GuessImAfab is a 22-year-old re-identified female who identified first as nonbinary, and then a transgender man, from the ages of 18-21. She lives in the United States. GuessImAfab was on testosterone for a year and a half and spent a lot of time engaged in the online trans community on multiple social media platforms. You may have seen an abridged version of this narrative on her Twitter account.

 GuessImAfab chronicles the development of her trans-identification, including being prescribed testosterone as a “nonbinary” teen. She now believes her gender therapist was negligent in not fully exploring the underlying reasons for her disidentification from her female sex. She also notes the lack of follow-up she received from the MD who prescribed T, despite her diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

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by GuessImAfab

I lived with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria for three years, believing wholeheartedly that I was not a girl, because the trans community told me that I didn’t have to be. ROGD is a phenomenon described by researcher and physician Lisa Littman as a type of adolescent-onset or late-onset gender dysphoria where the development of gender dysphoria is observed to begin suddenly during or after puberty in an adolescent or young adult who would not have met criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood. When I first developed what I believed at the time to be genuine gender dysphoria, Littman’s study was not on the radar, and it did not cross my path for the first time until late last year. I started to read the study, but it had been shared by someone opposing it; truthfully, as I read it and started to really resonate with it, I got panicky and just closed it and stopped reading, because I was scared to agree that I did fit the criteria. I did not re-identify and decide to detransition until later.

I want to talk about my experience with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (or being transgender), to add my voice to the growing chorus of detransitioners speaking out about what we’ve been through.

I was able, with the encouragement of the transgender community and transgender ideology, to develop an unshakeable faith in an unrealistic identity.  I struggled with self-hate, was susceptible to grooming, and existed under the influence of the online trans community, which uses tactics that I believe parallel Steven Hassan’s BITE model for mind-control to stop critical thinking and encourage cognitive dissonance. Behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control were all factors in the development and progression of my Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. My behavior was fueled by an unconscious attempt to escape from being female, bisexual, and gender nonconforming in a world that pressures women to be “feminine.” I want to share how it led me to seek hormone replacement therapy, and the red flags that professionals missed or ignored in my quest.

Let’s start from the beginning: I had been a tomboy when I was young, had a crisis over my sexual orientation in middle school, and went through high school as a “regular girl”- I wasn’t especially feminine, but I also wasn’t gender nonconforming. I’d been “part of the LGBT community” (in other words, I identified as a bisexual girl and was active on Tumblr) throughout all of my high school years.

As a teenager, I often joked with my friends and on my Twitter account that I “wish I had been born a boy” because I “just didn’t get being a girl”! (Later, these tweets would reinforce my false belief that I had always been a boy.) Every time I wore a dress to school, I felt the need to announce it to all of my friends, like I was putting on a crazy costume and just didn’t want them to be shocked. I was a theater kid, and had been since I was a child, and thankfully the theater kids didn’t get picked on. I was well-liked and lucky to not have a bad high school experience. The majority of my friends, theater kids as well, were either straight girls or gay boys, nearly all of whom I crushed on at one point or another. In fact, it became a sort of running joke that I was only attracted to gay guys, because by the time I had graduated, three of the boys I had “dated” had ended things when they realized they were gay. This was another big factor later on in my ability to be fooled into believing that I could actually really be a gay boy myself and always had been. But more on that later. For now, let’s move on.

The boy I dated from the end of my senior year of high school through to the beginning of my second year of college was, in retrospect, a total jerk, but I thought I loved him. He policed what I acted and looked like to the point where I feared that if I cut or dyed my hair, he would dump me. We started to go to college parties together and I was surrounded by girls in crop tops and high-waisted skirts. I knew that I looked more attractive when I wore that too (plus liberal feminism at the time was always making sure to remind me to “be a slut! do whatever you want!”) so I had a peak of “empowered femininity” prior to the rest of this tale.

My boyfriend grew less interested in me towards the end of our relationship, I could tell. I began to panic. I just wanted to be someone that he loved, was attracted to and wanted to be with. When he ended things, I asked if there was anything at all I could do to make him change his mind. He said no, he just didn’t want me.

Over the next six months, I alternated between deep, isolating self-loathing and rebounding with my (same) ex, though I knew I shouldn’t have. I would end up sneaking out and sleeping with him every few weeks even though I was well aware that he didn’t want to get back together. To be 18, right? Months wasted with impulsive, unhealthy behavior — it didn’t allow me to grow.

During this time, I first cut my hair into a bob after years of wanting to, after weeks of agonizing, fearing I would be ugly with short hair. But when I finally did it, I didn’t feel ugly, I felt incredible. We’d broken up in the fall and I saw him periodically until the spring. November was the first time I discovered “non-binary gender identities”, and I started the research that would consume every aspect of my life for the next three years.

For a visual representation of some of my ROGD timeline, throughout this article we’ll take a look at my iPhone notes and private social media posts from that time. (Heads-up for mentions of self-harm.)

My memories of this time period are a little foggy. I was so miserable and wound up all the time, I can’t tell you exactly what I was thinking except from looking through things I’d written. I just kept reading and internalizing all of the ideas that the online trans community stressed: it didn’t matter if I hadn’t had sex dysphoria since I was a child, that was just the “mainstream trans narrative.” I could still be not-cis; that was valid. And anyway, I had never liked my large breasts or wanted anyone to know that I was busty. So maybe that had been sex dysphoria, and I just didn’t realize until I learned more. The community said so.

I was still very nervous, and hadn’t told anyone I was internalizing things I read about gender identity until I joined a club in college where I met my first “trans person” (in my opinion, another girl with ROGD, but that’s neither here nor there).

She identified as “agender” and used they/them pronouns. The meeting was the first time I ever had to do a pronoun circle. I was meeting all these people for the first time; I had a chance to start over and be a new person. So, when it came around to me, I said my pronouns were they/them.

No one questioned me. I took a deep breath. Okay, cool, so that felt fine. Maybe that meant something. When they addressed me, they used they/them pronouns. I considered how it made me feel: I didn’t mind it. I told them I was still “exploring my gender identity” and they all affirmed that and told me to take my time.

I continued to “research”. I got deeper into the online theory. In the spring, a little after I stopped meeting up with my ex, my friends from the club and I went to a week-long event together that was incredibly trans-positive. Pronoun stickers and all. I had been thinking about my discomfort with my female name, and they encouraged me to “try a new name” just for the event.

So I did. The name I chose was androgynous, not exclusively male, and over the week I began to introduce myself by it. It felt… cool, comfortable. I didn’t have to think about who I really was or who I had been, which all felt tied to my female name. I could create an entirely new identity for myself, and it was “valid.” The community swore that this feeling was “gender euphoria,” another sign I was on the right path.

At one point, I remember hearing someone say, “If you have questions about your gender at all, you may not be binary trans, but you’re probably not cis.” This stayed in my mind for a long time.

While I was at this event, I met a straight guy who I started to like. I told him I was non-binary, so not a girl, and he was like “Okay cool, no biggie”. We started to date about a month later, and over the next six months or so I “explored my gender identity,” with his “support.” I cut my hair into a pixie and started to wear men’s/neutral clothes more. It felt amazing, like coming home after I’d been dressing up and playing the part of a feminine girl for my previous boyfriend for so so long. I took this as more proof that I was on the right path. And my boyfriend still liked me — he said he’d like me no matter what! For a short time, I felt on top of the world.

I continued in my non-binary identity, until the fall when I transferred to living away at a new college. I started to feel stressed about my identity. I felt like no one would take me seriously as a “non-binary” person or see me as anything other than a girl; I didn’t want to be seen as a girl.

To try to sort out my confusion, I went online and looked to the trans community and to trans ideology. Was this a normal feeling?

Apparently, some non-binary people went by he/him pronouns! It didn’t mean that they were men (I had insisted to myself since the beginning that there was no way I was a man, because men were trash, and why would I want to be one of them?). Cool! I changed my pronouns to he/him.

My boyfriend was okay with it. He knew that I wasn’t male or anything, so it didn’t threaten his sexuality or masculinity. The pronoun change really amped me up though. I was living in “gender-neutral LGBTQ housing” on campus and we all put our pronouns on our dorm room doors.

Every day it was a reminder.

After a few weeks, the anxiety I was experiencing because my family was unaware of my feelings and situation really started to weigh on me. But I knew they would not understand being non-binary. Once, months earlier, I’d tried to talk to them about the agender girl I knew — they were lost (and amused).

But I felt so much better in my presentation, so much more comfortable in my mannerisms, in using he/him pronouns and “being a boy” (in retrospect, it was being gender nonconforming). When I compared the contentedness I felt in my new self-expression to the distress I had been feeling when I first discovered trans ideology, I was affirmed by the online trans community into believing that the change was indication that I did have gender dysphoria. It was absolutely drilled into my head that it did not matter at all that I did not have the “typical trans narrative”. But I decided that if I had any chance of my parents accepting me and my dysphoria, I had to play it like I was a Transgender Man, because that was the narrative they knew…

…which leads us to the letter I wrote to my parents when I “came out” to them as transgender. I read over it for the first time recently since I wrote it (two and a half years ago), and to be honest, it’s legitimately embarrassing nonsense. It may be enlightening, however. If I had read this letter for the first time now, but it had been written by someone else, I would have seen how many leaps of logic there were in what I was saying, but only because I’ve gotten out of the thought-cult. I would’ve reacted in a similar way to my parents at the time. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t understand the scope of the cult-logic and how utterly mind-consuming it can be. I had also been a very secretive child, and had never really been forthright with them with regard to my feelings about myself before, so they had very little to work with. So while it’s now cringeworthy for me to read knowing that I wrote it and truly believed that I was correct, I think it’s a really stark, grim, and telling portrait of how well-meaning young women who feel “different” can be indoctrinated into believing they’re transgender.

Here it is in its full, maladaptive glory. Names have been redacted.

When I look back at the first day I came home after sending this and The Conversation I had with my parents, I feel so overwhelmed with guilt and shame. They and I both had no idea the extent to which the ideology had been hammered into my brain as irrefutable… they did their best and it ended with a screaming match and me leaving to stay at my boyfriend’s house. They had so many questions that I didn’t have answers to because of the huge gaps in logic that I had been conditioned to ignore. When they pointed them out, I became flustered and overwhelmed and felt like I was being attacked for the way I felt. I left the house after dinner, sobbing.

We didn’t talk directly about it for months. I wasn’t living with them full-time at the time. Whenever I came home, we danced around the subject and they pointedly avoided referring to me by name or pronouns at all. To me, at the time this was just more of a rejection and fueled my fire to prove myself. I spent so much of my time engulfed in queer/trans theory. Because my parents hadn’t affirmed me and I’d left in a fit, all of my friends and the community were hugely affirmative following my “coming out.” Luckily (though I didn’t feel lucky at the time), I have amazing, non-bigoted parents who assured me that they loved me and wanted me to be happy; they just believed I was mistaken.

Not everything was going smoothly during this time. When I caught my boyfriend flirting with a girl, he insisted it was a mistake, that he knew I deserved better, and that it wouldn’t happen again (it would). I asked if it was because I wasn’t a girl, because I wasn’t feminine enough for him anymore, and he insisted no (it was). He was the only support I had or cared about at the time, because I felt hurt by my parents. I was terrified he would realize that he didn’t want to be with a trans guy and leave me for a pretty girl. I was up his ass constantly looking for approval that it was okay for me to be who I wanted to be. So, I forgave him.

Literally all I ever thought about was him and my gender. I lived away at school until the following spring, either holed up in my dorm room on Tumblr and Leftbook, or driving to my boyfriend’s place to hang out with him and our friends (his group of friends that I slid into). Sometimes, I crashed at my parent’s house. Every time they “dead-named” me I felt more alone. My isolation and depression were growing. I moped all the time, I skipped class, I was constantly sick.

The weekend before I moved home for the summer, I caught him flirting with yet another girl. I “forgave” him again, meaning I agreed to drop it because of my paralyzing fear of losing him, but it pushed my stress level over the edge and sent me into the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. To make matters worse, I had to have (not gender-related) surgery when I came home. I lived at home all summer, recovering from surgery, depressed, anxious, feeling misunderstood and disrespected by my parents.

I had a lot of time on my hands.

I started watching testosterone before-and-after videos on YouTube. I began to consider what it would be like and feel like to pass to strangers as a man. It sounded… nice — certainly better than the idea of always being looked at as a failed woman for not being feminine. Another example, I thought to myself, of me experiencing “gender euphoria.”

I have ADHD and have been unmedicated my entire life. I got incredibly hyper-focused on watching these testosterone videos. They were all happy. They all looked like I wanted to look. They all talked about how being on T made them confident, self-assured, and comfortable in themselves. Many of them, though, talked about always being masculine and thinking they were lesbians. Whenever I felt doubts about being transgender, it most frequently was that I didn’t relate to this aspect of their stories. I had never thought I was a lesbian. I had been feminine in the past without it bringing me to the brink of suicide, which was what I’d believed happened to trans men as kids. So I would go back online and try to see if anyone felt the way that I did.

As it always does, trans ideology had a justification for my lack of severe distress over being feminine as a child. I think that this justification was what ‘helped’ my parents ‘understand’ as well. I was led into believing that I was a gay male, and that my attraction to men and femininity when I was young was just me expressing the fact that I was actually a gay boy. Part of the reason I was able to convince myself that I was a gay man even though I had experienced attraction to girls since I was a child was because I’m not attracted to trans women, and the community claims that if you’re not attracted to trans women, you can’t claim to be attracted to women at all, since Trans Women Are Women. I was told that most likely, because I had always been a boy, deep down I just had internalized homophobia about it, and had only thought I was attracted to girls.

My parents, seeing how depressed I had been, and having not spent much time with me during the past year while I was away, tried to see my point of view. Over the next few months, my peers provided me with more logical fallacies to get my parents to “understand” where I was coming from. Eventually, when they saw I was more comfortable being gender nonconforming than I had been being feminine, and that I wasn’t backing down, they made the switch to my new name and pronouns. I know I never convinced my parents that I was “born in the wrong body” or that I was ACTUALLY a man, although for a time I had absolutely convinced myself. The reason why they “gave in” was because they witnessed the genuine transformation and growth of my comfort in my body and self-expression. I had the wrong idea, though, about why my “dysphoria” was soothed when I socially transitioned. Every time I felt happy with the way I looked or felt, it was because for the first time in my life, I felt free to express my gender nonconformity. In retrospect, I believe that I unconsciously did not think it was possible for me to dress and act the way I wanted to without a “valid reason” — simply desiring to be a gender nonconforming woman didn’t seem possible to me. It wasn’t something I even realized I preferred until I tried it. By internalizing transgender ideology, I falsely attributed my newfound comfort in female masculinity to “proof” that I was actually a transgender man. And once I began to imagine what it would be like to be seen and treated as a man, to “pass”, it became all I could think about. I started to hate my body and my voice more and more every day. The deeper in I got, the more dysphoric I became.

Eventually, I told my parents I wanted to start testosterone.

Side-note: “What about your straight boyfriend?”, you’re thinking. “If you started testosterone, wouldn’t the masculinizing effects turn him off?” Thanks for reminding me. My boyfriend swore that all he wanted was for me to be happy, and that he would still be attracted to me no matter what because he loved me. At this point, I had been socially transitioned for almost a year and we were constantly saying that we were gay together and that we were going to get gay married one day (I Know.) and live happily ever after. But the longer I was on T, the less attracted to me he was. I could tell, which was difficult for me. I’d catch him flirting with someone else 6 more times over the course of our relationship. But I’m ahead of myself! End side-note.

My mom reached out to a coworker whose son is transgender, and she was put in touch with my gender therapist. The therapist I went to had a Master’s degree in social work and is licensed in clinical social work (LCSW). His official stance is “that the gender therapist’s and medical provider(s) role is to support the client in their gender identity, and not to be gatekeepers for medically necessary treatment.”

I was beyond thrilled when I looked into who the therapist was after I got his name. He was a trans man. Being trans gave him a bias, and I knew that going into it at the time, which was exactly what I wanted. I knew this meant I’d won– he had diagnosed my mom’s friend’s child with GD and connected him with a doctor to prescribe testosterone. He agreed with me in terms of how I believe gender identity worked, and he was a proponent of the affirmative-care model for transitioning. I just needed to convince him that I fit the role of someone who needed testosterone. I’d already mostly convinced myself, and I’ve always been a great actor (theater kid, remember?). I felt like I was set.

To be prescribed testosterone, I met with the LCSW two times over the course of about a month. We went over my general medical history. He asked me about my feelings about gender and my identity. I told him honestly that I wasn’t 100% “binary,” but I WAS sure I wanted to be on testosterone. I didn’t necessarily feel like a cis man, but I felt uncomfortable being seen as a woman. I felt sexualized, I didn’t want people knowing I had breasts, and I thought hormones would help people think I was not a woman. I explained how I felt about “being gay for men”, but that I had “no assigned sex at birth preference, so I would theoretically date a trans man”.

Now, pause. None of those things should have qualified me to be a candidate for hormone replacement therapy. All of those things should have been taken into consideration by my therapist. He could have performed a thorough assessment of my mental health, my possible history of trauma, my experiences with abuse and objectification tied to my body, as well as my experiences with sexism and homophobia as a woman. He could have continued to meet with me for more months before he decided I “passed.” He did not. He told me that there was a Primary Care Physician in his network who he’d sent other trans patients to, and referred me to her.

This doctor was incredibly endearing. She listened intently when I talked to her and she didn’t once make me feel like it was the wrong decision for me. She came across as an empathetic adult who could help and wanted to do what she agreed was best for me. I think that may be the most dangerous thing for girls with ROGD—all that “validation” from people you trust with your health. This doctor told me that on testosterone, I would experience the “three H’s” (I’d get “horny, hot, and hungry”). I would sweat a lot, get hairier, and my voice would deepen. My fat would redistribute. She did tell me that she recommended I look into freezing my eggs, as I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, and “you never know because there aren’t a lot of long-term testosterone studies.” I didn’t have the money, though, and kids were the last thing on my mind anyway, so I refused. She gave me a small packet to read over detailing the known effects of T. I signed a form saying that was OK with me, went for bloodwork, and when my hormone level results came back and I was approved as healthy enough, I was prescribed T a few days later and sent home. Normally, she said, she would make me come in after I picked up my prescription to have her give me the shot the first time and give me needles and syringes, but I showed her I could do it myself with a saline shot so she let me go and prescribed syringes to the pharmacy along with the testosterone.

That was nearly two years ago. I was switched from that doctor to another one a month later when she moved networks, and I met with her one time. I have not been to see that doctor since, they have not followed up with me, they have not asked me to come in to get my levels checked or to assess my health. They simply continued to refill my prescriptions through my pharmacy when I requested it on the app, until I stopped requesting it. I am 22 now, and both the doctor & therapist know I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

To me, this is the reality and medical irresponsibility of informed consent. Neither the therapist or doctor were unkind or made me doubt myself. I believed this could all be true, so it was true. My perception was the only reality I knew. Why would I stop?

I had moved in with my boyfriend by the time I was able to get my appointment for T. My family, finally, was happy for me. They watched me do my first shot on Facetime and we all clapped.

That was that: I was on testosterone.

Initially, I was pleased with the changes T was giving me, but my experience wasn’t as intense as a lot of people I knew. PCOS means my natural T levels are high, and I told myself that maybe I was always meant to be testosterone-dominant, I was just “in between” before, and that’s why I had felt so uncomfortable.

Seriously, the weird circular reasoning you start to do after years in this community is… beyond.

All in all, my (absolutely straight) boyfriend and I lasted 9 months after I started T before he ended things.

I moved home. Thank god, thank god, thank god for my family. I really don’t know what I would have done or how I would have fared if my family weren’t so incredibly loving, understanding, and patient with me as I healed from what I’d been through and reconciled the past three years of my life.

I consider myself VERY lucky that being gender non-conforming (a masculine female) is how I feel most happy and true to myself, and as such testosterone’s changes to my body don’t upset me too much. But that is not the case for all female people with rapid onset gender dysphoria, and I was able to access it far, far too easily.

When I reflect back over the time that I suffered with ROGD, especially the months prior to starting testosterone, I wish I could tell myself then what I know now. Transgender ideology and the toxic internet culture around it brought my life to a staggering and painful halt for three years. The professionals around me who should have screened me thoroughly and been willing to help me get to the root of my issues with my body, my expression, my gender, and myself, did not. Because of that, I will never get the chance to have a healthy relationship with the body that I had and the person who I was before T.

On a personal level, in order to move forward in my life and grow into loving myself, I feel that it is healthiest for me to accept the changes to my body and what I went through. Otherwise, I will spend far too long resenting myself and the people around me. For this reason, I don’t waste time mourning. I believe a better focus of my energy is to share my experience, empower other women to reconcile their relationships with themselves, and help those who still are being groomed into believing that the only way they can be happy is to permanently alter their bodies. There are so many suffering, deluded young people whose faith in lies are being encouraged by the medical community at large, and whose lives and bodies are being irreversibly changed because of a lack of critical understanding about what Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is and looks like and how severely it can impact impressionable youth.

In a follow-up post, I will get into my experience of reconciling and coming to terms with my body, my identity, womanhood, and myself, but for now I’ve covered all of the important points with regards to the development of my Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.

Thank you all for reading.