From: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/4kp5jt/peak_trans_iii_tell_your_story_here/da1i9kn/

This ended up being very long, sorry, but i'm submitting because I typed it.

I never really thought about trans issues at all before having the experience I am about to speak about. Seeing as my politics are so left wing they fall off the spectrum, I've always just thought “oh, it's the next civil rights thing, Joe Biden is talking about it, cool, good on them.” I am now convinced that it is a patriarchal cult that tells people it's not OK to feel what they feel and be who they are, and that they need undergo painful surgeries to conform to everyone else's ideas. To be clear, I think that society ought to get to the point where anyone who wants to wear and dress and makeup should be able to wear it without fear of violence or increased social stigma. What I have a problem with is the notion that simply because someone is suffering due to social stigma, it means the best thing to do is change their body, and the notion that gender roles are someone linked to biological reality.

I convinced myself that I was trans for a week. It may sound trivial, but when I say convinced, I mean like completely 100 percent convinced. And it was an emotionally exhausting experience that, at the end of, gave me a window into my own internalized misogyny.

This was in the middle of exams and I was on very little sleep. For whatever reason, I came across trans issues, then remembered a bunch of stuff from my childhood about liking girly things and the color pink and I was like “holy shit, I'm a trans woman.” I tell my girlfriend, she is sad but tells me that she doesn't want me to think she is making choices for me.

As I go through this experience, I start looking into different resources. One of the first I came across was a trans chatline. When I told them I thought I was trans the first thing they said was “have you booked the surgery?” After telling them that seemed like jumping the gun a bit, they responded with “well, better to book it now even if you chance your mind because of long waiting lists.” Thinking this was incredibly irresponsible of them, even in my current state, I just left the chat. Most resources were like this, no real critical thinking, some even explicitly said things like, if you think that you're trans, you are trans, don't overthink it (really meant don't think about it at all). Ask transgender on reddit was also awful in retrospect.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend started doing all this research and found stuff on de transitioning and radical feminism (including this subreddit). Every time I showed her a study that was like, “it seems transgender is a real thing,” she was able to point out how flawed the model of the study was, or how bad the sample size was, basically every single one of these studies had some critical flaw. Seeing the de transition stuff got to me a lot, but at the same time I was thinking “maybe they weren't really trans, but I know I am.”

But then I really started to go through the radfem sources, and really started to study them. I thought that if I am talking about changing my body and life, I need to seriously consider this, and not simply dismiss critical sources as bigotry and hatred as the libfems would claim. And the more I read, the more I came to realize, yeah, these women are right, I really can't deny it. The libfems can call them bigoted all they want, but from a purely logical standpoint, from a purely empirical standpoint, they make more sense.

What I got from them is the insight that trans identity is based purely on the patriarchal idealization of women's bodies, and a feeling of entitlement to women's bodies and women's spaces in order for men to be cure of their suffering. This obsession with “passing” makes it obvious, but there is more going on here. I think it also has to do with living in a society that devalues suffering and tells you that it's not OK to suffer. We all suffer at times from our social reality, whether it be not fitting in at school, or not having a good home life, stuff like that. Of course, women in particular suffer due to larger structures of patriarchal oppression. The solution is obviously not to tell women to get in line with patriarchy, or tell women to surgically change their bodies into male bodies so they no longer suffer from patriarchal oppression (which would never be offered as a solution en mass because I agree with the notion that patriarchy is about access to women's bodies), rather the solution is to fight this system of oppression. Anyone on this subreddit will know this of course, but it's something I hadn't really thought through until going through this.

For myself, I was someone who was not socialized with hyper masculinity at home (turned out my father was gay) in a day when most of the other kids were. I was bullied by my peers for not being into masculine super hero stuff. I had a bully in nursery school that was completely one way, and my teacher never did anything about because she said we needed to work it out for ourselves, which is a very patriarchal thing looking back. I was shamed by my peers for being interested in books. In regards to dysphoria, I convinced myself that I had phantom breasts during this experience. I started to feel as though my brain had somehow mapped them out. The truth is, I am a survivor of sexual abuse and I was just experiencing my trauma of something that happened to me.

Basically, for me, my self evidence for being trans consisted of the aggregation of my suffering. These individual things are not causally linked in the sense of them leading from a single, biological source. In short, I convinced myself I had a reductionist solution to my suffering.

This is how all cults operate. They tell you they have the solution to your suffering if you follow them. I honestly believe that trans is a cult, offering people a fantasy world to escape their suffering. And it is a fantasy world that is enforced by terrible social attitudes, and feelings of entitlement to women's bodies and women's spaces.