Figured I'd post my story here since it seems appropriate.
I first found out about trans shit during like 2020 when I was still in high school (yes I'm a zoomer) and for the longest time, honestly, I didn't really care much. I never agreed with the radical elements of the movement like the whole sports thing and jailing people for saying the wrong pronouns but I was perfectly fine with adults transitioning, as I believe in individual freedom. Honestly I still do feel this way but I never had any clue how bad the trans community was until I experienced their emotionally manipulative tactics first-hand.
I always loved being a guy, from when I was a kid. And especially when I got into college I became a lot more masculine and extremely proud of it. Having dreams of getting ripped, loved wearing suits, idolizing male characters in games and anime, wanting to go on dates with girls. And I also had been exposed to trans content a ton online, as I went down the extremely autistic terminally online politics rabbit hole in my freshman year of college. And I did see some of the freaks but because I only hung out in center-right/right-wing circles the trannies I got exposed to were the more "reasonable le epic based" ones like Taftaj and shit. But never once did I ever think that anything related to trans women that I saw or any aspect of what they went through related to me. Never felt any sort of gender dysphoria my whole life and never felt any kind of desire to be a woman, and as I just laid out, loved being a guy. In fact I remember at various points being happy I wasn't born a woman. Occassionally I'd have passing thoughts that were just like "Huh what would it have been like if I was born a girl" and shit like that but that's all they were, just fun passing thoughts that I briefly entertained and thought nothing of beyond that. I did also briefly have kind of a thing for trans women when I was a teenager but it was strictly just for wanting to be with one, not for actually being one. Never had any kind of serious AGP shit whatsoever and was exclusively straight. Around the time I had the thing for trans women I had like one fantasy where I was a woman but that was it and I thought nothing of it at the time, and completely forgot about it and generally kind of grew out of the thing I had for trannies for the most part afterwards.
Back in November I was fairly depressed, much more than usual largely just due to irl stress regarding college and work, and generally started feeling directionless in my life. One night while I was depressed and bored (and horny) I just, very randomly, remembered the one-off time from all those years ago when I had a fantasy of myself as a woman. And I thought it was arousing and decided to indulge it again. However, unlike the time I got off to it back then and just didn't care and moved on, this time was different. After I was done, the thoughts were still there... which I thought was very weird. But I was tired and just went to sleep. The next morning I woke up and everything was normal, I went to the bathroom as I usually would and then remembered the fantasy from the previous night and was like "Oh yeah what the hell was that all about?" ...I kid you not, in that exact moment, I felt this immensely unnerving anxiety and unease quite literally set in. And then a thought appeared in my head: "Am I transgender?" This very, very quickly spiraled out of control. I started feeling extremely disassociated and had no idea why the hell I was suddenly having these thoughts. Then, for some reason, I guess because it started with an erotic fantasy, throughout the day I started indulging it more, I guess thinking maybe that would satisfy the thoughts, but it only made it worse and made me even more confused. I was getting pretty desperate and looked up one of my thoughts on Google, I think it was like "Are you trans if you have fantasies of yourself as a woman?" What this led me to was, of course, none other than the subreddit r/asktransgender, where the very first thing I got greeted with was not only the whole "If you're even questioning it then you probably are", but also a gazillion other people asking "Am I trans or is it just a fetish?" and people replying with absolute bs like "It's never just a fetish, autogynephilia is debunked pseudoscience". And you can't forget about the people saying "That's how my egg cracked!!!" along with the whole "egg" thing in general. Up until this point, I had never been exposed to this side of the trans community. At least not this personally. I heard like one random leftist troon say something about the egg shit before all of this but at the time just thought they were a crazy person. You can only imagine my shock when I found that this stuff were the mainstream narratives in online trans communities, and that if you were to dare disagree with any of them you were an evil nazi transphobe.
Now in this moment I was also not in a sound state of mind, I was having distressing intrusive thoughts about being transgender coupled with sudden sexual arousal at some of these thoughts too and was desperate for answers. So naturally, what do you think happened to me next upon coming across this stuff? Absolute nightmarish pandemonium. The next two days after I saw this were a new kind of hell I never thought I could experience before. I was literally convinced it was real, that I actually had gender dysphoria now and that getting turned on by thoughts of being female was proof because of the whole "It's never just a fetish". That confident, happy man who I was so proud to have become, all those years of emotional and spiritual development, literally within two days it all got completely blown to smitherenes. I was beyond horrified, distressed, and even nearly suicidal, and had multiple breakdowns in front of my family. I did not enjoy the thoughts of myself as female, I didn't feel any discomfort with my body or anything like that, but I was absolutely terrified that I was transgender and literally could not stop thinking about it. Ultimately where I achieved some clarity was when, after having a breakdown and nearly being suicidal after, I came across what's known as "Transgender OCD" (or TOCD) while looking online. This is a subtype of OCD (not a separate diagnosis, just a possible theme that OCD can take on) where someone who is not trans or dysphoric and has been content as their actual gender their whole life suddenly starts having distressing intrusive thoughts that they are trans (key word is distressing, as in they do not enjoy these thoughts and don't want to be trans) in response to some kind of specific event, and do various compulsions to try and relieve them (like reassurance seeking and mental checking, etc.). When I saw this, I felt nothing but immense relief, because it perfectly described what I was going through. There was another explanation beyond dysphoria, and this one had substantial enough research backing it that even the degenerates on the mainstream trans subs (most of them at least) couldn't deny its validity. Now I have never actually been diagnosed with OCD, but I have had numerous past obsessions over stuff like friendships, nuclear war, getting fired from my job (over a stupid joke my boss made), and I even think racism at one point that were very similar in nature in how the thoughts appeared and things I'd do in response to them (like reassurance seeking), so it all kind of clicked into place when I found all this out. But I have to say that TOCD is by far the worst of these themes I've ever dealt with. Like it's not even close.
While I was relieved in the moment I then found the subreddit for TOCD and people suffering from it and began to heavily use it for reassurance which would just continue my OCD cycle for much longer, and I'm even still dealing with it now unfortunately. Once I found out what I was dealing with was almost certainly OCD and not actually any kind of real transgenderism, I stopped looking on those godforsaken trans subs and just stuck to the OCD ones and more moderate shit like r/detrans. Though I've realized as time has gone on that Reddit in general makes it worse bc it's just used compulsively so I've been trying to stay off of it. Ever since then it's been really up and down for me. I've had times where I've been better and times where it's been bad. The entire month of February almost and part of March I was in complete rumination hell, just having constant "What if I'm just in denial?" thoughts like every single day. Then after that though I was actually doing much better on my own for a good amount of time as I was staying off Reddit and trying to not do compulsions, until a couple weeks ago when I had a really bad relapse that sent me back down the spiral. I'm doing okay right now but I could be better and I honestly should seek treatment for my OCD and also get properly diagnosed. Thing is, at the start of dealing with this I saw a talk therapist who was completely unqualified and not knowledgable at all about OCD who legit tried to explore my thoughts as if they were real which left me feeling like I wanted to die for like two days afterwards, so I stopped seeing him and have generally been apprehensive about therapy because of it. That's another thing I hate so much about this, that therapists are wrapped up in this absolute chaos that is the trans movement. It's a shame, really.
But even though I feel (and hope) I'm past the worst of this, I feel my mind has been fundamentally altered and I'll never be able to see things the same way. Every single time now I see an attractive woman my brain constantly yells at me to "check to see how it feels to be her" and it's so annoying. I have no "gender envy" whatsoever when I look at women, no dysphoria, no euphoria unless you wanna count the weird AGP fantasies. This shit has made me feel completely disconnected from my old self, a man I was so proud of being all my life, and while I've been getting pieces and pieces of it back over time the damage has been immense and horrific. The fantasies in particular really scare me as they definitely can't be caused by OCD meaning I definitely have some tier of actual autogynephilia, and I literally don't know how that's possible considering I almost never had them at all and was exclusively straight before all this. I had them a lot in the first two months of dealing with this theme but lately they have thankfully decreased and I've gotten a lot of my normal straight fantasies back, which I find very relieving and means I definitely don't have any kind of chronic AGP at the very least but it's still extremely terrifying. But most of all, I blame the trans community's rhetoric around this shit. I was desperate for answers and scared and when I went to seek help thinking I could trust them, I was told that if you even remotely fantasize about being a woman then you are trans 100% without a doubt and if you say otherwise you're just in denial and are repressing and will be miserable for the rest of your life, and so you absolutely must experiment to find your "true self" and search your memories (yeah, my memories where I display no signs at all of this shit). They're quite literally encouraging obsession and paranoia. I saw someone once describe the idea of "questioning your gender" and all this nonsense as being OCD nightmare fuel and I certainly could not agree more. They have absolutely no idea how harmful these statements are, and I'm sorry the people who say this shit are unironically evil. They're in a fucking cult, and they deny it even though they literally have a goddamn bible (the "Gender Dysphoria Bible" to be exact). They have this insane obsession with turning more people trans that has done so much damage to so many innocent people, which unfortunately now includes me. Because if I had gone on those subs in my desperacy back then and was instead met with "Oh no you would've 100% known by now you just have a fetish don't worry", this story would have been far different. I likely wouldn't have lost months of my life to this that I now can never get back, and my self-image that I was once so proud of would not have been tarnished and distorted to kingdom come. I will never, ever forgive these people for what they've taken from not just me, and so many others. They seriously can go fuck themselves.
I just seriously wish I remained as I was before all this, because as I said, I never knew the community was this bad and degenerate. I literally had no idea. Apologies if this is too long and emotional but I think my story should be heard not just for people with trans-themed OCD, but for others who have been harmed by their insane worldview.
