You know, I'm sure that by someone's metrics I qualify as a detransitioner which is sort of weird to think about.
I have zero regrets, but like, I have definitely gone from being very insecure about myself, to experimenting with gender, and subsequently coming out the other side massively more secure in my masculinity and what that means to me - and I'm positive some (cis, incurious) people would see that from the outside and think "Oh he changed his mind".
Actually I'm sure the people that might think that are exclusively from the pool of people who when I came out, instantly assumed I was exclusively transfemme despite me being very upfront about being Enby. Looking at you, certain family members.
this is good illumination on why I think we'd be better off eliminating the term "detransition" entirely. it frames harmless experimentation as a mistake. it's indelibly associated in the public mind with a body "permanently scarred" by "the wrong" hormones — simultaneously reinforcing stigmas around trans bodies, and usurping sympathy for them onto (assumed-)cis ones.
I'd love to see a real push to change the language to retransition, because it's really exactly that and the implications of "did it more than once!" are far better for everyone than "shouldn't have in the first place."
Heck yeah! I have been pushing for 'retransition' in my circles pretty heavily for a while now because if I view transition as a line segment rather than a ray, a thing which has a starting point but no ending point, I invalidate myself just as thoroughly as that trans chat on telegram that ostracized me as soon as I got surgery because I was 'done' and not worth their time, or just as thoroughly as those who have tilted their heads and said, "You got voice training — hell, your instrument for you bachelor's degree was voice — why do you let yourself sound like that?"
As soon as I view transition as a line segment with an end point, I throw out the moment I started learning how to love my body. I throw out the moment I found a way to own the masculinity that has been a part of me for as long as I have known what masculinity is. I throw out friends whose transition looks different from mine because, in the end, it is not a ray, some straight line continuing forever, but a ceaseless path made of a thousand curves.
The only linear thing we experience is time, and even that is up in the air.
I also retransitioned from transmasc to butch/androgynous lesbian and I'm always a bit afraid to bring it up. I still very much do not consider myself to be cis and i will bite if someone she/hers me without pre-approval, but I do feel much more balanced and rounded as a person nowadays than when i was desperately clinging to masc-passing and rejecting everything feminine. It's such a different feeling
