Story My (pathetically long) sob story

[hobbydevil]

TLDR: Distressed, mentally ill young woman has gender dysphoria, makes dumb decisions, gets fast-tracked towards medical transition including surgery by overly affirmative doctors and therapist overlooking very obvious red flags in her medical and personal history, woman fucks up her body and health, regrets it and plans to kill herself over it. Boo-hoo. :(

I feel extremely and utterly lonely right now and I feel the need to share my story with someone... anyone. I just want someone to know before I ctb (eventually, not right now - I am planning to leave by the beginning of next year).

I am very nervous because I am deeply ashamed of how my life went, but I am just going to trust that I'm not going to get ridiculed here.

Disclaimer though because some parts of it are about a pretty controversial topic: This is just MY life and me rambling about it and interpreting it the way I experienced it. Parts of it might seem political and even controversial, but I really just want to... talk about my own life and how all of this affected me. I won't deter anyone from doing what I did, even if I feel that it was horrible for me personally.

I'm 23 years old and a lesbian woman. I'm also an "ex-transsexual" (born female, lived as "male" or a couple of years) who permanently damaged her body.
This is my (pathetically long) sob story.

I grew up in a perfectly normal, loving family. There was honestly nothing too wrong there. (Okay, you could probably find some things that are wrong, but I consider those very normal slightly wonky family dynamics). My parents, who are relatively well off, did all they could to provide me with everything I needed for a hopefully happy and successful life, and I can't really remember anything bad happening to me... until I turned 15 and developed anorexia & bulimia seemingly out of nowhere.
It wasn't completely out of nowhere though - at the time my best friend had been struggling with anorexia and bulimia, and while I (without much success) attempted to help her recover I somehow got sick as well.
I think it was a combination of food, weight and appearance in general suddenly becoming this huge, all encompassing topic between us, and me already having been an unstable teenage girl who was very insecure about her appearance. Anorexia tends to spread among teenage girls anyway.
There had also been some people bullying me for my appearance when I was 12/13 etc, and I guess it must have gotten to me more than I realized at the time. I had always been really "good" at repressing shit (this will come back up later).

Anyway, regardless of how it started, I got very sick very quickly. I'm an obsessive person when it comes to these things and I lost weight very fast. Probably because of all the compliments I received when the weight loss started - what a high that was... and so "motivating". Anorexia was the perfect coping mechanism for me at the time. I over-exercised, refused to eat, would sometimes even throw up water because the weight increase on the scale after a glass of water made me feel horrible... It was all about control, control, control.
I didn't even look better or good at all while underweight, I looked... like someone who was slowly dying - but I felt so disciplined and strong and successful because I managed to stick to my disordered goals and rules.
I eventually had to get hospitalized when I was 16 due to me being close to death because of how underweight I was.

I was in inpatient treatment on and off until I was 17, then I got more "stable" - which basically meant I was just doing all my disordered ED shit in private and kept a healthy-ish weight to seem "normal".

I switched schools around that time to start over "fresh". The school I switched to started from grade 11 and went to 13, so I was able to join a completely new class where everyone was starting over anew, which was perfect for me.
School was great honestly, but didn't really help much with my mental health. In fact because I did really well in school nobody there noticed something was still wrong with me.

I don't think the treatment I received for my ED ever really helped with my warped mindset towards self-worth and my value as a person or any of my other mental problems, they just made me gain weight until I looked healthy, tried to scare me off by showing me how anorexia was damaging my health and sent me on my way. I was just as unstable as before, but I started expressing it in a different way...
I had struggled with binging and purging before, but when I turned 17 I straight up became a raging bulimic.

And I mean raaaging. Binging on junk food and throwing up whenever I was left alone for more than 10 minutes.
The binges prevented me from losing weight - you can't really always get all the food out by throwing up - so I didn't really look sick anymore to anyone.
My family was the only one well aware of my bulimia, and me and my parents had huge fights about it (at one point they wanted me to move out because my self-destructive behavior was making everyone at home sad, especially my mom and my sister), so eventually I just... became better and better at hiding and seeming fine.
Only binging & throwing up at night when everyone else was asleep, or waiting for opportunities when my parents and sister weren't home.
I kind of developed a daily schedule around it.
Woke up, went to school, picked up junk food on the way back home, waited until my mom left the house to pick up my little sister from school, ate half of the food, threw up and cleaned up the "evidence".
Then did homework and other stuff, waited until it was night and everyone went to sleep, ate the rest of the food and threw up again, went to bed.
Repeat.

That was my daily routine, my normal.

So far, so bad. Back then I honestly often thought it couldn't get any worse, and I already felt suicidal at the thought of continuing life like that (couldn't imagine myself getting older than 20), but oh how wrong I was!

There are... two series of events that happened from that point on (age 17 to 19) that would eventually lead me down an even more self-destructive path:

1: I had a close male friend who sexually abused me.

I had met him years prior online and we had been friends for a while, but we got really close after my ED inpatient treatment because he visited me there one time and that turned it form a purely online friendship to actually meeting up in person from time to time. He was 5 years older and just as unstable as I was, but in a... different way.

He was helplessly obsessed with me as emotional support and wanted me to be his perfect girlfriend - despite me not being interested in him that way at all, especially because I was already aware that I felt attraction to women and none to men. He couldn't take no for an answer though, and would always attempt to pressure me into it.
We had endless conversations about why I didn't want to try dating him, and whenever he visited he would start crying when he had to go back home and ask for endless hugs or massages or other physical intimacy to cheer him up.
I felt sick during all of it and would dissociate a lot.
I was always really scared of saying no because I didn't want him to hurt himself (or to hurt me, which honestly was a fear of mine). I think it was emotional abuse, to be honest... I didn't want to make him cry so I went along with his requests.
He was honestly... messed up in general though, depression aside. Felt attracted to 12 & 13 year olds, obsessed with hentai, had really messed up rape fantasies about me that he would tell me about ("intrusive thoughts" that he simply *had* to tell me about to feel better) and I tried to be a supportive, understanding friend during all of it, even when he started going through my underwear when I left my room or kissed me or told me how easy it would be to rape me because I am weaker than him.

It feels so fucked up just to write this. At the time, when I was 18, I just thought all of this was no big deal. That it didn't affect me. Because I felt "fine" when he wasn't over and because he always "apologized" for his actions and acted like a decent friend the rest of the time.
But like I already wrote... I used to be so, so good at suppressing shit. So I did just that, and continued to be friends with him. I just tried inviting him over less and less to get away from him because I was scared.
I vividly remember though how I fantasized about starving myself to death again when he told me those things, so I guess it must have affected me a lot.

2: I got into my first relationship and it was a mess.

Ah, first love. At the new school I switched to I met the most perfect girl in the world.
She was a classmate. We became friends during the first year there and then something more than friends. She was so sweet. Artistic, funny, cute, nerdy, in many ways just like me but also really different. She was also gorgeous. We wrote stories together, we drew pictures for each other... I fell for her so hard, and the stars must have aligned perfectly because she fell for me, too.
Problem was she had a boyfriend. An older boyfriend who pressured her into sex, got angry and annoyed when she didn't want to be intimate and was anything but loving, who she would complain to me about all of the time.
One day after class she cried because of it and I consoled her like usual. Somehow the conversation went in a different direction that day though, and she ended up confessing that she would love to be with "someone like you (me)" instead, and eventually revealed she had feelings for me.
What followed were the happiest four days of my life. I confessed my own feelings, she was happy, I was happy, she promised to break up with him.
It happened on a friday and I was... pure happiness in human form the rest of the weekend. The next day, saturday, she even briefly dropped by my house to bring me roses while I wasn't home - meaning I came home to find roses on my bed, how fucking romantic and perfect. I was so happy.
Monday came, and after school we met up in the evening to hang out. I was still so deliriously lovedrunk. We had our first kiss that evening.
And then on Tuesday I got dumped.
Sort of. Basically she didn't want to break up with her boyfriend anymore, she wanted to save her relationship and try harder to salvage it. I don't really know - I guess she got cold feet, wasn't ready to come out, I have no idea to this day what exactly it all was...but she dumped me and wanted to simply remain friends. I don't really blame her for getting cold feet, it was a difficult situation for us all, maybe it was too rushed... but it really affected me, getting discarded like that after I had just made myself so vulnerable to her.

This started some of the worst months of my life. We basically had a weird love triangle going on. She stayed with her boyfriend, but flirted with me when we hung out. She told me to wait and wait and wait until she was ready... but could never tell me when. At one point it was "just give me a few months", then "after we finish high school, maybe", and so on.
I was so desperate and insecure that I just went along with it. Pathetic, I know. I thought I could convince her somehow, by being extra-loving and supportive but nothing I ever did was "enough" for her to pick me, even though she continued to be so unhappy with her boyfriend.

Eventually, after a couple of months like that, her boyfriend (who was aware of my existence) had enough and broke up with her. Then me and her got together.
I don't think I was really aware of it, but I think in a way I felt like... second best. Like she didn't actually want me.
It didn't help that she was still sort of grieving her former relationship when we officially got together... I totally understand her side, and it must have been very hard for her to deal with all of it (keep in mind her ex-boyfriend had essentially sexually pressured her as well, and she struggled with mental health in general, so we were already a dangerous mix) but in any case my already low self worth took a direct hit.

I was a changed person once we got together, and she often told me that. Before the love triangle drama, I had been really kind, loving... once we got together I was often strangely distant, standoffish, and struggled with intimacy and expressing affection.
I wasn't really aware of that either. I just noticed that I had issues being intimate (physically and emotionally - I would get extremely nervous and uncomfortable) but I didn't really connect it to what had happened in the months before we got together (or all my other trauma for that matter).

Also... being in my first lesbian relationship was... hard. My girlfriend-at-the-time's mom wasn't too happy with it, constantly making comments to her about staying on birth control in case she meets a man. At school we got... I don't want to say bullied, but we were in an all-girls-class and we started to get treated differently. People talking behind our backs, people asking sexual questions, people making up disgusting rumors about "lesbian orgies" we were supposedly having, people not wanting to share the locker room with us anyway because "ewww lesbians, they're going to perv on us!".
Not to mention getting shouted at by strangers in public...
With how shy and insecure I was re: sexuality and intimacy, this was hellish to me.
But that was also again something I wasn't really consciously aware of. I just started to feel more and more like I was... wrong. More wrong than I had ever felt before, but I couldn't quite put a finger on why.

That was when gender became a bigger topic in my life.
Have to do this in two parts because of the character limit. Sorry.

 

[Rachel74]

You have nothing to be ashamed for at all. You have done nothing wrong apart from love the wrong person. Sending hugs

 

[hobbydevil]

(Had to do this in two parts because of the character limit. Sorry.)

The beginning of the end.

I had learned about transsexualism a year prior, when I googled if there was any way to get a mastectomy without having breast cancer.
I never really cared for my breasts and I would often fantasize about having a male chest and being a boy in general. I had also been a tomboy as a child and tween, and I already hated my body because of my anorexia issues anyway.
When I learned that there were "men trapped in women's bodies" it all made sense to me. This was me!
I can't really explain where exactly it all came from, but I'm sure it's connected to the sexual abuse/harassment somehow, and me just rejecting myself in general.

In fact I am pretty sure my anorexia and gender identity issues/dysphoria are inherently linked... born from the same sources.

I already identified as "nonbinary" (basically "not like other girls" for me) at the time, but just a couple months after starting to date that girl I switched to identifying as male.
In retrospect, I think I wanted to be male to be... normal. Just a guy with a girlfriend. I didn't want to be a lesbian (I had internalized so much homophobia and thought of myself as disgusting, predatory...), and I didn't want to be... me. The insecure anorexic weird girl who made life bad for her family because she's mentally ill. I wanted to be this new, male version of me.
Part of me probably also associated being a woman with being weak, rape-able and a lot of the other disgusting things the sexually abusive friend had called me.

To sum it up I wanted to escape. My body, my identity, my sexuality, everything. I now consider my whole transition such an act of pure self-hatred. What could be more self-hating and self-rejecting than picking a different name and drastically changing your body (at the cost of your health)?
It's still a mystery to me sometimes how I went from a stance of body acceptance in eating disorder recovery, to me desperately wanting body modification at the expense of my health as "treatment". Goes to show how deluded I was.

Another contributing factor was probably one of my close friends identifying as male as well, starting exactly at the same time (without having talked to each other about it beforehand!). We had similar experiences in childhood - being tomboyish, not into girly things - and probably egged each other on a fair bit once we started talking about it to each other - social contagion is very much a real issue with disorders like this I feel like...

In any case, I started gender therapy that same year. I don't want to dwell too much on this part but my therapist was... a failure.

He was a 50+ year old extremely wealthy man with no kids. Which isn't to say people like that can't be good therapists, but... he certainly couldn't relate to a 19 year old anorexic lesbian woman all that much.
He didn't see any of the red flags (anorexic lesbian with dysphoria desperate to change her body? Not alarming at all, no sir!).
I told him I hated my female body and desperately wanted to be male, and he took my word for it and barely even encouraged me to try less-invasive alternatives or to really look at my life and the reasons for my gender identity issues (which there clearly would have been plenty of topics to talk about).

Instead, he prescribed me hormones and referred me to surgeons a year later, and encouraged me to change my legal name, which I gladly accepted.
To him I think gender therapy was always just about me proving how serious I was about transition. Problem is... you can be dead serious about things and still be wrong and disordered.
I can only really explain it like this:
When I was severely anorexic and underweight, there was nothing I wanted more than to lose another 3 kg, even knowing it was dangerous. I desperately wanted it. I was dead serious. I was completely out of my mind lost in the delusion and mental illness.
In transition, I desperately wanted to take testosterone, look male, get my breasts removed etc - even knowing it was dangerous. I was just as lost in the "euphoria" of getting to change who I am as I was when I first developed anorexia.

I got encouraged to accept and embrace my body and think about my health in anorexia recovery... in contrast, I got encouraged by every "gender specialist" I saw during my transition to do the exact opposite of that and take hormones and get surgery to fix my gender identity issues. I got told I was truly a man inside because I was masculine, and I latched on to that because I already felt so uncomfortable and broken as a woman, and confident when I imagined myself as a man.

Where I live you have to get therapy for a year, a diagnosis, and an evaluation by a second psychiatrist to transition - this is to ensure that only the people who really need to transition get to do so. Well, I went through the process and I can tell you it's absolutely pointless these days in many places, at least where I received counseling. Nobody detected any of the red flags in my background - instead everything got conveniently explained as a result of my dysphoria. Anorexia? Result of my dysphoria. Uncomfortable with being a lesbian? Because I'm really a man and men aren't lesbians! Uncomfortable with intimacy and sex? Because I am trapped in the wrong body!
This was right at the time when transgender activism really picked up, and it became socially unacceptable to really question a dysphoric person's desire to transition, which probably contributed to why I saw transition as my only option: it got presented as the only option, and an affirming, brave and beautiful one at that. A hope and promise of a better future to latch on to.

In any case... I transitioned and got considered a success story. I was so masculine, worked out a ton, seemed happy - meanwhile I continued to actually feel horrible on the inside. I never felt male enough. I still had issues with intimacy because of it - even with muscles and body hair, I was undeniably female. I constantly compared myself to men and my dysphoria really only got worse. After the breast removal surgery I got my uterus and ovaries removed because I felt so wrong having these female organs as a "man" - so horrible that I didn't care about the myriad of health risks associated with these procedures. I was also on my way to get SRS - genital surgery to create a fake-penis, which fortunately didn't actually happen because that surgery is just straight up gruesome and brutal to a female body.

I can only compare it to anorexia again - 16 year old me didn't care that she was going to die if she kept on starving, 20 year old me didn't care that she caused herself to be at risk for all these health complications, I just cared about following my disordered, self-destructive instinct of somehow changing my body to become happier and more comfortable in my skin.
And contrary to anorexia, I got encouraged by doctors, therapists, surgeons along the way, which helped me to ignore the risks. My surgeon called it a routine procedure, the hospital had a whole ward just for transsexuals, and in my trans support group surgery got celebrated... it all seemed so "normal" in a really weird way. I thought: if all these other young women are able to get it, and the nurses and doctors consider it "necessary treatment" for our gender identity disorder, well... then it must be the right treatment.
This is a very controversial statement, but in a way the trans support networks I was involved in functioned like pro-anorexia groups in the sense that objectively unhealthy behaviors and procedures got deemed necessary and even great, affirming, something to celebrate and look forward to etc.

How naive I was. I know I am responsible for these decisions, as I am the one who signed up for them (this horrible guilt and regret I have to live with is a big part of why I don't want to live anymore)... but at the same time I don't blame myself for it either, the same I wouldn't blame myself for my eating disorder if that makes sense.

I stayed transitioned until I turned 23, still completely sold on it all having been the right treatment (I explained my depression and doubts as me still being too dysphoric and needing more surgery.... again very comparable to how my anorexia functioned. You are not happy? Lose some more weight, and more and more and more...)
But then something changed.
Call it growing up, or maturing. During all of my transition I had suppressed so much bullshit - the sexual abuse, my sexuality issues... When I was 22 these topics came back up for a multitude of reason: I moved to the city where the abusive male friend was from, which made memories resurface. My girlfriend-at-the-time and I parted ways, which made me reflect on our time together. I attempted to finally recover from my bulimia (which had never gone away by the way) and in that process had to think about my helplessly disordered teenage self.

And it all just... clicked. I could see what all the specialists had missed: The very, very obvious connections between it all and my identity issues.
It was like somebody had flipped a switch in my brain honestly.

I still wanted to be a man, but I now understood *why*.
And I also understood that neither my mastectomy nor the hysterectomy had achieved what I had wanted... to really become male. I had just hurt my female body which now has the exact same health risks any other female body that went through a hysterectomy has.
Even testosterone treatment was unhealthy for my body - I got bad acne and it negatively affected my liver and blood levels in general.

So now here I am. 23 years old and... a broken woman? Reliant on HRT so I don't get even more sick. Missing organs that were perfectly healthy. Having wasted all that energy, time and money for something that only caused me to be seriously suicidal. With no way to really undo the permanent damage to my body and my life. Knowing that it all happened because I was a self-destructive, depressed teenage lesbian.

Frankly... I am done. I clearly messed up. Life in this state is not really worth living to me, not when I am forever haunted by how I could have been helped to avoid all of this.
I feel even more detached from my body (and just... myself) than ever before. I have health issues now. I am in constant pain, and I am constantly grieving my own spiritual suicide.

The only reason I am still here right now is my family, who will be very sad when I die, and the fact that I feel a sense of responsibility to tell therapists and surgeons about this possible outcome when obvious red flags are overlooked (because transition regret is currently not really talked about at all!).
The same professionals who wrote ridiculous referral letters to surgeons about how me not feeling comfortable in bikinis was a reason why I am "psychologically male" (yes, that really is a line in one of the evaluation letters I received from a transgender specialist) and should get surgery are still treating other young people like me right now. The one who actually included that absolutely ridiculous bikini thing runs a trans support group.

I have met so many young women in transition... A lot of them with histories of abuse, trauma, eating disorder, closeted homosexuality, and the number of "transition regretters" is already starting to creep up. That friend I mentioned before, who identified as male at the same time as me? She also transitioned the same way I did - albeit with different therapists and different surgeons - and regrets it now, four years later. It's heartbreaking.

I really don't want to be part of a transition regret suicide statistic, and I don't want to be a sad example for the regretters I have made friends with now (or the regretters of the future - and there will be many more imo...) but I also don't really want to be alive like this, and only living as a warning story for other people is... not worth all the constant heartbreak over my messed up life. That's my dilemma.

Thank you to whoever read all of this word-vomit.

(I would just like to say again that I have nothing against trans people... by all means - your body, your choice, I stand by that. But there is a very real problem with gender nonconforming and often times young gay people being fast-tracked towards medical transition right now, and I am just one of them. And it seriously destroyed all will to live in me - and I didn't even have much of that to begin with.)

 

[Strangeasangels]

I am so sorry. I am also a lesbian... 52 years. I was bi for much of my life but definitely was always more into women. I remember constant confusion growing up. It was a different time and my mom was religious so I was made to feel like a horrible human being doomed to hell for having such inpure thoughts. It fucked me up for life. I had one gf and she was emotionally abusive. I had many boyfriends but never felt right. It is hard for me to connect with people.

You are still sooo young. Can you see about some sort of reverse process? I know a hysterectomy is final but you can still be happy and you have a story to tell. You seem educated and smart. Your life still has potential... do you mind if i ask where you live? Perhaps go to someplace more open minded.

 

[hobbydevil]

I am so sorry. I am also a lesbian... 52 years. I was bi for much of my life but definitely was always more into women. I remember constant confusion growing up. It was a different time and my mom was religious so I was made to feel like a horrible human being doomed to hell for having such inpure thoughts. It fucked me up for life. I had one gf and she was emotionally abusive. I had many boyfriends but never felt right. It is hard for me to connect with people.

You are still sooo young. Can you see about some sort of reverse process? I know a hysterectomy is final but you can still be happy and you have a story to tell. You seem educated and smart. Your life still has potential... do you mind if i ask where you live? Perhaps go to someplace more open minded.

I live in a pretty open-minded country (which is also why I was completely unaware of how the homophobia I faced as a teen affected me - I just believed since hey, gay people are tolerated in my country, so getting harassed in public shouldn't get to me).

I don't know. It's not just the physical aspects (though they also seriously bother me and make me feel mutilated and horrible), but also the psychological side to it - knowing I consented to all of it based on so much pseudo-science ("Not being comfortable as a woman means you are a man!") and self-hatred.
In a sense I feel like I already ctb...spiritually. I can't even recognize my own voice and I don't feel like it will get much better from here on out.
At this point I am just so messed up - I still struggle with all the same issues I had back when it all started, just with a bunch of new ones on top. I'm also just a bother to my family and friends who even if they don't say it I can tell are so sick of me and my constant mental issues at this point...

 

[Strangeasangels]

I live in a pretty open-minded country (which is also why I was completely unaware of how the homophobia I faced as a teen affected me - I just believed since hey, gay people are tolerated in my country, so getting harassed in public shouldn't get to me).

I don't know. It's not just the physical aspects (though they also seriously bother me and make me feel mutilated and horrible), but also the psychological side to it - knowing I consented to all of it based on so much pseudo-science ("Not being comfortable as a woman means you are a man!") and self-hatred.
In a sense I feel like I already ctb...spiritually. I can't even recognize my own voice and I don't feel like it will get much better from here on out.
At this point I am just so messed up - I still struggle with all the same issues I had back when it all started, just with a bunch of new ones on top. I'm also just a bother to my family and friends who even if they don't say it I can tell are so sick of me and my issues at this point...

The world if a fucked up place and people are self-serving. It has always been this way... Anybody who is remotely sensitive knows this. Life is not happy but life can be good when the stars align...

They have not aligned for me. I am over the hill. I just lost my job. I have had ailments all year. I have lost hope and now I am done...

You can still come back. You are young....

 

[woxihuanni]

It was not word vomit at all, you are so articulate and it's a heart-braking story. I'm so sorry for what you've been through, and will refrain from platitudes. Thank you for holding on a little bit to be a voice to protect other people from the same pain.

It particularly touched me because I have a sort of weird dysphoria, I wish I could 'transition' to the gender that I actually am, because I have some opposite-gender characteristics and not enough of the ones that are supposed to go with my gender. Have always felt ashamed about that, and there is nothing to be done about it whatsoever.

I wish you as much peace as possible whatever might happen.