"Half a year after I decided I was a woman, I visited the best-known expert on transgenderism in the Czech Republic, sexologist Hana Fifkova. After a 30-minute-long appointment, she told me I was a clear case—she said she had zero doubts that I’m a beautiful girl and sent me along to attend further exams.

"The psychologist tells you: ‘draw a person’ and then ‘draw a person of the opposite sex.’ Depending on the apparent sex of the first figure you draw, the psychologist will assess your felt gender...As I knew about this test from a facebook group, I knew I had to draw a person in a dress first."

"When I was a 14-year-old boy, I decided I was transgender...My reasons will sound familiar to anyone who’s had experience with this phenomenon: I had undiagnosed autism. I was being sexually harassed in school. I didn’t have any close friends. Most importantly, I spent a lot of time online. That was where I was exposed to transgender ideology for the first time.

"That ideology told me any discomfort with restrictive gender roles or your developing body is a symptom of gender dysphoria. The appropriate response to gender dysphoria is to transition. You need to transition as soon as possible. If you wait too long to transition, you won’t be able to 'pass.' Anyone who restricts your access to hormones is a bigot who wants to hurt you, which means you can lie to them with impunity....

"My life felt like a nightmare, and becoming trans seemed like a way out. If I was trans, I’d no longer be an oppressive 'cis white male.' I would be special and valuable. I’d have friends. People would stop hurting me. I wouldn’t have to deal with the terrifying experience of going through puberty and becoming an adult. I wouldn’t have to face the responsibility that came with adulthood, a responsibility that I felt totally unprepared for."

"When I was young, I was bullied a lot, being very bright but physically weak, which singled me out as a super-nerd and resulted in a lot of violence. I started to fantasise about being a girl from about age six because that would make me safe and take me away from my place at the bottom of the male hierarchy...

"I told the psychologist I wanted to be female but nothing about the other issues involved, such as being bullied. I wasn’t aware that bullying had anything to do with my gender issues, but he didn’t ask any deeper questions. So, I was just like, ‘This is who I am and this who I want to be,' and they were like, ‘That’s great!’ and after just two sessions I was given hormones...

"One of my biggest struggles is that due to the medical procedures I underwent, I have difficulty with dating, am unable to have children, and still having problems finding a good hormone balance...I feel regrets about not having children and not being able to have biological children. This was something I didn’t appreciate when I was younger, but really feels like something missing now."

"Everything that happened to me the last 10 years destroyed my life. I destroyed it. I'm not a victim...I did this to myself, but I had help...I was very naïve, I was in a really bad way and I got taken advantage of."

"I came in contact with a transgender woman who had transitioned in her 30s. She encouraged me to explore my femininity more. She took me to a support group for LGBT people to talk about my feelings of gender confusion. In this group I was told that I was transsexual and that the dysphoria would only get worse as I would get older. Transitioning young and as soon as possible was the way to go according to the members there...

"[This] trans woman, who at that time was in her mid-40s, took me, a teenager [age 16] exploring his identity, shopping for women’s clothes...to an electrologist to have my facial hair electrolyzed. She provided me with hormones from an online pharmacy. I couldn’t tell my parents, that was the deal...[She] convinced me that my parents were transphobic and that they wanted to harm me. She encouraged me to move out and become a runaway. She offered [me to] stay at her place...

"Transitioning doesn’t solve anything. SRS just makes matters even worse. One thing I learned is that everyone feels uncomfortable around trans people and everyone is just walking on eggshells to avoid saying something offensive. Dating someone is also quite impossible as a trans person, unless they fetishize you. No one truly wants to be with a transgender person forever. There is just too much problems that come with it. Had I known all this before committing to irreversible procedures, I would never have done it."

"I was happy maybe for a month or two but then got even more depressed after surgery. My neo-vagina started constricting...I will never be able to get my penis back, which is extremely traumatic for me. I want it back and I can't. Sex is traumatic for me now because I've had botched surgeries…the one thing they don't tell you is once your first surgery didn't go right and second one didn't go right, after a while nobody wants to touch other surgeons' work because they don't want to attach their name to a complicated case. Every time you go in there is more scar tissue and more complications."

"Transitioning was a way of killing myself without dying because I was so unhappy with my life...I thought that if I could do this one thing, it could change everything. I could reinvent myself as an entirely new person…

"This new person won't have the old problems or the old societal expectations. But of course that's not really true…

"It's the ultimate way to solve your problems because you're being told everything about you boils down to this one thing that is wrong, and if you can fix this one thing everything will be perfect...

"[But I came to realise] there was no actual way I can know what it feels like to be a woman because I'd never been one, so the idea of me saying 'Oh, I feel like a woman' was absurd.

"And the second thing I came to realise was that I didn't actually need to change my outside because of how I felt on the inside. I just needed to come to terms with it."

"I first learned about [trans] from television, where at the time a very popular program featured interviews with transsexuals. That made me think about the possibility of gender reassignment. It’s not something I would have thought of on my own. It wasn’t a product of my mind, but an idea I got infected with from the media…

"Then a transgender woman, a biological male, who was about 40 at the time, reached out to me [at 14] and we started writing back and forth. I’ll call this person ‘Eve’...

"When I was 15, my mother took me to a sexologist…[who] ultimately concluded that I was a gay man who didn’t accept his sexual orientation, and that I had defensively adopted the identity of the opposite sex in order to avoid thinking of myself as gay. Back then, as a 15-year-old, I rejected this diagnosis. It filled me with great fear and disbelief. But Eve reassured me that this diagnosis was wrong and that I should not pay any attention to it."

"It's kind of the weirdest thing, really. Because when you're transitioning and when you're in that head space...passing is the biggest thing ever...You look down and you see, oh, my arms are quite hairy actually. They're a bit masculine. And it just sets you off. It's the worst thing in the world and it...feels like being stabbed. Honestly, it sounds so dramatic...Is that a bit of male pattern baldness? And you're like, oh my god, this is the worst thing in the world. I want to actually be killed.

"And when I sort of unraveled my whole identity and realized, oh, actually, you know, I just want to be able to dress more femininely and to have long hair and to be able to wear makeup and to not be bullied for it. And that doesn't mean I'm a woman. When I started to unravel that, the dysphoria sort of just left as quickly as it came. And it's so bizarre."

"I’m only in my mid-[twenties]. I transitioned in my teens and had surgery. I was [too] young to make such a decision.

"I’ve sunken into such a deep regret. I don’t even feel transgender anymore. I feel like my old self. I am happy with a female appearance, but that is all I really needed.

"I feel like I was brainwashed by the transgender agenda and by gender norm expectations. I would do anything to [have] my penis back.

"My feelings were confusing, and I thought they would never go away. I’m just a guy who’s really in touch with my feminine side.

"I can’t believe what I’ve done to my life. And now I have no choice but to take hormones forever. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m losing my mind. All I would have had to do was discontinue my hormones and everything would have been all right. I honestly feel 100% normal and okay...if only I had never had that surgery."

"This whole thing was a bad idea. I am 19 years old, and I feel as though I have ruined my life. Now that I’m all healed from the surgeries, I regret them. The result of the bottom surgery [vaginoplasty] looks like a Frankenstein hack job at best, and that got me thinking critically about myself. I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn’t one. I became (and to an extent, still feel) deeply depressed."

"I thought that transitioning was going to lead me to being happy. And in my initial post in Reddit, you know, I mentioned that when I affirmed 'Ashlynn' I felt it absolutely necessary to destroy 'Dustin' and destroy everything that Dustin represented. Dustin was a shell of a person who was very insecure, very lost, and I felt the need to destroy that person."