By: Eli K., she’s in detransition
After a long and complicated gender journey, Eli started a blog on her detransition experiences in early 2020. Raising her voice as a counternarrative to the anti-trans rhetoric surrounding detransition stories, her criticism is aimed at the pathologization of transition-related healthcare needs as well as the legal situation of transgender people in Germany, where she resides. You can find her on Twitter (@shesindetrans) and Instagram (@eli_kaputniza).
What it actually was that pushed me over the edge and made me think I might go without testosterone “for a while”, “just to try”, I can’t say. The questions would just pop up in my head sometimes – eventually, I was even thinking them while being sober.
“What if? What could go wrong?”
At first, it wasn’t much. My last depot (T-)shot wore off slowly, too slowly perhaps for me to understand what was actually happening to me before it was too late. Asleep at the wheel, they say.
Some detransitioners claim to have what they call “reverse dysphoria” – instead of being distressed over bodily characteristics that came to them naturally, they feel similarly unhappy with their post-transition bodies. Curiously, the onset of “reverse dysphoria” is often said to happen after the detransition itself, as part of the new (old?) gender identification. A woman with a beard surely must feel all kinds of bad about herself, right? Wrong. My dark stubble became a social issue for me when I started to dress openly feminine in my everyday life. Not an issue for me, mind you. An issue for them: random strangers giving me looks and calling me names. But back to my hormonal struggles after quitting T.
My problem wasn’t being a manly woman, my problem was me losing what I had loved about myself in my transition years. Of all the gradual changes, seeing the armor of muscle around my back, ribs and belly melt away was my greatest nightmare. It felt like a true loss. My body, which had been strong, beautiful and capable before, became the one thing I feared the most: vulnerable. Out of fear, I stopped eating. I know it sounds completely irrational to imagine myself to be somehow less vulnerable in the emaciated form that I took on in the year following my last shot. Myths and meanings of eating disorders often carry an icky gendered flavor, maybe because food restriction is a real, actual means of exerting control over women. In my own disordered logic, however, it wasn’t so much about fulfilling gendered expectation. Rather than that, it felt like my physical safety was at stake at all times. I was safe if I could fit myself through the smallest door gap if need be, if I could escape into the cracks between the floorboards like Houdini.
Instead of giving in to my eating disorder’s demands, I should have questioned what exactly I felt so afraid of. Was it the transmisogynist slurs hurled at me every now and then? So much for “transmisogyny exempt”. Was it a shift from feeling impenetrable and unbreakable as a man, a sweet feeling that had accompanied me throughout my male-passing years? All of that, for sure. And something more: the certainty that I had lost the support of a medical system that had promised me a miracle cure for a problem so huge and voracious it could have swallowed me alive. The doctors, they had lost hope in me. Had I lost hope in them?
No. Not in all of them, that is. I remember my last conversation with my old endocrinologist before I left for the new one, who at that point had kindly accepted me as a patient already and was fully supportive. I remember telling him about leaving and my reasons for it. I spoke about how he declined my request for estrogen replacement therapy with the feeble excuse that I had levels of estrogen that were “higher than postmenopausal”. My hormonal withdrawal symptoms, including severe urinary tract infections culminating in having bloody urine that summer, were simply ignored. But my ultimate argument/accusation wasn’t about my own experience with him: it was my former beloved and now friend whose post-transition body was incapable of producing its own hormones, it was her whom he denied an access to a new kind of HRT after she quit T. A medically irresponsible decision, to say the least. That I knew her and this, he couldn’t have known.
And still, he remained almost unmoved. Still, he found the audacity to accuse me of digressing when I openly accused him of mistreating both me and my ex-partner. His discomfort showed, but his voice assumed a peculiar, shallow quality: he couldn’t even be properly angry at me. It’s rarely villains who do the bulk of the damage. It’s mostly the cowards.
My strange and difficult gender journey wasn’t a problem for my new endocrinologist at all, who prescribed me estrogen gel with the suggestion I try it and see if it helps. It did, and even though I quit this new HRT eventually, it gave me a priceless understanding of the hormonal workings of my body. That I had full control this time is the priceless part. Not an issue for me. Only an issue for them, like I said.
Can You Hear Us? is a project that brings together the voices of trans, detrans, gender non-conforming, and questioning individuals calling for inclusive community and solidarity in pursuit of collective health liberation. This is an anti-oppression oriented space centered on solidarity with each other across axes of oppression and marginalization. Learn more.