Do you feel like your old self died?

[Kirsteneklund7]

Nah, I didn't kill my old self, but since I detransitioned I've felt a lot like I had stuffed away my old self, like into a storage room somewhere far back in my mind, and I've dug around a lot in there to try to find her again now that I miss her. But I can't. The problem isn't that my old self is gone, it's that I'm still her but I've grown up and changed with the years and experiences I had while transitioning and whatnot for the past decade. 30 year old me simply cannot ever be the same as 20 year old me was, transition or not.

However, back when I thought I was a trans man, I saw everything through a lens of "myself as a guy," often unwittingly. Now I know I basically tried to "re-write" myself into what was a male persona, while I thought that persona was the real me that I was trying to liberate. Confusing times! Because I had just before my transition created a female persona that I was trying to force myself to become in order to escape being trans. I really wasted so many years on trying to force myself into either box of the gender binary, when both chafed against my soul.

Now I mostly just think of myself as a human being with an androgynous mind that just so happens to have been born female, and that's what I've always been regardless of how I've identified my gender or how I've changed my body. I see myself as a woman now only cause I made peace with my body being female, I don't really think I have a gender per se. I'm not a tiny teen with perky breasts and a high voice anymore, but that I'm now a hairy, flat-chested woman with a deep voice... is still my body and changing it never changed who I am inside.

Although of course it did change how I interact with society, and how society interacts with me, cause passing as male is obviously different from passing as female, and I never got the luxuary of being able to choose which of the sexes to pass as from day to day. And transitioning changed how I relate to my body. I went from very dysphoric to loving myself, but also from feeling whole to feeling amputated. I've grieved and felt liberated, comforted and torn apart. I've felt lots of confusion, frustration and many other emotions. So of course I've changed, going through all that.

Amazing, so much of that is how I have felt over the years. On the" why do people transition thread" I mentioned an entire side of me got locked away in a box for a long time.

I am making friends with and getting to know my female self. I feel much better these days.

Surgery may or may not be the answer for me but allowing my feminine side to exist and expressing the total self is very good for me.

My old self has not died.

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[F_P_M]

No, they EVOLVED.

I think of it like caterpillars. Do you grieve for the caterpillar when it becomes a butterfly?

I'm evolving, i'm growing up but i'll always be ME. What's inside me doesn't change (except perhaps i'll be less miserable) it's just the shell.
I will still be the same person, just a happier, healthier form of me. A more genuine and honest one.

I'm not dying, i'm just making some adjustments to the meat suit my conciousness is stuffed into, to make it more comfortable to wear.

[RobynD]

I never did. Feel like exactly the same person inside. Feel the relief of GD going away and the changed life but that is it.

[LaRae]

Nope, I just stopped fighting the parts of myself I didn't want to be. I evolved.

[SeptagonScars]

Amazing, so much of that is how I have felt over the years. On the" why do people transition thread" I mentioned an entire side of me got locked away in a box for a long time.

I am making friends with and getting to know my female self. I feel much better these days.

Surgery may or may not be the answer for me but allowing my feminine side to exist and expressing the total self is very good for me.

My old self has not died.

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Expressing the total self is definitely a good thing! For me that means I kinda have to balance expressing both my feminine/female and masculine/male sides of myself to not feel like I'm suffocating in one way or another. And that is sometimes difficult to not forget about one aspect or the other, or bend too much in either direction.

Whether one needs surgery or not really is individual. For me just bringing up what I want to change or not about my body just helps me navigate my fem and masc sides, how they relate and co-exist. But really it's more to do with just explaining my dysphoria vs euphoria. Although how I was as a trans guy was mostly fabricated, there was a certain degree of maleness/masculinity to it that was always genuine. You do as you wish with your own body, and I'm sure you'll know what exactly that is further down the road.

[KathyLauren]

No, I don't feel that the old me died.  The old me was liberated to become the new me.  She didn't die; she started living.

I am becoming more comfortable all the time thinking of the old me as female.  (As in "She didn't die", above.)  In spite of my best efforts to appear as male back then, I never managed to pull it off convincingly.  So, more and more, I think of that pre-transition person as female.  And she is more alive now than ever.

[jkredman]

He didn't die, he chose to free her!  They've both been happier ever since!


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[Allie Jayne]

Like most of you I don't feel a loss, probably because I have always felt I was who I am now. Instead of doing what I was told, I am doing what I need to do. The concept of 'old self dying' is a way of dealing with something many can't comprehend. That is, a person can be more than one gender. Mostly it's family and close friends who are locked into the idea that someone can't change their gender, but are then confronted with someone who obviously has. Their only way to rationalise against their beliefs is that someone died, and this new person is someone else.

Allie

[graspthesanity]

It's an interesting question! Well... I feel like I just became who I always wanted to be, there is only a shy boy wanting to be free in the past who kept getting told to stay quiet by his parents. That's all. Now I released him and he is fabulous!

I actually have been feeling more myself these days now that I'm in a good place transition-wise.