i wish detrans narratives weren’t centered around looks, appearance. i want them to address the way it feels to live in pain in a surgically altered body- no, i need that to be addressed.

it’s not about aesthetics at the end of the day for me. or, the part that cares about aesthetics, that’s like 10% maybe, it’s an add-on. sure, it’s difficult to have a beard. and i have empathy for a young woman who finds herself suddenly half bald. like, that’s really fucking tough. but it is reversible or “fixable”. you know what is not reversible? what cannot be lasered away or covered with a wig? a mastectomy. I cannot just take estrogen and re-grow my breasts. and i am not left with a flat chest (i.e. a male chest, or a pre-pubertal female chest): there is too much tissue missing. it is an incomplete chest. the skin stretches tight over bone (bones which were slightly warped from years of binding, incidentally). My heart beats far too strongly against it. It’s as though you packed up boxes and forgot to insulate the breakable items with newspaper, bubble wrap, or cloth. there’s no buffer there. and the nerves are haywire, i often feel a deep below-skin itch on the bone itself but in order to scratch it i have to touch a piece of skin five inches to the left.

honestly, some of this verges on body horror territory, in my opinion. and i think that’s what ‘detrans allies’ et al, not to mention those who dismiss or ignore us, need to understand… opposition to surgical transition doesn’t, in my case, come from some political, anti-gender motive… it’s literally about physical comfort. it’s about the ability to live life in a body that works. and i care about this not just for detrans women, but for trans men too, or anyone who seeks a “gender affirming” mastectomy: i want people who have suffered dysphoria like me to live our lives in bodies that don’t hurt. sometimes the hurt isn’t clear until 5, 10 years later. sometimes you didn’t know how much it hurt because you took so many pills or had so many drinks you just couldn’t feel it anymore.

if there was a surgery like this that didn’t cause this kind of hurt, i’d support it wholeheartedly. I’m not sure how much clearer i can be.