Not 100% sure where I'm going with this but just wanted to give some thoughts as a desister.

Was re reading the Great Gatsby and finished with the brilliant final line - "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".

The line is such a bittersweet masterstroke of an ending, possibly my favourite final line in a book ever. It made me think about the futility of transition, of fighting against the current and having elements of my natural state, my female state, constantly popping through, like some hideous dysmorphic whack a mole.

I am previously trans identified, and for the most part, a recovered body dysmorphic/gender dysphoric (to me these are one in the same thing). I luckily never transitioned, and took myself off of the waiting list for the gender identity clinic in London. I cannot explain what a dark time it was in my life - I have had huge issues with my female body since I was 3 or 4 years old, which intensified throughout school and came to a head in my 20s.

Part of this reason for my 'dysphoria' with my body was the fact that nothing looked or felt or 'worked' as it should. I'm a lesbian, with small breasts, one of which is deformed through a hormone imbalance and stuck in an early Tanner development stage. I have PCOS, endometriosis, hyperandrogegism, hirsutism, fibrocystic breast disease (which is sore), meaning I'm naturally muscular, lean and with the ability to grow chest hair and a beard along my jawline and chin and a moustache. I also have an Adams apple and a very deep voice (reads as male over the phone 99% of the time). Nothing felt like it worked properly for me being female. And of course, being a young lesbian is rough. You have to face the reality that 1.4% of women are lesbians, meaning that the vast majority of the sex you are attracted to will not like you back.

And so - feeling almost 'halfway' there with my natural body, I began to seriously consider transition as a means to escape my neither fish nor fowl feeling. The most important - the breasts must go. I focussed hard on this, feeling jubilant at the prospect of having a chest that wasn't filled with painful cystic lumps. Then I started to bind, and again was met with real pleasure that now I passed as male in public a good 80-90% of the time, my clothes fitting exactly as a typical man's would.

Until...

I realised they didn't. Not on bottom anyway. I realised that despite having a very narrow pelvis, I had a female looking Q angle - the angle of the quadriceps where the thigh bone attaches to the pelvis. There's a bump there, both sides. Now I can't wear jeans without incessantly thinking about it, not buying things with excessive pocket flare.

Then I noticed that, despite reading male, my thick lips and pointed chin, which got slightly more pointed after a fall cracked my chin and caused some callousing of the bone, were stereotypically female. Cover my sloped forehead and portruding brow bone and boom, that's a female face. And actually, is that a feminine looking gonial angle? (The angle of my jawbone, sloped for stereotypically female, right angle for stereotypically male). Oh God that would have to go too. I could do these surgeries, these surgeries existed. I even found surgeries for shaving down my thigh bones (!!).

I started religiously reading about surgeries to correct these, as well as top surgery, nipple reshaping. Did my slightly bandy legs read female too? What about small ears? Thin ankles and wrists? How do I induce vascularity in my arms and hands to make them look more masculine? So I started taking bodybuilding supplements.

On and on and on and on it went. Whilst I've never had an eating disorder, the spiral I've read about from women who have gone through anorexia seemed similar. And yet I was being encouraged by my GP regarding my referral to the GIC in London "not long now, not long to wait now". I told nobody except my girlfriend that I was on the waitlist, didn't change my name, didn't announce my 'identity crisis'. It suddenly transpired that my increasingly paranoid delusions about my own appearance were becoming all encompassing, I would go to the work bathroom several times an hour and stare at my own face, run my hands over the bony bits of my thigh bones, cover my wrists with too long sweaters, reapply trans tape to my breasts... oh shit I've ripped the skin... wad of toilet paper, soak up the blood, reapply trans tape. Back to my desk. Answer the phone. "Hello could I speak to 'dontdoxxmepls'?" "Speaking" "Oh sorry I thought you were Male Colleague 1!"

My inner monologue: Deep voice deep voice, it's good right? Right? Shows me I'm on the right path? Right. I'm doing the right thing? Sure, they'll all call me a male name soon, then I can stop this awkwardness. Am I intersex? I feel half female because of my conditions. Being a lesbian has made me less female because everyone treats me as a defective woman, but here I am an actual defective woman, hairy, muscular, deformed, cystic, deep voice, leaking blood under my trans tape.

I go on r/FTM, see girls who are perfectly feminine girls, talking about how they pass. There's a slight nastiness to my inner thoughts here, I feel scornful because they don't pass. I know I do, without any medical intervention yet. I imagine the new me, no foot in both categories, just firmly in one.

And so, as a layperson with an incredibly vested interest in biology and medicine, I start googling. I go on PubMed, I find anecdotal evidence that isn't hug boxing. I stumble across study after study - my heart attack risk if I transition is going to be 5x that of a normal male. The bottom surgery I want has a potential 90% complication rate. My painful breasts, with non cancerous cysts, could be gone, but a permanent 'zapping' or numbness could replace it. I see absolutely shocking top surgery results, some that look like they were done in the dark. I see women in wheelchairs with stoma bags after phalloplasty. I see women with fistulas, UTIs that go septic, damage to their bladders, damage to their livers, damage to their kidneys. I discover Exulansic, who blows the lid off the whole enterprise, who shows me study after study, who includes videos of TIFs on social media platforms I don't use, shows them crying post surgery, in agony, complication after complication. "My surgeon though, he's so amazing, he says this time it'll definitely work".

I spend a year on the waiting list for GIC, getting reassuring letters from them - don't worry your appointment is coming, don't worry, it's soon, don't worry, it's pride month, here's our pamphlet - and during this time I turn 25 and my hips change a bit, my breasts change a bit, my face becoming more angular as I lose baby fat, my periods start happening with a bit more regularity. Immutable signs of femaleness creep in, I feel paralysed with their intrusion. A nip here a tuck there, an injection of a class B substance and I'll fix them all. I listen to older TIFs on r/FTM, discussing how they suddenly became more 'female' looking at 30, how their skin became a little less taught on their breasts, how they knew then that was the tipping point.

I feel as though I can't breathe, as though I'm soldiering on up a mountain with thin thin oxygen levels, gasping for air. The panic increases when I have sex, and my previously high libido disappears into thin air. I scratch at my skin, do dubious workouts meant to help mute your Q angle, apply scar lotion to my skin rips from wearing trans tape too long. I watch more videos by Exulansic, thinking that maybe if I watch them all, maybe if I go through all these treatments that she covers, maybe I can mitigate my side effects. Maybe I can spot where these girls made their wrong decisions, wrong surgeons, wrong lifestyle choices, wrong recovery techniques.

Then I watch a video by Exulansic in which a woman has a phalloplasty and discusses her complications. The video is pretty long from memory - maybe 40 minutes. This TIF 'passes so well' is my first thought, as she talks to the camera from the shoulders up, and I watch her and begin to feel like I'm rooting for her, rooting for it to go well even though I know it won't. As the video goes on, she has been looking sicker and sicker, more and more washed in the face, dark rings appear under her eyes as she uploads countdowns to her revision surgery.

Then she steps back from the camera, new day, post revision surgery. She shows her full body for the first time, standing IIRC in boxer or swim shorts. I physically recoil - she is unmistakably female. She doesn't pass at all. Those hips, that ribcage, those legs, those wrists, those ankles. Even the muscle insertions on her legs (I'm a amateur bodybuilder so these things stand out to me). She has just had a meat tube surgically attached to her pelvis, and her body has a large chunk missing from her thigh, looking like she's a burns victim from the revision. She has a catheter bag strapped to her leg, and it's like my whole house of cards comes crashing down.

I look at her and it's like I have a drum beating in my head 'thisiswhatiwantthisiswhatiwantthisiswhatiwant' as I look at a woman who's a few years older than me and is disabled through elective surgery. Worse still, I know that part of me recoiled not just because I saw what surgeons had done to her, but because I saw that she still looked visibly unmistakably VERY female. I felt horrified that the ardent feminist in me, that I had always identified with - I was reading radical feminist books in my mid teens - recoiled at seeing a female body as though it was bad. I recoiled because she was the boat against the current, she was what I was emulating as my final destination, and yet I could see she would never reach hers, and neither would I.

I've never had a panic attack, but I feel close to it. I got up and looked in the mirror, and took all my clothes off and really LOOKED. It was like the blinkers were off. During my time so submerged in FTM culture, I had become absolutely and totally fucking switched off from reality. Totally divorced. I had health complications and conditions yes, but I was healthy by my own definition - I looked healthy, I could participate in all aspects of life without a disability precluding me. Reality hit me the moment I saw that woman's body, when I knew that for all her suffering, for all her financial ruin through undertaking these surgeries and time off work, for all her physical pain, for all her dysphoria, for all of her face passing, she was female, and she had been totally, totally fucking let down by the system that she trusted to help her.

And I was, am, always will be, was from the moment of my conception, female. Without surgeries, I had experienced the 'jumping' of dysphoria - binding made me conscious of my Q angle, growing my facial hair made me conscious of my genial angle, smiling made me conscious of my pointy chin. One day my obsession was my breasts, another it was my height, another it was my wrists. I realised when I looked at her body, without breasts, with visible 'neophallus' bulge, with body fat recomposition from testosterone, that despite her having 'one thing 'fixed'' - her breasts, testosterone etc., she had gone for more, and more, and more. And she'd been waved through. She didn't leave her house much anymore. Her curtains were drawn a lot. Her catheter bag still strapped to her leg as she made jokes about her 'ween'.

I threw out my memoirs by TIFs, annoyed at how many of them didn't mention the complications I knew from following them on Instagram that they'd had (as they posted 'revision surgery' updates), I unsubscribed from the FTM subreddit, I rang the GP and asked that they take me off the list for the GIC clinic.

"Oh why?"

"I changed my mind. I want a long lifespan and health span, and my dealings with chronic pain due to my pre existing conditions have shown me that I'm not willing to open up more doors for disability and chronic illness if they can be avoided".

"I'm pleased you've made a robust choice for yourself, it sounds like"

Now I'm over 1 year 'out' of this cult like mentality. I kept up weightlifting, started yoga to try and reconnect with my body, allowed myself to buy clothing in brighter colours that doesn't hide the shape of my chest, went back to regular sports bras. Got into women's sports again, allowed myself to see healthy women in all shapes and sizes. I started to unpick my sexual abuse I suffered when I was younger, started to unpick my reasons for being interested in bodybuilding, for being into martial arts, for constantly needing to be 'bigger' and 'stronger' or basically just 'harder to attack'. It all linked back to fear of men through sexual abuse, and fear of men due to homophobia I'd experienced in public and in private. The house of cards kept tumbling. These revelations were painful, difficult, scary to hold, and I often felt like I was getting into dark places. Except, instead of experiencing the dark places of dysphoria, I would come out the other side lighter, and lighter and lighter. With no scalpels near my body, no lifespan cut potentially in half, no elected disability, no premature male pattern balding, no agonising pain of forcing the fish to grow feathers and calling it fowl.

As I began this journey through healing, I realised so much about myself and my former community - namely, that the TIF community never are fully satisfied. Never. I knew some that 'loved' their surgery results, but would bemoan their hips, bemoan their lack of sexual sensation that started disappearing from their engorged clitoris after 6-7 years on T. The body was still an obsession. The top surgery 'made me my true self', but they still had to have 3D nipple tattoos, then liposuction to balance out their torso, then a full chest tattoo to cover up the 3D nipples being ever so slightly wonky. Etc. And so it goes on.

I'm okay now. I can have sex again. I enjoy my body. I think about my body comparatively so little compared to before. I don't recoil when someone corrects reads me as female on the phone. I am kinder to myself and the world around me. I take medication for my various conditions when I need to, and I have made lifestyle changes to help them where I can. I feel free.

In the bodybuilding world, there's a quote that is attributed to a BB figure from the 2000s called "Zyzz". Zyzz died in his early 20s from steroid abuse causing a fatal heart attack. The quote is "we're all gonna make it brahs". Ironically, Zyzz didn't make it. And this quote went round the FTM subreddit constantly - new users every day, commenting under someone's 'progress' like new facial hair or voice lowering "we're all gonna make it brahs!".

What I find deeply sad is that they - like the guy they probably don't realise they're quoting - won't.