Tumblr, but couldn’t figure it out.”

We’ve all read Lord of the Flies, right? A bunch of tween boys get stranded on an island and all of their deepest, most repressed urges surface as they desperately attempt to organize and manage the tiny preteen society they’ve found themselves in. The novel ends in bloodshed, as the author theorizes that the immaturity, communication breakdown, and decision making difficulties one would find in a group of adolescent boys would create a chamber of destruction. How would it have ended differently, some have asked, if the story was one of a stranded group of girls? What would happen if every troubled, isolated, self-loathing, depressed, and emotionally overwrought teenage girl in the world wound up alone on an island?

Tumblr. Tumblr would happen.

~A quote from this series I began long ago, and unfortunately have yet to finish.

A major aspect of Tumblr culture has always been social justice ideology. Things that are now being played out and witnessed by the general public on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, like dissociative identity disorder LARPers, demisexuals, neopronouns, otherkin, and everything you see on @LibsOfTikTok, have long existed in an uncannily identical form on tumblr.com. The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie uncle knew the term “CRT”.  As cultish religions tend to operate, open devotion to the religion is mandatory. Perhaps the outsiders most likely to understand the way social dynamics worked on that website would be survivors of Scientology or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.

I found myself in a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!

Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege, you can relax a little and talk about your life without wondering if you are distracting from the struggles of or speaking over marginalized groups, because you are marginalized too. With the new pronouns often comes a wave of positive affirmation from friends and followers, and the subconscious picks up quickly that there’s a way to make the deal of being on Tumblr even sweeter.

This is the incentive I felt to comb through my thoughts and memories for things that might be further evidence that deep down, I wasn’t really a girl. I hated my body; it must be because I don’t like that its female. Boys have never been interested in me like they are with other girls; well, maybe I would be attractive as a boy, and then I could be like all these cute “gay trans boys” I saw dating each other online. I didn’t have many friends, it must be because being a girl isn’t my “authentic self”, and that was getting in the way of my social life. Plus, people were nicer to me since I said I was trans so that must be an indication that being trans is the right thing to do to make friends. Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women. I must not have really been meant to be a girl, because if I was, this wouldn’t all be so scary and confusing. I felt like my family didn’t care about me or pay attention to me, it must be because they subconsciously have always known I’m trans and they’re transphobic. I mean, they did make fun of Caitlyn Jenner that one time. They hate me! Just wait until I tell them I’m going to start testosterone; they’ll have to pay attention to me then.

I was also certified boy-crazy, but in the weird nerdy stalker way, not the actually dating boys way. I always had a crush on some boy I would never talk to, whether he was a celebrity, fictional character, or someone I just saw around at school. When I had a crush, it would utterly dominate my mind. I would become infatuated with every little detail of how they looked, spoke, laughed, and moved. I had elaborate fantasy worlds in my head down to the minutia of what we would talk to each other about on the drive back from delivering our third baby at the hospital. I had a one-track mind and I craved an intense fantasy element. This led me to the world of fanfiction, mostly male/male pairings. What could be better than boys? Double boys! But they’re written by girls so they make sense and feel familiar instead of different and intimidating. I loved the unlimited amount of creative and exciting content other girls were writing about my favorite characters. I wasn’t super into erotic fanfiction, and if I did read it, it was always within the context of a longer, more relationship-oriented story, but pure erotica was popular too (often carrying heavy kinky themes…). I began to identify with these representations of boys written by other young females, and the themes within male/male fanfiction were so much more titillating than anything in mainstream, professionally produced media, or even heterosexual fanfiction for that matter. The pairing being same sex seemed to give writers and readers the freedom to explore these characters and their relationships without being constricted by the norms that come with heterosexual dynamics. It became this liminal space where I could explore what interested me about boys and fantasies about relationships, connecting it to whatever my media obsession was at the time, without the pressure of interacting with real boys, as real boys made me painfully bashful.

I wasn’t alone in these mental and emotional traits that led me to shipping and fanfiction, and I certainly wasn’t alone in wanting to be a boy after immersing myself in this kind of content. “Shipping” is the word for being interested in a pairing between two characters or people, and each “ship” has a community comprised of devoted shippers as well as people with a casual interest in the pairing. Being involved in these communities, comprised of mostly other trans-identified teenage girls, created a feedback loop in which we would obsess over these male characters or celebrities, share fantasies, art, and writing, and affirm and engage each other over these interests. One last aspect that bears discussion is the concept of “head canons”. In a story, the “canon” is the timeline and facts of the story as the official author or historical evidence relays. A “head canon” is anywhere where one’s personal perception of or preferences for the story deviates from the official canon. For example, if in the canonical Harry Potter story Harry is an English teenage boy attending wizard school, one might have a head canon that Harry is actually black, nonbinary, and drops out of Hogwarts to become a professional chef. The concept of head canons opens a whole world of possibilities for projecting onto a character and muddling the fantasy of one’s personal identity or desired reality with the fantasy of the identity and life of an entirely fictional character in a fictional universe. In my head canon, Harry Potter, who I related to and was a meaningful character to me, was born female and was either nonbinary or a trans man depending on what point in my life you would have asked me. When I watched the Harry Potter movies, where Harry is obviously played by a male actor, or read the books, where nowhere in the text does J.K. Rowling state Harry is transgender, I would still kind of interpret the story through my own lens in which he was, and thus further see myself in him.

The adolescent brain is in a developmental stage primed to incorporate experiences into the process of identity formation, and spending so much time in fantasy without building much of an identity through real social and life experiences can lead to the identity and fantasy elements becoming indistinguishable.

My perception of myself as trans formed in the intersection between overwhelming emotional struggles, heavy fantasy, emotional and intellectual infatuation with males (real people, fictional characters, and the idea of males generally), fanfiction, social and ideological incentives to be trans, and insulation from experiences and perspectives that might have challenged the views I was developing about myself and the world. Each individual girl’s story will vary, give or take a few factors, but in the broadest sense these are the basic factors that comprise the trans “social contagion” described by people like researcher Lisa Littman and Abigail Shrier in her book, Irreversible Damage, particularly when we are talking about male-attracted girls. What I’ve said here barely scratches the surface.

From fantasy to reality

Over the three years that I identified as trans prior to reaching legal adulthood, I kept this huge aspect of my self-perception to the confines of Tumblr and the few school friends I met after switching high schools, also avid Tumblr users, and all but one also identified as trans. I cut my hair, wore baggy clothes to hide my body, and was gifted a breast binder by a friend from Tumblr that I would wear out and about, but I didn’t talk to my parents about any of this until late into my senior year of high school. By this time, I fully identified as a “trans boy”, wished I had a male body, and wanted to medically transition.

When I told my mother about all this it was on an impulse. I had a whole spiel planned out where I would tell her all about how I was always trans, I just didn’t know it, and hand her a big packet of printed out articles from pro-trans organizations about what different words meant and why I needed to transition. For some reason I still don’t quite understand, on one gloomy day we were driving back from the grocery store and I just blurted it out mid conversation, telling her that I was going by a male name, male pronouns, and was going to transition. I immediately wanted to stuff my foot into my mouth, but it was too late, and the dead awkward silence was setting in. For what seemed like eternity, she drove in silence. I stared at the headboard, eyes wide and heart thumping. Finally, she responded with a word: “No.”

“No, I am not going to call you that. You are Helena and you are a girl,” she said, maintaining her glare at the road before us.

Deflated and conflict avoidant, I remember saying something meek and passive aggressive like “if you feel that way, I guess…” and we finished our drive in silence.

The next day, I went to the school library and printed out all those articles I had saved for my planned “coming out”. When I got home, I scrawled a long-winded letter on loose leaf paper with what was originally going to be my “coming out” spiel, stapled it all together, waited for her to get home late and head to bed, then I slipped it under her bedroom door at night as she slept. The following day, I anxiously awaited speaking to her, wondering what she thought of all the articles. Had they convinced her? They had to, right? I was showing her that experts clearly agreed that trans people like me are valid.

When I returned from school that day, the packet was face down in the kitchen trash.

Distraught, I agonized over what would happen when she got home. Would she yell at me? What did she think of the packet? I wondered if she had already read “transphobic” material that countered the articles I sent her. Hopefully she read my letter and could see past any transphobia and realize that this was the real me. She didn’t yell at me though. Instead, we mostly avoided each other for a few days and then both acted like nothing ever happened.

This would continue for months until another fateful confrontation, ironically at the same grocery store we were driving home from the first time. I don’t remember how the argument started, but somehow, we got into it over my conviction that I was transgender.

“I don’t understand why you can’t just be a masculine woman,” she said.

I responded, “Because I’m not a masculine woman! I’m a trans boy!”

She didn’t understand that the issue wasn’t of repressed masculinity itching to be let loose, it was a conviction that I was a part of the transgender identity group, and any masculinity I engaged in was a conscious supplement to that end.

Yelling and crying between us ensued, very classy for the middle of the dairy aisle at Kroger. She told me I had lost my mind and needed to see a psychiatrist. I told her she was a hateful person who wanted trans people to die. We went back to not talking much after that.

I was heartbroken. Now that I’m older and on the other side of this, I understand why my mom was struggling so much with her reactions to what I was demanding of her. We never had a relationship where we confided in each other often, and she can be somewhat emotionally distant. I don’t demonize her for it anymore, but at the time I interpreted her unwillingness to enterta