- Joined
- Jan 1, 2021
I'm so sorry. That's a fucking useless thing to say but that's all I got. I hope you can find someone to travel with, it might give you some relief seeing more of the world than this current year Western garbage.I'm losing my best friend in the world to gender shit and my heart is broken.
When we met as teens she was awkward, self-conscious, and obviously gay. Over the course of about fifteen years I got to watch her transform into an amazing woman- smart, funny, interesting, and comfortable in her identity as a butch lesbian. She's the closest friend that I've ever had (the kind where we basically shared a brain) and watching her blossom was seriously one of the happiest times in my life. Then she moved to an area notorious for its genderfuckery, and everything went to shit.
As long distance friendships usually go, we didn't talk regularly, but we saw each other at least once a year, which made the gradual changes noticeably stark. A couple years ago she started going by "they". Okay, cool, I was into trans rights at the time, but I remember still feeling vaguely disappointed. I figured that I would support her in this new phase of self-discovery, but I did assume it was just a phase. New clothes, progressive pronouns, all easily undone when she finally figured out that being trans wasn't a magical cure-all to her problems.
For a long time that's all it was, until suddenly she had a gender therapist. Who, in typical gender therapist fashion, was totally willing to sign off on extreme medical procedures after one or two visits instead of talking her through her sudden discomfort with being a woman. I was shocked when I heard my friend was going on T- she had never had any interest in masculinity, or any desire to transition to male, so what the hell was the point? She was already very androgynous, and I couldn't shake the feeling that there was some kind of social pressure behind this choice. It came out of nowhere and moved alarmingly fast.
I knew I couldn't change her mind, so I quietly supported her, and when she made the choice to get a double mastectomy (cutely named "top surgery" of course) it wasn't a surprise. She had always hated her chest, and I had sort of half-expected at least a breast reduction in her future, so that actually set off fewer alarms than the T. It wasn't until I saw the aftermath that it hit me how severe of a procedure it was- she had horrific scars across her chest, nothing at all like breast reduction scars. Somebody had artlessly mutilated my best friend's healthy chest, all over this sudden trend that has young women cutting their tits off. I still feel sick when I think about it. Somehow she's happy with the results, and I hope that never changes.
As rough as the surgery was, the final nail in the coffin for me was visiting her after some time on T and hearing her new voice. I knew that it had changed, but I had no idea how it would feel to talk to her and hear a squeaky teenage boy voice come out. I loved her voice- it wasn't especially pretty, but it was my best friend's voice which made it one of my favorite sounds in the entire world. And now it's gone forever.
I'm never going to hear her voice again, and I can't fucking get past it. Her old voice is ingrained in my mind, and it's just gone. I'm never going to hear my best friend talk shit or call me an idiot again.
Her personality took the longest to change, but it finally started to go too. Everything is gender shit now. Everything is problematic. Her presence online is just gross overly-sexual art and photos of a mutilated torso. Our conversations are sad shells of what they used to be. The person that I watched blossom is fading, and I have to pretend to be okay with all of it.
We used to talk about traveling together. I'm finally making enough money to make that happen, and now I don't think it's going to. Her existence is a political statement that can only exist in a very specific environment or it all falls apart, navigating new cultures together would be a nightmare.
I've always secretly hoped that one day she'd get over this and detransition, but now I don't even know what I hope for. She's so far gone that she can't go back, she'll always have weird body hair and a prepubescent boy's voice. I'm terrified of what might happen if she ever comes to and realizes how severely she's damaged herself.
I'm just so fucking sad and angry over the whole thing. I hate this movement, and I hope that everyone who's promoting it burns.