Alright let’s clarify a few things.

I’m 24, no surgeries, just estrogen. Although of course I do support those of us who want surgery.

In the past I would have considered myself a creepy nerd, as well as a loser (kind of like you lol). I was a misogynist, chronically online, addicted to gaming, addicted to porn, suicidal, and generally very ignorant.

Today I don’t spend my time on the internet (with the exception of coming back here for this PSA). Lost interest in gaming, porn, etc.

Nowadays I spend most of my time with my irl friends, or at work, or cooking/cleaning my apartment.

I don’t use dating apps anymore either. I’ve noticed that dating apps (much like any other part of the internet) are the most low effort option, and tend to attract the bottom of the barrel.

Whereas socializing irl tends to be much more rewarding. Of course, I never used to enjoy socializing irl before transitioning. Most of us don’t.

While we’re here, you seem to have some pretty severe misunderstandings of what it means to be trans, which I’d like to address.

First off that it is based on insecurity.

Being trans is a rare medical issue in which the brain and body do not develop to be purely male or female, but instead a mismatched mixture. I personally consider it a severe disability much like type 2 diabetes, since unmedicated it may lead to a premature death.

I personally used to have a very hard time believing that trans identity was real and fully legitimate, until after getting closer to trans people irl and ultimately starting estrogen. I was hoping that hormones might help my mental health, but extremely doubtful that taking a pill would really work.

It took about two months, and then my mental health issues basically vanished. Of course I had already done a lot of other work over the years to improve my mental health, but all of my efforts had always capped out at feeling just barely ok. Whereas estrogen seems to have completely removed the ceiling on my happiness and mental stability.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that before I turned 13 or 14 I also had no history of mental health issues, addiction, or really any problems at all. I was a relatively happy kid, up until the point when testosterone hit me. At which point I basically stopped going outside and became heavily suicidal.

At the end of the day though, knowing my personal experience is not really that much information, and you’d be better off educating yourself on your own, if trans identity is something you’d like to understand.

Since you already seem to know some trans women who are, as you describe “insecure,” I would caution you to remember that this doesn’t mean you have an accurate representation/idea of what normal trans women are like, the ones who aren’t stuck with their internet-addiction and complimentary mental illness.

Obviously there are quite a lot of trans women on the internet. If you haven’t figured it out yet, one reason for this is that if you don’t live in a city or liberal area, the internet may be the only place where trans women can easily/safely find each other and talk to each other.

But also, internet escapism helps mitigate the pain of dysphoria and intolerance! Being trans is very painful, first of all because of how mismatched sex hormones ruin our brain chemistry, and secondly because of how relatively ignorant people (like yourself) don’t understand/believe in our identity.

These are all sources of pain that tend to encourage trans people toward escapism on the internet, or through casual sex, or through hard drugs. I’ve met plenty of girls who fell victim to hard drugs or sex culture, instead of internet culture.

At the end of the day, hormones only go so far, and if you don’t also make the effort to take care of yourself, then the effects are limited.

Not to mention, there are plenty of other problems that get in the way of recovery for trans women. I’ve known girls who experienced violent hate crimes, or even lost friends to just straight up murder. Unfortunately the statistics are not very good for us girls in that department.

Not to mention the girls I’ve met who were abused by their families in an effort to straighten them out.

Perhaps the most traumatized girl I’ve ever met was one who was shipped off by her family to a correctional camp for queer/trans teens, where she lived for a year or two. Some of the teens in the camp were being raped by the instructors. And of course when she was eventually sent home, still just as trans as before, the parents just shook their heads and disowned her, on the basis that “they tried their best.”

All the trauma talk reminds me, of course, it’s important to also distinguish that some of us are lucky enough not to be abused at all. Such as myself. Some of us are even lucky enough to avoid a lot of dysphoria by transitioning at a younger age, and don’t end having to live with a history of mental illness at all.

Being trans is not equivalent to being mentally ill, any more than being black is equivalent to being poor. This shit doesn’t happen on its own, because we somehow mysteriously suck at life. It happens because of the systematic intolerance of our society.

Obviously I understand you may not believe what I have to say here. If you were going to believe in trans people’s experiences at all, you probably would have just believed us in the first place.

But changing your mind is not the point of this thread anyways. The point is to bring some trans discourse to gurochan, so that other girls in the same situation I was may be able to get help.