I'll share my peak trans story here since my old one was on reddit and it was way too lengthy.

As a teenager I was indoctrinated into the Christian Patriarchy movement. (Yes, it is/was a real thing.) They believed that women should be basically owned by her father until she was married, from which point she should submit to her husband totally. If her husband died, she should submit to her sons or closest male relatives. She should have as many children as possible and raise them up to be Christians so she could "outbreed" the heathens. I never really believed most of those things, but being surrounded by girls and women who were so submissive, wore skirts and head coverings, and seemed happy to be feminine... it really screwed with me.

I bristled against the notion that I ought to be more feminine. I wanted to be a person, not a baby-making accessory. I began to think that since I felt resistance in myself against this idea of "womanhood", it must mean that I wasn't really a woman. I never came out to anyone as trans, but in my head I saw myself as such. I went through intense dysphoria about every part of my body that reminded me I was female - breasts, hips, facial structure, thin hands, lack of muscles... everything. I was happy if someone thought I was a boy. It was textbook gender dysphoria, and no one can tell me I didn't really experience it.

I peaked in 2015 when I started to realize that words had no meaning to the trans movement. Then I saw this video that College Humor put out about "Coming Out as Trans-Everything" and in the comments was someone saying "People are reaching peak trans". I was like, what's peak trans? So I looked it up, and found Gender Critical on Reddit. The image on the sidebar with the pink and blue brains in the "wrong" bodies caught my attention. I was fine the way I was? I could be a woman without the whole "womanhood" thing? It was an amazing feeling to realize that I didn't have to worship this idea of gender - whether I submitted to femininity or chased after some ideal of toxic masculinity.

My dysphoria slowly subsided over the next year or two, and now I'm happy to say that I love being a woman! I'm comfortable in my body without the chains of gender holding me down. If I had gone down the path of being trans, I would have felt increasingly more uncomfortable about my body, since there would always be something I would hate about myself. So thank you, Gender Critical.