#the risks skyrocket of harming your partner in ways they later hugely regret

[wild-at-mind]

Just remembering when I was waiting for bf to get his tatt done and looking at the magazines, they had one of those extreme body mods magazines which was interesting. I have never understood why people get this kind of body mod, but I'm trying to work on being more open minded. And from this magazine I can see clearly that the ethos is 'my body is mine and I should be allowed to choose to do these things to it', which resonates. And as a trans person I would hope I wouldn't forget that transphobes call transition 'irrepairable damage' and self harm. (I can remember watching those early 2000s documentaries where surgery for transition was basically framed as an extreme body mod to be looked at for shock value.)

So I'm looking at this magazine, all open minded like, and then suddenly one of the models (who was being interviewed for something else, like he had his dick split in two or something) just casually is like oh yeah I have tonnes of different types of swastika tattooed on my arm. And sure enough, then there's a pic of like...20 swastikas done in different ways all on one area of his arm.

:[

[thisismyveryownsideblog]

With the final report now released, I feel compelled to say something, or else I risk looking back and berating myself for staying quiet.

We now know, for a fact, that the commonly-repeated claim that many of the means of medical transition are safe is, in fact, not based on sufficient high-quality research.

Moreover, we also now know, for a fact, that the referral rate has skyrocketted in recent years. I have been listening to the stories of detransitioners quietly myself now for about a year. Please, please, please understand: there is no guarantee that your certainty right now means that you won't end up detransitioning later. So many detrans people will tell you right out the gate that they were absolutely 100% sure they were trans when they first started out down this road.

Please, please, pause and really evaluate this decision before you make it. Ignore people who are trying to rush you to medically transition; if they really cared about you, they'd let you take the time you need to make such a huge decision. You don't need to rush. You can take your time and really ask yourself what you want—not just for today, not just for tomorrow, but for forty, fifty, sixty years down the line. This isn't just a choice you make for your teen years or twenties or thirties. This is a choice you're going to have to live with when you're middle-aged, your grandparents' age, and very elderly.

The trans community is known for downplaying negative results of medical transition and silencing naysayers; people who are deep into a possible sunk cost fallacy cannot be trusted to inform you about the possible negative effects of their decision. Ask detransitioners to tell you what they wish they'd known before starting medical transition.

And ask yourself why you want to transition. Really sit down and interrogate this. I know it's scary. But you wouldn't want to make a serious medical decision without making sure first that there wasn't another way to solve it. Many detransitioners have listed among the reasons they thought they were trans as repressed internalized misogyny or misandry, justified discomfort with being sexualized or a self-defense response to past sexual assault, repressed AGP or AAP, trying to "trans the gay away," or undiagnosed autism. For many of them, transition was only a distraction from the real root cause of their unhappiness—a costly, invasive, and ultimately harmful distraction. Dysphoria does not automatically mean that medical transition is your only option for dealing with these feelings.

Look. I'm not a TERF. I don't hate you. I don't want you dead. I'm just really, really concerned that a lot of you are making extremely serious medical choices, choices that will leave you a medical patient for the rest of your life when you don't have to be, choices that could gravely affect your ability to have kids or find a partner someday if you decide you want that, choices that plenty of other people before you have made and later regretted.

Slow down. Think this through. Do your own, independent research, and ask people who've come through the other side and regretted it what they would have done differently.