Detrans Titans - Limpida
Detrans man interviews Limpida, lead of the detrans male group
In this series, I’ll be interviewing ‘detrans titans’, people who have made a significant impact in the detrans community and continue to do so, often at great personal cost, helping many hundreds, if not thousands of people who have found themselves waking up from a living nightmare.
In my first edition, I interviewed AlexIS, head moderator of /r/detrans and for my second titan, I wanted to interview Limpida, lead of the detrans male’s group, which was set up in March 2022 by Limpida following the genspect ran Detrans Webinar. Since March, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Limpida and he has been an encouraging, brutally honest yet extremely compassionate individual.
He is moving forward with his life and as he does so, he’s making a difference to the lives of many detrans males by creating a constructive, safe and well-measured environment for recovering detrans males and desistors to come and support each other.
The Interview
TR: Hello! Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed for this series! For me personally, I can say having gotten to know you and being involved with the detrans discord really has been empowering. For those who don’t know, can you tell us when you transitioned and subsequently detransitioned, what that entails, and if you have any reflections on that entire experience?
Hey, nice of you to do this series, happy to be invited!
So, I began to believe I was trans back in 2013ish, when I was 15 years old. Over time, my obsessive compulsions with regard to gender, gender roles, and being perceived as a man left me almost incapable of functioning (among other problems, exacerbated by heavy internet addiction).
In college, I became a shut-in and joined a left-wing cult led mostly by women. It was towards the end of my time in that cult, in the summer of 2019, that I went to an informed consent gender clinic at a Planned Parenthood in upstate New York. Within about 45 minutes of meeting me, they told me I was an ideal candidate for HRT and gave me forms to sign. About a week later, the prescription came in, and I was put on spironolactone (a testosterone blocker) and estradiol. It took me about two years to realize I had made a massive mistake, and six or so months after that I quit HRT cold turkey – which you’re really not supposed to do. That was back in January of this year (2022).
As I’m typing this, we’re in the middle of July, so it's actually been six months to the day since I came off of everything. I feel f—ing great dude! Every sensation, emotion, that I associated with being a man, that I was afraid of, I love for the first time because I know it’s a sign that my body’s repairing itself and functioning properly. It was a rocky start but it’s been well worth it.
There were many points where I was afraid of hurting myself, where there was this voice in my head that kept telling me I was a failure, that it was over for me, and of course there was the whole “holy s—t who am I?” situation, but I let those problems motivate me to get better rather than allow myself to fall apart entirely.
There have been ups and downs, and there will continue to be (I mean, every time I remember what hormones were like it still hits me like an avalanche and I start freaking out), but I keep picking myself up and carrying on. It’s the only thing you can do. I don’t think I’m unique in that regard, it just feels like I’ve finally grown up after a prolonged arrested development.
TR: You have a certain style in online discourse, one could say you really don’t take any prisoners, and it’s a far cry from how you are with those you care for, extremely patient, compassionate, and assertive. Why is it you have this approach and what is it you want outside eyes looking in to really understand?
Haha, so first of all, if anyone gets to know me on a personal level, I’m a pretty amicable and sensitive guy. Sometimes I can even be kind of a pushover; that’s how I ended up in this situation in the first place.
The hardcore rhetorical sparring I do, the no-holds-barred “go f—k yourself” stuff is mostly a front, and it’s a front I adopt intentionally. I have no real reason to be overtly combative in my personal life, or in my intimate interactions.
But Twitter is not my personal life, it’s a warzone. Everything that gets published on there, whether it’s earnest or not, is a forceful attempt at steering the discourse. This isn’t necessarily true for every single last Twitter niche, but for the one we’re in, it certainly is. These are serious political battles with serious political stakes. How the issues are framed matters, because the framing determines who is going to pick them up and run with them. The only way to keep people thinking about the framing of their message is to ruthlessly criticize anything and everything that gets published, and everyone who is doing the publishing. I attack quite literally everyone on all sides of the issue – and other issues as well, since I’ve always been a politics geek and I have a lot to say on a lot of things. Trans is just my account’s main brand so I usually stay on-brand.
My role in all of this is to force others to sharpen their arguments, to really consider their positions, and to consider the shape of the bubble they’ve cultivated for themselves. I’m not an idealist or a moralist either. I’m not interested in making friends or cultivating close relationships on Twitter. Has it happened? Yeah, but that’s always going to happen on social media. There’s always someone who agrees with you among the many who will threaten to kill your dog if you disagree with them.
Despite having made these connections, I am also unafraid of criticizing them. I have gone after literally everyone, including people who fall within my circle. Some take it well, some don’t. I’m not going to stop, because if I did, no one would stay on their toes, they’d fall back into people-pleasing and following their feed’s flow.
I aim to be a thorn in the side for ideologues of all stripes, even those nominally on my side. I openly align myself with right-wingers in the detrans discourse, but this is, again, a matter of branding and of online performance. I’m honest in sharing my thought – those aren’t fake, my opinions aren’t just posturing – but the abrasive manner in which I share them and the people I prod very much are part of an elaborate political and rhetorical performance, whether they realize it or not.
TR: How have you found engaging in this discourse to be with your mental health?
At first, it was kind of hard since I was still raw from everything that had happened. I was processing on the fly, which I discourage others from doing when they jump into this. I sort of needed it though, since not very many people in my personal life understood what I was talking about or why I had made such a dramatic heel-turn.
Unfortunately, when I joined Twitter, there wasn’t really a place for a guy like myself to turn to. Half the feminists hated me just for joining, the other half expected to use me like a sock puppet. I didn’t want that, I wanted to speak for myself.
Over time, and with coaching from some of the other detrans titans, I managed to self-regulate and to not care too much about random people interrogating my history or dogpiling me. At times though, it still has been hard.
Being the prickly personality I am means I make a lot of enemies among people within my own circles. Balancing those kinds of relationships can be difficult, even among people who agree with me fully but who, for the sake of public appearances, can’t afford to give me the time of day. I’ve felt lonely and embattled at times, but at the end of it all, I just remind myself that I chose this, I chose to be this way, and I choose what I’m looking at and what I’m responding to, and that’s the end of that. I just got off a month-long break – the longest break I’ve taken since I started dipping my toe into this discourse – because it was getting to me. So many eyes on me, so many people looking up to me, down at me, talking about me, making screenshots and threads about me. So many people fed up with me, so many people gassing me up like I’m some sort of saviour or sage.
Social media in general is a machine meant to regulate your emotions for you, you know? It’s usually against your own interests. So the only thing you can really do is exert control over it when it starts to feel like it’s exerting control over you.
And that’s what I did.
TR: Speaking of good health, you’re keeping yourself healthy and fit, do you do anything else to take your mind off this entire topic?
I’m still in grad school, so I’m finishing up my Master’s. I’m vacationing in Europe in a couple of days too, which will be relaxing. For the most part, it’s talking to friends, hanging out, writing about other topics, distracting myself with chores, errands, family, video games, and the like. The big thing though is the gym. I get my best ideas in the gym. I’m often Tweeting from the gym.
Ever since I got off the T blockers, I’ve had an insane amount of energy and I’ve been putting it to good use weightlifting. It helps with everything, especially being fully present and focused. When I’m not going to the gym, that’s when I start to struggle with the weight of the discourse.
TR: It’s great to see you flourish in your personal life, without giving away too many details where would you like to be in 5, or 10 years’ time?
My five-year plan is to have finally finished all the credentials I need to kickstart my teaching career and to maybe get a few years under my belt in that position. That’s the main thing really. I hope that by that point I’ll be able to start writing freelance as well.
As far as the Substack is concerned, I intend to write about more than just detrans stuff, I want to connect it to all the other deeply nihilistic threads running rampant in youth culture today, as well as to big things with big political stakes that many would consider verging on conspiracy theory. I hope to impart useful analysis beyond this one topic, since I have my eye on eighty different things at a time.
Though I posture as more conservative online, and I push certain calls to action here and there, I’m mostly just an observer. I hope to extend my critiques to all facets of polite and acceptable discourse. I hope in ten years, I’ll be doing all of that and have started raising a family. That could be done in five too I suppose, if all that’s going well in my love life continues to go well, but since there’s no rush right now, I’m more comfortable saying that’s in ten years.
TR: For some detransitioners, religion plays a part in their own detrans journey. Did religion play a part in your detransition or were you also religious during the transition?
Yes, so I was baptized Romanian Orthodox, and I went to an Orthodox private school growing up, so I do have a religious background despite most of my family being quite secular (communist regimes have a tendency of doing that to people). Once I got to high school, I was kind of an edgy nu-atheist type, not because I had any particularly bad experiences with the Church, but because I really hated American evangelicals and thought they were dumb, as a hyper-online teenager who from an urban background tends to be.
In college, as I was beginning to detach from the leftist cult, and especially right after, faith began to play a larger role in my life again. It really picked up shortly after my grandparents took me in, and my grandmother is still very involved in the local church and we still observe holidays and such. I needed something to cling to after having totally decimated everything I had believed in prior, and returning to Orthodoxy filled that role well. I had an epiphany during a particularly dark period, where I was contemplating suicide again, and all of a sudden, I saw this warm light behind my eyes, and felt this warm presence wrap around me. It felt like God. I like to believe it was God. I was still trans at this point though, and that raised serious concerns for me with regard to bodily integrity; I began ruminating on what I was doing to myself more and more often, even as I was failing to accept that I had been born a man. As I inched closer to detransitioning, I sort of faltered a bit in terms of actual religious observance, but I never doubted that He was still there for me, and that He loved me. Now that I’m a few months out, I’m sort of mixed on the concept.
I still have faith, but I also take the line that religion develops to fulfil a specific socio-political function. I keep up the traditions I was raised with though. I’m kind of caught in between retaining my Orthodox heritage and believing in historical materialism as a more universal explanation for the world, our past, and our future. Both are comforting to me, and both have been very rewarding in their own ways.
TR: What has been the most rewarding part of detransition so far?
Being in tune with myself, not having to pretend, not having to constantly remind myself that I am X thing and being disappointed that it isn’t true. I’m just letting myself be me (within reason). I’ve adopted a new set of standards to conform to, and they work better with what I am at the baseline. The true self-acceptance, facing all my problems honestly, working through them intentionally, that’s the most rewarding thing.
TR: You run the detrans males group, a new group setup as of March 2022, who is this group for specifically and is there anything you would like readers to know about the group?
Ah yes. It is specifically for men who have been through detransition/desistance or who are still trans and trying to detransition and need the support. It is first and foremost a support group, but it’s not a hugbox. People are allowed to be critical and judgmental in it.
There are other men in it who are neither detrans nor desisters; some of them are men whose sons are transitioning, some of them are therapists and counsellors offering services or referrals, and some of them are just there to be role models.
We don’t let journalists or women in under any circumstances. It is a 100% male-only server. The downside of this is that you have to accept that you’re a man before you can receive support, but this is sort of a page out of Alcoholics Anonymous; you can only help yourself once you realize you have a problem.
We do things a little differently from the main detrans server too; we don’t allow people to pick their pronouns, we don’t play any nonbinary nonsense games with our members, and we are very strict about not promoting any kind of “gender-affirming” treatments, to the point where we ask members who believe that “tru-trans” exists to not discuss the topic. We do this because when people are in the early stages of trying to detransition, they’re usually also looking for any sort of hope that they really are this thing that they thought they were for so long, and retaining faith in the existence of a “true” transsexual, someone who really was born in the wrong body, usually keeps them trans for longer than if they don’t come into contact with the myth in the first place.
Other than that, it’s kind of a free-speech zone (within the asinine limits of the ToS). People mostly just hang out, there’s usually not heavy discourse going on at any given time. We play games, we watch movies, shoot the s—t, talk about our days, discuss any random thoughts we might have; it’s a chill-out spot. Sometimes people need to vent or ask for advice and we have channels for that. It can get heavy. But it’s a heavy thing to deal with, and we’re there for each other.
TR: Can you tell us what the name Limpida means and how you chose it?
In Romanian, Limpidă (pronounced leem-pee-duh if you want to be anal about it; in English most people just say limp-eedah) means clear and/or pure, and it’s in the feminine gender (Romanian has three gender cases). It rhymes with the name I picked for myself when I was trans, so I used it as an online pseudonym for my photography and writing before I ever got involved in all of this. I’ve cycled through many, many pseudonyms in the past; I’ve quite literally never used my real name in a social media profile, and I’ve burned through dozens of them.
When I started hormones, I decided that I wanted that I wanted something more lasting, since I considered that as both the start of the rest of my life and the final fulfilment of my internal identity. I wanted it to last a long time, I didn’t want it to be a passing thing like all my other monikers. It was a pretty word, it rhymed with my chosen name, and it meant something noble and ideal (honesty) which I strove for and still do.
So despite it being a remnant of my trans persona, despite it being in the feminine gender, it was still a part of me, and it’s what I still wanted to be known by online. I’ve produced some of my best work under that moniker even before I was involved in this discourse, and I wanted it to carry over, even if I think I’ve improved since then.
I also didn’t want to go back on my promise to make it last; each new online pseudonym I’ve adopted has led to a very different online persona, and I didn’t want that to keep happening. I want the moniker to stay the same even as I change over time, rather than accidentally facilitate an overnight rebranding that changes the entire outlook of my online presence again.
TR: Final question, what are you looking forward to the most this coming year?
Oh god, so many things. First and foremost, finishing my Master’s. I still won’t be fully certified at that point, but after the Master’s, I’ll be done with academia until I decide I need another credential to boost my salary, but that’ll be a long time from now.
But I have a few trips with friends and family I’m taking this year which will be very relaxing, I’m waiting on some news about the next step in my certification process, and I’m either going to be student-teaching or tutoring this coming fall semester, all of which I am also very excited about. 2022 has been very good to me, despite everything terrible that’s going on in the world, and I’m confident it will continue being good to me.
TR: Thank you Limpida for your time, spiciness and insight, every conversation I learn something knew and I must say, It’s great to have you back buddy!
For anyone at the beginning of their Detransition journey, advice help, and support is available on reddit.com/r/detrans
Fabulous and looking forward to Limpida's other topics of discussion. Truly resonate with his insights about himself and how much he will help others as a teacher, too. Great interview!!
Another great post. Very well written.