A Canadian detransitioner submitted this comment to our Election 2021 page on the evening of the Canadian federal election this week. We made sure she was ok and put her in touch with some supportive people before publishing her comment here:

Thank you for existing. I am a middle-aged transer, then detranser……alone, embarrassed for doing this to myself. My gender dysphoria was triggered in childhood. I Iearned to live with it, until my 30s, when I became a drag king, and got so much positivity for being so masculine for the first time in my life, that my GD got re-triggered by all the confirmation and conflation between performing gender and actually being that gender.

People were always asking me when I was going to transition, so much so, I started having all those thoughts I had as a kid, “everything would be better for me if I were male”.

All my life, going to the women’s restroom caused me to sweat, because, if there were women there, and if I wasn’t in a tank top and shorts, I would get disapproving looks by other females. I was often questioned, and told “this is the ladies room” or told to get out. I once had a whole group of women screaming and pointing “man! Man!” at me in the women’s YMCA change room. I don’t think I ever stripped so fast to expose my breasts as I did then, so why wouldn’t I, after years of this stress at just going to the bathroom, would I not want to just go and pee in the men’s room without anyone caring?

les mer her