Notes on a Detransition: Fetish Scene Abuse, Dissociation, and the Formation of a Trans Identity

Victoria G's disturbing account of how abuse fueled her trans identity.

Photo by Savannah B. on Unsplash

(Content warning: This article contains references to extreme sexual violence, abuse and rape.)

For around a decade, I was in an out of the fetish scene. Alongside it, I had a trans identity. The dissociation and discomfort with my sexed body hasn’t completely faded, although I have for now, made great strides with bodily integration through a very patient and thoughtful therapist, joy, artistry, activism, grounding, and an awful lot of analysis.

At the same time I was identifying as trans, I was being abused. Precious few outside of the fetish scene at the time realised or knew, and for the entire time I was in the scene, the abuse continuously escalated each time I engaged with a male partner. I was coerced into situations against my consent and repeatedly raped, sometimes as my boyfriend watched as they had orchestrated it, and the first incident I reported, the police wouldn’t even bother to take notes, as I was “active in the BDSM scene and had obviously consented.” (Incidentally, BDSM and rough sex defences are the go to’s for perpetrators still, to get off the hook, but that’s another post.)

Diving In and Getting Burned

For those unfamiliar, BDSM stands for Bondage (tying up/restraint), Domination (having sexual power over a person submitting to you) Sadism (pleasure from giving pain and suffering) and Masochism (pleasure from receiving pain and suffering). The fetish scene encompasses all of these, as well as thousands of other kinks- a kink being a socially unconventional implement or act which heightens sexual arousal, such as a blindfold, or sex in a public place.

I went into the fetish scene curious, but propelled in by my first abuser; it was treated as a fact of life that it was his sexuality, and that I was coming too. I was curious about how it operated, but was also extremely vulnerable; I’d already experienced rape, coercive control and other sexual violence. I went in with boundaries and limits, things you won't do, that were often, and sometimes very quickly violated; the predatory men fully able to sense that I had a vulnerability, and systematically eroded them with the finesse of a surgeon. When you're young and vulnerable, having a hulking great brute tower over you makes you frightened to say no. I went in never wanting to submit, and this boundary was publically broken when an abuser I was dating at the time, dragged me by my neck in a café, off of a seat, loudly exclaiming and bragging to the other male dominants he was speaking to “See? She likes it.”

I was too scared to do anything in case he snapped my neck.

When “Consent” Becomes Meaningless

At one point, I was beaten until points of my body turned black, and the scene treated it as hilarious when I wasn’t able to sit down; friends who were in this circle at the time, giggled in the café we were at when I was attempting to do so, knowing glances exchanged as people around us finished their greasy spoons whilst we shared a post night-out hangover brunch. There was this idea in the scene, of being part of this knowing and illicit underworld that “vanillas” had no idea about, and for those who don’t belong, this idea of kinship, no matter how malignant, can be alluring.

There is a ‘twilight zoning’ that happens with the fetish scene, the rapid breaking down of barriers and installation of this alternate reality as totally normal, with its own language and protocols, and this has immense implications as to how you process what happens in it; an actual sadistic act of abusing a woman through severe beating becomes a mere “communication issue” that the submissive woman needs to talk about with their dominant in “conflict resolution” because he just “got a bit carried away”, and escalating abuse is very easily masked by this good intentioned, poorly implemented, easily hijacked protocol.

I remember distinctly, the feeling of my sensory processes shutting down, oftentimes when I was beaten, whipped, or forced to perform in front of others, a retreat deep into my head, and slightly to the left. And you had to play it cool as otherwise there was the idea of being “a prude” or “moralising”. Boundaries were constantly pushed, shattered, and those preying on me (largely men, occasionally female narcissists) were able to perfectly operate within the grey areas of consent to the point of full boundary snapping in front of others, and were adept at seeming to others the paragon of virtue while piling up victims. Despite the police being aware, nothing ever, was done. It's hard to seek justice when they also attend the clubs, and the idea of “informed consent” that they so often tout as a get out of jail free card, is a lie.

Losing My Body, Finding My Trans Identity

This catalysed the formation of my trans identity, and what started off as a full on bodily dissociation to cope, started a rumination of truly wanting to be a man; I’d already had other aspects of gender nonconformity growing up, didn’t really feel comfortable in my sexed body, had what would be socially considered masculine attributes, and had yet to realise I just loved women.

The dissociation after one particular round of abuse was so bad, that I remember not even being able to properly feel my body; almost like I was touching at it from behind a pane of glass, and this in turn, triggered further rumination when I tried to connect with it after another beating; as I was still deep in the abuse, it just shut down. I remember tending to my bruises in the shower, head spinning, and not even being able to feel the full pain of it all as there was just so many of them.

Simultaneously, the alternative and gay scenes were already queered, as were the online groups I was a part of; the idea of genderqueer, genderfuck, genderfluidity and so on were all fluttering about, and there was precious little talk of sexuality that I was actually there for. I still don’t see the idea of questioning gender, as in gender roles, being bad- if how people are coded and expected to behave due to their sex class is indeed a set of social constructs as some people believe, then there’s no harm in just picking what you like and what you don’t, no matter if something is coded as a “boy’s thing” or a “girl’s thing” (There are many viewpoints on this, but that is for yet another post.), the issue is that these forums and groups are also used by predators for coercion and grooming, and there’s precious little self policing or critical thinking going on; part of me wonders that if these groups had been properly self policing, if we would have gotten to the state we’re in in the first place. But in a space where there are a lot of people who have been abused, made to feel like outsiders, shunned and wanting community, many of them are empathic and open, so it is very easy for predators to hijack that empathy of these groups of people for their own gain, and for those who have experienced pain and ostracisation, to immediately want to comfort those who tell them they have experienced it; sadly, this makes the vulnerable in these groups the perfect target for those predators. Many predators even become leaders of these groups or forums. Therein lies the rub. Where do you escape to if they run the show?

The Predators Running the Show

With my body still aching, I ruminated further, imagining how I would look with a stronger jawline, if I was muscly, jacked man. I wanted to be as tall and masculine as possible, take up some space, and I now realise that aside from some capacities for bodily disconnect I may have been born with, this was me desperately wanting some armour to escape the concept of being abused again. I wish at that point, I would have had anyone to speak to. Upon coming out as trans, I had a tsunami of approval and acceptance; that is catnip to someone who has had a lifetime of abuse and degradation, and the one friend that criticized it as “a waste”, had a long history of trying to get into my pants. It wasn’t an opinion I could take with any aplomb.

I Couldn’t Stop Them so I Tried Becoming Them

The men who were abusing me also played into my trans ideation. Nicknames like “soldier boy” were used during rough encounters, and at the start of this, I could sometimes pass almost as a “twink” in certain clothing to them (or so they would say for their own gratification), which is how I was treated by one of the men who abused me at the time. Other friends who had adopted a trans identity were encouraging me online from across the world, even using male titles for any roles I might have with them, which gave me a surge of validation, and the dysphoria I was feeling of my sexed body, bled further and further into my everyday life.

I remember distinctly having an attraction to a female friend of mine, a model, who was doing a photoshoot with me, and feeling this enormous, black wave of depression that she would never relate to me as a man. That feeling of desolation that crept over me, not knowing at the time that this was the cumulative result of years of extreme sexual violence, abuse and dissociation, just led to further pain. I never made a move or even told her, as I wouldn’t ever want to disrespect her boundaries and sexual preferences, and I still maintain keeping that to myself and not bothering her with my feelings was the right decision, but that black wave stayed with me, that I would never be seen, or related to, as a man. If I had only known then what I was experiencing was just being same sex attracted.

“Comp Bi” and Performing for the Scene

I had been with women before, but there’s a concept in the scene I’m going to call “comp bi”. In some lesbian discourse, the concept of forced heterosexuality some lesbians experience is called compulsive heterosexuality, or “comp het”; if you are a bisexual woman on the fetish scene, you are extremely hot property as you can be the “bait” for a predatory man to lure in women, akin to a leather-clad honey trap or "flirty fishing", so there’s an intense social pressure from the men to be bisexual or open to everything. When I had been with women in there, it felt just performative from their side, that it was for the benefit of an onlooker or scoring social points in the scene, and not due to any connection; oftentimes they would come onto me when their boyfriends or husbands were watching because it turned the men on.

As the abuse escalated in my personal life, this ideation worsened, and I turned to home brewing; a concept that you can make your own hormones or endocrine disrupting stacks at home, and rapidly fell prey to the idea of emerging as and living as someone totally different; I had fully immersed myself in the idea of how my life would be if I was a man, how I would have the odds finally stacked in my favour as a man, the idea of having some power and control over my body as a way of escaping abuse was now deep in my psyche, and I had no way of fully verbalising it for what it was, as it was coated in genderspeak. I was being abused to the point of tears, and then ingesting pills to change my hormonal profile afterwards. It worked, by the way, and I am now living with the consequences.

At this stage of the game, I was being abused by a lover who was decimating my sense of self, stealing my clients, telling me I wasn’t capable of working from my tiny studio, and who took great pleasure in towering over me and laughing as he reduced me to the point of tears, frequently being turned on by them. It comes as no surprise to me now, that this type of full on physical and psychic attack coupled with sadistic abuse, made me want to flee my own body when the people around us were actively supporting him. At one point, he coerced me into getting a coil as he wanted to “take me at any time” without condoms, which scratched my womb going in, didn’t settle, needed to be removed the next day due to severe pain, scratched me when being removed, and the week after I collapsed and was hospitalised with blood pooling in my underwear. I can still feel the scar. No wonder I felt dissociation about the organ I felt the most pain in, almost as if I held it responsible for this entire debacle, that if I just didn't have it, I wouldn't be in this agony.

Talk about self-blame.

Pills, Pain, and Playing Tony Stark

One of the side effects of upping your testosterone is that you simply feel less; you can even lose your ability to properly connect with what you are actually feeling, and I remember that I cried less, felt more forthright, and that euphoria of not being in psychic pain the whole time further emboldened me on my journey of self destruction. I can’t begin to tell you how dangerous this is, building an identity on the concept of not being able to feel. I started working out more, telling more people in real life that I was trans, and people in the scene I was in were going along with the concept as the social contagion caught on; and all the while not telling the vast majority of people what I was doing to my body and still wearing largely “female” clothes, until the culmination of wanting to socially transition after being groomed and encouraged by a predatory trans identified male into doing so, came to the forefront. I remember obsessively looking for any changes in my body, noticing when my jawline became more masculine, noticing every time I could lift more, looked more muscular, a kind of living autopsy as I felt it was my weaker self, my abused self, “dying off” inside.

In reality, that is not how any of this works. When you ingest these drugs, you have no idea what you’re taking, nor what fillers and binders they may contain. Many are completely unregulated, usually from corrupt companies in India or China, and could contain anything from lead, arsenic, cadmium, aluminium, even rat poison, or something equally as toxic. There’s no way of guaranteeing any purity or authenticity, no matter what they tell you, and any pill marketed as a supplement that changes your hormonal profile aren’t FDA approved or monitored. It’s Russian Roulette for your health. Despite feeling euphoric on these, it was the Tony Stark Paradox: What was keeping my trans identity alive, was also killing me. There is no death of the former so the other can be reborn; this is not the Anaïs Nin concept of the flexibility of self, this is not playtime. It is a tangible dicing with severe health consequences or even death, as a desperate attempt to escape a brutal, degrading reality.

It did not stop the abuse.

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The Fallout of Faking It

What it did do, was alter my sexuality considerably. I became hornier, more easily malleable to the men who wanted to abuse me, and that feedback loop fed further and further into trans ideation until I could no longer see myself as anything other than a man, even though I knew full well, I was female. This type of abuse based bodily disgust I was feeling was never spoken about in trans circles; the concept never even came up, masked by mantras of “gender euphoria” and “living as your authentic self”. The disconnect and disgust I was feeling was so deeply rooted, that even after detransitioning in 2020, it took until April 2022 for me to be even comfortable with being called a woman again; the level of internalised misogyny I was feeling was so embedded through each encounter wrought with sexual violence that it took ten tries to find a therapist who wanted to take me on, to unpack. Why ten? Many thought I was “too complex a case”, and there are no specialists for sexual trauma based gender dysphoria and detransition. Some even asked me for my pronouns despite telling them of my history. I had to fight, tooth and nail to find the therapist I thankfully still now have. I need to sit with the fact still, that if I hadn’t been so bloody minded in wanting to recover, it’s doubtful I would have survived.

It has been a very painful, slow, arduous coming to terms with what has happened to me, the veil lifting all the more as I delve deeper into what happened and the malignant echo chamber that surrounded me, in therapy, and I know there are countless other women in the fetish scene, both online and in real life although the two oftentimes bleed into one another, who are likely experiencing similar abuse; a scene that for all its security theatre, has precious little safeguards to truly defend against predation. The analogy of pulling teeth simply doesn’t cut it, unless one was welded into your mouth with such ferocity, you needed an entire rugby team’s worth of dentists to pull at it until the thing tragicomically relented in a chorus of surprised grunts and a shower of blood.

Writing this was gruelling, but I’m hoping at least one woman in a similar predicament to the one I was in can see this and understand she is not alone, that she can get out and make a life for herself that will truly benefit her, even if it is a steep hill to climb.

You don’t need to live your life existing for, or running from, predatory men and your own body.

I survived.

So can you.

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Listen to Victoria on the Beyond Gender podcast