How a Social Justice Echo Chamber Took Over My Life

and how I learned to see moral grey again

As a person who is now somewhat disillusioned by gender, I have a confession to make: a few years ago, I would have absolutely loathed someone like me. In fact, even months into my detransition, I would have called somebody like me a transphobe, a TERF, and generally an all around bigot. I might have thrown in some loaded terms like “eugenicist” and “genocidal” too. 

Perhaps that is unsurprising. 

Now that I’ve had those labels lobbed at me, I’ve started to find them a little meaningless. I know that I care deeply about transgender people — as I do about all people — and I will not let anyone tell me I don’t. Having been on the other side of the name calling, I also know that trans activists do not call me a TERF because they believe me to be trans exclusionary, or even a radical feminist. They call me a TERF because I have stepped out of line. 

Because I know this, I have been able to take this switching of roles — where I have gone from the caller-outer to the bigot — and use it to examine my former life as a very-online social justice activist. The portrait I paint of my former self, and of my former community, is not particularly flattering. It exposes a serious lack of critical thinking, enforced by the community, and a strong pattern of thought control and emotional manipulation. 

My values remain the same as they have always been, and while my overarching beliefs have changed relatively little, the way I engage with them has changed dramatically throughout my self reflection. I have learned to question my peers, my allies, my political rivals, and myself. I have learned that my own brain is subject to logical fallacies and propaganda just like everyone else’s. I have learned to fear certainty. 

So what changed? How did I go from blindly believing that my perspective was the only correct one to seeing overwhelming shades of grey, all in the space of a few years?

I was dragged through it, kicking and screaming. 

***

I’ll now bring you all the way back to the beginning of my story — to the hesitant pull of detransition, where I suspect many in my position started. Because the reality of detransition is that it’s daunting, and it’s not merely a daunting task to undertake; it’s a daunting thing to even consider. This is not helped if you are, as I was, heavily invested in a particularly extreme brand of activism.

This type of activism means well, and the people who involve themselves in it are overwhelmingly kind, empathetic, and compassionate. They see others suffering, and they wish to end that suffering. This is a noble ambition, and I can’t fault them for it.

In fact, I still align myself with these people’s views — in broad strokes, at least. I still believe in the right to food, water, shelter, and good healthcare; I am still an environmentalist; I still believe that everyone should be included in society to the fullest possible extent; I still believe, naturally, that all people deserve respect and equal rights — that inequality should be remedied, both systematically and interpersonally. 

None of those things are bad in themselves. The controlling — and I’d go so far as to say ‘cultish’ — aspect of this type of activism comes not in the beliefs, but in the way the activists police and surveil each other, and in the intensity of their prescribed focus. 

If you have never been involved in this sort of community, it’s easy to just see the crazy, and to miss the level of control that can be exerted on its participants, both actively and passively. The people who feel called to this movement all view each other with some level of suspicion, the belief being that some are lying about their devotion to the cause because everyone is inherently bigoted, and some are less willing than others to “do the work” to correct that.

People are itching to pick out these hypothetical bad actors, to the point they focus inwards, on conflicts with people who largely agree with them, rather than debating the people who disagree with them entirely. 

Because of this, it is not enough to simply pledge yourself to the cause of social justice; you must constantly reaffirm and project your stance to avoid being confused with thoughtless oppressors. It must become your life’s work. You must see every interaction through this lens, and you must be constantly striving to better yourself. Again, this is not a bad goal inherently, but it becomes bad when it comes at the detriment of other things. 

In this worldview you must be willing to purge yourself of anything and everything deemed bad, no matter the personal cost. TV shows. Books. Hobbies. Friends. Family. Nothing can be put above this non-negotiable moral code. There is no critical consumption, there is no loving someone while disagreeing. It is all or nothing.

In addition to the amount of mental energy one must commit, the spaces I frequented had a culture of moral purity, where doing even one bad thing makes you an all-around bad person, and where bad people must be punished. There is little gradation to the things “bad” encompasses, and minor spats over children's cartoons are treated with the same gravity as overt homophobia or racism. Doing — or simply being perceived as doing — any of these things will get you “called out” as a bigot, and that is a difficult hole to climb out of. 

If you want to be let back in after being called out, you must cleanse yourself from the sin through a ritual of public apology and a nebulous “taking of responsibility”. For some things this at least has a clear path; say you accidentally use an outdated term, you might publicly commit to educating yourself so you don’t do it again in the future. Things are a little less clear when it comes to more subjective crimes. 

You might ask, for example, “how are you meant to take responsibility for something like enjoying a piece of problematic media, or for genuinely disagreeing with a piece of economic policy?” and that’s a good question! I don’t think there truly is an answer; you can’t even ask what you’re meant to do, because if you really cared you’d already know. You’re just supposed to inherently understand what the mob wants to hear, and not knowing is viewed as deliberate. 

Do all this and there is still no guarantee you’ll be forgiven — and even if you are, your mistake is liable to be dug back up at any time, forcing you to grovel again. Correction is swift, aggressive, and typically done publicly. People are definitely not above wishing harm on those who won't submit (in fact, they seem to revel in it).

None of this is being applied to politicians, or even public figures, to be clear. It is being applied by teenagers (and now 20 and 30 somethings, too) on each other. It is a world in which a 15 year old with 100 followers is seen to have the same impact on society (and therefore be deserving of the same punishments) as an adult celebrity with millions of followers. It is a world that does not see the value in nuance — actively rejects it, really.

So, there is little room for error in this community, and I use the word “error” loosely. There are, of course, errors that ought to be apologized for. Those are not what I am talking about. Rather, what “error” really means in this context is disagreement, and the consensus of what’s morally acceptable and what isn’t changes rapidly and somewhat arbitrarily. 

For example, when I first came out as FtM in 2013 the language du jour (on Tumblr) was to write “trans” like this: Trans*. The asterisk, as I understand it, was something coding related — a wildcard meant to signify a variety of possible endings to the initial letters. If you search for “trans*”, you could potentially get results for things like “trans man”, “transgender”, “transition”, and “translation”. So you see, adding the asterisk was a way of making “trans” an umbrella term for any and all potential trans identities, and that made the asterisk inclusive — and therefore mandatory — to use.

I think this probably sounds a bit archaic today, where the label “trans” has become the umbrella in itself, but I assure you it was considered a serious cultural issue to my teenage peers at the time. Using the asterisk marked you as safe, and as a person who intended to do good.

The minutiae of language is a Really. Big. Deal. to this style of activist community. See, it wasn’t just that the asterisk was a sign of allyship, the inverse was true as well: if you didn’t use it, it was because you could not be trusted. Back in 2013, not using the asterisk was a major infraction in my social circles, and you would be admonished for it. Refusal to correct your behaviour was met with shaming and shunning, by strangers and friends alike. To refuse to use the asterisk was to signal your belief that only binary trans people mattered, ergo it was hateful, ergo you were a hateful person who could not be tolerated by an inclusive community. 

As it goes in this space, it only took a year or so before the asterisk was deemed problematic (ironically because it implied that the word “trans” did not already include nonbinary identities) and switched sides to become a marker of someone who wasn’t keeping up with trans culture. You must be constantly engaged with the community, or you will miss these shifts, and you will be branded as not caring enough.

It’s easy to see how that creates a pressure to keep up and not ask questions. 

This perceived importance continues to the current day, and it extends well beyond language. In my former circles it is no longer acceptable to merely call J K Rowling out as a transphobe, for example; you must hate her and her works in order to meet their standards of bare-bones ally. If you don’t understand the real world violence of reading Harry Potter, they assume you probably don’t mind trans people being murdered either. 

Not only are you not to be trusted if you don’t fall in line, your sin is also transferable, and anyone who interacts with you becomes a sinner themselves. You believe precisely what everyone else does, you do as they say, you don’t engage with anything or anyone problematic, or you are pushed out. People will “warn” others to avoid you, and your username will be passed around with a plea for others to block you, ensuring that nobody accidentally interacts with you. If someone does interact with you, others will reach out to admonish them. People who have never even heard of you will take others at their word that you are evil — no evidence necessary. All this is done along with the intent of keeping others “safe” from bigotry. 

It’s not a method of curating one’s own social media sphere, which would be fine — good, even. No, it’s a tactic of isolation. An affront to one is an affront to all, so the entire community must reject sinners, and if someone feels hurt everyone must validate their feeling. 

This culture is one of its own, but it also seeps into other spaces, saturating them until the two are practically synonymous. I would never have considered myself specifically a social justice blogger, for instance; I was into bandom. Bandom being “band fandom”, which on Tumblr means being a fan of 2000s era rock and emo music. Bandom culture on Tumblr is totally enmeshed in this well-meaning but unnuanced activist worldview, to the point that many fans genuinely believe it is nonsensical to enjoy these bands if you are not a social justice activist. 

Even if you truly believe this is how the world should be — and I very much did believe that — it’s exhausting. It’s a culture that encourages constant shame and guilt, and it can turn on you at any minute for things you never could have anticipated being “bad”. You can’t even say that it’s exhausting, because that’s centring yourself, and implying that your feelings are more important than the crucial work of social justice. People are dying and you think it matters that you’re stressed about it? How privileged!

Exhausting.   

***

In these communities, where you must adhere to the majority opinion, detransition isn’t a thing that exists. It just doesn’t happen — or in the rare (very rare!) cases it does, it must always be a tragic example of transphobia forcing someone back in the closet. To acknowledge the potential for regret is to question the very fibre of the belief system: that people innately know if they’re trans, that a trans identity is an immutable truth, that regret could never come for them. The number of people who regret their transition may as well be zero, it’s so rare, according to the information I had access to in this community. This goes beyond detransition, in fact: sometimes trans people themselves are coerced into silence about regrets or complicated feelings that they might have, fearing that they will be fuelling transphobia by sharing their truth.  

I can only speak to my own experience, but when I felt the first twinges of “maybe I made a mistake”, I did everything I could to block it out of my brain. I could not let myself think about it, my mind would totally freeze up and scramble to explain it away. It was normal, I figured, to doubt yourself sometimes. The doubt was my internalized transphobia, as I’d heard so often. 

Still, it kept coming back up, and at some point I had to concede that I’d need to deal with it eventually. I began to think about what living as a woman would mean for me, and I realized that I wasn’t truly living as a man, since a mastectomy and nearly three years of testosterone had not made me pass as anything more than a young teen (if that). 

I’m unhappy because I don’t pass, I decided. That was as far as I was willing to think about it.

With this, I felt freer than I had in a long time. I wasn’t a transphobe — in fact, I was very trans, so trans that I couldn’t bear my reality and would be happier living as a woman than being constantly reminded how much of a man I was not. I briefly talked to my sister about my fears… and then I tucked it away again. This was spring 2021: I was recovering from a depressive episode that had led me to quit my job, my city was back on some level of pandemic lockdown, and I had next to no local friends. I barely saw anyone outside of my family, so the gender thing was not particularly pressing. 

Still, the thoughts persisted. Still, I steadfastly refused to let the idea of regret enter my consciousness. 

Eventually I broke down — still with the understanding that my pain was from the reality of the situation, in that I would never get to be a cis man. Living as a trans man might be the best option for some, but the stress of it wasn’t worth the limited relief it brought me. I did my final shot of testosterone and then promptly told my mom that I couldn’t be a trans man anymore. I spent the next six weeks (until the T was out of my system) regretting that shot, convinced my voice was getting deeper by the day. It was the longest six weeks of my life.

“If I could wake up a cis man tomorrow, I’d take that in a heartbeat,” I told my therapist at the time, “It’s just that I can’t have that, so I have to do this instead.” 

I still wouldn’t allow myself so much as a google search to see if there were others in my position. It felt like betrayal, to myself and to my community. Looking back, I think I was scared I would relate to what I’d find. 

I told my immediate family and my therapist that I was over gender completely, and that I didn’t care what people thought of me. I like my androgynous voice, I told myself. I like my mastectomy. I didn’t regret this, it just didn’t work out. 

My therapist told me she thought I’d made a good decision, given that she’d never seen me so happy. 

I started to share my feelings with my closest friends and on my Tumblr, and they took my no-regrets narrative relatively well. “I’m terrified that this will hurt trans people, I don’t want that,” became my mantra, and I smothered my story in it. For everything I said about my detransition, I gave twice the consideration to trans people. I begged people not to take my story as proof that anything needed to change to prevent what had happened to me. 

For a while this worked, but the weirdness was rapidly seeping in now that I was living as a woman. Suddenly I was a woman with facial hair. I was a woman with no breasts. I was a woman with a voice that was altered by testosterone. I had to come to terms with the fact that not only would I never be a man, I now felt more separate than ever from other women. 

At the same time, I was learning that there was no amount of grovelling I could do to earn the respect of certain trans people (and allies). I started to get frustrated with those people telling me to shut up and stop giving ammunition to transphobes. How could the events of my life, my feelings about my own body, be bigoted in themself? Why was my story any less important than anyone else’s? Why did they feel entitled to my silence for their own benefit?

At this point I was also starting to get frustrated with my friends’ inability to condemn the people who were behaving cruelly towards me. I was giving it my all, and they wouldn’t give me an inch.

***

I was finally starting to feel some regret, though I wasn’t ready to admit it. I was, however, finally ready to explore it with others. I had no idea what I would find, but I had the sense it would be painful. 

First, I tried Tumblr. At the time this Tumblr was the only social media I’d ever really used, so I was comfortable there and knew how it worked. This was a mistake: to this day, any Tumblr tag related to detransition is filled with content about “detrans kink”, which only escalated my distress. This was my worst nightmare, and people were out there fantasizing about being forced into it? Gross.

I moved to other sites, Twitter and Reddit forums. To me, still trapped in the controlling belief system I’d learned, everything I saw seemed horribly, irredeemably transphobic. There were people saying they wished they’d never transitioned at all! There were people saying transition should be regulated! There were people saying they wanted to sue their doctors! There were conservatives! Didn’t these people know they were contributing to the mass violence against trans people? I couldn’t engage with it, or the sins would rub off on me. 

I found my way over to a subreddit that was explicitly trans-positive (I would later learn it was almost entirely comprised of trans people), and it felt safer. It was not the free speech wasteland that the other spaces were; perceived transphobia was removed on sight. I posted there, insisting that I did not feel very regretful, but admitting I was feeling a bit lost. People were kind to me, and I value the time and energy that they gave to me. I walked away from that post feeling affirmed in the notion that transition was simply not for me, but it had been worth a try. 

And then my world crashed down around me. 

***

I missed my voice. That was the first piece of regret I was able to acknowledge, and it hurt. It is still an ache that is deep within me, unhealed and likely to stay that way. That admission to myself opened the floodgates, and I quickly spiralled into a deep depression and mourning. 

People didn’t take kindly to this, especially once I started to feel that I’d been misinformed by my community. I wanted to understand why transition hadn’t worked for me when my community had assured me it was the answer. I wanted to know why the doctors who oversaw my social transition as a teenager had completely neglected the impact of my already-diagnosed mental illness. I wanted to know why I had been told that regret was an impossible outcome. I felt very hurt by the larger trans community blaming me for my “choices” when I had dutifully listened to their insistence that it was my only option for happiness, and that comorbidities were always unrelated to a trans identity. 

That last one — the idea that the discomfort caused by my autism, selective mutism, and depression had mimicked gender dysphoria — made people particularly upset. They took it as an attack. My community pulled away significantly once I started to feel there were factors other than gender involved in my dysphoria, and that I had deserved for those factors to be addressed first. It only made them angrier that I thought it would be good to prevent more people from getting the wrong treatment like I did — even though I was openly committed to trans people getting what they needed, too. 

“How dare you support conversion therapy!?” was the response I got to any suggestion that I should have been given some — any — amount of therapy, or that my dysphoria was psychological in origin (I still don’t understand why they equated “neutral exploratory therapy and assessment for mental illness or neurodivergence, where adults get to make their own choice at the end” with “conversion therapy”. The system I propose is merely an extension of the informed consent system they endorse). 

My two best friends stopped talking to me, and my larger community continued to distance and block. My feelings continued to escalate, fuelled by the total dismissal of my suffering. I began to feel like I’d been indoctrinated into a cult. 

I realized that my friends did not care about dysphoric people unless they actively identified as trans. Either that, or they saw me as an acceptable casualty in exchange for trans people to not have to examine their feelings. This stung. The people who loved me were perfectly okay with me suffering dysphoria for the rest of my life if it meant that trans people wouldn’t face the inexcusable bigotry of… exploring all possible outcomes? Minimizing the amount of medicalization they would need to endure to be happy?

I realized that they prioritized trans identities over literally everything else, including people caught in the crossfire — even including other trans people. They were not interested in preventing what happened to me. To them it didn’t matter if therapy was totally neutral and open to all possibilities, including the patient being genuinely trans; if a single person were to end up deciding they weren’t trans after all, it would be conversion therapy. Even if that person was someone like me. I felt completely alone in the world.

I still wouldn’t engage with detransitioners, because I was confidently not a bigot, thank you. 

At some point my former best friend realized I was suicidal, and she actually called me to talk. To my dismay she began to tell me that she knew I was upset, and that I shouldn’t hurt myself over it, but that I should really be thinking about how hard trans people have it and stop doing things to hurt them. I remember the rage that bubbled up in me; this was what she had to say to me in my worst moment? I hung up on her. 

It was only months later that I realized she hadn’t fumbled her words, but that she had truly meant to call and tell me that. To her, my pain would always be secondary to any pain felt by a trans person. That call was the last time we spoke, aside from a brief conversation through DMs where she officially ended our friendship. 

I was devastated; a decade of friendship thrown away because I thought I deserved better medical care, and because my friend’s empathy was limited by the idea that trans people’s feelings ought to come above all else. My other closest friendship would soon permanently blow up similarly. 

***

This rejection unlocked something in me. I had nothing left to lose, no friends left to abandon me for participating in supposed transphobia… so I turned to the internet at large. I started back on the “good” subreddit, mostly lurking. Now I was noticing the fragility of the support there: it was okay to be wrong about being trans — as long as you were quiet about it. It was okay to detransition — as long as you told people you were glad you tried it. It was fine to feel regret — as long as you didn’t advocate for preventing more regretters. 

I realized that these people, too, thought my call for better care was transphobia.  

The more time I spent on this subreddit, the angrier I got. I frequently saw ideas that I found very hurtful being forced onto detransitioners — like the idea that detrans women were, for all intents and purposes, the same as trans women. We had taken testosterone after all, and (in their eyes) that was the only thing separating trans women from cis women. 

I suspect that this was a genuine attempt at comfort, to be fair — merely meant as reassurance that our problems had solutions because trans women managed — but it infuriated me. It came from a worldview where being seen as trans was a neutral thing that didn’t matter, and that worldview didn’t represent me as a detransitioner. I was not a trans woman, and the idea that I was locked into a lifetime of being trans was another blow to my fragile self image. I realized that these people, who explicitly claimed to care, were still putting ideology above the needs of detransitioners. 

I also noticed that people did not take kindly to anyone who felt deep regret or mourned their old body, and that there was an ever present vein of “you guys are the good detransitioners” running through the discourse. I had just escaped a situation where the support was conditional, but I had traded that one for another flavour.

So, begrudgingly and desperately, I went back to the “bigoted” spaces. To my surprise the people there were quite empathetic, and they had largely been through the same sort of pain that I had. They were willing to support me through it.

This was revelation number one: I was not alone in my anguish. 

***

Despite my newfound peers’ support, the social justice activist in me struggled with the free speech element of these conversations. People said all sorts of things that I considered morally abhorrent, but there was no punishment here. These people were not banned, nor blocked, nor informed of their bigotry — in fact they explicitly were to be tolerated and debated. 

This is embarrassing, but I genuinely was not capable of coping with this sort of conflict. It shook me to my core. It left me fuming and sent me spiraling about the decline of humanity; how could anyone believe something that was so obviously wrong? In my mind, the only explanation was that they were deliberately being hateful.

It’s worth noting that, aside from my personal revelations about trans healthcare, my bar for “bigotry” was still basically on the ground.

I believed in my brand of social justice wholeheartedly, and I didn’t shake those beliefs even when I was burned. I was thoroughly convinced that the way I had been treated was not a failure of my worldview, it was a failure of my peers to me specifically.

I thought I was special; I thought that I was a good, caring person who had somehow slipped through the cracks. If only they would realize that, things would be fine. The fact that this wasn’t happening short circuited my brain.  

I quickly left the detrans spaces I’d peeked into, finding that they were upsetting me more than they helped. 

At this point I had some self awareness, at least, and noted that — though I still thought I was right for it — I was incapable of disagreeing with anybody about anything more serious than simple personal taste. Even then, I’d become so accustomed to hearing about problematic fashion/artists/media/activities that I was skeptical of totally innocuous things. And yet… sometimes, I found myself guiltily, shamefully agreeing with things I vehemently stood against. 

This was very emotionally difficult for me. It was an enormous weight to contend with, being unsure if I had the right to my own opinions, let alone if those opinions were “valid”. I had spent so long in a community that defaulted to the most outraged person that I mentally ran circles around my own thoughts on any contentious issue; I disagreed with the group’s perspective, sometimes, but I adopted their viewpoints anyway for fear of causing harm, and for fear of being ousted from my social circles. I did this even when I could not get it to logically make sense. 

I lived in a world of black and white, good and evil. The choice was, in those terms, easy — and crucially, it was never my choice to make.

Now it was happening again, but this time I knew for a fact that my community had led me astray at least once. I knew that some of their beliefs about transness (that anyone who thinks they’re trans definitely, immutably is, for example) were incorrect. Hearing what these detransitioners had to say got me thinking, but it got me thinking in ways that felt forbidden. I became so uncomfortable with this that I downloaded a browser add-on to block myself from visiting these sites. 

Nonetheless, it was revelation number two: some of the beliefs I expressed felt compelled.

***

I began to circumvent my own blocks. I hated myself for doing it, but I couldn’t help myself. I was so hungry for empathy, so thirsty for information, that I found myself obsessively on the “transphobic” sites no matter what I tried. Eventually I gave in and indulged, and little by little I found my views shifting. Not changing, exactly, but softening — becoming more flexible. 

I found myself able, for the first time, to question the idea of gender itself. I followed some radical feminists on Tumblr for a while, but I found them just as overbearing, anxiety-inducing, and hyperbolic as the trans community, so I abandoned that route. Despite the hyperbole, I suddenly found myself able to think clearly about the logic involved in the “gender debate”. Although I still thought that transition was the most helpful path for some people, the concept of gender stopped making as much sense to me. This was frightening, seeing as I was still in the throes of my previous revelation.

I desperately wanted to join the discussion, but I found myself unable to properly engage. I was hedging what I truly wanted to say, still carefully obscuring it in a myriad of caveats and exceptions. This, if you were wondering, is a compromise that satisfies no one, and I was left on the sidelines of the discussion from both ends. I wasn’t willing to tell either side of the debate what I really thought. 

I started to notice this in myself more generally; I felt like the entire world was comprised of people like me, who centred social justice in their lives, and who would be very upset with any challenge to their morals. I worried about disappointing them. I worried about hurting them.

I was participating more and more in Reddit conversations at this point, where I was safely anonymous, so I had a little more experience under my belt. I had calmed down a touch from my initial six month flurry of grief-rage-terror, and occasionally I would DM with redditors who were struggling. Sometimes this was me trying to provide the same sort of advice that other detransitioners had given me, sometimes it was just listening and acknowledging their pain. I had voice trained, too, so I’d invite people to talk about that if they were asking questions publicly. 

I was always skeptical of the people I spoke to. Sure everyone was labeled, and technically you had to be detransitioned (or desisted/questioning) to comment, but the honour system is not exactly rock solid and the stakes felt very high. I did not want anyone in my real life to know that I held these apparently controversial views. I never spoke to anyone without taking a peek at their post history first, making sure they weren’t simultaneously calling themselves happily transitioned, or frequenting trans meme communities. Occasionally they were.

When I really thought about it, I even felt like other detransitioners — even those with far more extreme views than mine — were trying to trap me. I felt like the shoe could drop at any moment, and I’d be on the outs with my peers again. When I’d talk about it in real life, even with people I trusted, I’d tremble uncontrollably. Even when I felt safe, I did not feel free.

This was revelation number three: the compulsion to censor myself extended to conversations with people outside of these communities — people I agreed with or trusted.

***

On my end, I still felt a level of guilt for so much as thinking — let alone speaking — about what I’d always known to be transphobic ideas: that biological sex was real and unchangeable, that transition had as much potential to hurt as it did to help, that gender medicine was largely experimental and fraught with complications, and that there was a social contagion aspect to the rise in trans identification (that I was a living example of it, even). 

With each hole I found in my worldview, that worldview weighed down on me more. I felt the urge to break free of it entirely. I began to resent it. Here I was, hurt and fallen flat on my back, and instead of processing my trauma I was stuck feeling guilty about its existence. I felt conviction in my altered beliefs, but I felt ashamed of them. Why was I feeling shame about something I thought was true?

It dawned on me that I wasn’t experiencing this for the first time. Some of the very vanilla opinions I held about autism, for example, were considered ableist among my peers. I realized that I had developed a bad habit of telling myself I was wrong about my own thoughts — not just that I was incorrect, but that I was bad for thinking them at all. 

When I believed something in my heart that was different from what the people around me thought was right, I did every bit of thinking around it I could to convince myself that I was the mistaken one. I realize now that this is a feature, not a bug, of the worldview I left. Over the years I had been set up to think that my conclusions were wrong if they didn’t match up with those held by the loudest members of the crowd, and now my feelings were past the point of reconciliation with said crowd.

I thought back to the months I’d spent denying my desire to detransition, laying in bed at night repeating these sort of desperate truisms to myself: Nobody detransitions. It’s normal to feel regret, it’s just you mourning the life you were supposed to have. It’s impossible to “not feel” like a man, since ‘man’ is whatever you feel. Nobody who thinks they’re trans is wrong about it. 

My own brain didn’t feel private anymore. I realized that I had a habit of rewriting my running internal monologue to fit the culture I’d been embroiled in, even beyond the subject of gender.

I was so used to people taking things in bad faith that I edited my thoughts as though they were intended for external eyes, trying to remove any and all ambiguity. All of this for sentences that would never leave my mind. 

I started to worry that people could hear my thoughts, and that they’d think I was an awful person for using stigmatizing words, or for thinking about something controversial, or for not thinking enough about the right things. 

Suddenly, this habit freaked me out. 

This guilt over my own thoughts was the natural end point of the worldview I’d bought into. The ideology itself made disagreeing with the group impossible, because they didn’t even need to reason you into their way of seeing things. All they had to do was insist that your prejudices were blinding you, and from that point any attempt at discussion would be seen as harm. 

Certainly they were correct sometimes, that my prejudices were getting in the way, but they couldn’t always be right. There were some things I had forced myself to believe that I knew were inarguably false — not just saying them to appease the crowd, but genuinely convincing myself that logic and evidence didn’t matter as much as other people’s feelings did. 

That was the final revelation for me: I had learned to self censor my own internal experience.  

***

My life seemed to freeze after I realized how deeply I’d been affected. I was angry and bitter. I was simultaneously horrendously judgemental and completely incapable of trusting my judgement. I felt betrayed. 

It was the sense of betrayal that most deeply affected me. I had given so much of myself to this belief system, more than I ever really understood. I realized just how normalized it had become for me to lie for what I thought was the greater good. There were countless times when I had repeated the claims my social justice activist community insisted on, knowing full well that I was wrong, and believed that I was a good person for doing so.

I also realized how much of an impact this worldview had on my life beyond the issue of gender. The way the activism communities I had participated worked was more performative than anything else — the people who considered themselves activists hardly did any true activism at all. Instead they yelled at each other, preaching to the choir in an effort to get validation and social clout. Because they refuse to interact with anyone they actually disagree with, they force their own social group to endure their highly emotional, accusatory, catastrophizing messaging. It went well beyond typical appeal to emotion. I began to notice how anxious this messaging had made me.

When I had quit my job, right before I started to question my transition, I assumed I had done it due to my mental illness. I was not entirely wrong in my assessment of the situation, of course, but looking back with a willingness to critique, I realized there was another factor: social justice had contributed to my anxiety. 

My boss at this job had been a big fan of Donald Trump, and we’d regularly get emails in our work inbox about her donations to him. This was somewhat unusual, seeing as we’re Canadian — I mention this because it did stand out in a way it wouldn’t elsewhere. I took it as a sign of her supporting the alt-right, and I felt guilty for working for her. I felt guilty because in my social life I was faced with a constant barrage of very serious, very manipulative moralizing about situations like the one I found myself in. 

Most of my social circle vehemently believed that working for a Trump supporter was an act of violence on the part of the employee, because some of the money the boss earns off your labour eventually gets funnelled to Trump who uses his power to hurt people. I was essentially donating to him myself by knowingly supporting a business (by working there) that was donating to him. Or, sometimes it was just that people like my boss shouldn’t be interacted with at all, so that was violence in itself. 

That is a heavy weight to carry, if you believe in that worldview. I was personally responsible for my friends being hurt, because I stayed at my minimum wage retail job. It made sense to me at the time. My labour made my boss money, and she was using that money to fund oppression. Of course I was contributing to harm. 

I had used this to justify my anxiety, and why I was struggling to work for her, but now I was not so sure that made sense. Is there really a way to exist in such a fractured society while only interacting with “good” people? How could I make that bubble for myself when “good” entailed them believing exactly what I did — which, as I’ve established, was often incomplete or nonsensical? 

I no longer believed this was possible. 

The same was true for gender. I had been called a TERF, a transphobe, and a conversion therapist, all for being hurt and for not wanting anyone else to be hurt in the same way. My personal experience had led me to a different conclusion than my friends about how much caution was needed in the field of gender medicine, and they couldn’t cope with that. I felt guilty and evil over my own lived experience. At the same time, I felt that my friends and community were hypocrites; they claimed lived experience was the be-all and end-all, but really they only cared about lived experience when it aligned with their preexisting beliefs. 

I started to seriously question if it was healthy to have immersed my life in politics to the extent my community demanded. How many reasonable people had I dismissed as bigots in the past over minor disagreements? How many people’s hurt had I ignored in favour of my own? How many opportunities had I passed up out of a desire for moral perfection? How many times had I created needlessly uncomfortable situations because I was incapable of agreeing to disagree? How had I gotten to a point where I believed that disagreement was always due to malice?

I came to the conclusion that I did not like the person I had become. I was anxious and angry, overbearing and insecure. I had no space or energy for fun; politics had leached its way into every aspect of my life. I felt ashamed any time I wasn’t actively thinking about oppression. 

I was so tired of feeling that way, and I was incredibly hurt that my activist community did not want to improve trans healthcare. It didn’t matter if the policies they advocated for were capable of causing harm to trans people, they were going to keep advocating for them anyway. I had spent my entire teen and adult life investing in a group that disposed of people who didn’t further their agenda, and I hadn’t even cared until I was personally affected. 

I felt guilty again, and this time it was in the other direction. I had let my world become so walled in that I had abandoned genuine truth and justice. I wanted to change that.

***

I began to more seriously engage with the detrans community, with my heart open to differing perspectives. I saw the community, and the spaces they frequented, for what they really were: complicated, thoughtful, and eager for deep discussion about the systems and ideology that had harmed them. 

The first, and biggest, thing I noticed was that I’d been lied to. My old community had told me that these people — detransitioners and radical feminists — believed certain things. Some of them were true, or sometimes true. Other things turned out to be the complete opposite — that radical feminists want to uphold gender roles, for instance, when they actually don’t think gender is important at all. This was strange for me to adjust to, and added an additional level of clarity to how my old world operated. They were not above misrepresenting others, and they insisted on pure avoidance because they knew people would quickly realize the inconsistency if they civilly interacted.  

I still disagreed with people frequently, even knowing what they truly thought, but I noticed that I was not the only one. Plenty of disagreement occurred, it was simply accepted as a fact of life. When my impulse was to call an opinion bigoted, I would really take the time to think about it. Most of the time I ended up at the same conclusion, but being able to think about the other person’s perspective and goals — without judgment — allowed me to feel more secure in my views. I was open to changing my mind if I found some merit in the other person’s argument, and sometimes I did. I refused to feel guilty about it.  

Because I felt sincere in my opinions, I felt comfortable standing behind them in a firm but non vitriolic way. My stance had changed before, and my own experiences had coloured that. I was less comfortable judging people for arriving at their own views, even if I thought they were dead wrong. Instead, I wanted to have a conversation with them. I wanted to know how they felt, and to understand their thought process. I wanted to find common ground for us to start on. 

I wanted us to strip us down to the bare bones of our humanity and build from there. 

I found that the world was somewhat less polarized than I had been led to believe. When I would talk to trans activists, for example, they tended to come at me full of rage and unwilling to listen. They would ascribe views to me that they assumed I held, and from my own experience I knew they did this because they felt anyone who argued against anything they believed must be a full on evil person. I also knew they were wrong. 

When I responded in kind — the way I wanted to — the conversation went nowhere. Most often I was yelled at and blocked, or else I was told I was being groomed by the alt right. On the other hand, when I was patient with these people and tried to empathize with them, things tended to go a little better. We often disagreed, still, and they would often lie to my face still, but we were able to see that we had similar goals — mainly for people to get the medical care that would truly help them. 

I won’t lie and say that these conversations have dramatically changed minds, but I think they have humanized me somewhat. It’s better than a conversation that never even begins, at the very least.  

It was a conscious effort to do this. It was not fun. It did not feel good. I did not think these people deserved my time or mental effort. I had to reckon with this: did I want to do what felt right emotionally, or did I want to make progress? 

I decided that I would no longer throw out good in the hopes of forcing perfection. 

***

It’s so easy to feel self righteous when your world is broken into the binary of good and evil. It feels like a no-brainer to take the “morally correct” position when the alternative is being an irredeemably horrible person. It is natural to feel unquestioning conviction in your beliefs when you only interact with people who agree. It is sensible to feel outraged at disagreement if you feel your rights are on the line. It is logical to cut people who disagree with you out of your life, if disagreeing means they want your friends and loved ones to die. 

Unfortunately, the merit in the statements above rests on them being true, and I no longer believe that they are. The world is not made of good and evil, it’s made of a frequently conflicting network of needs, values, and motivations. People are rarely all good or all bad, they are complex and multifaceted. Refusing to question your beliefs, and having others agree with you, is not proof that you are right. Not every political disagreement is a matter of life or death, nor does it mean the disagree-er wants you dead. 

I have learned this, and I have learned it the hard way. There are few moral questions that have complete, objective right and wrong answers. It feels safe, and it feels good, to believe that there is a way to do right by all people, all of the time, but it is not practical to hold that belief in the face of conflicting truths. There is no escaping the moral complexity in so many of the political conversations we have. I have chosen to work with it, to embrace it, even.

I hope one day my former friends and peers will follow, and I hope they get there with less pain than I did.