I was born in 1993, socially and medically transitioned (MtF) in 2019, and detransitioned at the beginning of 2024. Though I ultimately concluded that transitioning didn’t improve my gender dysphoria, and that it’s the wrong choice for almost everyone suffering from it, I don’t regret transitioning. What I learned about men and women — and our culture generally — was worth the physical and emotional pain of transition and de-transition.

My medical transition included hormone replacement therapy, facial feminization surgery, and breast augmentation. I also extensively trained my voice. After all the procedures, I believe I was perceived as female by 90% of people in passing, and 70 to 80% of those with whom I had an extended conversation. Though of course this didn’t make me a woman, the experience of (sometimes, in some ways) being seen as one was revelatory.

Here’s a list of the things I learned when I was trans —

Being the target of male sexual attention is often unnerving and scary. I have much more sympathy for women’s defensiveness and instinctive mistrust of strange men than I did before I transitioned. When you can’t know which acts of kindness are genuine and which are driven by sexual desire, it’s rational to react to all male attention with suspicion. Guys can find this insulting, because of course they are good people. But if more men understood why women develop these protective shells, they would take women’s aloofness less personally.

Your brain is very good at identifying which men are more or less likely to be dangerous. That’s one of its primary evolved purposes. Suppressing this takes conscious effort and puts you in more danger. The cues are obvious: a dirty, disheveled guy is more likely to be a risk than a man wearing a suit. A man who’s twitchy, hostile, loud, or who otherwise lacks emotional control is dangerous. Men who don’t give up after gentle refusals are dangerous. Less educated men are riskier than more educated men. Poor guys are riskier than rich guys. All these things are intuitive, and reflect statistical facts. Unfortunately, the memetic parasite of egalitarianism — the belief that it is somehow unvirtuous to notice differences between groups of people — wants women to override their instincts and put themselves in danger for no reason other than compliance with ideology.

The large majority of transwomen are not any more behaviorally or psychologically feminine than the average man. They adopt some superficial aspects of femininity, but they are still sexually aggressive, they still dominate conversations, etc. This reflects both my personal experience in the trans community and the best research we have on the psychology and neurology of male gender dysphoria. While about 10 to 20% of transwomen are neurologically and physically under-masculinized (shifted toward the female average), the majority have male-typical brains, male-typical personalities, and male-typical interests. If you spend time in transwomen’s spaces, either online or in person, you will see almost exaggerated maleness: transwomen love computer programming, strategy games, extreme politics, and niche porn. Many love guns and openly fantasize about violence against their enemies. I found this deeply troubling when I was trans. I have always preferred the company of women. I like their gentleness, their social grace, their supportive kindness. I was very happy to be let into their clubhouse. Unfortunately, the same cultural movement that enabled my inclusion also left the door open for any male who declared themselves a woman, most of whom made me uncomfortable in the exact same ways that had caused me to prefer women’s company in the first place.

There is something different about men attracted to transwomen vs. gay men. Men constantly hit on me when I was trans, and — now that I’ve detransitioned — almost never do. While some of the attention I received was from guys who thought I was female, most of it was from men who knew I was trans. In the scientific literature, a person who looks female except for their male genitals is called a gynandromorph (GAM), and men who are attracted to this configuration are called gynandromorphophiles (GAMPs). Research on GAMPs indicates they are more similar to heterosexual men than homosexual men: they show strong arousal towards normal women, and very little towards normal men. Thus, GAMP is best understood as an uncommon variant of heterosexuality, rather than an expression of homosexuality.

Leftists will put their ideology above women’s safety 10 times out of 10. Several women I knew had extremely negative experiences with trans and “nonbinary” men in our social circle, ranging from overly aggressive flirting and sexual innuendo to forcible rape. While these individual instances of predatory behavior were acknowledged as such, it was absolutely verboten to point out that this was male-coded bad behavior. Perpetrators of sexual abuse against women are overwhelmingly male, and these were males engaging in sexual abuse of women. Yet even the victims refused to acknowledge this, and indeed reacted with hostility when I, a transwoman, pointed it out. It was truly dispiriting to see their tribal attachment to a political faction outweigh self-preservation and common sense.

Men and women are deeply different, and those differences are not socially constructed. The experiences I described above — and many others when I was trans — convinced me of a fact that, deep down, everyone understands: men and women have different psychologies, and these differences are primarily biological in origin. We can see this in cross-cultural comparisons of personality differences between men and women, in the brains of infants too young to have received any contaminating “socialization”, and through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Of course, none of this is surprising — it would be bizarre if men and women had identical minds, given the vastly greater reproductive burden women bear.

Critics of gender ideology long to return to second-wave feminism, which they see as more grounded in the material reality of sex, but that was also the movement that first championed blank slatism — the belief that all psychological sex differences are socially constructed. Until we can accept that men and women are fundamentally different, we’ll continue to misread each others’ emotions and communicate poorly, and politicians will continue to pursue destructive utopian visions of perfect equality that encourage men and women to see each other as competitors or even enemies, rather than partners.

Transitioning often makes gender dysphoria worse because it encourages you to dwell on your gender constantly. The foundational claim of the trans movement is that gender dysphoria can only be cured by transition and social acceptance. But that’s actually a form of emotional blackmail: “We will DIE unless you accept that there are no meaningful differences whatsoever between cis women and transwomen, and pay for our experimental medical procedures.” Variants of this claim have been endorsed by many leading medical and academic organizations, which has led many in the general public to assume it’s backed by a strong body of evidence. But it’s not. Most of the landmark studies on transition satisfaction are plagued by embarrassing methodological errors and would never have passed peer review if they weren’t in line with progressive ideology. Most have small sample sizes (like this study with a non-representative convenience sample of 220 youth transitioners), short time horizons (as this evidence review notes, hardly any studies on trans youths include long-term outcome data), and massive loss to follow-up (like this widely-cited German study which lost 49.3% of participants over its duration). Furthermore, the benefits of transition reported in these flimsy studies are confined to self-reported measures of satisfaction. When researchers examine objective measures — psychiatric medication uptake, mental health related hospital visits, suicide attempts — the effect of transition becomes statistically insignificant, or negative.

Almost all trans people have mental illnesses. This is both my experience in the community and an empirical fact. Most of the trans people I knew talked constantly about their psychiatric issues, their relationship problems, their inability to maintain consistent employment, their substance addictions, and almost every other marker of dysfunction you could name. It’s a very depressing culture. This is obviously a troubled population, and our current approach to helping them is not working.

The most scientifically supported theory of male gender dysphoria is Ray Blanchard’s two-type model. According to Blanchard, there are two distinct clusters within the MtF population: homosexuals and autogynephiles. An autogynephile (AGP) is a heterosexual man with a psychological condition which causes him to displace his attraction to women onto himself. Because he is heterosexual, existing in a male body feels a bit like being forced to be gay. Many gender-critical activists have seized upon the term autogynephilia, but have little understanding of what it means and how it functions. They imagine that all AGP transwomen are consciously and maliciously living out a fetish at the expense of everyone else. This is inaccurate. While it is true that most transwomen are autogynephiles, they genuinely do not perceive themselves as such. They aren’t consciously lying. They truly believe they have a feminine mind or feminine spirit, because this is what their autogynephilia wants to be true. The human ability to launder our own motivations is incredible, especially when a large and influential cultural movement encourages us to do so.

Something is deeply wrong with how our society relates to sex and sexuality. I believe the first step towards healing is understanding. I hope this record of my experiences can help foster that understanding.

— Hunter Ash