"While volunteering at an LGBT youth drop-in center in Tuscon (that was ages 13 to 23) over the course of the time that I was there I saw a lot of problems. I saw a lot of comorbidities in these young kids who were there. Several there were starting to take puberty blockers. They had the Lupron implants. We had a top surgery fundraiser for a 16-year-old. There were kids who went there that identified as 'furries.' You know there were kids that were so enraptured by their own disabilities that they wore them like merit badges. And I was like what's going on here? You know like this is weird and that's really when I started waking up to [thinking] I don't think kids should be into this."

"Now, yes, I say: I never had dysphoria to begin with. That doesn't mean I didn't think I had dysphoria. I had body dysmorphia. I didn't go through the proper psychiatric channels before I started transitioning. So I mistook my body issues for dysphoria when they were not. That is something to consider if you’re doing informed consent treatment. That maybe you just go through proper channels. I was so convinced I thought that I’ve been transgender since I was eight years old. But it turned out to not be accurate, and I found out the hard way."

"In this [Pokeman] community, I [age 14] met someone who described themselves as a 'lesbian'...Nicole, aged 21. Nicole came into my streams every day giving me tips...Nicole put me at ease and invited me to add them on Skype personally, and to follow each other on Twitter. This is when I found out that Nicole was a trans woman, as they would often tweet about trans issues, their hormone regiments, etc...I became friends with their friends, their girlfriend (also a trans woman), etc...Not having many real friends...all of the positive attention I was getting online from this new group of friends was pretty foreign to me. It was pretty welcome, though. It felt good!...Eventually, Nicole invited me to follow their secret Twitter account. This account was full of pornography. Pornography unlike anything I had ever seen before. The most graphic hentai you can possibly imagine...

"[I later joined a new] online community...Many, many people in this game's community were coming out as transgender at this time. They were all lonely outcast boys just like me...I came out as trans alongside two of my friends on this game. Oddly, all three of us have since detransitioned. I was the last to do so."

"I began to disassociate with Calvin and find a new role in this person that I was becoming. I began to put this armor on myself and detach from every hurt, every pain, every rejection, you know, every bit of abuse that I'd faced throughout the past. I began to block that out by becoming this person."

"I think probably within a month of on estrogen I had my first interaction with...suicidal ideation and...suicidal attempts and when I brought that up with my doctor they were like, 'well, you know, uh, we just need to make sure your levels are good and you'll you'll be fine.' That's I kid you not...

"[8-9 years later] How it started was..I went to the doctor I said, 'hey, like, I think this is going on; I think I want to just, you know, maybe take a little testosterone to maybe like help ground me because I feel like I'm in space right now...I want to go on T and let's start this...'

"I think after the first week of the tiny bit of T, I felt better than I have since I was like 20."

"[Detransitioning] was a really embarrassing and depressing moment. Because...you make all these changes, you tell everyone like this big announcement, you kind of make everyone change how they're supposed to perceive you and talk to you and talk about you. And you feel, almost, kind of like a letdown, I would say...but I...got back to feeling better once I...came to terms with the fact that I did want to detransition...

"Once the breast implants were out that was...literally a big weight off. Yeah, they were very heavy...literally and metaphorically it was...a big weight off. Because while I had them I was always wearing...sweatshirts, always hunched over. I just felt so uncomfortable with my body...I just didn't even want to see myself...naked basically...It just felt wrong...It just felt completely wrong...I had added something to my body that shouldn't have been there...

"I, for a while there, really believed...that gender is this end-all, be-all kind of thing. And now...after detransitioning, I don't really care about gender. I just look at sex because...sex is...the base and it's what actually matters and gender is...BS...

"When I detransitioned, it was like finding myself again. Like I had kind of been...lost for a while and just didn't really notice it until I detransitioned. And then I was, like, no...this is, this is who I'm supposed to be. This is who I always was...This just is me. Back to being...me. Back to being Garret."

"I was going to go to Thailand and have the final surgery, sex reassignment surgery. I was on a beach with two transgenders that had the operation already, and we were sitting on a blanket on Coney Island having a good old time. And they just both looked at me, said, 'Don't do it.' And I said, 'Don't do what?' The one looked at me and he says, 'You know all of my life I thought I could find peace and joy and happiness if I could just be a girl. And now I am medically and legally a girl, and I'm more miserable now than I ever was my entire life.' He said, 'And I think about taking my life every day.' The other one looked at me and he said, 'I think about taking my life several times a day, every day. You do not want to be us. don't do it.'"

"I had undiagnosed autism. I was held back in school. When I started puberty at age 12, I got teased a lot for it. I was really tall. I became very self-conscious of my body. My autism definitely affected my social ability. I’m hypersensitive to social situations and panic and get upset I’ll do something wrong. As much as I wanted to be like the other boys, I found it hard to relate to boys. I found it easier to relate to women. I struggled with my gender and sexuality. I went through all the different labels. They were me, boxing myself in. I transitioned at 29. I found [that] at first being trans very exciting. There was liberation. I recognized my dysphoria was a bunch of other things. My issues with masculinity. My issues with my body. And it wasn't particularly identifying as a woman. I wasn’t pushed to transition. It was me thinking I was trans because I have all these issues. I wish I would have worked on my issues."

"There is one thing that binds us all: we are men who did not want to become men, whether we acknowledge we are still men or not...You are a man. You were always a man. You are still a man. You will always be a man. You are male. You were always male. You will always be male. Your appearance doesn’t matter. Your hormone therapy doesn’t matter. Your surgeries don’t matter. None of it makes you a woman. Your sex never changed. Your feelings that you are a woman are a delusion. You are experiencing a delusion. It’s not real. It feels real, but it’s not. You are a man who wants to be a woman, nothing more. You will never get what you want. Others may try to give you what you want, but it is only an illusion. The research is fake. The treatments are fake. The clinicians are lying. Your friends are lying. You have been brainwashed. If you continue on this path, you are going to send yourself into an early grave over absolutely nothing."

"I went through Gender GP and they were pretty quick to prescribe me because they used the informed consent model which is...it’s bad. Informed consent is this idea that you consent on the context of being informed...I was not informed...I couldn’t have been informed...Nobody knows the extent and the side effects of these medical procedures...And that’s what I think is so scary about children undergoing these procedures is. We don’t know the consequences of disturbing puberty...Puberty is probably the single most important thing your body does in your life and we’re messing around with it like we’re God...So from taking hormones, almost immediately I was getting side effects. I remember being tired all the time. Drained...just struggling in general."

“I was under a mistaken belief that transition is something that has a finite ending point. So, I saw surgery as being the end of transition and then I could just go on and live my life normally...Then, later in life, like every experience that you have, it is all through this fact that you are not a member of the sex that you are trying to impersonate. So, transition doesn’t end. Because everything that you’re encountering after that point has to be understood through the fact that you are a transexual, and not a member of the opposite sex.”

“Living a normal life. That was pretty much all I ever wanted was to be loved and live a normal life…

"[The health care I got is] definitely not what I thought I would be getting when I went on this route…I thought like, oh, I'm going to get in contact with [this] LGBT friendly place and they're going to put me in contact with, you know, elders of, like, you know, people like me. And I was going to be able to like have a little bit of self-discovery and like learn to be more comfortable with myself before going on like such a major route...because at that point, you know, I was young. So, I was kind of like looking to like people around me a little bit more to like understand my emotions and why I had so many problems…just figure out why I felt this way and why everything about myself felt so bad...

"But in my personal life [letting nature take its course and stopping estrogen]...felt like a deepening of my awareness in my own skin. Not really for positive or negative. I'm just learning to like not really label my emotions as they come up. It's just like it is and that is it kind of thing. And I try to practice that quite a bit and it's helped me a lot. And like understanding like the deeper layers of like my dysphoria just a little bit. I'm still exploring it. …but it's allowed me to kind of see the base of it being you know shame and the guilt associated with things I went through as a child and a lot of the homophobia I faced.”