For anyone who's interested, this is a transcript of most of the video:
“I’m not transgender, and I’d like to, I suppose, un-come out as transgender. I’ve been out since I was 16 and thought I was transgender since I was 15. I’m 21 now, so, yes, it’s quite a good chunk of time. But it’s, um, it’s worn off, I suppose, is all you could say about it. It is a bit more complex than that … It has often seemed to me like the only option is to medically transition and become a man, but that’s not what I want. I don’t want to be a lifelong medical patient. I don’t want to be psychologically dependent on hormones that are made in a lab and injected into me. And whilst the idea of having a penis is still a very enticing one, the idea of being hospitalised every five to ten years to have a silicone rod in my penis surgically replaced is a horrifying one. What I want, and what I’ve always wanted, is peace with myself. Not a surgically altered self, but my own self. I want to feel an organic love for my body, this body that … I was lucky to be born into and to inhabit. When I was 15, 16, 17, I didn’t lay in bed wishing to be a boy. I lay in bed praying out of sheer desperation to a god I didn’t believe in to 'Please just make me a girl. I just want to be okay with being a girl. I’ll do anything to not be trans.' I wanted to find ways of dealing with my gender issues that aren’t medically transitioning, and those ways weren’t presented to me. The only solution that was presented was chopping your breasts off, injecting yourself with hormones and becoming a man. And that’s not the life that I want, it really isn’t. If I can do something, if I can have a way of dealing with my gender issues that isn’t doing all of those things, that’s the one … I want to do. Now’s my time to make peace with femaleness, with womanhood. Even though I’m not very good at being a woman, in the sense that I get gender dysphoria, a woman is still what I am. A dysfunctional, wonky, weird, gay, autistic and completely authentic woman. I don’t know how to tell people about this. The immediate feeling when I think about revealing to people that I’m not going to transition after all is intense embarrassment, humiliation and uselessness. I feel embarrassed that I could get it so wrong for such a long time whilst being so convinced that I was right: as though I was possessed by someone else entirely. Someone else isn’t really the right word, though – I think it was more like I was possessed by something, by an ideology. Like I believed in a god that I’m recently starting to not believe in. I really never understood the power of flawed thinking in large groups before, but now I’ve been sucked into it for years of my life, I feel like I have a much better understanding of what leads people to religious bigotry and to cults. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable comparison to make. I can’t understate the role social media has played in all this. It’s glaringly obvious to me now that which part of the internet you inhabit for large chunks of time has serious effects on your brain and your view of the world. I’m the kind of person who isn’t easily sucked into herd mentalities, and I’ve never been sucked into any mentality like I was into this one. So coming out of the other side of this is a huge life lesson and a humbling one. Even my fiercely logical mind couldn’t resist the ultimately contradictory logic underlying in most online trans spaces. I just tried to wrangle logic haphazardly into the contradictions. Thankfully, though, I can only lie to myself for so long. I don’t ‘feel like’ a woman and I don’t ‘feel like’ a man: I am female and that’s all there is to it. I don’t need to feel like anything to justify the fact that my female body likes to do, say and think things that women aren’t supposed to do. The terminology of identifying as male or female was always something I was a bit suspicious of, and now I fully loathe it. I identify as … a metalhead, … a painter, I identify as left-wing politically. I don’t identify as male or female. You can’t identify as male or female, or intersex – you just are. It’s an immutable reality, not a wishy-washy identity. This is such an obvious statement that it feels impossible that this simple truth could be a completely life-altering conclusion to come to, but that’s how deep in this I had got myself. I spent the last five years doing mental gymnastics, sometimes agile and impressive, and sometimes clunky and contradictory. Like I said, I was desperately trying to wrangle impossible logic around an untruth because I was too far into third to turn back. Or not, as is the case. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I? You’re not too far in to turn back. I’m not sure where to go from here. When it feels right I’ll tell my parents, and I know they’ll be happy to hear it, because the concerns they had about my 16-year-old self are ones that I’m just starting to understand as a 21-year-old. I suppose wisdom really does come with age, doesn’t it? But, um, yeah: you try telling that to an isolated, self-loathing, gender-nonconforming 16-year-old who wants to transition. I mean, you’re gonna run into some issues. I don’t want to do a big dramatic announcement that I’m detransitioning or not being trans any more. I’m just going to take it easy, and slowly, one relationship at a time, one person at a time. My name is legally changed, so that’s going to be a challenge. I’m not even sure if I want to change it back yet. And I still bind, I’m still binding right now, but that’s – I see it as part of my butchness, you know, it’s … not to do with being trans, to be honest. It’s … gender dysphoria that I … deal with in my own way now and I don’t want to go through all the things that I was kind of being, I guess, pressured by these online spaces to go and do … But there’s plenty of time for all of this, is my point … It’s the key thing that I’ve realised: that you’re never too far in to turn around and take a different path, never … I know that there are lots of people who were just like me, really, who were going through this same thing, and I have a funny feeling that there will be lots, lots more of us in the next few years, as more people who were sort of teenagers and nonbinary and trans at the moment get into their early twenties. I think there’s gonna be more of us. So if I can make this resource that maybe people can relate to, then good, because we are … people like us, sort of the masculine girls, butch lesbians … who were born between … the years of 1995 and 2000, really, sort of, have been the guinea pigs for this, for this, whatever this is, whatever’s going on in the trans community at the moment … I’m out the other side now and I really hope that some more people who are struggling with this can get out to the other side, because it’s nice.”